That Thing When You

Youth Culture and the Foodie Movement: 

In 1998, Mario Batali gutted the space that was once home to the stodgy Coach House and replaced it with the loud and brilliant Babbo. The Times later cited Babbo’s “Led Zeppelin soundtrack” as “one of the dividing lines between a restaurant with three stars, which it unequivocally deserves, and one with the highest rating of four.” That missed the point. The whole idea was to fuse fine dining and rock and roll. Anthony Bourdain’s 2000 Kitchen Confidential destroyed the archetype of the foofy French chef in a toque and replaced it with an image of cooks as young tattooed badasses. Then, in 2004, a young neurotic chef named David Chang (no relation to Diane) opened Momofuku Noodle Bar, serving what Bourdain has called the kind of food that chefs themselves like to eat after-hours—that is, simple, ingredient-driven food, often global, that is unfailingly delicious but not necessarily expensive or stuffy. Somewhere along the line, young people even began to view cooking as a form of artistic expression. The idea of eating well wasn’t just democratized. It was now, improbably enough, edgy.

(via the-feature)

Ah…JayZ as Biggie’s hypeman. 

bodying:

Jay-Z doing hypeman/ad-lib duties on “Get Money” live with Biggie, 1996. I wish Jay still dressed like this.