Bulletproof Chicken Wings and Nutcrackers

The week in Diamond

I’ve been reporting on multiple pieces this week. We have our summer vacation coming up and I keep promising Emily up and down that I will enjoy myself during our time away, but to do that I need to feel like I did a ton of work before I can relax. She keeps joking that it’s my “Hemingway vacation,” since we’re going to a tropical place and I will be working on the third draft of my novel when we’re not at the beach, but I don’t count that as work. I have a hard time calling anything I do “my job” because either nothing is work or everything is work. I’m constantly writing or reading or just looking around and somehow it gets into the stuff I write. It’s a lot like Nora Ephron’s “Everything is copy” idea, but mixed with the old grandma in Isaac Babel’s “You must know everything.” Have you read that story? It’s one of my favorites and George Saunders also loves it. He read it for The New Yorker a few years back.

I published two things this week. One was over at Grub Street. It’s a profile on Gertrude’s and the team behind the new spot that’s opening next week in the old James space. I’m a fan of those folks but was especially interested in hearing what restaurant world meme king Eli Sussman had to say about opening a spot after spending the last few years growing an audience as a person who does a great job criticizing and critiquing the good, the bad, and the ugly in his industry. I think it puts him and his partners in an interesting position to not only run a great place, but present an example of how to do it right.

Read: “First He Made the Memes. Now He Has to Open a Restaurant” by Jason Diamond at Grub Street

I also had a chance to revisit the 2013 film The Counselor. I had wanted to do it later in the year, but since Cormac McCarthy wrote the screenplay and he passed away this week, GQ asked me to do it so I did. It’s a much better film than the critics (including myself) gave it at the time it was released.

Read: “Cormac McCarthy’s Only Major Screenplay Was a Flop. It Deserves Another Shot” by Jason Diamond at GQ

In other news, in what I consider one of the funniest recipes published by the Times in a hot second, the Paper of Record dropped a Nutcracker recipe. I’m not sure how many recipes I’ve seen them publish with Everclear, but I’m all for it.

Read: Nutcracker recipe by Millie Peartree at New York Times Cooking

I think most city dwellers have a love/hate relationship with skyscrapers. The skyline would look naked without the Empire State Building or whatever they call the Sears Tower in Chicago now. But Rowan Moore took a look at London and Paris, one city that is a “a free-for-all, with raucous clusters of towers,” and the French capital, meanwhile, had a “flirtation with tall buildings, is now back to banning them. Which city has it right and what can other cities learn?

Read: “A tale of two cities: Paris proves that you don’t need skyscrapers to thrive” by Rowan Moore at The Guardian

The man, the myth, the legend, Abe Beame, went to East Flatbush to find what might be the best bulletproof Chinese fried chicken in all of Brooklyn.

Read: “Exploring The Legend of Snyder Wings: The Best Fried Chicken in New York City” by Abe Beame at Okayplayer