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Ozersky's latest book, Colonel Sanders and the American Dream, was published in May 2012. His videos about food and gastronomy can be seen on Ozersky.TV.
Somewhere, at some time, you’ve probably met someone with a very well-thought-out, plausible, structured and completely insane plan to start his or her own food business. Maybe it was to sell a line of designer chutneys. Or unfiltered honey from a rooftop apiary. Maybe it was to open an omakase bar where the chef would [...]
When I asked Tom Colicchio, Top Chef’s lead judge and one of the most visible of American chefs, about the Braiser, the all-celebrity-chef news site that launched Monday, he cut me off before I could even finish the question. “I hate that phrase,” he said. “It makes no distinction between a chef who is on [...]
Now that I am old, I probably can’t take it for granted that everyone remembers the iconic scene in Five Easy Pieces, when Jack Nicholson wants to order a plain omelette with tomatoes instead of potatoes, and a side order of toast. The waitress, a stand-in for all the inflexible authority figures that loomed so [...]
It obvious to everyone, of course, that “artisan,” when applied to Dunkin’ Donuts bagels or Tostitos chips or Domino’s pizzas, is a laughably transparent ploy — a shameless buzzword used by marketers in their endless, desperate lather to sell more bad products. At least Domino’s, which launched an ad campaign last month for its Artisan Pizza, [...]
April 20 has a special significance in America. It is known among pot smokers as Weed Day, with the date having been chosen for the same hazy reason 4:20 p.m. is widely regarded as a good time to light up (although no one can quite remember how the tradition got started). Weed Day is hardly [...]
Stupid things are sometimes far more compelling to me than smart ones. For instance, I seldom think about the themes in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s epic Three Colors trilogy, but to this day I don’t understand why, in The Blues Brothers, the Good Ol’ Boys arrive at Bob’s Country Bunker at 3 a.m., ready to play a [...]
Gayot, an off-brand dining guide, made what could loosely be called news last week when it released its “best steakhouse” list. You’d think that a list of ten almost indistinguishable restaurants in the U.S. made by anonymous reviewers using arbitrary standards for a company nobody has ever heard of would encounter at least some skepticism. [...]
Being a childless misanthrope and everything, it pleased me to see two new books addressing one of my pet peeves: kids and all the things they don’t like. Pamela Druckerman’s best-selling Bringing Up Bébé and the forthcoming French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon both address the bizarrely stilted taste of American children. We’ve [...]
There was a small stir last week in New York City when Consumer Reports came out with their bagel rankings. Among frozen and chain bagels, several brands were rated as “very good,” including Costco and Dunkin’ Donuts. New Yorkers found this simply hilarious, and the New York Post, always up for some scorn-stirring, went to [...]
I’ve never been to Noma, René Redzepi’s famous Copenhagen restaurant. But I understand what it represents. So does everybody else — as Lisa Abend’s brilliant profile in last week’s issue makes clear, Noma represents something much larger than dinner at a particular restaurant. Redzepi is the personification of the nature worship that I wrote about two years [...]
It takes a lot of courage to admit this, but I am against eating pink slime. Also, I think that guy in Uganda should stop kidnapping and murdering children. Also, I laughed at the old lady in North Dakota who wrote a rave review of the Olive Garden. Wait, did I say that it took [...]
I’ve often found myself, in this strange time we are living in, wishing I were Norwegian, and never more so than when engaging with the debate over American foodways. There are some unalterable facts about how the U.S. feeds itself today, or, as Tracie McMillan puts it in her fine new book, The American Way [...]
Let me tell you about my cast-iron pan. I bought it when I was at a Waldbaum’s in Jersey City, on a rainy night, for the cost of what then amounted to two pizzas. (Today, it would be one.) This black and craggy pan — mistreated, temporarily misplaced, abused, taken for granted and used in [...]
Scientists in the United Kingdom announced on Monday that they believe they are close to growing hamburger meat in a lab. So close, in fact, that they have recruited Britain’s greatest chef, Heston Blumenthal, to cook the meat once it is ready. According to the The Guardian, “The current plan is for Blumenthal to cook [...]
For a business that traffics primarily in fried-chicken sandwiches, Chick-fil-A attracts a lot of heat. It’s not because the chain’s fried-chicken sandwiches aren’t delicious — they are! Moist and crunchy, soaked with MSG, served simply with little pickles on a soft-as-air squishy bun, they’re so good even McDonald’s is knocking them off. But the chain [...]
I found Fat Chef, the Food Network’s new reality show about, well, fat chefs, surprisingly hard to watch. But I also found that I couldn’t stop watching it. It was depressing and inspiring at the same time, an emotional speedball. I can’t say I really approve of it, but I know that I’m going to [...]
The first thing you need to know about Slavoj Zizek, the world’s most influential philosopher who is still alive, is that he is crazy. You can’t understand half of what he’s saying. His ideas are drawn from the most arcane, abstruse fields of thought ever invented by man: Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, Hegelian metaphysics and post-Marxist [...]
Amid all the tumult and blowback from Paula Deen’s diabetes fiasco last week, an obvious question went unanswered. If her foods are debilitatingly unhealthy (which they are), and she has no good answers for how we should eat (she doesn’t, at least so far), then who does? It’s a multi-million dollar question, and one that [...]
Hostess Brands filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, and everything about the story was depressing. First, and most obvious, was the symbolic blow to the solar plexus of American iconography: the inventor of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, teetering on the verge of extinction. A spate of nostalgia pieces appeared, pondering our lost innocence [...]
It’s probably safe to say that few of her viewers were surprised when down-home cooking doyenne Paula Deen announced that she had Type 2 diabetes. How could they be? Deen’s recipes were so gruesomely unhealthy, so prodigal in their use of butter and cream and sugar and all the things we are supposed to avoid [...]
