The Dude over at PortlandFoodandDrink.com likes to pile on Michael Hebberoy, he of ripe/Gotham/clarklewis infamy, and who can blame him? It’s low hanging fruit. I take Schadenfreudian pleasure in reading his posts regarding boy wonder (here, here and here). Partly because I’m a dick, but also because it’s still fairly entertaining. To draw a parallel: tonight I watched the puffy shirt episode of Seinfeld for the sixth time.

Anyhow, a fellow blogger took umbrage with one post in comments.

…the amount of negative attention that you focus on Michael Hebberoy is a little sad. Don’t you have someone else to focus on, or is the food scene in Portland really that small and pathetic that the antics of one ex-restaurateur are blog fodder for months? Maybe you got personally burned by Hebberoy and that’s where the vendetta comes from, but the name-calling and childish “nyah-nyah”-ing really detract from the credibility of what is otherwise a decent blog.

Later, she expounds, “I guess I don’t know enough about the Portland food scene to be ragging on you guys for harping on one man. Could the swath of destruction he left really be *that* bad??? I met the guy and really found him to be a food-revolutionary.”

To my discredit, I’ve never eaten at ripe, Gotham, or clarklewis. The latter I might still venture to in the near future, if it’s still around and I’m not feeling too self-conscious. I’ve heard good things about the food at all the aforementioned places. But “food-revolutionary”? Having a few dozen people over to your house for a dinner party is not revolutionary. If you are asking them to pay, it’s a business, you know, like a restaurant. If you think people should be grateful for the opportunity to pay good money to eat at your house, you’re an egomaniac.

“Killing” the restaurant is not revolutionary — it’s delusional. Like as if I claimed I’m subverting and reinventing journalism with my piddly keystrokes on this lame blog. It takes plenty of cocaine and stiff cocktails, while locked in a bathroom for extended periods with your closest admirers, for anyone to foment that sort of delusional hubris.

The conscious omission of capitalization is not revolutionary unless you’re E. E. Cummings. And having a “writer-in-residence”? That’s not revolutionary — merely whimsical. And to me makes as much sense as a Nascar pit crew employing a poet laureate, or a street magician needing an accountant.

Revolutionary? Fire. The cultivation of crops. Pasteurization. Food revolutions are epochal. 80,000 B.C. 8,000 B.C. 1862 A.D. Even taking into account the entropic evolution towards singularity, we still aren’t due for another food revolution for a few more years. Give me a ring in the year 2050 when organic, nano-robotic spores successfully spawn a chateaubriand in a laboratory vat.

Helping to cook and organize a meal for Kylie Minogue’s cousin and Norman Mailer’s butler doesn’t make you a revolutionary — it makes you a caterer. And I’m sorry, but catering is not revolutionary. It’s a profession, and, when done well, a craft.