Paul Smalera

As you’ll see in my latest New York Press review, I was quite smitten with the soy-fueled goodies at Kyotofu. Have a read, and do yourself a favor– check it out!

PS-Yes, Alone in Kyotofu is a play on the Air song from Lost in Translation. I highly suggest you check that out too!

Friends, there is good pizza, and there is good pizza. Having grown up in New Jersey, I was used to the idea that if a pizza place managed to stay open for more than a year, the pizza they were serving was probably going to be good. Small town economics dictate that crappy restaurants close fast. Yet here in Manhattan, bad pizzerias are everywhere, and they stay open for years! There are simply too many people on this island who don’t know or don’t care what a good slice should taste like. May I suggest, for those of us who do care what a pizza is supposed to be, that you read my New York Press review of Cronkite Pizzeria and Wine Bar, a new joint on the Lower East Side? Although they are definitely a gourmet sort of place, they are doing all right by me. Mangia!

Photo: Wendy Ploger

It's been a while, but here's another clip of sorts. Over at Conde Nast Traveler's website, every issue of the magazine should bring with it a monthly online quiz. This month's is written by yours truly, and it's all about that city of sin, that according to Guy Martin in this month's issue, may save us all: Las Vegas. To take the quiz, click here. Sorry, no betting!

Have you ever really, really wanted to like someone, but just couldn't? Like, no matter what they said or did, or how cool they were, this person just rubbed you the wrong way? And you're kinda pissed off at yourself because you don't think you're a very judgmental (at least not in a  harsh, calculating sense) kind of person, but, regardless, there it is. You don't like 'em.

Well, when I reviewed Kampuchea Noodle Bar for the New York Press, that's sort of how I felt. As much as I wanted to settle in at a table and slurp up all the goodies and flavors I had come to associate with Southeast Asian cooking, in the end, I just left the place feeling a little flat. I hope to see this place come around, but for now, if you want to know what I'm talking about, have a click on my review above. Thanks, and enjoy.

Today my New York Press review of Meskel, a cute Ethiopian spot in the East Village, ran. If injera's your thing, if you (doro)wat some good eats, have a read. Thanks!

Imagine, if you will, that you live next door to Henry Kissinger. He waves hello in the halls. He puts mail of yours that he accidentally received back into your mailbox. But you can’t get out of your mind that you live next to Henry “War Crimes” Fucking Kissinger.

Well, that’s actually not my essay at all, but imagine you lived next to Kissinger in 1970 rather than today. And imagine he decided, one day, that you, and everyone else in the building, were the enemy. That’s a little closer, but still nothing like my essay in this week’s: New York Obsever- New Yorker’s Diary. You’re going to have to find out what it’s about for yourself. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Ever move somewhere and crash your moving van into a bus? No? Really? It's totally the rage. To learn about how sweet moving-van crashing can be, read my column, The Welcome Wagon in this week's edition of The New York Press. 

The other day I was whisking my own tarragon, mustard seed, lime, mango viniagrette, and as I reached for the aged champagne vinegar, I thought, "what the fuck am I doing?" It turns out David Kamp has my answer. What I, nay, what we, all of us as a country are doing, is classing it up. But why? What's wrong with Wonder Bread and Hellman's? Those are 2 of the 5 ingredients in an kick-ass BLT, the food of the gods and my choice at diners nationwide. David recently asked visitors to his blog what they thought of the title of his book. I was delighted to weigh in, and he was delighted to highlight my delightedness to weigh in. How delightful. 

Want to know what witty title prompted my witty rejoinder? Click on the link above, or buy his excellent book here. PS, David also authored The Rock Snob's Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge which, as a formerly aspiring Rock Snob, I love. I say formerly aspiring not because I achieved Rock Snob Nirvana (get it?) but because I just gave the hell up. I was sick of being outgunned by the emaciated nerds who run every record shop in the universe. Now I just bow down, offer alms and humor them while I plunder their superious knowledge to aid me in my shopping.

So, you're in New York City, you're walking to work, thinking, "Damnit, I am so sick of that secretary who always answers the phone in the exact same fake chipper monotonous voice, I am just gonna…", but ho, what's this on the sidewalk? A crisp new Benjamin Franklin!  

Friend, call out of work today, before you do harm to yourself or others, and heed my advice for a manifestly decent day of eating, seeing and doing. $100 A Day Winners - Gridskipper

That is all. 

So, we've gotten fat. As you probably noticed at the grocery store, on the airplane and in the stands at your son's Little League game, we're not alone. If you're an adult in the United States, 65% of the population including yours truly, are brothers-in-donuts. I for one never have to worry about being stranded on the highway, thanks to my spare tire. On my 6'3" frame, I'm easily carrying an extra twenty pounds of fat. The neighbors can attest to the sucking sounds that emanate from me every time I try to put on an old pair of jeans. What's a guy to do?

This is a rejected article. It's a piece I researched, developed and pitched with every hope of placing it in print as a freelance writer. If you read it you can probably guess the markets it was written for. I'm proud of this story and hope publishing it here will get it in front of people that are interested in it. Enjoy, and feel free to comment. Perhaps I'll add a postscript to the comments later on.

Enter the diet. It's an American concept, a guilty atonement for the indulgent excesses of meals, snacks and noshes past. It is penance for cheesecakes, nachos, and anything that emerges from a deep-fat fryer. We announce that we are going on one to our spouses, our coworkers, and our waiters. It's commonly estimated by journals that at any given time, one-quarter of the adult population is on a diet. If that's accurate, diets must hardly ever work. A plump 91% of us have tried to lose weight at least once in our lives.

Needless to say, if we had kept if off, 65% of us wouldn't still have a weight problem. So how is it that the diet experts can't seem to help us lose weight, and more importantly, keep it off? Most diets involve eating according to some arcane plan, plenty ofself-denial, and strategic cut backs on carbs, sugar, fats, or all of the above, depending on what particular diet guru's Kool-aid you're drinking. Besides the psychological effects, the logistics of staying on track tend to derail your social life and your daily routines in favor of a tightly regimented eating schedule. In the heat of a diet, it's a thin line of shoestring potatoes that keeps us from flipping out when our server is confused by our order of a hamburger, no bun, no fries. Thus, the dichotomy of dieting: we adhere to strict and unintuitive rules in an attempt to lose weight, only to eventually find ourselves back where we started. But, what if it wasn't that hard to get skinny, albeit the diet was even weirder than a typical weird diet? Would you try it, like I am right now? Seth Roberts, author of "The Shangri-La Diet", was trying to solve his own weight problem when he hit upon something even more American than the diet: the quick fix.

As something of a blogoholic, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where I found Roberts' Shangri-La diet. I do know that skipping across the blogosphere one day last month, I stumbled into a network of sites dedicated to it, which felt something like falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. Blogger after blogger extolled the simplicity and sense of the diet plan, emphasizing that it wasn't so much a diet as a reprogramming of the mind. After finally finding and reading the instructions, I was sure something was missing. The basic rule of the diet, if you can really call it a diet, is simple. In fact, here it is. Drink, twice a day, in the middle of a two-hour window of noteating, a few tablespoons of flavorless oil, or a solution of sugar water.

Then, according to the bloggers, watch as the pastry case at Starbucks releases its death grip on you, as the dessert menu goes unread, as you barely finish half your lunch, as you have no desire to raid the vending machine for a mid-afternoon snack. Roberts claims that you will feel full after having eaten less food, which means you will cut your caloric intake without even thinking about it. Rather than having to deny yourself the fries on your plate, you just won't be interested in eating them, unless you want to feel bloated and sick afterwards. I can't help but think of it as gastric bypasssurgery for the mind.

It's pretty safe to say that if Roberts was my friend, Berkeley professor, Ph.D. or not, had he told me about this theory of his, I would've listened, nodded politely while eating my chocolate cake, and remembered to check his medicine cabinet for unusual drug combinations the next time I came over for a visit. But before allowing skepticism to set in, before understanding how his diet scientifically worked, I came across dozens of bloggers who are trying it and losing weight. Roberts shrewdly links to pretty much every blogger he can find doing the diet, and provides a forum wherehe encourages others to tweak his plan to fit their needs. Instead of being a diet guru, Roberts is a diet tour guide, allowing his tourists ample time to wander the grounds of Shangri-La and customizehis theory to fit their individual tastes and goals.

The substance of Roberts' discovery of his diet, and the focus of much of his book, is his research background, his penchant for self-experimentation, and an accidental realization that drinking soda in Paris left him feeling completely full and unable to eat. Roberts determined that his lack of hunger was due to his body lowering its set point, that is, the weight it wants to be, in response to the foreign (to him) taste of sodas in the City of Light. Using what he knows about the intersection of psychology, physiology, and hunger, he developed the diet plan, lost over 30 pounds, and has kept it off for five years. Even if Roberts is a walking laboratory, the research studies he cites in the book are peer reviewed, with control groups and blinds, e.g. careful experiments with verifiable results. His eureka moment was to connect theories of phsychology, weight loss, appetite and taste in such a way that his diet seems less a wild-eyed hunch and more an elegant solution to a thorny and complex problem.I decided it was time to try it, just as soon as I could overcome my physical aversion.

Thinking about it– thinking about having less appetite, picking at my food, and drinking oil bothered me to no end. I had a queasy reaction to the concept. I mean, drinking oil. After discussing the diet with my girlfriend and several friends, they had similar reactions. On some instinctual level, they all thought it would work. But in practice, not one of them was willing to go at abottle of Wesson Oil armed with just a tablespoon and a chaser glass of water.

Re-reading Roberts' book and website, I realized, in a way, aversion was the last barrier my mind was putting up to losing this protective fat. Roberts argues that our primitive brains make us horde and overeat tasty food when it's in abundance, to give us a shot at staying alive in leaner times. The problem is that in modern times food always tastes good, and there are no leaner times during which to burn off fat stores. Our bodies haven't caught up to the fact that sitting in an office chair is the new hunting caribou. It seemed my inner caveman was appealing to my sense of reason one last time,before I dosed it back into the stone age with extra light olive oil (ELOO, as Roberts riffs on Rachael Ray's EVOO).

What made me finally decide to push the button and move the canola oil from the back of the kitchen cabinet to the front was Roberts' accurate assessment of his main critic, UCLA Medical School professor John Ford. In responding to the criticism on his blog, Roberts makes an argument I can believe. Most of us are already taking in at least a few tablespoons of oil and sugar every day. If eating those calories separately will lower our set points, reduce the amount of food we eat, and, Roberts claims, make us hunger a more balanced diet (less junk food), there is probably no medical risk to those few hundred calories of sugar or fat. Slamming the door shut, he goes onto say, "For a long time, medical school researchers have contributed no useful ideas to our understanding of how the average person can lose weight." In fact, the more complicated and esoteric diets have become, the more Americans, myself included seem to be gaining weight without being able to lose it.

The diet is a non-diet, and I admit, it appeals to my intellect. It's a mental trick that fools our bodies into shedding pounds of fat that were once a security blanket for sustaining life, but are now more like heavy winter jackets in, well, Shangri-La. Ten days in, my hunger is reduced and my tendency to snack is gone. Drinking the oil (I haven't yet tried the sugar water) is actually as easy as tilting my head and shooting it back. I felt the effects within 8 hours, as I bought a takeout sandwich walking home on the first day, and forgot about it for an hour after I arrived. When hunger hits, I eat, but so far, much less than before. I should probably start bringing my own Tupperware when dining out.It's far too early for me to have accurate results (Roberts lost his weight over the course of about 100 days), but so far, I like how I feel.

As a "serious eater", to quote Calvin Trillin's "Tummy Trilogy," the idea of eating less bothered me, but it now seems that I was eating way too much. By turning the diet from a puritanical exercise into what feels like a video game cheat code, Roberts seems to have hit upon the underlying Ur diet that explains why other diets work at first. All that remains to be seen is whether instead ofWeight Watchers cards, we all start carrying around portable ELOO shooters.

« Previous Page — Next Page »