We’re back in action, our banged up typing wrists finally recovering after impacting a damned Prius, the entitled driver of which mowed us down in LA traffic. Our fixie is unscathed but the Legman has set aside the bike to recuperate in New York for a while. And it was en route that we came to understand the existential hold of food culture that has gripped the American psyche.
  Seated beside us aboard a satisfying Virgin America flighta gray haired Pasadena couple clinically pored over a thick folder of magazine pages, blog downloads and consulted the Zagat guide every single minute of the trip. I suspected they were researching a book. But no, their intensity was directed towards joylessly planning every one of 26 restaurant meals they deemed necessary to survive in New York for a week.  Neither embraced the hunt for the best slice or burger, they hadn’t the enthusiasm for ethnic cuisine that would drag them to Washington Heights for mofungo, they weren’t motivated by the informed gastro-wordsmithing of Sam Sifton or GQ’s Allan Richman.

They were simply compelled as accountants looking to balance the tables, to find $30 bargain meals from the amassed research. Asked of their favorite cuisine, they offered a price, the $15 lunch at some mid town joint, describing the food as “Venetian” only after consulting Zagat.  The only emotion displayed? The woman’s dismay at not being in the league of dining at Masa.  Meanwhile I was rereading Mans Search For Meaning, the Auschwitz survival account of Dr. Victor Frankl who poses his dilemma; how best to survive on a crust of bread? Eat it at once or break it up through the day?

     This alone doesn’t  make a case for the Food Networkization of the nation. But when we landed in a barstool at Legman’s favorite gin mill Milano’s the last of the Bowery bars, we were struck with this bizarre food scene; an Anglo Irishman, accompanied by a couple of elegantly dressed Brit chicks is raving about the bundle of take-out he’d ordered from Rice, the foodie Asian eatery around  the corner on Mulberry.  A literary type, he went on about the blackness of the black grains, the coriander fragrance of his curry while we’re savoring the first decent pint of Guinness in year and counting our acquaintances on a photo wall of the dead and buried, he’s insistent on sharing his joy.  We finally accept a croquette of indeterminate matter to be congenial. But first off, the Legman has never ever met an Irishman who gave a rat’s ass about chow, but moreover, it is the context that made us feel we were down the rabbit hole; it played out where back in our college days Jack Flynn, an old smoke residing at the Sunshine Residence, would flaunt a pack of Lebanon salami that would comprise his food ration for the week. Now it should be noted that Milano’s had at one time served food.  A menu certified by the War Price & Rationing Board, 139 Center Street, hanging in the bar lists the price of a ham and potato sandwich at 20 cents. But we’re betting no one of that Greatest Generation expounded on the confluence of those three ingredients while getting sloshed here.

For Those Who Know: They Never Ate Here