“Life fades … vision dims … and all that remains is memory.” Such are the haunting first words of The Road Warrior, and we can’t help but think of them as we look back, through heavy lids, at the year that was. And so we recall the most memorable food moments of 2007.
1. The combined fury of the blogosphere coming down on the well-coiffed head of tiny Danyelle Freeman, when she ascended from humble “restaurant girl” to full-fledged critic at the Daily Snooze. Comments on the Eater board got so mean that we felt positively guilty for reprinting them. (Not that that stopped us.)
2. Doing our part to add to Gordon Ramsay’s misery by reporting on his furious neighbors, his selection as an icon for British homosexuals, his various legal troubles, and even his seared tea bag.
3. Bruni–Chodorow: The Apocalypse. The city’s most emotionally vulnerable restaurateur meets a zero-star rating and fights back hard.
4. David Chang telling everyone who would listen how much he despises the media, while simultaneously appearing everywhere from a “best dressed” spread in Esquire to a mail-order bacon catalog.
5. Watching Daniel Boulud dance on top of a piano at Le Bernardin at three in the morning, while we drank from a Don Julio bottle with Scott Conant.
6. David Burke vigorously denying to us, in a nightclub VIP room, that he has a mullet.
7. Having Mario Batali tell us, in no uncertain terms, “Adam Platt is a miserable fuck.”
8. Visiting the Red Hook Ball Fields with Aaraon Sanchez and randomly running into Andrew Carmellini on a similar cheap-eats mission, looking equally beside himself with excitement.
8. Upon hearing word that a certain meat-centric young chef had smuggled illegal Spanish hams into the city, sneaking into the kitchen of his restaurant to purchase some of the black-market meat, a drug-deal–like escapade that gave us a rare “bad boy” frisson.
9. Watching a group of line cooks at Dani stand by in awe as Hung Huynh demonstrated his preternaturally fast knife skills for a Grub Street video. Honorable mention: watching a bunch of equally excited line cooks take cell-phone pictures for their friends of a freakishly big truffle at Le Cirque.
10. Having Tom Colicchio take us aside at Taste of New York and ask us, sotto voce, how we found out that he had been included in People’s Sexiest Men Alive issue. Sorry, Tom — we never kiss and tell.
