Appointment television eating, Dinner Time Live with David Chang, and more

Some thoughts on appointment television eating, Netflix's Dinner Time Live with David Chang, rumors & ramblings, and your music pick

I’m currently in New York for the week, I plan to eat at Foul Witch, Frog Club, Le Rock, and more, so stay tuned. 

Appointment Television Eating

Along with trance music, Mad Dog 20/20, and owning media, appointment television is crawling back into our lives. I’m not the first to talk about streaming bundles imploding back into cable TV. It’s all a mess; prices keep going up, and unless we’re midseason on White Lotus, it feels like scraping the bowl for resin most days on our home screens. 

We’re beginning to relearn how good it feels to enjoy something simultaneously with millions of others. Let’s take the Super Bowl, for example. Historically, my job at a Super Bowl party is to react to specific moments with irreverent observations—typically to the halftime show and commercials more than to the gameplay itself. Making a room full of people laugh feels nice, but if your friends aren’t funny or smart, you can go on Twitter, see reactions from the best reactors in the world, and share them with your room. Reactions to reactions of reactions. But what about the food? 

Six people took a scoop of your buffalo chicken dip, and a few asked what that “kick” was. By the time Usher gets his preshow peptide shot, you’ve stopped explaining what Momofuku Chili Crunch is. But if you post a photo of that dip and tag @momolongplay, dozens of people are clamoring for the recipe. It’s a slot machine pull of praise upon checking your replies. 

Production quality and increased internet speeds allow us to watch music festivals like Coachella live in crisp detail on the flat-screen in our air-conditioned homes. It’s not as exhilarating as being there live, but it evens out when you factor in parking lots, $24 cans of Modelo, and being forced to hear what USC students say to each other—staying home gets easier every year when you think about the pros and cons. I’ll never get a DUI at my house. My bathroom never has a line, and my wings never run out of ranch. But I’ve also never met anyone new there. 

I’ve written about the flywheel effect of smoking, eating, and drinking before. But a new, dangerously introverted wheel is beginning to spin. It’s the flywheel effect of watching a live event while eating foods you don’t normally let yourself eat and checking your phone occasionally to see what your friends are saying without ever having to put on clothes or ask someone what you can bring to their house. The feeling you get from not having to put on a look and a smile and not being forced to tell someone “what you’ve been up to” since the last party can negate the warm feeling of physical camaraderie, depending on your friend group.

So, much like an actual dinner reservation, anything more than a six-top at your coffee table is too much. Two is perfect, but you cannot sample as many items on the menu. Last month, Karolyn and I watched the Super Bowl at home, just the two of us. We fumbled into a tasting menu instead of a typical buffet setup. This allowed us to properly digest between courses and feel the RUSH of running to the kitchen to stir things and check the oven before the big game came back on. Like health food back in the day, this feature used to be built into our appointment viewing. We had no choice but to check on things during commercial breaks, because that would be the only chance. So now we do the Super-Bowl-makase. Awful name, yes. But imagine a quarterly tasting course with hot, fresh items to enjoy and, more important, to look forward to. The anticipation and release of wings, dips, smashburger tacos, and a dessert course? All the nasty-ass food you want to eat, but with p a c i n g. Inspired by the Okinawa blue zone style of eating until you’re 80 percent full, we chose to maintain 80 percent satiation. Make a seven-layer dip without cheese, for example. Little things like that help you feel less like a pile on the couch as you pile on the couch. About six years ago, people called this eating style “healthy-ish.”

Writing this reminds me of when I first moved to LA. My friend Andre (who some of you might remember as a cohost on my old food podcast) used to host Sunday backyard BBQs at his spot in Echo Park. Friends from all over had a standing invitation to eat some ribs, do some drugs, and crack each other up. Once the sun set, we’d clean up and fight over a spot on the couch to watch HBO’s Sunday programming. Imagine the high one got from watching back-to-back episodes of Entourage, Curb, Da Ali G Show, The Wire, and The Sopranos the first time they aired. How good does that white-noise title screen feel, followed by Ali G rolling a spliff with one hand? It’s on par with a first-class upgrade. 

Throwing something live on in the background, like Formula 1, tennis, or Coachella, breathes life into your home, more so than prerecorded content. It keeps you partially tethered to the outside world. I can go to Coachella or the US Open if I want to, but I can’t go to the Oscars, the Grammy’s, or the Met Gala because I’m not famous yet. And I can’t be a guest on Dinner Time Live with David Chang for the same reason. Until then, let’s close Gmail, eat some low-sodium chips, and judge people’s outfits on television for a while.

I’ve been watching Dinner Time Live since it debuted a few months ago. Like Saturday Night Live, most people I talk to hate it. It’s the same format as Molto Mario, Mario Batali’s Food Network show from the ’90s. Batali’s had some cool guests over the years, like a young Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. Mario might not be a great guy, but hosting he could do. He commanded the countertop with authority and encyclopedic wisdom. You had the feeling that any question a guest asked would be met with a thoughtful and interesting anecdotal and romantic reply featuring pinpoint-precise Italian pronunciation from a guy who looked less like Al Pacino and more like Tim Allen (specifically in The Santa Clause). All while never letting his garlic burn or his guests see the bottom of their wine glasses.

Mario also had the safety net of editing. Any flub could be corrected with a clean take, much like I can do on How Long Gone if I mispronounce a guest’s name or place of work. Anytime Chang is asked a question by his guests, he pauses to consider how to answer without offending a country or delivering an incorrect piece of information as if it were fact, all while overcooking the A5 Wagyu. 

All this is to say, it’s not perfect television. But I kind of like it that way. Watching people interact without a safety net will forever be compelling to me. The show airs Tuesdays at 4 p.m. PT, so I never watch it live, as I don’t eat dinner at 4 p.m. There’s a running gag on the show where Chang wants to keep the MA-13 rating (presumably so that more people can watch the show and learn about food and cooking), but within the first five minutes, he and his guests say the word “fuck” so many times that they lose it. 

Would it be better to run the same exact show every week, with a few “fucks” bleeped out, a few fuck-ups refired, and a few flat jokes chucked in the bin? Would it still feel alive enough to keep my attention? Maybe. Since Chang can’t steer the ship and cook at the same time yet, he has to rely on his guests to keep the plates spinning. Instead of booking comedians who don’t know each other, the show should book friends who already have a rapport; they don’t need a Netflix special. Unlike SNL, they don’t announce who the guests will be ahead of time (they actually just started), so live viewership is not necessarily talent-dependent. But I’m in the minority on this, I know. The average viewer just wants to see a French fry cheese pull—they don’t care where Dave sourced his dry-aged yellowtail.

Nevertheless, I keep watching, judging, and silently adding my own comedic tags. I watch these people and think, “Hey, I could do that.” I’m sure Chang felt the same when he pitched the idea to Uncle Ted Sarandos, but it looks easy until that camera’s red light clicks on. I’m mostly excited about what this show could mean for the future of live television. Hopefully it opens the door for similar programming across the board. A daily sports show, entertainment news—or maybe, one day, a cooking show where the guests know about food.

Rumors & Ramblings

• Kanye and Bianca continue to go to the Cheesecake Factory, often at the Grove, an extremely popular outdoor mall in Los Angeles. A little vulture told me they were spotted ordering a late-night ice cream sundae at Gigi’s in Hollywood last week, followed by…a second ice cream sundae. They were also seen hitting the Raising Cane’s drive-through in Burbank. All this begs the question: What she order?

• My tailor, Robert Lim, is an older gentleman who’s been making custom suits since the ’70s. I asked him if he could recommend a spot near his shop in K-Town where I could grab a bite. He paused briefly and handed me this note, reading “Cho Sun Kalbee Restaurant on Olympic.” If you don’t know, it’s one of the most well-known Korean restaurants in Los Angeles. He’s a great guy who deserves more business.

  

• I grabbed a quick sushi lunch at Matsumoto in West Hollywood with my friends Paulie and Al. I had a nice piece of shad that tasted like a faraway sea, a flavor I had never appreciated until that very moment. Like the best pieces of sushi, uni especially, shad is either amazing or inedible, a short spectrum. Also, this happens when you’re 20 minutes late to lunch with an ex-graffiti writer

  

• A guy on Twitter claims to have eaten three pounds of scallops per day and lost 22 pounds in a month. I’ll keep the 22.

• My barber, a former employee of Marc Jacobs, recently regaled me with stories about their infamous seasonal retail location in Provincetown, MA. Every summer, certain salespeople who met the criteria were invited to sling some stinky rat tees for the summer and perhaps party their faces off. Apparently, rapper 50 Cent was a frequent window shopper. It feels like a Hulu series about the last golden era of retail waiting to happen; call it “Shop Boys.”

• And speaking of P-Town. Go hit Sal’s Place in West Hollywood. They close down in Cape Cod and move west for the winter, only to close and return again when it warms back up. Are there any other restaurants that migrate like Sal’s? Cool vibe if you can pull it off. It’s a fun little room full of power gays, an easy wine list, and lightning-quick martinis. They automatically split the Caesars, and their vongole is a fastball down the middle. Skip the entrées (sorry) to save room for tiramisu. The best part about Sal’s? It’s cash only, and reservations are available only by telephone.

• On a recent trip to the gym, I felt motivated to up the weight on my dumbbell presses when the guy next to me was pressing a higher weight while wearing anime-themed Vans.

Music Pairing 

“Don Quichotte,” Magazine 60 (via YouTube)

I finally watched American Fiction on the plane yesterday. The film’s writer and director, Cord Jefferson, appeared on How Long Gone about a year ago. I was pleasantly surprised to see this song pop up halfway through the film. It scored a scene of people doing cocaine during the daytime perfectly.