Today, the first installment of the new web series Foodies premieres. The pilot opens with a man sitting in his car, inhaling fast food like a dirty secret before arriving to a dinner club where the guests are eager to whip out their phones and snap pictures of a Wonder Bread consommé. We feel for him. The series is about a group of L.A. gourmands who come together to show off their culinary chops with absurd flare, each perhaps jockeying for place at the head of the table. They explore the pretensions of food culture, as with lead Danny Domenica’s (as played by Daniel Franzese of Mean Girls) pompous attempt to make the mundane into the molecular with his deconstructed peanut butter and jelly. One recipe by Tom (Jefferey Self) ventures into the repulsive with a durian fruit tart, which if you know anything from watching Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, it’s one of the few flavors the daring glutton cannot stomach. Tom’s ambition, it would seem, is to make a statement about the extreme dichotomy between that which is repugnant and that which is whimsical, or some uppity shit like that. As Iliza (Anne Lane) remarks that Tom is a genius because she’s never had anything so “delightfully revolting,” we think at least he knows his customer.
Admitting to actually owning a foam canister and affirming that food is the only art that employs all the senses, Grant can also grind down on some McNuggets – a self-referential projection, we wonder, onto one of his characters,But these characters, though absurd and somewhat out to lunch are not meant to be viewed with derision. “I love food,” says writer and director Japhy Grant. “It’s really rich territory and I hope when people see the show, they’ll realize that we’re not railing against food culture. We love playing with our food.” But are the recipes published on the site meant to be followed? “If someone makes a durian fruit tart, we’ll absolutely post it to the site.”
(Continue to Poor Taste)
