When you’re a human cartoon, it’s tough to be taken seriously.
When your pedigree springs from the louche environs of UNLV and the middle-brow banality of Johnny Garlic’s (not to mention those dens of sophistication: Sacramento, Santa Rosa and San Jose, et al, (wherein this franchise fits like stretch pants on a soccer mom), serious gastronomes consider your cooking (if they consider it at all) unworthy of their time or calories.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs… Oh wait, this is something else entirely, although I’m fairly certain I listened to “Sympathy for the Devil” at one point, and I recall there being amyl nitrate somewhere.
The build up to this story held a great many undertones of personal danger, but mostly calling in favors, tracking down PR types and weaseling my way into whatever it is I could. My fervor was motivated less by testing my true grit against a weekend of a gluttonous bacchanalia, although I am always eager to do that, but to test my earlier prediction about the Hubert Keller/Sarah Johnson Beer Garden being the best real event (“real” referring to any that isn’t a Michelin starred chef cooking a dozen-by-a-dozen degustation-athons). Really, honestly, with the trend of overselling the food booth and TV chef selfie events AND making the grievous omission of any Le Cirque/Circo/Sirio things, I would say my prediction had sadly come to fruition. Grand Tasting: consider the ball dropped. It all kind of ran together…
ELV just saw a Budweiser commercial which claims that Anheuser-Busch “….might be America’s best known local* brewer.”
Which might might be the biggest crock of shit — from an industry that specializes in crocks of shit — we’ve ever heard.
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* Anheuser-Busch makes over 11 billion bottles of beer a year, at thirteen different bottling plants**, and pockets almost $40 billion a year doing it.
** Local brewer my ass***.
*** Speaking of giant asses, that seems to be what this poor young woman has stuck on her ribcage:
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