Pop Culture

Brangelina’s Vineyard, Aerosol Tea, and More (Unexpected) Places We Found Food This Week

September 23, 2016

As of late, I’ve become obsessive in my quest to “find the food angle” everywhere I look. The good news: I found a lot of food where I least expected it. Every Friday, I will present each week’s findings. Here were last week's.

  • Juan Likes Rice & Chicken: Wednesday's episode of Bill Hader's IFC mockumentary extravaganza Documentary Now! featured Juan Likes Rice & Chicken, a send-up of Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) and every imitation that little monster of a documentary spawned. The 'documentary' is set in a fictional Colombian restaurant, and I'm told it's at once funny and totally spot-on. Alan Systma over at Grub Street did a nice write-up about what it nails about the particular genre it seeks to mock.
  • Sylvester Stallone's imagination: Get a "slice" of this! As I reported earlier this week, Sly is on the rebound from his Best Supporting Actor loss with a new comedy show about Beverly Hills pizza mogul Richie Palmer, a man who fled the Bronx two decades back to pursue his pizza dreams in the golden state of California. (He now owns Mulberry Street Pizzeria's six locations.) "There’s plenty of material," Richard Johnson of Page Six writes, because "Palmer was once engaged to Cathy Moriarty (“Raging Bull”) and married to Raquel Welch." Ah, yes, that tired trope of associating men with the women they've romanced! I wish we'd stop doing this. Anyway, few other details have emerged about a show that's called—ahem—Pizza Guy. Great stuff.
  • Aerosol spray canisters: Let's hop over "across the pond" to the United Kingdom, where tea "mantrepreneur" Guy Woodall hoisted No More Tea Bags onto the unsuspecting British market. Forget brewing tea and steeping it for minutes; No More Tea Bags is a pre-brewed tea that comes from an aluminum spray can, because literally who asked for this? It comes in three flavors: English Breakfast, Earl Grey, and Jasmine. Is this #teaheresy, as a number of churlish netizens claim? I think so, but it's no matter, because Woodall staunchly defended his product, claiming the market needs it. Perhaps he's right.
  • Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's divorce: Yeah, sorry kids. Not even the culinary universe is immune to this wide-reaching cultural fissure. "How Will Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's Multi-Million Dollar Wine Business Play Into Their Split?", poses Ana Calderone of People Magazine with a question that I hadn't considered thus prior. But now I can't stop thinking about it. The former couple bought a vineyard in Correns, France for $60 million in 2012. What will become of this winery? A matter of grave concern.
  • This unfortunate video of a Domino's driver: The commercial above, wherein a Domino's deliveryman does a nifty wheelie on his way to fulfilling a customer's dreams, is apparently quite famous (I'd never seen it; blame my sheltered life). Some aspiring daredevil of a Domino's deliveryman in the United Kingdom tried his hand at imitating the commercial's antics, and—yikes! You can see it below. It's a thrilling, tense few seconds. I want to scream "knock it off!" at this man through the screen just before he gently tumbles to his side. Perhaps you will have this same urge. And now this man's gaffe has gone viral!
  • This pumpkin spi—haha, no. We're not doing this.
  • The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey: Well, this one's no fun. Have you kept up with CBS' The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey? I have not, because I've exhausted my knowledge of an awful case that has sadly metamorphosed into national spectacle for this country's depraved citizens. Obsessives of the case may have heard of the pineapple theory, which surmises that a piece of pineapple the young girl ate holds the key to her still-unsolved murder. This pet theory has escaped the purgatory of the Unresolved Mysteries Reddit and now been introduced into mainstream parlance thanks to this documentary. I don't know what to make of this.

And that's all I've got! All in all, a fine week for food. Bye!

What'd I miss? Please, let me know in the comments!

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Mayukh Sen is a James Beard Award-winning food and culture writer in New York. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Bon Appetit, and elsewhere. He won a 2018 James Beard Award in Journalism for his profile of Princess Pamela published on Food52.

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