Monday, June 30, 2014

NEW YORK GASTRONOMIC QUESTIONS TO PONDER - NUMBER TWO:



Should you go to a restaurant just because you find the chef (sexually) hot?

THE ANSWER: Well, you know in your heart that you probably shouldn’t, that it’s likely to end in tears, nevertheless the heart has its reasons and so I went to the Empire Diner at 210 12th Avenue, largely because the executive chef there is Amanda Freitag.


I first saw her on the TV show Chopped where she’s suitably stern and austere, but something told me she might have a soft, melty boozy center, like a liqueur chocolate, a notion not discouraged by seeing pictures of her looking disheveled in leather and/or with a beer in her hand.


Of course I’m not a fool.  I didn’t for a moment expect a celebrity chef, much less an executive chef, to be manning the grill on the brunch shift, and so it proved.  Opportunities to bask in the erotic culinary Freitag glow were as limited as expected.


The place was stylish, the service was friendly and the food was pretty darn dismal.  My grilled cheese sandwich looked like this.


I reckoned it wasn't quite dark enough to actually send back.  The Loved One even said that was how she liked her grilled cheese sandwich, but I sort of wish I had.  But surely nobody in their right mind would want to find this lump of dodgy-looking tomato in their grilled cheese sandwich, or anywhere else.




No comments:

Post a Comment