Remember when Brian Williams somewhat hilariously joked that the media story of the year was the New York Times’ “discovery of Brooklyn”? “There are open markets, like trading posts in the early Chippawa tribe!” he marveled, mocking the paper. “Artisanal cheeses for sale on the street! It’s like Marrakech over there. I’m leaving here to get to an artisanal market right now. It’s a flash artisanal market. It’s the newest thing.” Well … The Times either got the joke and decided to continue it, or the writers just don’t care that they got called out, and continued on with the trend. (We suspect — hope? — it’s the former.) Because in this weekend’s “Travel” section, the editors literally sent out food critic Sam Sifton to EXPLORE BROOKLYN for a “36 Hours In” feature. Like it is a foreign city, and not, you know, New York. The city that makes up two of the four words in the name of their own paper.
In his column, Sifton marvels at the “cobblestone streets under the Manhattan Bridge” and “the leafy precincts of Fort Greene.” He recommends Spoonbill and Sugartown, which “offers an eclectic mix of art and design books and academic tracts.” Then he gets to the really good stuff: Artists and Fleas, “where artists, designers, collectors and craftspeople showcase their work”; Blue Bottle Coffee, which is “an impossibly nerdy outpost of the original Oakland coffee bar”; and Buttermilk Channel, where he recommends the “local cheeses and pastas and a superlative duck meatloaf.”
Duck meatloaf. Sam, please, please, please tell us you’re laughing at the same joke the rest of us are.
36 Hours in Brooklyn [NYT]
