Diner for Schmucks
Which brings me to M. Wells, a metal-clad diner as shiny as a magpie’s trinket, situated on a corner in Queens as dead-drab as one of the borough’s countless cemeteries. A little more than a year ago, the diner was an abandoned shell, and now it symbolizes the renewal of Long Island City as surely as the MoMA PS1 art museum and the Silvercup film studios. I don’t know what a burger once cost at the derelict diner that became M. Wells, since I never ate there, but I’m betting it was about $2.99. M. Wells sells one for $42, proof that gentrification is thriving in Queens. … My experience there was like no other. The motto is “All’s well at M. Wells.” I assure you it is not.
Eat No Evil
Thanks—or no thanks—to the new high priests and hipster philosophers of the food world, lately it feels like everything on the menu comes with a heaping side order of guilt: Is that mâche local and roof-raised? What’s the carbon footprint of your burger? Was your salmon farm-slaughtered or delicately line-caught? It’s enough to put a man off his meal. But not Alan Richman. The man who’s always been the Defender of the Appetite makes a thirty-day pilgrimage from perfectly sustainable farm to perhaps unsustainable sea to, uh, chicken coop in search of what it means to eat ethically—and still savor the pleasures of eating—in the twenty-first century