On Food
Food is So Last Year
I’ve eaten everything; there is nothing left to eat.
Food and I have broken up. Lose my number, food.
Last Friday an old friend, a new friend and I tried out a new restaurant in Los Angeles, steps away from the LA River. We were all influenced by the restaurant’s Instagram account, and the buzz surrounding the revitalized — or recklessly gentrified, depending on your politics — neighborhood, Frogtown.
It was great and by that I mean it was just okay, because anything that passes for fine dining or new cuisine is no longer interesting. We had shoestring potatoes, fish dip with homemade saltines, a grilled salad that required a steak knife to slice through it (cool gimmick, I guess), soft shell crab, pea risotto and a rhubarb tart.
It all tasted good I did not care one bit. I might as well have been eating turkey sandwich on wheat bread, hold the mayo.
Something fucked up is afoot, and that fucked up thing is that food has finally pushed it too far. There are too many people Instagramming food, too many people on Yelp writing paragraph after paragraph about whether a pear crostata was too sweet, too many choices. Restaurants are now working under the authoritarianism of Instagram and TikTok, making food visually stunning and then giving…
