Kale is cool, Brussels sprouts are back, heirloom tomatoes are hot, and the head of the Produce Sales Headquarters is very happy. But there's one outlier to the up-and-to-the-right sales charts that the organization is seeing with other vegetables: celery. It's up to Steve Buscemi's Marty, a down-on-his-luck celery salesman, to save his job by embarking on a noirish quest to make his product popular with consumers who don't even require the fiberous stalk in their Bloody Marys anymore.
See also: Portlandia's Food World Satire Just Keeps Getting Better: Our Favorite Sketches
Well, Chipotle has proven one thing with its new four-episode web series on Hulu, Farmed and Dangerous: It doesn't know how to make a TV show. Here's the plot of the pilot: Big Bad Industrial Farming has created a way to get cows to eat petroleum pellets, and spin doctor Buck Marshall (Ray Wise, aka Twin Peaks' Leland Palmer) has to sell the idea to the American people. The only problem is a viral video of an exploding PetroPellet-ingesting cow, and it's up to Marshall's daughter, a less charismatic version of Kirsten Bell, to go after the scruffy, handsome, and incredibly dull sustainable farming crusader (named Chip, get it?) who's responsible for spreading the video in his quest to take down Big Ag.
It sounds okay on paper, but the problem is that the show is not created to focus on drama, snappy dialogue, chemistry between actors, or anything else that makes up a good television series. Farmed and Dangerous isn't hung on plot points, it's hung on talking points. It's propaganda, not entertainment.
See also: Chipotle Makes a Beautiful Animated Short That Also Happens to Be an Ad
The Dogpatch is kind of a mystery. It's the city's anti-urban village, largely bereft of conveniences and amenities but increasingly full of great things to eat and drink. And now the explosion of pizza places is no longer limited to Mission's southern tier, with Long Bridge Pizza Company up and running on Third. Sign-less and nondescript from the street, and a little on the drab side overall, it's a commonsense operation that plugs a serious hole on Third Street (nearby Piccino being a somewhat higher-end pizza experience).
See Also: Salt + Fat = Excellence at the Pizza Shop in the Mission
It's hard to believe that ICHI Sushi won such a following in its original location, which didn't even really have a proper kitchen. It doesn't matter now, because that space is slated for a separate project, and ICHI has been reincarnated as ICHI + NI ("one" and "two" in Japanese). Tim and Erin Archuleta's gorgeous new space in the not-quite-Bernal-Heights strip sometimes known as La Lengua is a giddily anticipated spot for all your omakase needs.
See Also: Pizza Hacker Has a Permanent Home in Bernal Heights!
