S3 E10: 4 New Yorkers Kvetching feat. Allison Robicelli + Eddie McNamara

Editors note (from Tom):
Oh man, I love this episode. How could you not when Allison Robicelli and Eddie McNamara are our special guests?

Allison (@robicellis) and Eddie (@EddieMcNamara) are both old school Brooklyn to the core. We wanted to do an episode about the changing restaurant landscape of NYC, but to get there, we went down a wonderfully twisted path touching on topics such as:
– Red lobster
– Beefsteak Charlies
– How the Broadway show “Cats” is most likely just an elaborate practical joke that went viral
– City kids in the 1980’s and their envy of all things “John Hughes Suburbia”
The audio quality sucks (which is to be expected since it’s the end of the world and such), but the content is amazing.
WARNING: THIS IS MOST DEFINITELY NSFW

In March when Covid first hit NYC Tom and I thought we would still be able to put out a weekly podcast via Zoom but life happens and the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. After the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the protests that followed Tom and I both felt that we needed to pivot NotAFoodie into a more socially conscious podcast because at the end of the day Food is Politics, Restaurants are Politics, and it is easy for 2 Cishet White Guys to use their privilege and ignore the problems of others in our space, because they aren’t our problems. We will be addressing this by bringing on a diverse variety of guests, and no longer straying away from topics that we just didn’t think we should get into.

This entire episode was inspired by this Tweet

THIS A BILLION PERCENT. There were commercials for Red Lobster and Pizza Hut on all the time, but there was not a single in in NYC. They were the stuff of dreams. https://t.co/WrcBIpMesU

— Allison #WEARYOURFUCKINGMASK Robicelli (@robicellis) July 14, 2020

I replied back and after some back and forth with Allison and Eddie I got them both to come onto the podcast. Tom and I have been big fans of Allison’s podcast Robicelli Argument Clinic and were PSYCHED when she said she would come on. I wasn’t personally familiar with Eddie before he came onto the pod but he is awesome and knowledgeable and now we speak on twitter about food and baseball all the time.

This episode was supposed to only be about how chain restaurants and quick service restaurants are going to be everywhere in NYC now when at one time they were only in the suburbs but asking the 4 of us to stay on one topic is impossible. Check out this episode and hear us speak about Restaurants in the time of Covid, Parenting in the time of Covid, and Andrew Lloyd Webber Musicals because those are evergreen.