
Yesterday, The New York Times Magazine let food columnist Tejal Rao write 800 words about “seeing kale with new eyes.” Her paean to lacinato (the “dinosaur” one) concludes with what’s presumably a very good recipe — a blended-kale pasta sauce from Joshua McFadden.
One of the column’s readers was Mimi Sheraton, legendary former Times restaurant critic. She did not like seeing yet another story praising the green:
As a journalist, Sheraton’s almost made a beat out of kale-dragging. (See her 2016 Daily Beast article, which begins, “I know and hate kale when I see it.”) In all seriousness, she says it’s more a dislike of today’s chefs than the green — or of their propensity to serve it year-round, roasted so it has “the texture of broken ceramic chips.” But the shots fired (“Farm-to-Garbage Pail”!) look nearly unrecoverable. The trend can finally go the way of the dinosaurs.