So I’m catching up with the Times Wednesday restaurant section and there’s a story about a chef who — well, you read it:

He left Atlas after a year; at the restaurant that followed, Papillon, he was known for introducing chocolate and scallops to squab, onions to sorbet, and archaic methods like hay-smoking to expensive cuts of beef. One enchanted evening, diners were blindfolded for one course and, in another, bound at the wrists and directed to slurp foie gras from a bowl of soup.

The print paper has a picture of three well-dressed people actually putting their faces into bowls of soup, bobbing for the foie gras, like some parody of late-capitalist decadence, except that it’s real. (Here’s the coverage of foie gras stunt, barely three months after 9/11.) But that’s not the best part:

Mr. Liebrandt now says that such stunts were done deliberately, to generate publicity — which, in turn, would bolster his case with immigration authorities and allow him to remain in New York.
“I would do it again,” he said. “It did work, but it’s been surprisingly difficult to get past all that.”

That’s why we gave him a green card?