Why This New $18 Plate of Bread Might Just Be Worth It

Everyone should have an art. That is to say, something they care about enough to dedicate hours to, distract one's mind from the inevitability of death, the pain and suffering that is the stuff of life, and New York Times trend pieces. But no one, and we repeat "no one," should play any role (or shall we say roll?) in putting to market an $18 plate of bread.

But that is what the twee-masters at Bruno Pizza in the East Village did. $18 bread. But what else would you expect from two clowns who named their fancy pizza joint for Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600 for his curiosity about the world? (See what they did there? Wood-fired oven...burned at the stake. Cute!) Just as you would carefully work on a bread starter, read slowly so your anger does not boil too-too fast:

This bread itself, which will hit the menu on October 1 as a composed $18 dish with fermented Caputo Brothers mozzarella, buttermilk and "ambrosia" honey complex (a mixture of the honey propolis, pollen, and royal jelly), has been in the works since before the restaurant's opening earlier this summer. It's the brainchild of chef de partie Phil Marokus, who previously had no bread-making experience. "After I left my previous job, I had two and a half months before Bruno started up, and I was just super bored," he says. "I'd done a lot of research online and read Tartine Bakery's books to learn about how naturally risen bread works, but this has been a real headache! Why is the bread doing this, and not this? What do I have to fix to make that happen?"

Did your anger rise like the dough for the majestic $18 plate of bread? Take a thirty-second breather and read on from aspiring society page subject Sierra Tishgart (who sounds like she could be an exotic appetizer of baby lentils and Komodo dragon tongue):

The dark, seedy bread is rich and satisfying on its own, but Bruno's chefs also serve it with a bone-marrow-and-herb-infused compound butter. They also add pine oil, nasturtium flowers, and Jacobsen salt (and that's before plating it with the cheese). It's a nice accompaniment to vegetable-forward dishes like the fairy-tale-eggplant appetizer with black-cashew paste and blistered shishito peppers (and the pizza with smoked ham, Pawlet cheese, and peaches, for good measure). 

"When we started, none of us had any pizza experience," Marokus says. "But making the pizza dough helped me with the bread: I can see how adding more or less water or flour makes an impact. We've all worked together to figure it out."

Can you hear the mellifluous notes of self-satisfaction? They worked together for a year, folks, to design a plate of a few pieces of bread that would cost, after tax and tip, $20. Like NASA engineers or Supreme Court litigators devising legal strategy, they got together to figure it out. Someone had to, right? And we thought a $20 burger was still the ne plus ultra of the excesses of the New York food scene. We delight in being proven wrong but we're gonna stick with this one for now.

Cheaper than your co-pay

Harvard Students ‘Devastated’ About Yogurtland Closing

We pride ourselves on being equal opportunity trollers at the Weekly Hate Read, pursuant to the strictest EEOC regulations. Thus we have no qualms including an article from that august institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose acceptance rate hovers around only 5.9%. The 5.9% are very sad that a self-service frozen yogurt store has closed.

Up and coming cub reporter Sharon Yang, who has previously covered on a talk by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and a prestigious awarded given to noted economist Roland G. Fryer Jr., shifted her focus to the Harvard Square self-service yogurt beat, a perennial favorite in sleepy New England:

A small but passionate and vocal group of longtime student-patrons who frequented Yogurtland while it was in business described themselves as heartbroken over the closure.

Ms. Yang elicited some choice quotes on the closure, not least from the daughter of deranged law professor (or is professor of deranged law?) Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother:

"I was actually devastated. I was genuinely devastated. Yogurtland for me as a freshman, was a place of solace,” said Lulu S. Chua-Rubenfeld ’18.

Somebody call student health services! Though Ms. Chua-Rubenfeld claims here to have survived just fine standing in 20-degree weather at the age of three for having disobeyed her mother, we think this obsession with yogurt betrays a hint of PTSD. (By the way, what's the statute of limitations on child abuse?) Another student provided a more dispassionate assessment of Yogurtland's superiority:

“Pinkberry is not self-serve, you've got all these complications of lines, you don't get immediate access to the yogurt, it's hard to sample,” Jon D. Young '16 said. “The same issues plague the Berryline, the J.P. Licks, and what have you.”

Not to be outdone, however, Mr. Young added:

Young is a platinum level member of the rewards program, a distinction he earned after consuming more than 240 ounces of frozen yogurt over the course of his frequent visits to the store. 

“Yogurtland was the holy place for me,” Young said. “My temple, if you will.”

Pulitzer prize-winning material, my friends.

The nightlife in Cambridge, Massachusetts

At Hawaii Resort, Yoga by Day, Party by Night

We are hypocrites at the Weekly Hate Read. We denounce the parochialism of the Real Estate section while greedily indulging our need to deride it. That is why today we venture forth into its companion section, which the New York Times insists on calling “Travel.” We prefer the appellation, “Summer Homes and Places I Go Only First-Class.” We prayed for a piece that let us move beyond Williamsburg and the Upper East side, finally receiving a 2,000-word article detailing the Lollapalooza or Burning Man analogue for yoga devotees, set in beautiful, postcolonial Hawaii. Hallelujah.

Written by the Times' hard-hitting "primary Olympics writer" Lynn Zinser, the article grapples with the phenomenon that is Wanderlust, a three to four day festival combining various forms of yoga (what?) with all-night raves. It has now spread, like a rare tropical disease, to fifteen cities. We were unable to obtain a demographic census of the event, but we have our suspicions:

“When we first came up with the idea of a festival, people said, ‘No one is going to want to do yoga all day and party all night,’ except we knew that’s exactly what they would do,” said Sean Hoess, who founded Wanderlust with Jeff Krasno and Mr. Krasno’s wife, Schuyler Grant. “We would go to these yoga retreats, and that’s exactly what they were already doing.”

Exhibit 1: when there is a “Schuyler” involved, you are no longer dealing with garden variety WASP, but true Philadelphia Main Line or Greenwich, Connecticut WASP. (The same goes for Piper.) As such, Wanderlust joins other businesses in the now-familiar vein of daycare facility for putatively able-bodied wealthy adults. It is best in these situations to run for the hills or, as one would do at Wanderlust, up the coconut tree:

The tightrope walker fit in swimmingly with the impromptu human pyramids or the people hand-walking on stilts, the laughing circles of people bruising their hips in hula hoop yoga or splashing into the water trying to do Warrior 1 on a stand-up paddleboard. There is yoga with dancing, D.J.s spinning tunes to the downward dogs. There are the fabric hammocks hanging from trees for something called aerial yoga. At regular intervals, you could find someone shinnying up a 30-foot coconut tree. Just because it was there.

The business acumen of Krasno (who has been "incredibly" inspired by Williamsburg), Hoess, and Grant consisted of putting together this goofiness just as goofiness became the latest fad in papering over structural violence, while “Just be cool, man” became the most eloquent defense of its apologists:

“Our timing was just really, really good,” Ms. Grant said. “Just as the music industry was starting to nose-dive, the wellness industry was starting to catch its wings. There is such a broad interest in wellness, and there are so many different ways and different depths of how to practice that. It is starting to approach its mass appeal moment.”

Never fear, however, we are in the hands of the New York Times—an eminent and critical news source. Even the yoga-practicing journalist, engaging in a bit of participant-observation, smells something fishy here:

“Wellness,” as it turns out, can be a rather fungible idea, stretched to include eating poke bowls and kale salads by day and enjoying inebriating substances while the music pulsates late into the night. The wellness part of that being that, well, people were enjoying themselves.

Whatever concerns Ms. Zinser has are dispelled once she finds out that the trio of yogapreneurs made sure that those unable to attend the $440 entrance fee for the four-day festival and the $269/night Hawaii hotel (before fees and taxes) could enjoy a taste of this "community" for one day close to home. For those without PTO (paid time off for those not in the know), Wanderlust offers a one-day cocktail of yoga, road race, and Molly-fueled gyration to Prodigy, just in time for work on Monday:

Last year Wanderlust 108 made its debut: a one-day “mindfulness triathlon” combining a 5k run, a yoga class and a guided meditation. After two successful editions of that last year, it will reach 15 cities in 2015. That includes one in Brooklyn — Wanderlust’s headquarters — on Sept. 13 and one in Washington on Sept. 20.

“Those are just a taste of Wanderlust,” Ms. Grant said. “Some people can’t afford to do a three- or four-day festival. These are more of a community event. It’s a happening.”

If that doesn't sound like a recipe for a fatal combination of schizophrenia (run, yoga, DJ?) and class resentment writ large, we frankly don't know what is. Ms. Zinser, however, leaves reassured that there is a place for first-generation, good ol' yuppie Orientalist wisdom in this new-fangled space:

Ms. Phelan told the class that Yin is her favorite yoga because it involves the willingness to look within.

“All the answers are there,” she said. “The past is just a memory, and the future just a thought. There is only now.”

In that minute, everything seemed to make sense: the circuslike atmosphere, the party-till-dawn vibe, the stretch-and-be-seen scene, the idea that people traveled thousands of miles, or just a few dozen, to discover the one thing that is true everywhere. It is always now.

Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon: eat your heart out. The future is worse and weirder than you ever imagined.

Medicare will be defunded while you practice aerial yoga

Getting Workaholics to Stop and Recharge

They say you reap what you sow, but here at the Hate Read, we just reap and reap and reap. We leave the sowing to New York's one-percenters who busily sow the soil around us with bad taste, astonishing levels of self-regard, and obliviousness to others' pain and suffering. And apropos of pain and suffering, this week brings another chapter in the high-level collusion between so-called "doctors" (i.e., dermatologists) and model-actresses and financiers to ease their pain.

First, we have seen the work of aspiring journalist Paul Sullivan before on snagging high-end restaurant reservations, so it is good to see we're in the hands of someone who cares about the interior spaces of his subjects. To wit, he begins with short profiles of different real estate/medical potentates' self-care routines. First, Anthony Hitt, a "luxury property company" executive:

Anthony Hitt, chief executive of Engel & Völkers North America, a luxury property company, spends at least one week each quarter at his home in Maui, Hawaii. At this point, three years into the top job, he said he talks to his top lieutenants only 15 minutes a day when he’s there. The rest of the time he reads, practices yoga, rides his bicycle or otherwise tries to disconnect from the responsibilities of his job 

“My vacations are so low-key,” he said. “I try not to think, ‘What about this or what is the solution to that?’”

We salute Mr. Hitt for not thinking too hard--we're afraid of what would happen if he did. While the Times helpfully links to "yoga" in the above and a litany of stories on downward dog poses, it fails to link to Mr. Hitt's personal blog, whose last entry, dated December 31, 2014, listed his resolutions for 2015, including the all-important: "I will NOT forget that this real estate market will pass - and so will the next good or bad one." Good advice for us all. From your lips to Goldman Sachs' ears.

Next, Mr. Sullivan profiles Dr. Judith Hellman who bravely sticks to the surface of things:

Judith Hellman, a dermatologist in private practice and an associate clinical professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, has a mix of strategies to disconnect from the demands of her patients. Trained as a classical pianist, Dr. Hellman likes to play jazz on the piano in her apartment. She swims (in the shade, of course). She writes poetry, though she has no illusions about its quality.

And she takes off at least four weeks a year — next month it is scuba diving in Israel — and asks her patients to contact her only if it’s a true emergency.

What would be a true emergency for Dr. Hellman or her patients? This is a tough nut to crack as we're clearly in the hands of a narcissist writ large and as she'll have you know on her website, the mother of a musical prodigy. But finally, Mr. Sullivan hits us with the real story. People are overworked! Who knew?

People in the United States are taking less time off than at any point in the last 40 years, according to data cited this year in The New York Times. Responses to one online questionnaire indicated that a majority of Americans do not use all of their paid vacation.

It's hard to Hate Read the fact that Americans have the least paid vacation in the world. It's okay, the Times won't lead us astray yet, or it will lead us astray. Not sure exactly what the point is now. Back to previously overworked Mr. Hitt:

Mr. Hitt said that when he first became chief executive, he used to get up at 4 a.m. while on vacation to call people in Germany and New York, logging in hours before anyone else in Maui was awake. Now, he said, he has a great team and is comfortable relaxing. 

“It’s something that’s taken me a long time to get to,” said Mr. Hitt, just back from Maui. “I’m someone who likes to be in charge.”

Poor baby. He was made to work! From Maui! Now he's only in charge 48 weeks a year. Must be rough. But the beauty of Mr. Sullivan's articles is that he captures human frailty, not just human frivolity. In fact, frivolity and frailty are really two sides of the same coin, n'est pa?

Mr. Hitt said he was hesitant to admit it but his business runs fine when he’s not there. “There is no negative cost associated with me being gone, which is not what most C.E.O.s want to say,” he said, adding: “When I come back I have that 30,000-, 50,000-foot view that goes away in the few months between those visits.”

The gigantic phallus of Mr. Hitt's ego stands unassailed and we can all breathe a sigh of relieve. However, the real coup de grace is Mr. Sullivan's discovery of cryotherapy (apparently *not* weeping therapy) and Anastasia Garvey, runner up to Miss UK 2012 and, we project, a future Real Housewife. 

While Anastasia Garvey, an actress and model, doesn’t have office pressure, she says she is constantly on edge wondering if she’ll get a certain job. She has developed a regimen of ways to disconnect: meditation, acupuncture, cupping therapy, monthly trips to a reservation-only spa and most recently cryotherapy — as in spending some time being blasted by air cooled to minus 260 degrees. 

It only lasts three minutes, plus time to warm up again on a stationary bike, but it costs $90 a session, she said. She goes three times a week.

“The first time I did it I couldn’t remember my name,” she said. “You’re in a freezer. You’re so cold you can’t think of anything.”

We imagine this is a skill that comes in handy in her trade--forgetting her own name, that is. And while cryotherapy will set you and Ms. Garvey back $14,000 a year, now that SoulCycle is going public, spending $5,000 on a thrice-weekly regimen a year on a company whose stock any chicken plucker can soon buy, is hardly exclusive anymore. Pity the rich, but pity us more.

This is someone who can't remember her name

Uniting a Mysterious Ring With Its Rightful Owner

We offer the Hate Read's first trigger warning today. The author of today's atrocity, aspiring socialite Patricia Morrisroe, published a "book" titled 9 1/2 Narrow: My Life in Shoes. So you know we're in the hands of a materialist philosopher of sorts. The book was blurbed by Irene Beckerman, author of Love, Loss, and What I Wore, so you know we're in for a head-thumper.

Romance ain't what it used to be. Just read the weekly human rights violation that is the Modern Love column. If you hadn't guessed, this monument to bourgeois matchmaking can be found in the country's paper of record, The New York Times. Cue the tiny doomsaying, violin-playing orchestra in my head.

The saga begins on Ms. Morrisroe's 25th anniversary when she receives a $2,350 diamond ring in the mail from Neiman Marcus, which begins a series of reveries on jewelry and subplots that could only have been hatched in the mind of a crack-addled Real Housewife:  

Shaped like an oval shield with a sapphire in the center, the ring was so gigantic it extended beyond the knuckle of my index finger. It was a “statement ring,” and here’s what it said: My husband, after 25 years of marriage, still didn’t get my taste in jewelry. 

Decades earlier, there was the chunky Art Deco engagement ring that became a nonengagement ring when we postponed the wedding. Though we had been engaged for only 15 minutes, it was long enough for me to decide that while I still loved my former fiancé, I definitely didn’t love the ring.

The horror. Who could this terrible man be? One feels a bit of sympathy for Mr. Morrisroe  until realizing that if he's held it together for 25 years, he can't be made of much. Thankfully, their 10th anniversary ring tells all:

For our 10th anniversary, my husband presented me with a delicate Burmese ruby to make up for the Art Deco disaster. I was moved but conflicted: “pigeon blood” rubies derive their name from the color of the first two drops of blood dribbling from a butchered pigeon’s nose.

I have no great fondness for pigeons, but I didn’t want their symbolic blood on my finger. Luckily, the United States government gave me the perfect out. “Myanmar is violating human rights, and the U.S. has banned Burmese rubies,” I told my husband.

“I bought the ring before the ban,” he said. 

“Other people don’t know that. Besides, I feel bad for the pigeons.” 

“That’s the last time I ever get you a ring,” he said.

No doubt the Burmese military junta could count on this couple for a good hard-on. We would provide you a .GIF to show you what a Burmese military junta hard-on looks like but the free wifi at McDonald's is too slow to do .GIF quality control. And we regret to inform Ms. Morrisroe that "pigeon's blood" rubies have no blood in them. But alas, the $2,350 "bargain" ring was not meant for her, so she suspected a "secret admirer." Wrong--it was a Stefan from Studio City, California. She bravely trucked out to the remote tundra outpost of White Plains, New York to return it:

Neiman Marcus doesn’t have a branch in Manhattan, so I brought the ring to the Neiman-owned Bergdorf Goodman. The woman at client services suggested taking it to Neiman Marcus in White Plains.

Two days later, my husband announced that he had made a reservation at one of our favorite restaurants.

“You know what I’d really like to do?” I said. “Go to White Plains.”

“Are you crazy? That’s 40 miles away.”

“I know, but I’ve got to get rid of the diamond shield ring.”

“I was hoping we could have a nice romantic dinner,” he said.

“We can — in White Plains.”

Leaving Manhattan! Can you imagine? Do you even know where White Plains is? Isn't that where poor people go for colonoscopies? Meanwhile, Mr. Morrisroe had learned his lesson and bought his beloved a bracelet instead. The beautiful, or atrocious, thing about this Modern Love is the cast of characters we are privy to and to which the New York Times subjects its readers:

As it turned out, he hadn’t. His gift was a beautiful bangle bracelet that immediately fell off my wrist. To be fair, I’m very small-boned, but now it would have to be returned for resizing to the jeweler’s workshop in Jaipur, India. Still, I was so happy he hadn’t given me the shield ring that I didn’t care.

[A few weeks and paragraphs later]

Back home, I spotted a familiar box on the coffee table. Inside was my bangle bracelet. The jeweler had been able to resize it in her New York workshop. Now I realized why my husband had made dinner reservations. He had wanted to make it a special night.

The bracelet was beautiful. It was also very small, but after I used soap and ignored the pain in my thumb joint, I was able to get it on.

Can you just picture the jeweler with the workshops in New York and Jaipur resizing the bracelet to fit poor Ms. Morrisroe's bird-like wrists? We may be in for another one of the Times' famous labor investigation. Here the abuse would just be interacting with Ms. Morrisroe and the people in her orbit. On her book, an Amazon reviewer optimistically opines that it "Will Make You Laugh, Cry and Think." She's definitely right about the crying. 

The main building of the White Plains gulag

Along With Babies, Hairstylists Are Arriving in Hospitals

Apologies for the hiatus, Hateful Readers. We temporarily relocated to the West Coast where we were caught in a miasma of sunshine, ice cream, and brunch. Life on the Lifestyle Coast, as we like to call it, is like a being in a coma: while a relaxing break from the indignities of capitalism (that is, if you're not paying rent), it's not exactly up to you when you leave. When you finally do wake up, you're greeted by a nurse in white dreads, a hospital bill, and some sign the world has changed for the worse--climbing gyms for toddlers or something.

But we digress. This past week brought plenty of red meat in our CSA of Hate Reads. The latest journalistic atrocity the Times has aided and abetted is a feature on new mothers who contract with hairdressers to do their hair sometime between cutting the umbilical cord and placing the placenta in a doggy bag to drop into an omelet during brunch in Park Slope:

“I think someone realized, ‘Why should I not look good for that great picture that I’m going to show everybody, the first picture of my child?’ ” said Joel Warren, an owner of the Warren-Tricomi salons. 

Finally this public health--erm, hair--crisis is being addressed. And by no less than our favorite demographic: lawyers who live in the financial district.

When Donna Yip, a lawyer who lives in the financial district, went into labor with her second child in June, she had more than just her husband and medical team in her room at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. 

Jackson Simmonds from the Julien Farel Restore Salon & Spa was also there, with a curling iron, hair dryer and boar bristle hairbrushes in his Longchamp tote. They were his tools to style Ms. Yip’s hair immediately after delivery.

And here we were thinking that boar bristle brushes were passé. But never underestimate the rich: as Fitzgerald said, "The rich are not like you and me; they're cray." Ms. Yip a lawyer to Oak Hill Advisors, a firm "specializing in below investment grade credit markets" (that's investment-speak for "stealing candy from babies") would never leave pictures in the delivery room to chance, nor would the brave Upper East Side nurses who serve our corporate overlords:

“We have a lot of patients who have had a long labor, and they are like, ‘O.K., I want cool pictures of me and my baby,’ ” said Lisa Schavrien, the obstetric nurse navigator at Lenox Hill Hospital, who keeps in her mobile phone a list of hairstylists from nearby salons for the five to 10 new mothers for whom she helps arrange in-room appointments each month.

But let us not hate on Ms. Schavrien, who is probably under pressure from from millionaire hospital CEO Michael Dowling to bring in the bacon. Everyone wants to know, healthcare reporter Rachel Felder, what does it cost to have a hairdresser waiting for you after you burst out a ball of blood and slime? Is it a pre-existing condition? Will insurance cover it?

A hospital-room booking with a stylist from an upscale salon can be expensive: An out-of-salon call by Mr. Lospalluto costs $700; the charge for a similar booking from Julien Farel’s salon is $500. Stylebookings.com appointments start at $180 before tax and tip. Prices for Glamsquad’s services begin at $50.

Some us were probably worried about the outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease in the South Bronx, a potentially fatal bacterial pneumonia, but yes, please bring on the cool pictures. Patti Wilson, a director at the august journalistic instituted called OK! Magazine (because nothing denotes gravitas like an exclamation point and the word "magazine" to warn readers there may be words inside), put it succinctly:

“This is a moment where it’s one of those milestones. I’ll feel better if it’s blown out, and in pictures it will look better.”

If the New York Times style page stands for anything, it's for the proposition that everything looks better blown out. Perhaps the paper's motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print," should be upgraded to the aspirational "How to Look Fabulous All the Time" or the more prosaic "Stuff About Brazilian Blowouts." We'd at least be forewarned.

Would you like to accentuate your placenta?

'Tinder for elites' app The League had an exclusive party in Montauk with helicopter rides and celebrities — here's what went down

While we try to keep the faith and follow our beloved New York Times real estate section here at the Hate Read, sometimes there are cultural artifacts and political events noted in other publications that demand our attention. The launch of The League, a digital abacus for summing net worths and also a dating app for white people who work in finance, granted exclusive access to Business Insider to their Montauk party. We give you the Hamptons chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Grand Wizards of Manhattan eschew hoods and mingle on Long Island