Conde Nasty strikes again
New Orleans doesn’t always fare well with Conde Nast writers. Case in point: native son Nicholas Lemann (son of Uptown lawyer Tommy Lemann and stepson of novelist Sheila Bosworth), who has been particularly nasty to his hometown on the pages of New Yorker. But this recent GQ article by Alan Richman clearly takes the king cake:
I’ve never had much luck eating in New Orleans. I might be the only person who disliked Uglesich’s, a beloved seafood joint where I once stood in line for an hour in wretched early October heat for a po’boy containing a miserly quantity of oysters so overcooked they were like marbles. I believe most of the profits made by that establishment came about because of its periodic threats to close, which inevitably brought a rush of business. Uglesich’s finally shut down last year, to everybody’s dismay but my own.
Now, I know New Orleans is far from perfect, and I’m more than happy to hear critiques of the city from people who know what they’re talking about. But when someone compares Creoles to non-existent “faerie folk, like leprechauns, rather than an indigenous race”, I think he deserves a swift kick to the nuts.
BTW, that article came to my attention via Pat Jolly, Gawker, and the Onion’s AV Club, which offers a delectable dissection of the piece.
And apologies to an especially dear friend at the New Yorker. You’re still a mensch in my book…
Related posts:
Interesting follow-up interview with Richman by a local foodblogger here.
Wow. All that room to clarify his arguments, and he STILL comes across as a major dick–not to mention awfully gay. Perhaps there’s some truth to the old adage: you are, indeed, what you eat.
Okay, I thought conde nast was some strange French term like Deja Vu. Thank you Wikipedia, you are the source of the gods.
The article was pretty uninformed and snotty, although I do agree with that Uglesich’s thing (and a few other parts of the article) to an extent. I don’t think it’s what he said that bothered me so much as how he said it.
I wrote up a response to the interview he recently did with appetites.us (http://www.appetites.us/archives/000469.html) where he make the ill-informed statement that the Times Picayune is a third rate paper (I prove him wrong with examples of pre-katrina journalistic excellence, pulitzers and such)
http://www.bloggingneworleans.com/2006/11/13/alan-richman-still-an-idiot/
I think the same things said in the article can be said of restaurants in pretty much any city that prides itself, at least in large part, on its food offerings. So much of what makes a lot of places popular and much-beloved is the tradition behind them. If someone comes in front out of town and has no benchmark of tradition or whatever, the menu is going to be more run-of-the-mill.
We used to live behind Mandina’s and would wander over there to eat sometimes. Everyone would ooh and aah about how close we lived to a “great” place, but I was always underwhelmed. But I realized the the devotees were buying the whole package, not just the food.
I think the “many restaurants, one menu” thing is definitely the case in New Orleans. But, to be fair, a place has to serve what its customers will buy.
Seriously, I don’t know if you guys get it or not (I’m from New York, so I already got it, of course), but it’s all just a really poorly timed PR stunt for GQ as they attempt to launch Richman’s culinary leap into the world of culinary-character-humor: he’s planning to be the Borat of fine dining.
His timing is just off, you know how it is.
In order to get into the spirit he even had John Rocker co-ghost-write the piece, but the problem was that he really needed to offset all of that there’s-no-real-Creoles-just-a-buncha-fat- drunkards-in-new-orleeeens humor with some sexy time.
He’s trying to bounce back, I noticed (in the interview w/the Appetite blogger) by calling the Times Picayune a “third-rate” paper, but in attempting to emulate what Sasha Baron Cohen would have said, he really was too careful….any one of Cohen’s personas would have cut right to the issue and pointed out that the Times Picayune is actually run by the aforementioned pretend-Creole-drunkards and its editors are therefore much too drunk at all times of the day to write anything but juvenile smack-downs of others.
That and Pulitzer-prize winning Katrina coverage. But they probably flew down some New Yorkers to ghost write for that.