Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Is Brooklyn Food Actually Terrible?
Posted by Virginia K. Smith on Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:06 PM
So is it true? Should you spit that godforsaken pork out of your mouth and move back across the river?
I guess the answer here is really just a decided "eh." Ozersky isn't the first critic to bring this up — Jeffrey Steingarten, for one, has also publicly decried "Brooklyn boosterism" — and, somewhat impressively, the piece is more of a long explanation of his growing frustration with a food scene he sees as a "case study of conformity," than a Pete-Wells-tearing-into-Guy-Fieri-style screed. It does have its moments, though:
"The quintessential modern Brooklyn restaurant, as we all know, has little in common with its Manhattan cousins. Instead, it’s more likely to have a name like Testicle or Mutton Hut and specialize in off-cuts three days old, executed unevenly by dedicated but unsupervised young line cooks, and served with habitual insolence by ex-Suicide Girls in the flinching light of small-batch Edison bulbs. The prices generally are fair for what you are getting, but you’re not getting that much. Sometimes the food is genuinely good, like the bacon doughnuts at Traif; at other times it’s merely weird, like foie gras with maple syrup (served at the same restaurant)."[...]
"I believe that Brooklynites grossly overestimate their restaurants as a defense mechanism against the anguish of exile. The great unspoken fact of Brooklyn life is that nobody, at least nobody I have ever met, moved there because they liked it better than Manhattan. (“It’s not true!” I can hear them saying. “I have no interest in living in Manhattan …”) In fact, though, they live there because it’s the best place they can afford. Restaurants nearby become wildly attractive via a gastronomic form of beer goggles because their neighbors are so happy not to be eating falafel."
And sure, it's hard to argue that the kind of Brooklyn restaurants that tend to get a lot of press aren't weirdly similar —as an noncommittal vegetarian and generally broke person, most places tend to have prohibitively limited menus at prohibitively high prices for me, and more variety would be nice — but the rest of the argument here doesn't make a ton of sense.
Brooklyn's food scene as we know it — and, more specifically, as it's represented in this article — has existed for a relatively short period of time, and Manhattan has had decades to build up a coterie of varied restaurants in varying price ranges with maximum kitchen efficiency. To say that Brooklyn has outstripped Manhattan is silly. But do people who are in any way worth listening to really say that? And why, at this juncture, would it not be a big deal for Brooklyn to be "a great little culinary city?"
But anyway, there aren't really going to be clear-cut winners in a conversation that's simultaneously hyperbolic and subjective. Most likely, the more specific elements of Ozersky's argument that make you take the whole thing seriously — disappointment with steak quality at St. Anselm, accusations that Buttermilk Channel is "a southern restaurant incapable of serving decent fried chicken or biscuits, [that] gets hailed as masterful, mostly, I suspect, because you can take squealing infants there and nobody will complain" — are the ones most likely to piss off purists and be largely ignored by everyone else.
So yeah, tear into him if you will. Or, just go eat at a restaurant you like and try not to worry about it. Everything is fine. We have a lot of options.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.
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About The Author
Virginia K. Smith
Virginia K. Smith is the Assistant Editor at The L Magazine and a Bushwick resident. Her profile picture was taken at Summerscreen, because she is a real team player.
