The New York Times City Room blog says that the Loews Regency Hotel is now serving a $30 TV dinner– complete with porcelain trays and pricey free range chicken.
“We are looking for comfort food items that we can turn upscale,” said Mr. Rubin [executive chef]. “These days comfort food is this hip, cool thing.”
So-called “comfort food” is cool these days, though we’re unsure about how comforting paying $30 for a “TV dinner” can possibly be.
“I got TV dinners when my parents was going out to dinner and the baby sitter was coming over. That was a treat for me: Oh, cool! I got the little cake thing. There were the vegetables I could ignore because my mom wasn’t around.”
Ok, to each his own, we suppose. TV dinners? Bleecch!
Is There Any Comfort in a $30 TV Dinner? [NYT via Buzzfeed]
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That looks like chocolate pudding in the pic. Mmmmm…pudding. Maybe if it was a made-from-scratch dark chocolate pudding I could see paying $10 for this dinner. Otherwise, no.
@mjane79: Thank you! Free-range happy cows are 30 minutes away from me. Whoopee!
you don’t eat the porcelain plate, so why not drop the pretension and focus more on providing better quality food? Free range, my ass.
$30 TV dinner shit I’d take a $15 pizza for comfort food any day! The only thing on that tray that even looked remotely half way good was the cake/pudding/brownie/mystery dessert.
@phelander:
Please ‘splain me where the chicken herds are roaming free then. If I go to Wyoming will I see cowboys driving the chicken herd south for the winter?
Idiot. Chickens are not free. Anywhere.
better than free range chickens are KFC’s delicious little mutant birds. Born without feather or beaks these guys are easily mashed up into your preferred shape of consumption.
Who wants free range when you can have this.
@phelander: gee, you’re friendly
In economic times like this, $30 TV is sick. For you people that are actully buying this…
FUCK YOU.
Porcelain Plate? Included in the $30 price? What a gyp! I get bowls for $1.50 a piece. That porcelain better come from a magical country with bubblegum pie.
@TorrentFreak: Why, because those people have made the money not to suffer through hard times?
Or because people who stay at hotels and for some reason or another would be benefited by room service will get their food served in a gimmicky way?
Oh, such horrible, horrible crimes.
@Dakine: Yes, it’s wierd you’ve never heard of Chickenboys.
*snort* City people. Yes, I can direct you to at least a half dozen farms where chickens really *do* roam free. The farmers use “chicken tractors” for the coops – huge coops on trailers. In the morning, the hitch the trailer to the tractor and move it a few hundred feet to a different area of their fields. Then they open the door and the chickens are free to roam as far as they wish, doing natural chicken-things – eating bugs, uprooting weeds, wandering freely. Chickens have a fairly limited natural range – they’ll only roam so many hundred feet from their coop. And they instinctively return to their roosts in the coop as night falls; then someone just comes and closes the door to keep the raccoons out. I’ve visited farms like this. My kids have chased those free-ranging chickens. I bike past several farms that use this method when I do my errands. At least three farmers who use this method deliver their wares to our local farmer’s market. You see these chicken tractors all over Amish Country.
Y’all are right about how the phrase “free range” has been co-opted by the manipulative SOBs in agri-business, so that it’s now pretty meaningless. I avoid the phrase in favor of “pastured” or “grass-fed”, and yes, I do confirm that the farmers with whom I’m doing business live up to their claims. But those farmers are out there, there are a lot of them. I have a big fat binder full of business cards, price lists, pamphlets for dozens of these farms within about a 50 mile radius of me – and I know of a lot of farms with good reputations whom I have not yet visited, but could be represented in my binder if I had the time to seek them out.
And once again, jeez! Room service and hotel restaurants in NYC are always expensive. Hell, room service is expensive in East Bofuck, it’s astronomical in NYC. $30 for a meal in NYC? Why is this surprising anyone? Just because it’s packaged in a cutesy way that evokes images of cheap commercial foods doesn’t mean that it’s any lesser a meal than any other $30 NYC dinner.
@TorrentFreak: Ooh, I picked myself up two sets of those really kawaii lunch trays I linked to!! They’ll be so fun when my nephews come over! And we’ll think of your dour, unsunshiny, ungentlemanlike language, and laugh at you.
$30 for a well balanced meal is not much but I just wonder if it tastes like those microwave dinners from my childhood. If so I’d rather eat off the $1 menu at mcdonald’s.
@Dakine: most industrially farmed chickens are kept inside, never see the light of day, and are in such tight quarters that they have to chop their beaks off so they don’t peck each other to death as they stand atop their own poop and are fed daily antibiotics as preventitive medicine because the conditions tend to cause the chickens to get sick if they don’t. Free range means the chickens were raised the way chickens used to be raised. And no, I’m not a vegetarian but I am unwilling to buy meat where the animals were pretty much tortured the entirety of their lives.