THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
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It was indeed a Rube Goldberg project, reconfigured on the fly as an extra floor of space (once a FreshGrocer market) became available, requiring two kitchens, each outfitted with custom, high-end Montague ranges with inserts for the garbage cans and even salt and pepper shakers.
It took an extra year to redesign the expanded space, and the finished decor (along with a 500-year-old burled walnut stump fashioned as a maitre d' stand) finally described as "Pacific Northwest Natural."
Then came the rush: "I don't think we got a chance to grow legs," recalled Melissa Monosoff, the opening sommelier (and now at Savona).
Only half the kitchen staff - penciled in for 40 - was on board on opening night last April.
A last-minute market in addition to the bistro downstairs created an identity crisis and a logjam. "We didn't have menu covers for the first three months," said Monosoff.
But if the physical space was an unruly sprawl, the management structure seemed to invite maximum dysfunction.
Provco's Holtz found fault with nearly every aspect of the operation: The high-end chefs, he complained, weren't conversant with running a first-floor coffee shop, bistro, and prepared-food market. (Terence Feury had been head chef at Striped Bass and the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia and in Washington; his brother Patrick trained at Le Cirque in New York and was splitting his time between Maia and Nectar, his popular Berwyn dining room and bar.) [Oui oui!]
Two of the three spaces, he said, were underused, the market and coffee shop generating only hundreds of dollars a day. The kitchen equipment was way too precious. The soft costs for design, engineering, and architects were off the charts. The layout was built for inefficiency. Staffing was out of control! [SIC!] "If they could have hired someone to wipe their a-," he said, "they would have." (Overemphasis added)
This is what our bankrupt StinkyInky runs in place of reporting. We do need a good laugh now and then -- but why so expensive?