Also, somebody should have made this an episode of Portlandia instead of an physical store.
I've tried to read that story, like, half a dozen times, but I get the psmag header and nothing else. I am curious about the origins of artisanal toast!
3: You just need to delete the tag at the end of the URL.
Just the phrase "artisanal toast" makes me want to slap somebody upside the head.
I feel like a terrible person -- while it's a genuinely affecting article once you take it seriously, I read far enough to see that it was about a business that for philosophical reasons, serves only toast, coconuts, and coffee, and assumed it was a joke until people on FB made it clear that it's real.
Does "artisanal bread" have the same effect? Because that seems a bit pretentious but basically fine to me.
Artisanal bread is not as ridiculous as artisanal toast. Breadmaking can be complicated, but toasting something is not.
Toast, coconuts, coffee, and grapefruit juice.
I've never been able to get into the toast there - it's just a huge slab of white bread with too much sugar on top - but their coffee is extraordinarily good, and the shop has a pleasantly sociable feeling I don't find at other coffeeshops, especially extreme-hipster ones like this. I do always seem to end up in interesting conversations when I go there (a few times a year).
10: But if you toast artisanal bread, you would get artisanal toast. Or maybe not? At least if you toast wheat bread you get wheat toast.
Also, this paragraph is a bit much:
WHEN I TOLD FRIENDS back East about the craze for fancy toast that was sweeping across the Bay Area, they laughed and laughed. (How silly; how twee; how San Francisco.) But my bet is that artisanal toast is going national. I've already heard reports of sightings in the West Village.
All the way from San Francisco to the West Village? Why, that spans everything!
But if you toast artisanal bread, you would get artisanal toast. Or maybe not? At least if you toast wheat bread you get wheat toast.
As long as the word "bread" is implied as what the artisan has modified.
Well, you don't want to call it "Artisanal Bread Toast" because when you say it aloud, people will makes jokes about what kind of art gets toast to fuck.
People around Moby make the weirdest jokes.
I like to think they would if the world provided more straight lines.
14: The burrito tunnel might as well be repurposed.
Thank you, Moby. It still didn't get me the text of the article, but now I can see the sidebar and the footer. I suspect this is about an outdated browser, but the last thing I want is my IT person thinking about me and internet use, so I don't intend to get it updated. (I don't have administrative privileges to update it myself. Or choose a browser.)
16: On the other hand, "artisanal toast" could refer to anything. Like, um..., marshmallows, or pop tarts.
20: Hah! For the same reason, I'm practically reading this on Mosaic.
lynx www.unfogged.com is fairly pleasant, once you get past the sidebar.
I thought maybe it was toast that flows from the earth.
Hand-stretched artisanal toast.
Oooh, Lynx is pretty good for Unfogged. Haven't used it in ages and ages, if ever. I think maybe I'll go to that coffee shop now and order a coconut. Reading the Cracked article depressed the hell out of me, unsurprisingly.
It is old news -- but still endlessly stunning -- to think how Cracked has risen from its origins to become the greatest magazine in the world.
We donated piles and piles of Cracked from my parents' house, a few weeks ago.
I read heebie's excerpt and decided to stay the hell away from that article. But then 26 made me morbidly curious enough to read it. What the fuck is wrong with my decision making?
8 - Think of it as a coffee place that just serves coffee plus a couple random foods per owner eccentricity. A coffee place that had no food at all wouldn't surprise me. (I've never had coffee there, although I have had coffee at the Red Door, the place mentioned early in the article. Good coffee!)
I always avoid really good coffee. I'm perfectly satisfied with my current coffee and am afraid of acquiring a taste for expensive coffee.
For the same reason I try to avoid any wine over $10 a bottle.
At that level, you really should go with the boxed wine.
The box has a spout, you don't just have to... what have you been doing to try to drink your boxed wine, exactly?
"I keep head-butting this box but I'm not a bit drunk yet!"
Yeah I mean concussed is a good enough substitute in a pinch I suppose.
Any time you think you might save by cutting a larger opening in the top if the bag is more than lasted by the extra clean-up.
When ordering toast at a finer establishment should one indicate the level of toastiness desired?
What, you want me to stick my head under the spout like some churlish fraternity brother?
41: Well, if you want to be a snob, you can pour it into a paper cup.
The bread from the Mill is good which is great because it is pretty convenient for us. The toast thing makes me itch with irritation.
Re coffee I'd really like to encourage the pendulum to swing waaay far away from acid fruit bomb as soon as possible. I like my coffee with a bit of milk and my lingering tooth enamel thank you very much.
43.2: At least Blue Bottle is still keeping the flame of dark-roasted coffee alive. But yeah, the sooner the light-roast thing goes away the happier I am.
It definitely gets harder to shell out for coffee if you're making good stuff at home. The cost isn't too bad with these beans (although they run about half that price inside an actual Costco) coupled with a decent burr grinder and a drip machine with a gold mesh filter. My inner miser won't let me not take advantage of the free coffee at 7-11 for cops when we're out on the street though. I'd love to be drinking Peets Mocha Java all the time but 17 bucks a pound? Jesus.
So I kept seeing this linked in various places and not clicking because it sounded like it might rub me wrong, but everyone was all "it isn't just about stupid hipsters overpaying for toast" so I read it, and it rubs me wrong. Primarily, I feel like there's a "magical crazy person" thing going on. Also comment 14.
I am eating a coconut at that place right now!
Because I've never been anyplace in the US that serves coconuts, they mean a green, drinking nut, with the thin layer of soft jelly-like meat, right? They're not handing you a mature coconut and you're gnawing on hunks of the hard stuff, right? Because that would be weird. But referring to what you do with a green coconut as 'eating' it also seems weird -- it's primarily a beverage with some stuff you can scrape out and eat on the inside of the container.
My opinions about coconuts, let me show you them. And let me find it unsatisfying not to be able to use the Samoan vocabulary distinguishing between a green and a ripe coconut.
Primarily, I feel like there's a "magical crazy person" thing going on.
Also, this. Once I had it pounded through my head that it wasn't a joke, the woman it's about sounds like someone who is seriously not all right: if running an odd business is helping her, that's good, but it seems implausible to me that it's a workable longterm solution for what she's got going on, whatever exactly it is.
If it makes you feel any better, trapnel, the passage from the Cracked article quoted in the OP is not actually truth but kitsch, kitsch, kitsch, and apparently not the sexy shirtless kind.
Yes, a young coconut. And yes, it was more of a drinking experience. The actual jellylike meat I found kind of icky.
I am now trying the toast.
More of 49: I looked back at the article, and it's explicit about her diagnosis, of course. But, still, it sits wrong with me somehow.
That coffee shop owner's story is giving me some James Frey type vibes. So she's supposedly schizo but does everything but actual anti psych meds to cope? I also enjoyed the part where even though she's in her 30's and attended several different colleges but never went and opened a checking account and obtained small business info until told to do so by a magical old jew on the beach.
I seriously hope she didn't spend three years living on green coconuts. That'd be an insane amount of coconuts a day to not starve, wouldn't it? Ripe coconuts, you could do it pretty easily. Monotonous, but getting the necessary calories down your neck would be practical.
Primarily, I feel like there's a "magical crazy person" thing going on.
It has a bit of that, and I do think that's a weakness, but I still find the story that it tells an interesting one (and I think it benefits from being long enough that there's more than enough detail to keep "magical crazy person" from taking over).
But there were a couple of paragraphs that were a bit much.
But I think it's interesting that the article essentially says, "artisanal toast" --> "sounds absurd" --> "fad started with somebody who was, in fact, a very odd person"
Though it doesn't give any reason for why it ended up catching on. But, really, her story is more interesting than the toast anyway.
I was willing to give that cracked article a chance, until it quoted from "the last psychiatrist", and I bailed since I assume it's just going to tell people that they what they really need is to do is stop being "narcissistic" and go back in time to when they were 10 and become a rich white person.
57: Well sure. How hard can it be to screw up fresh slice of cinnamon toast?
The toast is lame and to be brutally honest makes particularly bad date food. Awkward to eat and strange. Youngsters find yourselves better date food!!! You look absurd when I am standing on the line in the Mill to buy bread.
The toast part is the least irritating thing about the article. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm more than likely to shell out a couple bucks on as a treat because the alternative is I buy a big squishy loaf of fresh bread and wallow in self loathing after living off of cinnamon toast for three days straight.
|| What's the etiquette on this? You have a laundry room with two washes and two dryers. You walk in and one dryer is going, one washer is empty, and the other one has a load of clothes in it that are done washing, machine off. There's a basket in front of that one with some clothes in it. (Dirty? Clean? Not sure!)
I think I maybe did a bad neighbor thing and went ahead and put the finished clothes in the empty dryer and started using both washers, possibly leapfrogging someone else's intended third load of clothes but I mean...there are only two machines. You can't reserve one, right? I don't know when they were coming back...
Sometimes I wish I lived in a normal town where you just have an actual washer and dryer in your house.
|>
The toast is lame and to be brutally honest makes particularly bad date food. Awkward to eat and strange. Youngsters find yourselves better date food!!! You look absurd when I am standing on the line in the Mill to buy bread.
The toast at the Mill may be lame, but the toast at Trouble Coffee is great.
a magical old jew on the beach
Are there openings in this line of work?
53: I'm definitely on your team about how irritating that article is, but going on meds and never getting off them is not the one true way to treat psychotic symptoms. Maybe she has stabilized without them. (Or maybe she hasn't. Or maybe she's on them. Who knows?) Sometimes people just recover from psychotic disorders. I don't pretend to be deeply familiar with the WHO schizophrenia data, but most sources note that prognosis is better in developing countries, despite rates of medication being much lower.
Here's one article. An excerpt:
The study demonstrated clearly a diversity of outcomes but "did not identify any particular pattern in the course and outcome of schizophrenic illnesses which could be regarded as specific to a given area or culture." The outcome of patients in the developing countries was not uniformly better, as compared to the outcome in developed countries. While high rates of complete clinical remission were significantly more common in developing country areas (37%) than in developed countries (15.5%), the proportions of continuous unremitting illness (11.1% and 17.4%) did not differ significantly across the 2 types of setting. Patients in developing countries experienced significantly longer periods of unimpaired functioning in the community, although only 16% of them were on continuous antipsychotic medication (compared with 61% in the developed countries).
Also, a few weeks back -- or maybe more recently than that -- a bunch of people posted some defense-of-the-humanities thing on facebook. It was a first-person essay, I think, though maybe not. I didn't read it. Regardless, I want to say that it was originally printed in the Times, but it certainly could have been from CHE or some other place. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
But it's not just toast! It comes with a narrative!
Ah, I give up. Artisanal toast is ridiculous. But Carrelli's story is totally charming. (And I wonder how many small businesses are created in part to soothe their owners' psychological needs?)
64: I agree, it's just that the totality of the circumstances makes me wary of the story. Cal isn't the local community college. It doesn't seem likely that that level of unmedicated mental illness along with transience would go hand in hand with holding down jobs, applying for colleges, and maintaining the kind of grades that would enable her to get into places like Berkeley.
(And I wonder how many small businesses are created in part to soothe their owners' psychological needs?)
Part of why I appreciated the article is that there are some analogies to be drawn with the experience of my brother. He isn't crazy (or no crazier than anybody here), and is smart and talented, but he was a little bit stuck in his life and he ended up taking over a failing ice cream shop, and it turned out to be great -- not just as a business but as a venue for him to express his personality. He isn't at all what I would think of as the classic small business personality but it turns out that he has an unusual ability to both be a perfectionist about the product, and to create a really unusually positive social dynamic.
So, yeah . . .
65: are you sure it wasn't a blog post?
65: was it "Humanities scholarship is incredibly relevant, and that makes people sad"?
70: Huh, that's a familiar name. I'm trying to remember where I know her from. I mean, Chicago, but I feel like I had one or two friends who were very close to her even though I never knew her well.
I agree, it's just that the totality of the circumstances makes me wary of the story.
What would be the best way to do this?
Just a proof that everything is not that bad.
It is always good to experiment, but what is the damage, and caused to whom?
Didn't we had enough social experimentation?