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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - FOOD PARTY PARTY

The other night Monkeytown hosted a "live feed" of

Food Party's

premiere episode on IFC. A live feed of a food show, har. It's the creation of Thu Tran, a small Vietnamese lady whose facial expressions often involve bearing all her teeth. Before the screening began I watched guests check in and quickly realized that nearly all of them were from IFC or

Food Party

itself. This meant that nearly the entire crowd erupted in applause

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every fucking time

one of their own appeared on screen.

The show began as a web series made by Tran and friends from Cleveland Institute before she left the Midwest and moved to Brooklyn. The show caught on, IFC picked it up, and that same team of friends signed on to create the series. It's a psychedelic, fast-paced mish-mash of puppets and cardboard sort of like that really sick Isabella Rossellini porno stuff, built loosely around the premise of being a fake cooking show. The first episode focused mostly on Thu's failed attempts at romance with only a brief segment in which she follows a cookie recipe calling for "2 ladles of flour, 2 eggs, and 8 seconds of sugar." Ha Ha! Sugar is supposed to be in cups!

When the live feed ended, the crowd was treated to a "making-of" video in which the show's director, Zachariah Durr, described

Food Party

as "Martha Stewart in an acid bath, shot full of tempera." I assume he means drinking a bathtub full of LSD, or maybe soaking in one, because the image of Martha Stewart's skin slowly melting off her body as she's being injected with Japanese breaded crisp does not conjure associations with this show. Unlike

The Martha Stewart Show

,

Food Party

's sets and puppets have that art school expatriate, craft-time, smoking-pot-to-

Yo-Gabba-Gabba!

feel that the world just can't seem to get enough of, even if it's not my own personal cup of acid bath.

ALEX DUNBAR