Man does not live on bling alone; where there is rap music there must also be food, intoxicants, and reality television. So maybe it was inevitable that they would all come together in a food TV series.
I received an e-mail recently from a music and food PR agency that handles a few local restaurants about a rapper named Action Bronson. Once I had Barbara Billingsley translate it from hip-hop-ese and looked up all the people I’m too old to have heard of, it revealed that he was doing a food video show at fancy restaurants such as New York’s Marea, which was once recommended to me by Rob Levitt of the Butcher & Larder. (I figured I should get something about Chicago into this item.) And yes, it is a complete lifestyle food video series, with rap, drugs, tattoos, F-words and everything else you would expect, enough to make Anthony Bourdain, the O.G. of this approach to food, feel very very old.
It’s not on an actual network—yet—but appears at the Vice magazine site, where it offers culinary insights into the restaurant Sam Sifton called “unfussy, as welcoming as a luxe clubhouse,” such as “I’ll slap the shit outta someone’s father right now” and “you know what’s goin’ on!” Action (mind if I call you that?) has a new release coming out shortly called Blue Chips 2, which I am reliably informed has “very dope collaborative energy”; watch for it and then go smack that shit down at Everest or the Pump Room. The video is below.