Cheap Shots and House Salad: Emperor pops off

"The Ivanka’s Salad, a chopped approximation of a Greek salad, smothered in melting goat cheese and dressing and missing the promised olives, that seemed unlikely to appetize a SoulCycle-obsessed, smoothie-guzzling heiress. (Instead, it looked like a salad made by someone who believes that rich women only eat vegetables.)" But photographed on a day they remembered the olives, evidently by the house food stylists, who seem as poorly prepared judging from this image (via foodspotting) as the chefs sound judging from the review.

If you wanted to know what prompted this:

Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016

you might be satisfied, like Mr. Pierce, in recalling that Graydon Carter was the elegant phrase-maker who years ago coined the near-Homeric epithet "short-fingered vulgarian" to refer to our president-elect. But Mr. Trump rarely rakes over old grievances when there are so many new ones he needs to respond to, on a daily basis, and this case is no exception, and there is more to the story than that.

What the tweet is really about is Vanity Fair's lèse-majesté in running a review of the Trump Grill or Trump Grille (apparently the restaurant itself spells it both ways) in Trump Tower (purveyors of the celebrated taco bowl with which he celebrated Cinco de Mayo, without beer or company, in the lonely splendor of his office), which appeared online yesterday afternoon and features some of the best and most lethally funny writing on the Trump phenomenon that you are likely to see any time this month, by Tina Nguyen:

TRUMP GRILL COULD BE THE WORST RESTAURANT IN AMERICA

And it reveals everything you need to know about our next president.

Sample paragraph:

The allure of Trump’s restaurant, like the candidate, is that it seems like a cheap version of rich. The inconsistent menus—literally, my menu was missing dishes that I found on my dining partners’—were chock-full of steakhouse classics doused with unnecessarily high-end ingredients. The [Szechuan] dumplings, for instance, come with soy sauce topped with truffle oil, and the crostini is served with both hummus and ricotta, two exotic ingredients that should still never be combined. The menu itself would like to impress diners with how important it is, randomly capitalizing fancy words like “Prosciutto” and “Julienned” (and, strangely, ”House Salad”).

Please read this, and share it on social media, to help plucky little Vanity Fair avoid the awful fate wished on it by the Emperor-to-Be and restaurant metacritic, Great Helmsman Donald J. Trump.

And we should revive the use of "short-fingered vulgarian", a true classic that will never go out of style. And remember that when he is president, as we are threatened with war, famine, and environmental catastrophe, what he's thinking about will be whatever slights appear, against his restaurants, or his poll numbers, or the size of his um fingers, on the tray of clippings (he doesn't read books or computer files) brought to him every few hours by Ms. Hope Hicks.