A quick update on the Alan Richman contretemps. You'll remember that Richman, the ne plus ultra of bitchy dining critics, wrote a piece in GQ about New Orleans wherein he decided that, since someone fucked up his wine order, we should let the city rot. Predictably, the piece caused some controversy in the Crescent City, occasioning this blistering response from New Orleans Times-Picayune food guy Brett Anderson. On the internet, the food blog Appetites sent an e-mail to Richman, to which he responded; it turned into a full-blown interview. Richman admits that he got a few things wrong (true), claims that some of his jibes were tongue-in-cheek and misinterpreted (also true), and lets off a withering attack of his own on Anderson and the Times-Pic. In the main he sticks to his guns; whatever your particular thoughts on the merits of the initial article (and our thoughts were a slightly more emphatic version of "Blow me"), this interview makes for some interesting reading. Fun fact: Richman used to cover the NBA.

Earlier today we asked for help in identifying the anonymous food critic Danny Meyer bribed for a good review. Eater moves the story along with the actual excerpt from Meyer's book. Relevant passage after the jump:

Restaurateur Danny Meyer, whose quick attention to detail saved the Shake Shack from a full fecal outbreak this summer, has a new book out, and it gets a bit of a pasting in Slate. Jill Hunter Pellettieri calls Setting the Table"trite," "too touchy feely," and full of "gimmicky nuggets." (Much like the burgers at Shake Shack this summer.) Pellettieri says this more in sorrow than anger, since she, like most people who follow the industry, is full of admiration for Meyer. Another Meyer admirer, presumably, is the "unidentified critic" mentioned in today's Page Six:

We generally enjoy Bloomberg/GQ food critic Alan Richman's acerbic, over-the-top eviscerations of the city's overpriced crudo emporia (example: "I asked [the sommelier's] opinion of a couple of $70-and-under Australian reds I was considering for my second wine. He suggested a $205 Australian pinot noir instead. The only appropriate response to that would have been to beat him to death."), but his dispatch from New Orleans in the current GQ, left us more than a little vexed. We're not usually offended by written equivalents of kicking a man in the nuts while his hair is on fire (really, how could we be?) but this piece left us feeling violated. We're going to a cheat a bit and give you a sample from the end, but read the whole thing:

Times dining critic Frank Bruni starts his review of Lincoln Center cheeseateria Picholine with a recollection of a previous visit :

Speaking of Inns, the kids over at Eater got a look at the newly renovated Waverly Inn, Vanity Fair supremo Graydon Carter's first foray into the restaurant business. There's about a thousand pictures over at that site, and the place looks like a nice, comfortable establishment in which to spend a chilly winter evening. Of particular note is the bar's magazine rack, pictured above. Quick quiz: Which one of these things is not like the other?

Hey, Arianne, it'll be news when someone praises Frank's prose.

Interesting developments on the food front: Today's Times brings news that three of the city's top chefs are leaving their current posts to focus on other endeavors. Tom Colicchio, long the heart and soul of Gramercy Tavern, plans to focus on his ever-growing series of Craft restaurants. (The subtext here is that Frank Bruni's crappy review of Craftsteak cost one of New York's best restaurant's one of New York's best chefs. Nice going, Frank. Still, you've got to love a guy who tells you that he needs more focus in a call from a golf course.) Thor's Kurt Gutenbrunner departs from that LES funhouse to "concentrate on his restaurants that better reflect his Austrian roots." And Paul Liebrandt, who restrained his more baroque impulses as the chef at in the Palace Hotel, has nonetheless been canned, presumably for being too edgy.

We remember this legendary guy in high school who could make time with any girl using the exact same line. Eventually some of the girls started to complain that it was a cheap trick and somehow shamefully manipulative, but we remember thinking at the time that if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Like consuming the flesh of ruminants in convenient tube-steak form but worry that the anuses and hooves you're eating might not be first quality? Well, if you went to a barbecue this weekend run by the kind of twat for whom grass-fed is a mantra and organic is a way of life, you may very well have been consuming "the politically correct frankfurter," a trend to whichThe Times devotes vast Dining In acreage this morning. Hot dog sales, as it turns out, have been in decline, what with consumer concern over the safety of the udders and nitrites they are essentially composed of (hot dogs, we mean, although if you take a look inside the average American consumer we doubt there's a whole lot of difference). Pasture-fed animals who live lives of gentle ease before having their lips and udders ground up and stuffed into natural casing are the wave of the future: Now you can have your hot dog, eat it too, and still be the kind of sanctimonious prick who complains about cruelty to lobsters while you stuff your Whole Foods canvas bag full of organic radicchio that was picked by some kid making five cents an hour.

It doesn't officially open, for normal people, for another week. But, even so, today is apparently New Le Cirque day in the New York press. The are nearly 4,000 tag-teamed words on the cover of the Observer about it — and, in fairness, about the Bloomberg building in which it resides. David Carr has another 1,500 words on the front of the Times dining section about the restaurant and its many opening parties. There's even a Carpetbagging-style video report on the opening party on the Times site, reminding us of both Le Cirque's fabulosity and why Carr became a print reporter in the first place. The message of all of this? That it's a big, very fancy, important restaurant for a big, fancy, very important people. That it's exclusive and in-demand, and high society is quietly calculating how to get a table and which table to want to get.

In light of the recent disappointing™ and disastrous openings of M:i:III and Poseidon, respectively, LAT columnist Patrick Goldstein examines one of Hollywood's favorite bloodsports, the Monday ritual of flop-tainted executives and producers donning sweaters made of chum and casting themselves into the lunchtime shark tanks at the city's power-eateries:

It can be a challenge, sometimes, to wait all the way till Wednesday for the chance to let Alex Kuczynski tell us how rich people shop. The Dining In/Dining Out section, which appears a full day earlier, on Wednesdays, feels our pain. Starting today, it introduces a new, monthly column by Alex Witchel — a.k.a. Mrs. Frank Rich — that will instead tell us how rich people eat. In the first installment of Feed Me, Witchel regales with tales of her hoity-toity dinner party (the foie gras that is apparently now served instead of caviar, of which the rich have tired, the lamb chops so exquisitely tiny they could have been another appetizer, the conversation of "the late great society walker Jerry Zipkin) and explores the mystery of the finger bowl.

A reader writes in to call out a fading actress for playing the "Don't you know who I am?" card too far east for comfort:

You may have come across the Shitty Tipper Database before — perhaps even as one of the titular shitty tippers. You're not alone: Cityrag has collected the best celebrity entries — can you guess which cheap-ass famous people the following irate things were written about?