If You Can't Stand the Heat. . .

How much longer can the celebrity chef craze last? When is one more celebrity chef one too many?

I'm undecided as to whether the chef-cum-tour guide phenomenon or amateur-cum-chef is worse. Neither one is really food-focused; both are entirely personality-driven, chef-in-your-face orgy of self-indulgence. I will admit to a certain soft spot for Anthony Bourdain, with his dry wit, fondness for smoking and drinking a lot, but still, his advice is hardly practical. But I think the whole genre took a step down with that Andrew Zimmern guy, who's basically just eating raw fish on TV, and it feels like reruns of "You Can't Do That On Television" in more exotic locales.

The flurry of amateur chef shows is perhaps more disturbing, in the same way that all "reality" TV shows are: if there are this many morons running around on TV, how many more must there be in real life? Layer upon layer of obnoxious personalities, uncalled-for weeping, complete unwillingness to take responsibility or make a decision. For sheer guilty pleasure, Hell's Kitchen is the best (worst?), but there's something intriguing about watching other celebrity chefs handicap the next one to join their ranks. I have little use for Top Chef's somewhat random celebrity panel.

Like the "cupcakes with publicists" phenomenon, reality-food-TV seems like another way to unnecessarily complicate what should be simple. Everybody loves food, and you'd love to think you'd cook it for yourself. But instead, you zap a SmartOnes in the microwave so you have time to watch Hell's Kitchen, and dream about cooking--and lots of other people make a whole lot more money in the process.

No Place Like Komi

Yes, that is indeed DC's own Johnny Monis' cute button nose on the cover of Food and Wine's Best New Chefs issue. The accolade is well deserved--Komi's cuisine is some of the most satisfying and inventive I've had in recent months. I can think of no better way to spend an evening and a couple hundred bucks in DC than experiencing the Komi tasting menu that manages to be both comforting and exotic. The chef isn't the only talent in the house, either--the service is impeccable, and sommelier Derek Brown's pairings were spot on and adventurous. I never would have thought to pair the sardines with a superbly dry sherry, but I'm sure glad he did.

F&W features Komi's signature dish of homemade pappardelle with milk-roasted baby goat ragu, but I would highly recommend placing yourselves in the hands of the master.

"News" in the loosest sense of the word

Two articles in The New York Times over the last few days caught my eye. I love the great Gray Lady, but sometimes even she occasionally provides fodder for the argument that newspapers are just outmoded and hopelessly withering in the face of New Media.

Sunday's article about the drop in online sales doesn't seem all that newsworthy as stalwarts of the virtual mall like Gloss or--sniff, sniff--my beloved Girlshop (now replaced by the hopelessly haughty Net-a-Porter) have announced they're biting the dust. Getting their e-mail was news; but Times article about the drop in online buying doesn't mention them, and seems a little out of the loop. I thought the dot-com bubble had already burst, and the industry had rebounded, perhaps not quite as robustly--but then nothing about this economy is as robust as the halcyon days of the Clinton administration, right?

The only interesting thing about Sunday's NYT article was that it fed into my own paranoia. I was a pretty hard-core online fashion addict, but quit more or less cold turkey once I had maxed out a couple of credit cards--and that, my friends, was when the dot-com bubble burst, leaving me to wonder, psychotically, if there never was any bubble, just me, Girlshop, and my AmEx. Some years later, I re-engaged in online shopping, more responsibly, more gradually, but still. So then when the summer went by and I'd bought nothing except some skinny jeans that I sent back, and then I hear they're going out of business, it raised the dot-com paranoia all over again. How many of us are really buying from these sites? The merch was always seemed expensive enough; I just assumed someone, somewhere was making money, and Girlshop was around long enough--and really so was Gloss--that it seemed like it had whethered the storm of online shopping fads (Pets.com, anyone?) and had become an institution replete with offline, real-time anchor to complement its online offerings.

So today, the NYT tops itself with this authoritative discourse on OpenTable.com. I don't know about you buy I've been using OpenTable for about a hundred years and presumably, so have the restaurants at which I have made reservations using its services. The little tidbits about the way restaurants use it to log info about their patrons--ok, that was interesting--but news? No.

No news, I guess, is good news, right?

Engagious

We're engaged now. The event I have regarded as an inevitability for the last three years is finally here and I am completely surprised. So now, like everyone else in my family, I have the opportunity to get all nuts about Wedding Planning, and marvel at how the heart grows. It's news that people take with almost uniform giddyness and cheer. The instinct to send cards and gives is more instantaneous than any announcement I've ever made. The response has been far more powerful than my moving and new job announcements of recent years--and I moved to some pretty freakin' faraway places.

It's wonderful. I don't even have words for it.

"They're cupcakes with publicists. . ."

There is, actually, some part of me that wants to quit and bake cupcakes--and what the hell, muffins, moon pies and oatmeal carmelitas--and sell them to the starved for food and time who will pay $4 each for them. But jesus--people are doing it for free, for other people:

Kirk Rossberg, who owns the 23-year-old Torrance Bakery in the South Bay area of Los
Angeles County, said he’s swamped with intern applicants. 'Until last year, I never had people
asking to work for free,” said Mr. Rossberg, who is also president of the California Retail Bakers
Association. He estimated that of the 30 interns he used this year, 90 percent were leaving
professional careers to pursue a dream of opening a bakery.'

Surely there must be a middleground, right? You don't have to take the Ivy League degree and Fortune 500 job and chuck them whole hog to bake cupcakes and build a bakery, surely? Why not just part-time it? Why not--radical idea--just bake cupcakes recreationally instead of trying to sell them or turn them into the hottest hipper-than-thou manna?

It's pastry, people.

"All I really need to know. . ."

Whatever happened to Robert Fulghum? Beloved folksy minister-author of All I Really Need to Know and Uh Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door, with their meditations on children, chicken-fried steak and Salvation Army bell-ringing. He seems tailor-made for the blogosphere, with his random anecdotes extrapolated in to life lessons. His signature is even a little cartoony graphic.

But I haven't heard about him in years and years, so imagine my surprise when I googled him (oh sweet Swiss army knife of the Web) and found that he is, in fact blogging.

Not exactly blogging. More of a journal. No comments or interactivity; a little more room between entries. I actually think he probably should democratize the format and embrace more of a conventional blog format because so much of his published writing depends upon the stories others have told him. Evidently, he's big in the Czech Republic right now. Or at least he was in 2006. . .

On some level, though, I respect his adherence to traditional, non-UGC format. I actually am not taking all that well to it myself. I want to research, outline, draft and edit; the blog thing is counterintuitive. Actually, it's intuitive, but why would I want to hang my intuitions out there for the whole world to see? It's a weird medium. In a world where everyone writes, who really wants to read?

"Engaged is the new black"

That gem comes from my brother, a recently-engaged man himself. The rings have really been flying lately--brother, cousins, some more or less random folks I grew up with, none of whom I know all that well but the fact that they're all in the old local paper all at the same time, getting married, makes one pay attention.

The strangers --former classmates and neighbors, acquaintances-- that's just coincidence and curiosity, but for the people I know and love, my brother especially, it's an occasion for astonishing delight. I can't say this out loud without sounding trite, and probably preposterously drunk but: it's a beautiful thing, maybe even miraculous. It seems really extraordinary that people in this day and age can love this way--that your family, and your heart, grows to expand and encompass someone else, amid all the distractions and pressures and events of life in this day and age. With everything else that concerns us, that occupies us, how does one even have the time or ability to fall in love that way? But we do, and I'm elated about it. It's elating enough when it happens to you, but when it happens to a person you've known and loved since birth--before, even--it's really extraordinary.

So hooray for the engaged. Bravo for the beloved. It's an extraordinary and wonderful day when engaged is the new black.