JOSH OZERSKY: Every aspect of
my life is utterly immersed and overflowing with the
juice of literature and the love of food. The guy in "Eastern Promises",
the gangster in "Eastern Promises", like when they induct
him into the Russian mafia, he says, "I live in the
zone." Like, that's me, you know what I mean? I live in the zone. Mmm. -Your only chance to evacuate,
your only chance to survive or evacuate is to leave with us. JOSH OZERSKY: My name
is Josh Ozersky. I am a food writer and
a food personality. I have a very intense, unique
relationship with both food and the food world and
the food media. I wrote a book about
Colonel Sanders. I wrote a book about
hamburgers. I write frequently for
"Esquire," "The Wall Street Journal." I write a cooking
column for rachaelray.com. And I do an event called
Meatopia, which is a big meat-centric, Woodstock-like
festival. Hi, I'm Josh Ozersky, and
this is Ozersky TV. I'm like a B-list food
personality, but like an A-list writer, and like
a C-list human being. You know? Childish. You're off. I have no use for that. Here, take that. I don't want that. Next stop, the slaughterhouse. I'm very much a product
of this kind of like post-apocalyptic
literary scene. You know what I mean? There was like a million years
of like food writers that were like, professionals, and like
all they [INAUDIBLE] stuff like, the peas are green. You know what I mean? And they all like, professed to
love MFK Fisher, like the most boring writer
who ever lived. And I came out of the
blogging world. I was writing all of
these crazy essays. And like, I had a very, very
intense, specific, personal sort of a feeling about food
that I was able to express in a very singular and
characteristic way at a time when that particular commodity
was highly valued. And this kind of broken down
fragmentation of the media has allowed me to flourish in spite
of all my vices and shortcomings. -You actually have like,
fat on your coat. Like, you did a day's
work today. JOSH OZERSKY: It'd be the
first time ever, maybe. Anyway. In a city that's as diverse
and busy and complex and byzantine as New York is--
particularly its food and restaurant world-- I need to go out all the time. I wanted to give a very
representative example not only of my day-to-day life,
but where I live. So I had my friend
Tommy Walker-- somebody I really love, totally
outside of the food world, or whatever, but then I
was like outside of this like, queer world that these guys
all lived in, and like, we really are sort of papal
nuncios to each other. Anthony showed up later,
he was late. He has a restaurant called
42 in White Plains. But he's like, too good for
White Plains, I believe. And then Mr. Recipe comes
by, and listen. I mean, what can you
say, you know? He goes beyond eccentricity
to flirt with a kind of Pennywise terror. Have you ever tied a woman
to the tracks? MR. RECIPE: I did. When I played Snidley Whiplash
back in high school, I did. JOSH OZERSKY: Here's my
thing about New York. The thing you really judge a
restaurant city by is not the temples of gastronomy, the
special occasion restaurants. It's like the neighborhood
restaurants-- the Hearth, the Commerce,
the Barbone. I'm driven largely by personal
relationships. Like, I like to walk around
and say hello to people. So the first restaurant that
we went to was Hearth. Hearth is a very fine American
seasonal restaurant with kind of an Italianette spirit. The chef is a man named
Marco Canora. He's one of my best friends
in the chef business. MARCO CANORA: Hey, buddy. JOSH OZERSKY: Hi. He's a real chef's chef,
you know what I mean? He's the kind of guy that is
universally respected within the chef community. MARCO CANORA: It's ready. All right. So let's take the brick off. He kind of almost feels a little
too comfortable here, where he like, he walked back
the other day in the middle of service, you know, just,
what's going on? What's going on? It's like, no, Josh. Not now. JOSH OZERSKY: Marco has
a new chicken that he wanted me to try. It was like a peppery
chicken-- like a spatchcock chicken. He presses it real flat. Like a brick chicken, but
not without a brick. The thing is when they push the
chicken down like that, it compresses the meat over time,
so it becomes almost more steak-like. And it has a kind of
density to it. Marco is a chef that has sky
high technical skills and everything, but he makes
food that seems to pre-exist in the universe. MARCO CANORA: So now it's
all the pan drippings. Rosemary and Calabrian chilis. And all of that fat, all that
fat is going to emulsify into this sauce. I'm going to bring
this over here. JOSH OZERSKY: Oh my god. Look at this is the chicken. Oh, hold on. I want to put the microphone. Oh, listen to that. Do you hear that? Look, there's a piece
of skin left for me. MARCO CANORA: I think it's all
about the crispy skin. JOSH OZERSKY: Oh my god. MARCO CANORA: This
is the pan sauce. Do you want to try it? JOSH OZERSKY: Yeah. Oh my god. Delicious. I could just eat
that, you know? There's a vegetable
on the bottom. MARCO CANORA: It's
spigarello-- broccoli greens. JOSH OZERSKY: Fucking great. Even the white meat-- even the denuded, skinless
white meat-- MARCO CANORA: Yeah. It's still not bad, right? JOSH OZERSKY: --is better
than someone else's chicken with skin. Is there a piece of bread
or something? I want to, like scarpetta
up this. I got a bread over here. Look at this. Recipe. I'm going to schmear
it for you. Here. It's this good now. Imagine how good this would be
like, 20 minutes from now-- 15 minutes from now. You know what I mean? I could go the rest of my life
and not eat hot food again. This is a wonderful dish. MARCO CANORA: Thanks, dude. I love it too. I'm glad you like it. JOSH OZERSKY: Absolutely of the
first rank of chickens. I could eat like another
one now, you know? MARCO CANORA: I'm sure
you could, Josh. JOSH OZERSKY: Do you
want to get pizza? Was that me? Oh. MARCO CANORA: Thanks, dude. JOSH OZERSKY: All right. Marco Bear. Awesome. MR. RECIPE: This
is [INAUDIBLE]. JOSH OZERSKY: So we finished
with Marco. Marco was like, OK, leave now. And so then I said, well, OK. I wanted to go down
and see Vinny. Vinny has a restaurant
up on the corner. It's called Eleven B. Vinnie is
like your real old school Italian New York guy. VINNY: You've already
had some food. JOSH OZERSKY: All right. Listen, listen. I want to introduce you
to my friend Vinny. Vinny is, in my opinion, the
consummate New York pizza man. VINNY: There you go. JOSH OZERSKY: And also has an
encyclopedic knowledge of mid-century show business-- VINNY: [INAUDIBLE] Sinatra [INAUDIBLE]. JOSH OZERSKY: --to Sinatra. True Sinatraphile. VINNY: All right. That's the way-- that's what it's going
to be today? Because then we don't
have to do any food. Let's just talk Sinatra, and-- JOSH OZERSKY: No. I mean, I could do that. You're the one-- you said you wanted me
to eat the eggs. Vinny is just a great guy, and
he wants me to eat this like old time Italian thing I'd never
heard of, which is eggs cooked in sauce. And I was like, what the fuck
do I want with that? I would rather just eat
spaghetti or something, but he says it's good, and I
respect Vinny, so. VINNY: We used to come home
from school on Monday-- especially Monday, because
Sunday was the sauce day. When we were tired of eating
meatballs on Monday, tired of eating leftover pasta
on Monday, my mother would do this. Italians are big on leftovers. If we've got leftover
macaroni, we make macaroni pie. If we've got tomatoes that we
didn't finish from the Sunday dinner, we make tomatoes
and eggs. JOSH OZERSKY: I was a
cultural historian, you know what I mean? Like, that's where
I'm coming from. So the story, the characters, is
what turned me on far more than the eggs. VINNY: See, it's starting
to come together? See it? See it? See it? It is by far one of the ugliest
looking dishes you're ever going to see, but
it's beautiful. See, this is the beauty of it. This is the money shot. That's the money shot. And that's it. That's tomatoes and eggs. Get that-- get that crap out of the way. JOSH OZERSKY: [INAUDIBLE]. VINNY: Get that stuff out--
don't touch nothing. Touch nothing. The table is wood. JOSH OZERSKY: It's totally
not what I expected it to taste like. VINNY: What did you expect
it to taste it? Now, it's not dominated
by sauce. It must be [INAUDIBLE]. JOSH OZERSKY: That's
what I thought, it was going to be saucy. VINNY: It's not. My father stressed to me
five times tonight-- you don't dominate
it with sauce. JOSH OZERSKY: I mean, it was
pretty much what it sounds like, but his pizza
is awesome. It's the pizza, like if Gene
Hackman would eat a pizza, like in "The French Connection"
or something, it would be this pizza. And then he started sort of
like this disquisition on pizza, like this, like-- I mean, it was this soliloquy. VINNY: As an American
pizza-maker, I always feel the Americans make pizza better
than the Italians. A lot of people feel that way. JOSH OZERSKY: [INAUDIBLE]. VINNY: Because Italian-- the Italian pizza is based on
the vegetables, the product, not the cheese. They're not necessarily wrong. Now, this is your basic
American-- it's like, you're the meat guy. It's a basic American
hamburger, you know? You start off with the best
possible ingredients that I could possibly buy. So now I'm going to say, well,
I can't blame the cheese, I can't blame the sauce, I
can't blame the flour. Now it's up to us, because there
is no better cheese than Grande cheese. JOSH OZERSKY: I'd never heard
him talk like that before, and in such an animated way and with
such ardent conviction. It was awesome. All right, troops. Let's move on. Like, Recipe's another one that
doesn't want to hide his light under a bushel. You know what I mean? Like, you don't become Mr.
Recipe because you want to like hang out on
the sidelines. So like we're in there, like
[YIDDISH], Recipe starts singing an opera. MR. RECIPE: [SINGING IN ITALIAN] JOSH OZERSKY: I mean, I've known
Recipe for a long time. I wrote a whole profile of Mr.
Recipe for The Observer. I didn't even know
he could sing. So these kind of surprises,
sometimes they're disturbing, and sometimes they're
uplifting. But they all are revealing of
hidden depths of character, complexity, and the false
bottoms that characterize all weird people. Holy shit. Holy shit. VINNY: Forget about the food. Forget the food. JOSH OZERSKY: Who knew? Who knew? So Recipe did his whole thing
out of nowhere, freaked everybody out, and then on B
between 11th and 12th is my friend Alberto has got a
restaurant called Barbone. One of my many failure
events-- I did industry night at
the Brindle Room. I'd be there, host it. Right? I came over the first night. What did I say? ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: Nobody came. What happened, Josh? I tried to do something,
but nobody came. Can I have a bourbon? -A double. A double bourbon. JOSH OZERSKY: He's an Albanian
guy from Kosovo. And one of the things that
people don't really know in New York is that like, half of
the Italian restaurants are run by Albanians. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI:
OK, so [SPANISH] un watermelon salad, un eggplant
parmigiana, los dos gnocchis, y conejo. JOSH OZERSKY: If that's
what you want me to eat, my policy-- ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: Well, I
don't want you to eat anything, because you're
fat already, but. JOSH OZERSKY: Well, look at
who's taking about the pot and the kettle. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: I'm
elegantly stuffed. There's a big difference. JOSH OZERSKY: I can see
your navel is poking through your shirt. That's how bloated
you've become. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: Shut up. Behave. JOSH OZERSKY: Alberto's never
going to be like one of the best new chefs-- or the best old chefs. Like, he's never going to
get a James Beard Award. He just is like, some guy who's
like, spent his whole life in restaurants, knows
everything about food and Italian wine, weird varietals
or whatever. And he's got this little
restaurant, and he makes delicious food. You know why I love eggplant? It's like the meatiest-- it's like veal that
grows on trees. Look at this. Look at that. I feel like when I'm around
Alberto or someone like Alberto, I feel like that I'm
in contact with the direct, undiluted stream of human
history and the freakish passion of our food ways,
our shared food ways. Like, there's no CVap. There's no sous-vide. There's none of the like, kind
of like digital food culture. Like, Alberto's old school. He's analog food culture. Everything's like physical,
everything's intuitive. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: OK. So this is the back leg
and the loin of a fresh, young rabbit. -Whoa. JOSH OZERSKY: You know, I've
never had a good rabbit. And rabbit always sucks. It's always dry. It's always kind of tasteless,
like bad chicken or something. Alberto, I want you to pretend
that you care whether I like this or not, or that you're
interested in my opinion of it. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: Let's do it. JOSH OZERSKY: He's been around
enough like, not to give a shit that like, I wrote
a blog or some shit like that, you know? And I'll just like, give him
my unsolicited opinion, and he'll like make fun
of me for it. Far from registering it as like
this James Beard Award, you know, like sanctified
thing? Oh my god. -Well, I've had a
lot of bad ones. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: Huh? What do you think? JOSH OZERSKY: Fucking great. It tastes like home cooking. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: It tastes
like home cooking. I had somebody here, do
you have like, vegan? I mean, we can do it. I say, I can grill some
vegetables for you. And she goes, the vegan
person, that's boring. JOSH OZERSKY: She said,
but that's boring? ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: Yeah. JOSH OZERSKY: What the
fuck does she want? ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: I mean,
you should know better. I said, you're vegan, so
you know what you eat. JOSH OZERSKY: They shouldn't go
into a restaurant at all. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: [INAUDIBLE]. JOSH OZERSKY: Let them go
on an IV or something. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: And then
they ask [INAUDIBLE]. JOSH OZERSKY: I'm going
to try a carrot. What do you think of that? MR. RECIPE: Oh, I don't
believe that. That's a vegetable, Josh. Vegetables are not on
your [INAUDIBLE]. JOSH OZERSKY: I only eat
things with parents. ANTHONY GONCALVES: The guy is
not only a great chef, but he's a character and a half,
and he's a great host. JOSH OZERSKY: You know what? I want to make a toast to
Alberto and all of the other great New York restaurateurs,
food guys, pizza men-- ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: Not
only that, but thanks to Josh Ozersky. JOSH OZERSKY: No, thanks-- no. I'm just lucky that
I know them. Here's to the New
York food guys. -Cheers. -I agree. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: [INAUDIBLE]. Thank you guys. Thank you for coming. -You're a great chef
slash restaurateur. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: All right. ANTHONY GONCALVES: And hit
man at the same time. Thank you. JOSH OZERSKY: And Albanian
hit man. ALBERTO IBRAHIMI: [INAUDIBLE]. ANTHONY GONCALVES: It
was my pleasure. Super, super, super delicious. JOSH OZERSKY: After Barbone, I
said, you know , let's all go back to the roof. I'll make something. We'll drink, we'll hang out. The original thing was like,
I wanted to make something really special, you
know what I mean? I wanted to get like a big,
like a beautiful, villa-- like they call the [INAUDIBLE] Reserve. It's like these Creekstone
steaks that Pat puts aside that are like this
uncanny marbling. Anyway, it was like
a typical thing. I got caught up. I was playing video games
or watching like "Columbo" or some shit. So I didn't get around
to doing it. So I was like, OK, let's go
in the other direction. So I went to the ghetto
supermarket across the street. It's like basically
a giant bodega. The first thing that
we're going to want to get is bacon-- the thicker the better. You can see this is like
the supermarket bacon. It's all watery. It's like Play-Doh. That's all right. This is good. The Krasdale cotto salami-- literally the worst
thing you can eat. All right. Well, this is gnarly. That beef is so freaking
gnarly. Look at this. What supermarket would
you ever see this in? You know? Gotta get this, for sure. You know what? I think we need some breakfast
sausage, too. All right. Let's just get some Spam. Have you had the bacon-flavored
Spam? It's every bit as delicious
as it sounds. Wait. Here's Spam with Cheese. Here we go. And they say this isn't
a great country. What am I forgetting? I know there's something good
that we could be getting. No, no. Hold on. There's one thing missing. Here. There's one thing missing
from this. To think that I almost
forgot it-- Krasdale rainbow sherbet
with extra guar gum. This, the perfect finish-- palate cleanser. Burn, baby burn. All right. All right. Two zone, even distribution. Gray and black. So let's sear off the
Spam, like this. This is nice. It's fatty, so we'll get nice
flare-ups, you know? ANTHONY GONCALVES: Yeah. Let it work. JOSH OZERSKY: No, I'm
very serious. Like, it's not all bogus. Like, I really am, like as a
barbecuer and as a grill cook, I love to cook, and
I do it well. I've done demos, videos,
whatever. I really know what I'm doing. And I really do know
about meat. And instead, I served them like
vile, like nasty sausages composed entirely of
lard and bungholes. I felt bad, and it was like,
going to be this ironic triumph of culinary primitivism,
but instead it just sucked. Look. It still has the rind on. This really is brutal. OK. So like, this is the worst
food in the world made as badly as possible. So then Mr. Recipe's like, this
is the finest powders extracted from the tears of Vietnamese orphans or something. MR. RECIPE: It's really nice. It brings out the flavor of
the pork, and gives it a really like, kind of like
cha-cha-cha kind of excitement to it. JOSH OZERSKY: I have a problem
with spots, like I get little spots and stains. I don't have that many shirts. This is like practically the
only polo shirt I have left, because they all had
like spaghetti fall on it or something. It's not something
I'm proud of. And then I was cooking,
and you know what's going to happen. So like I took off my shirt, but
I didn't mean it as like a piece de theatre or something. I was just like-- I was dirty and hot. That's-- so. But I won't deny that there was
a certain kind of like, Coney Island freak show
element to it as well. Want a little bit of grilled
meat, little boy? Huh? I'll give you some bacon,
a little chicken. I'll serve this like,
steak style. ANTHONY GONCALVES: Greasy. [? ?] Delicious. JOSH OZERSKY: In that order. ANTHONY GONCALVES: Salty. JOSH OZERSKY: Salty. So you know? MR. RECIPE: Come with me and
share this barbecue. You will love it. See you soon. JOSH OZERSKY: There's all these
weird people, and I'm a weird person, and I just try to
pull it all together in the spirit of eating and writing. Maybe I'm not like the best
person, like in every way, but I definitely keep it real
where it counts. You know what I mean? Say whatever you
want about me. Go to the IRS or the Justice
Department or Homeland Security, but don't go to
whoever regulates people using propane in outdoor cooking
events or shitty meat in meat festivals. All right. Not to interrupt
the beautiful-- I don't want to photobomb the
skyline, but I just want to show you how disgusting
this is. Look at that. That's what your vein will look
like after you eat this. But it is good.
