1. I've looked through the Richman's article. Yep, it's a piece of garbage. It’s totally ludicrous!

Posted at 4:04AM on Nov 3rd 2006 by Bob

2. I was just getting ready to write about this. I can stand a bad opinion of the food here, but the lies and misinformation are disgusting.

Posted at 9:24AM on Nov 3rd 2006 by Kelly

3. After digesting Alan Richman's absurdly vitriolic ax job on the city of New Orleans, its cuisine and its entire culture [GQ, November '06], I was left with a few burning questions.

First for the writer: What's wrong, Mr. Richman—did you lose your per diem lunch money in the slot machines at Harrah's? Has your wife stolen off with a washboard player? Surely, there must be some source to your reservoir of venom other than a few overcooked oysters and an unimpressed maître d'. As an independent rock critic who lives and works in New Orleans, I know all about harboring unpopular opinions about hallowed institutions; I disseminate them on a monthly basis. But your bitter rant reads less like a balanced critique from a celebrated gastronomic authority and more like the outsider observations of a jerk who's just jealous that he wasn't invited to the party. More malignant than merely picking on a scuffling populace, your rank, error-riddled writing is akin to intentionally tripping a hapless cripple. There isn't a person in this city who hasn't been through hell in the last 12 months, be it from losing their loved ones, their house or simply their job. Instead of pointing out the positive angles to their story—e.g., that 75 percent of New Orleans' eateries have now reopened, or that several world-class restaurants have since started up—you saw fit to set fire to their rebuilding efforts with overt falsities. You are a heartless arsonist, sir, and for that, you should be ashamed.

To the GQ editorial board—the same people who, I can only assume, commissioned this baseless piece of yellow journalism from an ignorant, admittedly biased author and are therefore left to answer for it: What if I wrote food articles for a swank, Southern-based mainstream fashion magazine and traipsed around Manhattan on the company's dime back in the Summer of 2002? What if I decried the supposed "newness" of the New American menus at David Burke & Donatella and the River Café; bitched about being presented the wrong bottle of wine only five blocks away from ground zero; whined about the dry franks and lumpy shakes at Gray's Papaya; and then proclaimed that Spanish Harlem had never existed because I didn't run into a single Puerto Rican during my limo ride from Yankee Stadium to a hotel on the Upper East Side?

The obvious answer is that I'd be unceremoniously dismissed—the very same action that the gentlemen who steward this suddenly afflicted Quarterly will take with regard to the embarrassing Alan Richman, should they seek to retain even an ounce of the fallow dignity it once so fervently flaunted. Only then will you regain New Orleans' respect and, more to the point, its growing potential readership.


Noah Bonaparte Pais
Senior Editor, ANTIGRAVITY Magazine



On Nov 2, 2006, at 1:40 AM, thecritic@optonline.net wrote:


RE: "I know all about harboring unpopular opinions about hallowed institutions."

Obviously you don't.

Best of luck.



Alan Richman



Subject: Re: A letter to Mr. Richman and the GQ Editorial Board
Date: November 3, 2006 3:54:45 PM CST
To: thecritic@optonline.net
Cc: jim_nelson@gq.com, michael_hainey@gq.com, fred_woodward@gq.com, jim_moore@gq.com, erik_meers@gq.com, andy_ward@gq.com, joel_lovell@gq.com, jason_gay@gq.com, mark_healy@gq.com, adam_rapoport@gq.com, john_gillies@gq.com, mickey_rapkin@gq.com, devin_friedman@gq.com, chris_huvane@gq.com, alex_pappademas@gq.com, nate_penn@gq.com, candice_rainey@gq.com, kevin_sintumuang@gq.com, andy_comer@gq.com, greg_veis@gq.com, laura_vitale@gq.com, ted_klein@gq.com, rebecca_peterson@gq.com, leah_zibulsky@gq.com, lucas_zaleski@gq.com, jordan_reed@gq.com, david_gargill@gq.com, kyla_jones@gq.com, benjamin_phelan@gq.com, thomas_wallace@gq.com, info@frenchculinary.com


Mr. Richman:

Thanks for your response, however rote. It's entirely plausible that you were, at one point, an intrepid, relevant reporter; the French Culinary Institute is an estimable organization, its inclusion of you as an ethics professor notwithstanding, and it's doubtful that the dear James Beard Foundation could have erred a dozen times over.

That said, your piece on New Orleans was so poorly planned and ineffectually argued as to be deemed laughable — if not for its lackadaisical reductionism, libelous bigotry and grave implications of serious sabotage on the city's one functioning economic engine. Amazingly, you seem not to know (or, worse, not to care) what corrosive effects your high-profile hack job could inflict upon the region and its ongoing recovery. Such lack of foresight and insight into one's own professional and ethical responsibilities is beyond contemptible. From someone in your decorated position, it's downright unpardonable.

I thought that by listening to your podcast I might better grasp why an honorary like yourself would choose such a lowbrow approach to his craft. I only grew more confused. You sling hateful hypocrisies as if they were poison-tipped arrows from atop an ivory tower; express unprovoked contempt for a culture you barely understand (your friend Leah Chase is one of your "faerie folk" Creoles, you should know); and wield the resources of a respected, 70-year-old journal as a soapbox for dispensing ridicule and racism in the guise of sardonic marginalization. Not to mention the continual mispronunciation of "Louisa's by the Tracks," your second favorite joint in the city even though you don't know its name ("I've never said it aloud"), and your confession of a simpleton's comprehension about the general tenets of social geography ("New Orleans shouldn't exist ... Why have they built there? Because it's nice living on a river"). Following your rationale, it's no wonder 12 million people settled in the equally precarious New York City: Situated as it is, on not one but two rivers, Manhattan must be just swell.

More offensive than your offhand generalities are your misleading, mean-spirited specifics. Could it be that poor Derek Guth, the Parkway Bakery daytime manager you ruthlessly skewer for displaying a photo of his damage, was simply excited to have a luminary like yourself eating in his humble establishment? You liken his ebullience to some sort of masochism: "Maybe the residents of Pompeii had the same macabre sense of fulfillment, pleased that they were being buried in hot ash like none before them." Were New Orleanians not so busy "stumbling out of bars" and "loving the dinner table too much," you pompously posit, we could have done more to prepare for Katrina's unprecedented devastation. Read your own paragraph once more, and then imagine the outcry had someone in 2001 gallingly suggested that the $350 prix fixe at Per Se somehow prevented New Yorkers from properly defending their borders. Your logical jumps would make Evel Knievel jealous.

"New Orleans has always been about food and music, with parades added to the mix," you oversimplify in the same sorry passage. "In the North, where I come from, we like to think we're about jobs and education, with sports thrown in." Might I suggest, Mr. Richman, before embarking on your next sensationalist smear campaign, that you properly educate yourself about the region you are about to excoriate — it might save you and your unfortunate employers from another internationally distributed ignominy.

That is, if these eight pages of repugnant excrement don't first cost you your job.


--
Noah Bonaparte Pais
Senior Editor, ANTIGRAVITY
P.O. Box 24584
New Orleans, LA 70184
www.antigravitymagazine.com
www.myspace.com/noahbonaparte
www.noahbonaparte.com

Posted at 9:32AM on Nov 4th 2006 by Noah Bonaparte Pais

4. I wanna see Richman tell Don Vappie that he isn't a Creole, because they are a "faerie folk, like leprachauns".

I guess racism is OK, as long as you do it against New Orleanians.

Posted at 9:32PM on Nov 7th 2006 by ashley Morris