The Wreckoning Reborn.

After a few months of licking my wounds and navel-gazing in the wake of the implosion of my former blog network and the spectacular flame-out of its shattered founder, (name withheld), The Wreckoning had landed right-side up on a new server. For two years, we found our legs while piggybacking on someone else’s shaky brand name, but now The Wreckoning is happy to be on its own. I’ll admit that at times during the last few months I thought of quitting, of wiping my memory and my hard drive clean in one glorious pass of an enormous industrial-strength magnet. I thought no one, including myself, cared.

But then two things happened. First, the weak economy gut-punched the restaurant business.  A lot of the poseurs and interlopers closed shop and moved back in with their mothers. (So long, Citrus. Adios, Goa.) Only the strong survived. This was a good thing. This gave me hope. I had become disillusioned writing about the terrible treatment exacted on customers, the exorbitant prices charged for sub-par food, the forced air of exclusivity perpetrated by the fly-by-night phonies who prey on the uninitiated—not because it stopped happening, but because it wouldn’t stop. There was no end to it. So thank you, busted housing bubble. Mazel tov, recession. Cheers to you, bank bailout. These catastrophes helped usher in a much needed correction in the bar and restaurant marketplace. People weren’t willing to spend $80 on non-Kobe Kobe beef and without their inflated profit margins, the kids playing restaurant were emperors in new clothes.

The second thing was that after much malaise, I began to get gloriously, rapturously pissed off again. But the bile in my mouth tasted different, more varied. I had been whacked by the economic downturn myself. There was new frugality blooming inside me like an overstuffed Valu-Pak of mailbox coupons. I found myself on a constant search for “the deal”. My eye was even keener. My bullshit threshold was at a new barb-tipped low. In short, this is going to be fun…

Coming soon…the slow troll down the waters of Sushi Row.