This incredibly long paean by Liz Robbins in today’s New York Times about aging former Meatpacking District restaurateur & scenester Florent Morellet. A mercifully short excerpt from this slavering epic:
To which those of us who are not discoing away every night in our luxurious retirement can only say: Fuck You. As if Brooklyn needs any more ultra-rich douchebags coming over from Manhattan to advocate for building luxury skyscrapers (none of them providing affordable housing) in the middle of previously low-rise working and middle class neighborhoods and trying to make their cool little “discovered” corner of Brooklyn more like, you know, Manhattan. Please go away or die already. You say “we have tons of neighborhoods to rebuild”… until we don’t and we are all living somewhere near JFK with jets roaring over our heads every 5 minutes because that’s all we can afford. And did not the editor think to tell Miss Robbins to maybe cut her ode to Mr. Fabulous here by, oh, I don’t know, 15 or so paragraphs? It boils down to a fawning story about a guy who owned a restaurant and is now on his 3rd midlife crisis discovering his personal fountain of youth in Bushwick, not exactly Pulitzer-worthy journalism. Jesus wept, at 3000 words who could possibly make it to the end of this damn thing? I dare you to try to finish it without wanting to throw your computer out the window.