Food fight! Time Out New York has published what it is calling, in a none-too-subtle stab at New York magazine, “The Real Cheap Eats.” And they used the above positively grease-saturated and utterly delectable looking Texas burger to it. TONY thew down the gauntlet this afternoon in its weekly email newsletter which began:

A certain other Cheap Eats issue this week features the foods of New York, but comes with a punch line: “all for under $25.” $25? Cheap? Bull!

And with that the mag presented its cheap eats for under $10.

That’s right. The New York Times, our newspaper of choice for cradling fish and chips or mopping up the seepage from a hanger steak (let’s see you do that with a Kindle), has declared that butchers are the hotness of the culinary universe.

Sure chefs are the rock stars, the paper reasons, but they are in the arena windmilling and grinding out cock rock, while the butcher, well, the butcher is in a back room bathed in blood, sulking and flexing his muscles. To hear the Times tell it, butchers are a cross between Danzig and Bright Eyes, while chefs (especially Daniel Boulud) are Def Lepard (and of course Mario Batali is Meat Loaf, but that’s too easy).

They even have this quote from a butcher groupie:

“Think about it. What’s sexy?” said Tia Keenan, the fromager at Casellula Cheese and Wine Café and an unabashed butcher fan. “Dangerous is sometimes sexy, and they are generally big guys with knives who are covered in blood.”

The article (yet again, as if New York magazine wasn’t doing a good enough job of this already) lovingly caresses Marlow & Daughters butcher Tom Mylan, who the paper calls “broody” (maybe he’s Morrisey). But then the writer unearths Ryan Farr, of San Francisco, a, um, rather colorful butcher who calls himself a “producer of porcine pleasure”and gives cutting demonstrations, complete with cocktails. For $30, Farr followers can drink at a local bar while he butchers a pig (and soon, a lamb and a quarter of a steer). And then there’s this fantasy he has about Mylan, which we don’t know quite what to make of:

Mr. Farr has a dream. “I want to throw a 300-pound pig in the middle of a room full of people and just tag-team it with him,” he said. So far, Mr. Mylan hasn’t set a date.

The Butcher is as aware as anyone else that this month, April, is poetry month. New York magazine knows this too, and in inimitable form, it tells the tale of the tape, as if they were boxers, of the two poets who became the first-ever winners to share share a National Book Award jointly: Juan Felipe Herrera and August Kleinzahler. Our money is on Kleinzahler. If only because he wrote a poem named “Meat.” (He also once suggested that the U.S. government break terrorists by forcing them to listen to Garrison Keillor reading poetry.)

After the jump, “Meat“

Meat    

by August Kleinzahler 

How much meat moves

Into the city each night

The decks of its bridges tremble

In the liquefaction of sodium light

And the moon a chemical orange

Semitrailers strain their axles

Shivering as they take the long curve

Over warehouses and lofts

The wilderness of streets below

The mesh of it

With Joe on the front stoop smoking

And Louise on the phone with her mother

Out of the haze of industrial meadows

They arrive, numberless

Hauling tons of dead lamb

Bone and flesh and offal

Miles to the ports and channels

Of the city’s shimmering membrane

A giant breathing cell

Exhaling its waste

From the stacks by the river

And feeding through the night

via NYmag.com

The butcher’s cold black heart did a grinch-like thump and swelled in his chest. And the cause for this celebration is reason #31, “Because Our Butchers Have Groupies.” Is it because New York (both the city and the magazine) is so food- and personality- obsessed that it creates hybrid celebrities that could exist nowhere else? If you’re the more hopeful sort you might inclined to think it’s that people are becoming more aware of where their meat comes from and they no longer think that it rolls off a shining conveyor belt pressed in plastic wrap and comes in wacky fun shapes for kids. Maybe that’s just the beef tea talking, but cheers and here’s to a brighter future, one in which New York magazine can go on celebrating butchers, bartenders, co-op farmers and politically-active hot dog shop proprietors.

“New York” magazine recounts the strange tale of a city-wide Kosher meat shortage in this week’s issue. Its got everything: horny Hasids, overzealous Feds, shiftless homeless Mexicans and a city torn asunder by lack of ritually slain beef. It seems Brooklyn-based Agiprocessor, the Kosher crew in question, have run afoul of more than a dozen state and federal agencies who don’t seem to buy that, “Hey, we answer to a higher power” bit. In May, its plant in Iowa was raided by immigration and 389 employees were rounded up and deported. After this raid a temp agency smelled something gefilte-fishy and recalled its 150 temp employees. Plant management purportedly thought the way to squelch these labor problems was to start trucking in homeless workers from Texas and offer female employees the opportunity to sleep their way to the middle.

Chick-fil-A, a purveyor of pressed and processed chicken parts, has been trying to take down purveyors of pressed and processed beef with its “Cows” campaign since 1995 — when it ran an outdoor campaign featuring two cows painting the words “Eat Mor Chikin” on billboards. Ever since, they’ve adopted the Holstein cows (typically milk cows which are used for low-grade beef when they run dry) as company mascots. Ten years and going strong, but the anthropomorphic bovines are reaching new levels of disturbing with a give-away calender modeled after “Rolling Stone” and featuring cows in guises as various rock acts such as the white-suited Brisket Inferno or the glam metal Slaughterhaus crooning “Every Chicken Has Its Bun.” Perhaps the most atrocious is the alluringly big-uttered Spicy Skirtsteak singing “Gimme Chicken One More Time.” The whole thing sort of makes us lose our appetites, so we’re just going to ogle the grill-on-grill porn accompanying Josh Ozersky’s truly illuminating “What a Grill Wants” guide in “New York” magazine this week (complete with a thought-provoking heat vs. time comment debate–seriously people, let the man do his job). There could be few better tributes to Clay Felker than being on the cover of an issue with such an insightful (but still really simple, as grilling should be) hot charcoal tips. That’s how we’d like to be remembered.

(with apologies to Tony Hoagland)

The brisket writhes in the smoker.
The pulled pork dreams of returning to Memphis.

But when Adam Platt talks about barbecue, his voice is strangely calm.
Yet it seems that meat is rarely mentioned.

He says, The boxy whitewashed space looks more like a boutique beauty salon than a rib joint.
He says, The elf-like tables are set with chopsticks.
He says, You’ll find they can be quite palatable when soaked in yuzu.
He says, The well-trained, unfailingly cheerful staff are dressed in snappy charcoal-colored T-shirts and come at you in never-ending waves.

He belches as if recalling his childhood in Texas.
He shakes his head at a rub.

Flavored, tragically, with raspberries, he says and quotes his daughter. (“The ones at school are better, Dad.”)

He calls a desert a towering Buyanesque creation. This, he says, could tip even the most hard-bitten man into a food coma.