If you saw the recent Times exposé, you know that Mayor Bloomberg — despite his public role as a nutritional scold — yields to no one in his private appetite for trashy victuals, including, but not limited, to: hamburgers and hot dogs, pizza and bagels (both sprinkled with salt), fried chicken, popcorn, and spicy Chinese food washed down with goblets of Merlot. Augustus Gloop, apparently, has nothing on the mayor of New York. And if you saw the subsequent blog reports of Bloomberg sampling the delicacies at the new Bill’s Bar and Burger, you might have concluded that (a) the man does not read the Times or (b) he’s sticking with a governing style best described as the “do as I say, not as I do” variety.
The Underground Gourmet, who was also in attendance that night at Bill’s, thought it must be theory “b,” — at least until we spotted the mayor making a leisurely retreat from the restaurant just before last call and overheard him casually recap his meal to a constituent at the bar. “It was very good,” he admitted. “I had the one with the peppers, the Bobcat burger … but without the cheese.” Whether this abstention is the result of lactose intolerance, or just the mayor’s idea of cutting back a little, we may never know. But it’s good to see this human eating machine relatively undeterred and making the rounds, even if he didn’t offer us his leftovers, as Chief Justice John Roberts did with Gay Talese.
