Blessed Are the Fuck-Givers

Friend-of-the-Slog Paul Trapani has been reporting, over past few months, various sightings of a food-world unicorn: really good restaurant French toast. 

Now it’s escalated to this:

What are these glorious home fries doing in a shitty diner in Plainview, NY?  Paul marveled at the crustiness, but I pointed out this unbrown relic that seemed nonetheless toothsome:

WHAT IS GOING ON???

My first though was “machine learning”, just because I’d just written the phrase  plus it never fails to sound smart and incisive. 

Then I remembered how me and several friends had agreed that in the (kinda) post-COVID opening, there’d been some hard-to-pin down foundational shift. Not a pleasant one. And foundational shifts are zero sum, so the breakfast elevation may simply be the other end of that. Nature finding balance. Gaia or whatever. 

But then Paul nailed it. It’s this: owners and managers cooking, due to the labor shortage. In other words, for the first time in a very long time, our French toast and home fries are being produced by actual fuck-givers. 

Blessed are the fuck-givers, for their home fries are crusty.

Photo by Paul Trapani