Kristin Gladney

The Great GoogaMooga had a lot to prove after last year's disastrous debut. For starters, the three-day Brooklyn food and music festival, held in Prospect Park, needed shorter lines, better phone reception, better organization and, perhaps most importantly, more food and alcohol to accommodate the masses. This year, the organizers (who also produce other festivals like Bonnaroo and Outside Lands) promised a new and improved event featuring 85 food vendors, 75 brewing companies, and 100 wines.

So did this little-big festival-that-could prevail from the "shitshow" moniker it was bestowed last year?

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The burger at Square Diner arrives disassembled--garnish it as you will.

One strange aspect of the Age of Foodism has been the fetishization of the humble hamburger. This has occurred for a variety of reasons: Cash-strapped restaurateurs have increasingly glamorized burgers because they're an asset to cash-flow, since a pound of burger is much cheaper than a pound of steak, and increasingly fewer of us can afford to eat steak in a restaurant. Also, our gourmet approach to feeding ourselves has led us to explore new and novel ways to make a more luxurious patty, so that now a hamburger made with plain supermarket ground beef is becoming a rarity. As is finding one that's been cooked much beyond an almost tartare-like state, oozing bloody juices and requiring several napkins to eat.

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Monica Heisey/Vice

Here is the formula -- if you can figure out what's in the little piles.

It's been done before. In fact, graham crackers were invented in 1829 by Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham as the perfect food, the one you could allegedly eat all by itself and have a balanced diet. Now Atlanta-based computer programmer Rob Rhinehart has invented a liquid diet that, he believes, contains all the nutrients the human body needs to survive, and even thrive, dispensing with the need to encounter actual food ever again.

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Liz Barclay

Elwyn Boyles' cheesecake at Per Se

I've been tasting a lot of desserts lately that are sloppy and off-key, that don't quite make sense, that look and taste lazy or rushed. In each case, the kitchen lacked a pastry chef.

Dessert is an essential part of a great restaurant meal, but too many kitchens in New York seem to be operating without a pastry chef.

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One of a series of subway teaser ads by TD Bank

I was hurrying toward the R train at Elmhurst Avenue with a group of friends - having just eaten a belt-busting Sichuan meal - when I spotted an ad on the mezzanine level. It was a subway billboard for TD Bank ("TD" stands for "Toronto-Dominion"), and it seemed to claim foodie cred by referring to a rather obscure ethnic snack: a Moroccan kofta sandwich served from a truck.

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Mallory Stuchin

Dammit, Jewel.

What I remember first is scanning my floor for any odd bits of my finger. The hardwood in my kitchen is roughly the same color as my flesh -- about a shade lighter than the corner of a Wheat Thin -- which didn't help matters.

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Castlerock Entertainment

He's not having what she's having.

If you're in your 20s, you're probably eating or hooking up right now.

At least, that's what the NY Times might lead you to believe. Two separate features in this weekend's paper suggest that, of the many gritty realities that plague millennials, dining expenses and dating dilemmas are among the most severe of the generation's problems.

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Liz Barclay

If you think chefs are going too far with their rigid tasting menus and impossible reservation systems, you'll love Corby Kummer's description in February's Vanity Fair of ambitious young chefs as "an army of fresh-faced Stalins" torturing us with their too-long, expensive tasting menus.

I've endured some terrible tastings. Boring, repetitive food, passive-aggressive servers, mind-numbing gaps between courses. Mistakes of any kind tend to be amplified because the restaurant is showing us more food, and over a longer period of time.

But I've also been delighted. Paying a skilled, thoughtful chef to cook whatever she likes for you is one of the finest legal ways for a human to relax.

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Irish moss seaweed -- is there a little of this in your packaged eggnog?

When you want some eggnog this time of year, all you have to do is reach into the refrigerator case at your local supermarket or bodega and Bam! You've got some delicious eggnog. But are commercially produced products, even organic ones, always good for you? The Wisconsin-based organic agriculture think tank Cornucopia Institute doesn't think so.

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Gee, it doesn't quite look like fried chicken, does it? Fatty 'Cue's fried rabbit with spicy vinegar dip

Is rabbit the new chicken? Well, probably not! But Fork in the Road has been encountering rabbit all over New York menus in the last few months, and it seems to be more than a fluke. It all started this past March (So March Hare!), when we encountered a novel rabbit cacciatore at Zero Otto Nove, depositing a good-size and tender haunch in a rich tomatoey hunter's sauce shot with capers and onions, and thought, "Gee, this is great." Somehow, the hare, with its firm pale flesh, stood up much better to a sauce that would have overwhelmed and nearly dissolved a piece of chicken.

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