le fooding, and other howlers

I take it as a given that I am not part of a target audience for Le Fooding, the French culinary media outlet. If Le Fooding were principally after my clicks, and those of other Anglophones, the name Le Fooding would of course never have been chosen, for in English it sounds unappetizingly like something Jabba the Hutt would demand of his chained servants.*

The publication's name is a mongrel French pun composed of two adopted English words, 'food' and 'feeling,' which I need hardly explain are not as sonically compatible to Anglophone ears. But the French, whose language lacks gerunds, find the "-ing" suffix very exotic, and tend to use it in curious ways. (Cf. 'shampooing,' a noun in French, and my personal favorite monstrosity, 'relooking,' another noun, signifying a makeover.) French is a rather more rigid language than English, and when considered on the level of the individual, I find the free-spirited, fingerpainty way the French employ English grammatical forms to be an inspired form of resistance : a supplementary lexicon not governed by the Academie Française.

In certain cases, however - particularly when mangled English is used in advertisements and other corporate discourse - I can't help feeling it bespeaks a certain myopic pomposity. For such usage necessarily contains one or both of the following assumptions: a) that no one to whom the language will sound strange will ever read it, and b) that it won't matter if they do. Both assumptions betray a rather dim awareness of the nature of the new media environment, not to mention a sloppiness with meaning that is unbecoming of any service that purports to transmit information. All this is on glorious, spell-binding display in Le Fooding's recently launched English version of its website, in the production of which, it seems safe to assume, no native Anglophones were consulted. Word salad? Word soup? Feast away, it's all there.

consider the perks: restaurant lazare, 75008

Bad restaurants, like the proverbial Tolstoyan unhappy family, may be awful in an infinity of ways. We dislike them accordingly. But how we truly hate restaurants is largely divisible into two categories. There is personal emnity: because the ownership or a key staff member has done you grievously wrong. Then there is impersonal emnity: because you sense that the establishment targets a clientele whose tastes you question, whose influence, you suspect, is ultimately deleterious to a culture you value.

My friend and colleague Meg Zimbeck of Paris by Mouth hated Restaurant Lazare in the latter way, which is probably the only way to hate an overpriced 110-seat fortress of a bistrot installed in a wall of Gare Saint Lazare. Pioneering bistronomy chef Eric Frechon is surely not there himself, peeling onions. The staff are replaceable hotelier school grads, so predictable you can't even resent their inattentiveness. What I think Meg resented, rather, was the restaurant's perceived culture of wealth-fluffing and preferential treatment, of stout bankers gorging themselves on guinea hens before boarding first-class cars and careening off to houses in Honfleur for the weekend.

As a fellow writer, with no quantifiable skills and no discernable route to fortune in my future, I hate these (possibly imaginary) people too. And I recognise that Lazare exists for them, while the plebs wait in hundred meter lines for Burger King on another floor of the station. That Lazare thrives is in itself a Pikettian sign of increasing income stratification. So it's with a kind of melancholy that I admit I don't hate Lazare; that I find the place quite useful; that it constitutes a perk of city life I wish I could enjoy more often.

why we dine out: come a casa, 75011

I still read Pitchfork. But since it now takes less time to download albums than it does to parse reviews, I usually just peek at the point score and make the call myself. I find it's a good way to avoid the publication's increasingly boosterish take on certain handpicked darling bands, a trend that began with Deerhunter and has reached self-parodical peaks with coverage of Savages and Perfect Pussy.*

This past December, Pitchfork cited Perfect Pussy's slight 4-song demo as among the Honorable Mentions for Albums of the Year. When I played it for my friend C, a young gallerist from New Zealand, she wrinkled her nose. "Yeah Bikini Kill blah blah blah, we've heard this before." We agreed that Pitchfork was having an NME moment, a paroxysm of hyperbolic hype about something totally unproven, deriving from the writerly impulse to say things messianically.

Editors are supposed to throw cold water on that sort of thing. The task is arguably more important in food and wine journalism, since readers can't (yet) choose to simply download a meal. It always costs money and time. Quite a few Paris food writers recently had their own NME moments over a shoe-sized Tuscan restaurant by Voltaire called Come a Casa. I duly dined there and came away slightly disappointed - not by the meal, which was basically as advertised, but by Paris food writing.

cue evil laughter

It's a little sad, but purely out of vanity, I have yet to delete any commmentary. Not even this sinister fellow, the substance of whose comment is somewhat hilarious, when you consider that it was left anonymously.

I just figure, you know, so be it.