Lindy & Grundy: Now Open + Thoughts on Whole Animal Performance Art

A. Scattergood

Lindy & Grundy, now open

Nine months after we originally wrote about them, after a well-publicized cross-country road trip, many butchery demos, profiles in Food & Wine and Bon Appétit and the Los Angeles Times, countless Eater updates, Facebook posts, some 5,200 tweets (from three Twitter feeds), rumored offers (all supposedly turned down) of over a dozen reality shows, and one 3,400+ word piece in today's Huffington Post later, Lindy & Grundy has finally opened.

Amelia Posada and Erika Nakamura, Lindy and Grundy respectively, swung wide their previously butcher-paper-covered doors at 2:30 this afternoon. And no, as near as we can tell, the face of Jesus Christ did not appear on any slab of sustainable, organic, locally sourced, hand-jigsawed beef. But what do we know. That sort of thing may happen when journalists aren't looking. (Check back later on every food blog and Twitter feed in Los Angeles.)

Is it worth all the merciless hype? This publication's estimable reviewer, who may or may not have seen Jesus on slabs of meat before himself, will certainly tell us in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, a few blocks north from Canter's and Golden State and the bacon palace of Animal, you can finally go shopping in what has previously been only an imaginary butcher shop.

In fact some of us were kind of hoping, after three-quarters of a year of relentless media coverage, that Nakamura and Posada would finally announce, not the opening of their shop, but that it had all been a very well-orchestrated bit of performance art. A joke on all of us. A one-day pop-up event, after which all the glossy pictures of hunks of meat, tattoos and pretty girls would line the walls of a permanent art installation. No actual legs of Petaluma-raised lamb, but a framed photo of them, next to a Jeff Koons-style sculpture of a pig. If only Eli Broad had bought the Times by now.