Chef/Writer Spencer

CWS, what you need is to get your own show on TVFN. That would put all your free-radical energy and rantings to good, and might I add entertaining, use. But they'd have to bleep you all #!%^! time . Well, I'll be damned...I even turned D. Leite to the darker shades...Welcome maricon, leave me the last bloodsicle. Let me tell you that's high praise from a guy I respect for his contributions to food writing...Thanks for the backhanded compliment...I don't deserve any better...And I agree with you, I'd be the Colin Ferrell of TFN for sure. Me...The Food Network? What's the point...Obviously, my whole schtick is based on the improbability that Julie Cordes really gives a rat's dick about food, and that Bobby Flay has a single flesh wound on him due to a kitchen accident. I won't be groomed, manipulated and packaged like some culinary Ken doll. I'd rather stick my taint in a Cuisinart and turn it to mortally ground that listen to some pretty debutant tell me I missed my mark. "Cut, let's do it again." That's not how it works in my world, regardless of the potential celebrity and cult following I may amass. It's hard to believe that someone as unknown as myself would turn their nose up at the whole TV chef thing...but I promise you I'll be nice but short if ever approached. It's not gonna happen anyways, come on, I'll never milk this thing properly. I've been voted the most likely to become the culinary Jimmy the Greek. I'm gonna insult someone's momma one day, after my only bail out has long since abandoned me...It's only a matter of time before I'm back to the everyday grind of line cooking and dreaming of getting a Michelin star. It's not a shabby deal by any means. Beats stagefright...

My kids, I categorically state, are not normal...My son resembles John Belushi in front of a pile of Peruvian gold whenever we drive by a Burger King. I've got him pegged as a line-backer, a big son of gun, looks like he's in eighth grade and he's only six. He sweats, gyrates, pounds at the window like a caged animal when ever he sees the golden arches. At home he's constantly running sorties on the refer. like it's been updated since his last go round ten minutes ago. So I push the Tyson Mega Chunks to the back of the freezer, hide the Ring-Dings, the Box-O-Bologna behind the burlaped oranges. I make the milk more prominent than the Cokes, sticking them in the lettuce crisper under the romaine like it's an Iraqi jet fighter. If I didn't surveil my par stocks I'll be selling ass on Third and Crump to pay the grocery bills. If that does irrepairable damage then so be it. I'd rather twist the guy up because he ain't experienced all that's great about the world of obesity than because I had to work the night shift to pay for his fucking two hundred dollar a week Krispy Kreme habit.

New pundits welcome I say...anyone I can turn to the darkside is a goodthing.

I hide stuff from my kids, especially my son, because he's got a deathwish. Left to his own devices that kid would have succumbed to cholesterol poisoning years back...Kids need to have certain things hidden from them. My god, doesn't anyone have young children. Suicide by chicken tenders is painful....

Look likes Tony's starting his own little Jim Garrison inquistion...

Welcome to the home of the culinarily disenfranchised...Get your ticket up front and hang on.... I hope you have thick skin too...

Just an observation.... It seems that the kitchen may indeed personify the personality of Mr. Beard. A little rough around the edges, no Einstein, but solid in his world views. Maybe he'd want it that way...all broken down and cramped. He was an original that's for sure...

If nobody else does it I'm going to e-mail Bill O'reilly from The O'Reilly Factor. Can you see him getting indignant with The Beard Foundation a la The Red Cross after 9-11. I cinch up my doom then for sure. I'd never get that coveted Best New Chef award then.

In my house nothing was forbidden, literally...My parents would try their damndest to get me to eat weird stuff. We lived in New England most of my childhood, Cape Cod, NH, MA. I rebelled against everything though. I didn't try bluefish until I was 13, lobster until much later. I was a foodie parent's worst nightmare. They let me in on their fondue sessions, tried to turn me on to the nuances of wine, beer, whatever. I grew up in quite the foodies paradise. We always grew our own vegetables, traded at CO-OPs for hand crafted things like peanut butter and cooking oil. It's that childhood that fuels me. My mother died in 87, a violent death and left me to carry on the torch. She's probably cringing up a good bit, but I bet she's proud of the fact that I put my all into the pursuit of good food.

This thread has been dormant for weeks...

Adam was the characters name. Chef, conspiracy theorist, government tool among other talents. Supposedly gave Wolfgang Puck ideas that he was never compensated for. Next to Ed and Leonard one of my favorite minor characters. Though they over did him towards the end. Blame David Chase for that. I am more that guy than Bourdain... there are a bevvy of parallels...I just wear better clothes and have an office.

Welcome FlaJoe...I agree with you on the Aussie show--mainly because I love a good pissy chef. But even the other Aussie show--the Road Warrior/Tetsuya offering--was grade A television. Let's look at what Tony has done...no one comments on it, but it is the king of all ironies in my book.... He writes this book, a foul-mouth accounting of his life in a kitchen, the triumphs, pratfalls, and the "Steven would steal another restaurants food processor sometimes with the shallots still in it" admirations and kudos of his cohorts in crime. In the preface of that book--the old I'm nobody preface--he utterly mugs the Food Network's band of bandeliers. He promises never to become that vain. Calls Emeril Ewok-like long before there were CWSes following suit. But then....He gets famous, he sells his ass to the evil empire and gets his own show. All of us cooks and chefs wince, hoping he delivers the goods, but leary of his success. And his first season is good--The French Laundry show being a gem of a program--but not Tony at his best. So then he gets another swipe at it with season 2...He, except for that campy NO show, hits homeruns every time. Now we're all singing his praises. What a brilliant thing. He flipped them the bird totally, spelled it out in no uncertain terms that the Food Network was a decaying root of washed out talent and then cozies up to them, slowly pushing them to get his way and then becomes a savior of the dying machine. Brilliant. That's why you got to like the guy...He's not fanny waxing anyone and he's got our respect--a Jedi Mind Trick of a feat. (Tony I want that all in twenties, delivered by a tall blonde with very few morals named Trixie or Nikki),

Well I'm very curious about Achatz, and I think that he'd probably burn my cynical old ass down to the ground with the high-wire acrobatics, monkey fusion, look into this mirror, take a sip of this--with one eye shut and try to conjure the image of nothingness--gimmickry....anyone who works with Keller and Adria can't be puffing smoke rings out their ass, they can't be. Agreed. I'm a die-hard blood though, with a subtle taste for some good crippin' but a true distaste for bad crippin'. And I can't abide when a blood wants to turn into a crip because they think it's cool to make foie gras tacos with pommegranite-foam, shaved abalone, and sous-vided caramelized dairy because some guy in Spain is doing it.

Too much rosemary in a dish, people say, "It tastes like pine, yuk." Lavender Honey Ice Cream, ok but in general, lavender belongs on your skin or on top of your toilet. The thought of shootin' a shot of pine-lime vodka makes my ass cinch up.

But how does that correlate to food? Listen, Steve nailed me. I'm a fake, I've never tried the food I'm bashing so I need to shut the fuck up... I agree. It speaks ill of me to sit on my high horse pretending to know what I'm talking about like some righteous asshole. So I'll back off that arguement. But I hear a whole lot of pine defenses "It reminds me of this...I have beautiful memories every time I smell pine. I choked one off in the woods with Sara So and So, all the while staring mindlessly into a gargantuan pine tree." Memory, as Keller knows, plays a major role in the whole food experience so it would make sense that this pine reprobation would work...I'm just having a hell of a time trying to figure out the mentality that would link pine to something savory and enjoyable...Memory is a strong thing but not if there's no liason to make the whole thing work. It just reeks of over-thought out attempts to captivate the intellectual factions. It doesn't smack whats-so-ever of a good meal. But I could be wrong.

That's so cool...How did you get that tm in the there...That's really neat...

The Beard Awards mean very little to me. It says, "Hey I can network my way on to a stage." Maybe that's because I haven't won one, right? There are only enough slots for a few chefs, pastry chefs, sommeliers, restaurateurs, writers, busboys?, etc. A lot of great talent gets over-looked. Like who's fishing for the next Alfred Einstein Keller in Memphis? No one. When Drew Nierporent (a guy I have the utmost respect for as a man who cares about morsels and the cooks who prepare them) thinks about Memphis, what does he think about, what do most of you think about? Now, this isn't necessarily about me but I know as sure as I'm sitting here with a quiver full of venom that I could outcook alot of these punks but will never make it to the Beard Awards. The more cosmo cities always get the nods. To think the Beard Awards are a true guage of who's doing the forging out there is naive...

Then you have our good buddy CT in Chicago.

Adria, Achatz, they've cooked all the stuff you dig. Achatz was your man Kellers right hand man, what's he going to do, copy him? He's in the process of forging a new thing, it will fall flat or roll forward. With the Beard award, it looks like the latter to me. Good luck to him and to you too. Don't clench your buttocks so hard, dude!!! Winning a Beard Award is no indication to me that people can sustain a movement through Martian-like cooking. Just like winning an academy award is no indication that one can act. Keller cooks brilliant takes on classics, nods to tradition, albeit tweaked into modernistic terminology. And shit, Adria is the third pillar in my shrine. I love that guy: brilliant, humble, slightly mad, and not financially motivated. To be fair to chefg, he has worked long hours with Keller, probably knows more about the guy than anyone on eGullet and has done a short stint with Adria, so he can't be totally crocked full of the shit of youth. But some of these forward thinking moves will prove to be teflon in their holding power. You watch. But until then I will take what I deal out. And I do, in PM.

Interesting. It sure makes one's life rosier and more simple - not caring if one's opinions have value. It really does...It's liberating...Why should I really care about opinions anyhow? I already know most people here think I'm a crackpot, loud mouth, bridge burning, false prophet doofus berger. So really I've got nothing to lose, no one to schmooze into a free meal, very few who'd stick their publishing tied necks out to take me on (thanks to those who've been brave enough to help me out). Pine, like in Pinesol, like in Christmas trees, like in car fresheners? Why do that to food? I don't get it. You want to have a walk down memory lane, go for a walk in the forest, clean your floors maybe. I could probably take some pine essence, trick it out in some beurre monte, spread it on a piece of nice brioche and call the fuckin' thing brioche avec beurre du pine, and it may actually be edible, but I hope someone like me would slap me back to reality with a meat mallet. You can make anything edible, just dunk the shit in some butter. It's stupid, and an immature world view of cooking. It may be a valid art form to some, and it probably is, but that ain't food. Food is not art. Food is flavor, comfort, memory, experience. It's not just experience. Some people on here have a hard time assimilating that.

I think Chefg was crackin' wise, was he not...If there is an intention of getting me to feel like I'm trapsing through a Maine wood then I can assure you that I would certainly be guffawing pine foam through my nostrils... But it could be world class pine, you're right...

I agree but stand firm. Does it devalue my opnion, sure. Do I care? Not really.

Hey that's a start. I realize that there are guys out there that want to make the Mona Lisa with a tail pipe, a slice of foie and a some Antillian moose dung. And that urge to come with something new, I believe, warrants a Beard Award or two but it won't go down into the annals of good food. This forest creation will never be duplicated and duplicated until it's a classic, and I don't think that's what HE is going for--a shame I think. We've gone through this over and over again throughout the last twenty years, the skyscraper presentation, the deconstructed mole weirdness, the tex-mex, the veggie reduction Jean-Georges thing, Vietnamese-French fusion (again), sushi. In my opinion these trends are more inspired by boredom and a need to peddle new trends within the pages of trade rags. I guess Vongrichten is a BAD example since I love the way that guy cooks but you know what I'm saying. It's starts to veer away from edible accountability sometimes...and I think that's what going on here. It's a bad time for the music industry. I think the food industry is trying to follow suit...

ONLY if it tasted like a romp through the woods on acid. Give me some nuances of reality, maybe some meat, something besides esoteric conceptualizations. Yes, as that thing stands I'd be choking.

My point is who would want to eat something that tasted like a pine cone. It's the whim of a chef who's trying to create the uncreated. Even if I liked the dish--which wouldn't be the case--I would have a difficult time appreciating it as real cuisine. It's like Walt Disney breathing down Thomas Keller's throat, being nut-kicked by a Red Bulled Adria. It's too much, it doesn't appeal to me....