I think people are bringing their own issues to the table here. I don’t post food pictures or those kinds of updates except to show off maybe some barbecue I’m cooking (especially the one time it actually involved building a cinder block smoker.)
But I have some friends who post interesting foods or updates they’ve come across, and it’s interesting to me. If it looks good, I make a mental note to try it out if I’m ever in the restaurant’s neighborhood. I don’t find it “arrogant” or “pretentious” at all.
Well, yes, of course. That’s kind of stating the obvious, isn’t it? It’s appealing to people who like little twists and experimentation with their food. Even if it is a quest to find the perfect BLT, it’s still going to appeal to this so-called “hipster/foodie” audience based on its ingredients.
Yeah, I love kale, too. I haven’t noticed it either in restaurants, though. To be honest, I only eat out maybe twice a month, but even when I end up at well-regarded “foodie” restaurants, I haven’t noticed it being more popular or anything.
I think sometimes the ingredients aren’t really all that exotic, but the trend to describe them in detail makes them sound both exotic and pretentious when it’s all spelled out.
For example, a BLT made with center-cut, hickory smoked bacon, organic buttercrunch lettuce, vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes, and served on slices of multigrain baguette with olive oil mayonnaise sounds pretentious, but is made of stuff I can get at my local Kroger- several of the things I mention are either mass-market items (Oscar Mayer center-cut bacon, Kraft olive oil mayonnaise) or are standard produce items (organic lettuce, heirloom tomato) and the only one of any pretense is the bread, and that’s from the store’s bakery.
It’s not generic store-brand bacon, nameless tomato and iceberg lettuce on a slice of wonder bread with Miracle Whip, but it’s not particularly pretentious either, unless you go out of your way to describe it as such.
That sandwich sounds disgusting. But only because the only bread in my household growing up was crumbly-ass wheatberry bread which I loathed with the fury of a 75-watt incandescent bulb ( yeah, I didn’t fixate on it, but that stuff sucked - trying to spread “old-fashioned” peanut butter on it was an exercise in frustration ). Just like gin after my first unfortunate bout with a substantial amount of alcohol when I was a HS sophomore, I’ll never put that shit in my system again.
Otherwise, I can sorta see it. I’m actually not huge fan of wasabi per se, but some other variant of spicy mayo sounds like a reasonable idea as long as it doesn’t end up fighting too much with the bacon. The reason a duck egg might be preferable to chicken egg other than whatever minor flavor differences there might be, is simple size. Might be easier to fit. And egg on a BLT, like a spicy mayo, sounds like an experiment that might be worth trying. I don’t think it would replace or best the original, but it still might be decent.
At the end of the day I find myself with a foot in either camp. Living in the Bay Area trendy fusion food is pretty ubiquitous and yeah, some of it is pretentious wankery. It’s easy to get annoyed with the more preciously over-the-top stuff ( especially if it has an unjustified price premium attached ). I know I have. But some of it, when done properly, is pretty damn delicious or at least a nice change of pace.
A lot of people probably thought the first BLAT was heresy as well ( a very unadventurous friend of mine was slightly horrified by avocados on anything, which she didn’t taste until she was in her 30’s ). But some foodie got the bright idea to pair them up and voila - two great tastes that go great together.
I agree. There’s a difference between foods chosen for deliciousness (we’ve got a local mad genius chef who makes things like bean burritos with bananas and coconuts in them) and foods chosen for trendiness (we’ve got a local mad moron chef who makes things like black bean burritos with green curry sauce). I’m super-happy to have the mad genius cooks out there, but the folks who subsitute fancy-sounding ingredients for that kind of genius are a waste of time in my opinion.
If you remove the stems and chop it up, and cook it in the rendered fat of thick cut grain fed organic cruelty free hickory smoked bacon, it can be pretty delicious.
This too. Obviously I would like more of a descriptor than “Sandwich,” but when you go all Portlandia on me and tell me my bacon was made from a pig named Sam, my eyes involuntarily roll. This reminds me of the dish I recently ate which contained “foraged mushrooms.” Foraged! The meal was great, so I didn’t complain too much, but the growing ubiquity of “foraged” food gives me a chuckle.
Word. But I suppose if you’re not impressed by it or are irritated by foodie pretense, it means you adhere to a strict diet of bologna sandwiches.
On the kale front,I much prefer it to spinach, which I generally find slimy if cooked or bland if uncooked, and my tofu-kale cooked in a savory ginger-peanut-garlic-chili sauce is possibly my single best invented recipe.
I suppose I’ve only ever seen that happen on Portlandia, not in real life.
It takes a certain amount of expertise/practice and effort to forage for ingredients, especially if you’re in a city. One would assume that people who forage for food want to serve it to people who want to eat foraged food. How would it work unless there was some kind of exchange of information?
I envy you. Portlandia is not so much a sketch comedy show as it is a documentary on Portland and its inhabitants. The overly-hipster description of menu items is nearly ubiquitous there.
