Is Jeffrey Chodorow The Antichrist?
The best part of today's profile of David Chang in the Times isn't that the reporter notices Pearl Jam playing on the stereo (no big deal, I have a limited edition of Ten!) or the news (unconfirmed) that Chang will be opening a Vegas Momofuku. No, the best part comes from Chang himself. Apropros entrepreneurs, Chang asserts that restaurateur "Jeffrey Chodorow is the antichrist." A quick marshaling of the evidence proves that Chang is factually correct.
A subjective look at Chodorow's restaurants reveal what can only be termed a cohesive plan to be able to execute any diner at any time. The 5-pound fish looming menacingly at Wild Salmon; the swords (SWORDS!) at Kobe Club. These are less design elements and more assassination mechanisms. But perhaps the most compelling argument has to do less with what is at his restaurants and more about who is at his restaurants.
It was at Choad's remarkably infernal Kobe Club that a union of the most unholy kind transpired. As we mentioned earlier, under impending impalement, this was where Ron Burkle, Bill Clinton and Oxycontin-posterboy Rush Limbaugh canoodled this week. More appropriately, a close reading of the interaction reveals that Clinton was actually cock-blocking Limbaugh as he tried to throw it in some lady. Of course, Kobe Club is where Limbaugh would take a date!
I was with the woman who poked me at dinner last Thursday night in Palm Beach...She was treating me like a wife, and we're not even married. I just met her that day....That's when she poked me. I liked her poking me even though we're not married, because we're not married and she couldn't do anything about it.
Anyway, so Limbaugh is enjoying a no doubt comped meal as his date looks into his Xanaxed-out eyes. Everything is leading to a post-prandial grope-fest.
I'm looking at this woman, talking to her. She's looking at me, not aware of anything else going on in the restaurant, and all of a sudden I become aware of a looming presence at the table. ..This looming presence, I look up, and, golly, if it isn't former President Bill Clinton....The lady I was with had to excuse herself to go to the restroom, and at that point four or five people in the restaurant came over and wanted pictures and autographs and this sort of stuff. When my guest came back those other people then stopped coming over...There is no "rest of the story." What kind of rest of the story do you think there would be? There is no rest of the story. No, no, no, no, no.
So in the end, Chodorow's End of Days plan to facilitate the creation of little Limbaugh babies failed but only due to the personal intervention and deus ex machina appearance of the Bill Clinton and the Ron Burkle, two of the greatest forces of good of Manichean midtown. —Josh