I already mentioned the reliable Cook Shack people, as they, along with countless other accomplished locally smokin' operations, have been specializing in the swiner things in life for a while now.
I already mentioned the reliable Cook Shack people, as they, along with countless other accomplished locally smokin' operations, have been specializing in the swiner things in life for a while now.
Presently, however, there's a brand-new would-be player in the crowded pigpen of barbecue competition. Only this one chose to join the snouty fray on the hooves of the overplayed H1N1 outbreak - how's that for timing?
Anyway, of course, the new release also coincides with the arrival of summertime-style sandwich eating.
What I tried: White Castle's BBQ Pulled Pork Slider (99 cents)
Maniac on the floor: If any movie deserves to be skewered, it's the idiotic Flashdance. But while a new and bizarre White Castle pork slider TV ad uses that deeply shallow movie's most famous dance scene for inspiration, it ends up sliding into a nightmarish David Lynchian kind of Hollyweirdness, too.
She wore piiiink pig fur: The commercial shows two regular-dude college-age guys in hoodies sitting in a darkened nightclub. As an unsettling, bare, repetitive and tinkling piano vamps, the camera zooms in onto the un-firm ass of someone on a stage performing a striptease-type dance while clad in a pink and very plush-looking pig suit.
In creepy shadows, the pink fuzzy pig prancer spins and suggestively wriggles until bright lights flash on as she lays out along a chair. Then the lights dim and Miss Piggy yanks on a chain that releases buckets of barbecue sauce that splatter all over her awaiting and outstretched body. She then shakes the sauce all over the grinning dudes.
Not so hot-to-trot: In a scant 30 seconds, this ad depicts women strippers as pigs, equates sexiness with a sickly fetishistic desire to be actually eaten, and shows men to be the nonchalantly smiling beneficiaries of humiliating behavior - in short, White Castle flaunts an uncanny ability to offend just about everyone on the planet.
On the plus side, I didn't think about the silly swine flu for awhile.
Pig in a poke: Pulling up to the Castle drive-thru, I noticed these new pork sliders are advertised everywhere. One reminder described them thusly: "Sweet. Saucy. Oh so naughty."
Actually that slogan turned out to be pretty accurate once I removed the sandwich from its wrapper. You see, the skimpy thing is sweet (only unappetizingly so), saucy (i.e. deeply drenched in a fatiguing and single-dimensional sauce) and oh-so naughty (shame on White Castle for charging a dollar for a flimsy tablespoon or two of cheap, unsmoky meat bits on a soggy bun).
Would I eat it again?: When Castles fly.
Spot a new menu item you'd like Taste Test to try? E-mail gbenton@columbusalive.com