What the food?!
New book lampoons NYC’s most bone- headed menu items
HONEY, what’s for dinner tonight? How about a plate of polished wind hog tickled with a steamed butter spaniel sauce? Or perhaps some frauteed bull joints?
The nonsensical food items showed up on a fake menu handed out at Brooklyn’s Great Googa Mooga food festival in 2012.
The humorous list was for a madeup restaurant called FUDS and created by three local comedians — Kelly Hudson, 31, Dan Klein, 30, and Arthur Meyer, 30. It perfectly captured the sometimes preposterous language of the New York food scene.
The FUDS menu got reposted on blogs and became a viral hit, and now the authors have cooked up an entire book. “FUDS: A Complete Encyclofoodia From Tickling Shrimp to Not Dying in a Restaurant” is just out. It’s full of absurd tips and bogus recipes, including one for a “sweet pork smear with tin whistle cakes.” If you’re planning to prepare it at home, the first step is, “call your friend Ryan and have him pick up the ingredients listed above.”
The idea for FUDS began with an inside joke between Klein and Hudson.
“Kelly and I were sending texts to each other with fake food on it for some reason,” Klein says. “We had no intention of doing anything with them. We told Arthur about it, and he said we should make a menu.”
“It was three unemployed people working on this on a Tuesday afternoon,” says Meyer, who now writes for “The Tonight Show.” “Everyone must have been worried about us.” Despite the original menu’s overthetop language, not everyone got the joke. “We had a phone number on the menu. We linked it to my personal phone,” Meyer says. “I’d let those calls go straight to voice mail. I probably got two or three hundred calls in the weeks after we handed out the menu. I think 98 percent of people would leave a message about what they’re ordering, playing along with the joke. But there were a handful of people who thought we were a funky, fun restaurant and they were interested in seeing if we did catering.” The authors say inspiration for FUDS was all around them.
“I could literally point out any restaurant in Brooklyn and say it’s about them,” says Hudson. “I’m remembering [ Cobble Hill’s] Brucie right now. They had something called brick chicken. It sounded just like what we were going for in FUDS.”
Klein and Meyer’s time working as caterers also inspired ideas.
“The vernacular they’d have to describe a meal — something you eat then poop out a little later — was way more elaborate than it needed to be,” Meyer says. “The word ‘ reduction’ was often involved.”
The trio says they may revisit FUDS at some point in the future— although Klein and Hudson have recently moved to LA, where they work as comedy writers.
“I can see us being together 30 years from now opening an actual FUDS restaurant because the joke went too far,” Klein says. “We’d be going, ‘ How did this happen?’ ”