Certainly, DCist thought it was worth a mention, and its article is longer than either of the lines in the NYT. Carman.
Did you read a piece last week in the New York Times about Capitol Hill being awash in junk food? It's okay if you didn't, but around my neighborhood we took it in stride, and I wrote a Journal bearing little snarky rebuttal.
The piece got some pretty good attention: The Atlantic Wire and CultureMob both picked it up (in addition to other local blogs and bloggers) and mentioned me by name. Not nearly in as grandiose a medium (online only), but it's still a reply of sorts.Funny enough, the New York Times replied to him. You can find it on my other favorite blog, The Hill is Home-- it ran on December 8th, the same day the NYT piece ran. We can, and we do, bristle when we feel that there is an undue amount of criticism heaped upon our junk food; but as a city we also understand and take pride in our happy circumstance, and we don’t need sour-grapes arguments to make our point. And for some reason, his tack sounded a little familiar, such as the use of the open-letter style; the sustained reverse-psychology snark throughout; and the ending reference to New York’s undisputed status as junk-food mecca.Why, you might ask, am I recounting this?
Well, apart from a minor amount of discomfort associated with realizing that small hyperlocal blogs are summarily overlooked by the local print media and don’t deserve even the slightest mention, there is also the obvious fact: why would anyone want to pick an earnest fight with the New York Times? There is a reason she’s earned the nickname “The Gray Lady,” you know. How can we earnestly compare ourselves to a city that is far bigger and more crowded and which was established longer ago, and which did not have city-destroying riots forty years ago, thereby decimating the diversity of its population? (Shoutout to all the helpful information in all the comments generated by the posts!)We can’t, Mr.
. Ominous!
I guess what chafes me here is that the Washington Post’s article, while bearing some striking resemblance to what I wrote six days before, does something that reeks of desperation: it seeks to make DC and New York equals, which they are not. This does not mean we are the ugly step-sister in the ball, either. Thank you! Just when we thought the whole thing was done, however, Tim Carman at the Washington Post (online and print) weighed in on the debate, yesterday. We can’t. Of course, in his piece --cleverly backed up by quotes of New York Times past-- he dwells on the oft-mentioned inferiority complex DC has when it comes to our fair sister to the north. Over and over and over again. We may still be up-and-coming in the food world, but rest assured that we Capitol Hill food-crazed people will happily eat the experiments and the attempts to maybe, perhaps, on a blue moon, someday, nab a lone Michelin star in this place.We’re not holding our breath, though.