Here’s how Bon Appétit magazine frames their choice of Ari Taymor‘s 39-seat downtown Los Angeles eatery Alma as this year’s best new USA restaurant:

To put it in sports terms, [it's] like a minor league baseball player who goes from batting .200 one year to hitting a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth with two outs to win the World Series the next. Yes, it’s that unexpected.

In nearby local baseball terms, another way to think of Taymor is as Yasiel Puig – squared. Rounding out the top three new American eateries is San Francisco’s very pricey Saison (#2) and Nashville’s Rolf & Daughters (#3).

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There is today nothing more from St. Martin’s Press than a resolute “no comment.”

FishbowlNY had been inquiring about how the recent Lianne MacDougall (a.k.a. Lianne Spiderbaby) plagiarism scandal has impacted the publisher’s plans for the North American release later this year or in early 2014 of the embattled writer’s first book, Grindhouse Girls: Cinema’s Hardest Working Women. In a Twitter reply posted late last month, St. Martin’s stated that MacDougall had ended the book project from her end. But that tweet has since been deleted.

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“Who is Nick Beef?” For years, that question – relating to the mysterious, capitalized ground-gravestone next to the one in Fort Worth, Texas that reads OSWALD – has mystified both the media and JFK historians. No longer.

Dan Barry, who writes the “This Land” column for the New York Times, laid it all out over the weekend. His findings are deservedly being picked up left, right and center, although he frames it somewhat more modestly:

This scoop may not definitively link Castro, the mob and the Central Intelligence Agency to the Kennedy assassination, but, hey, it’s something. And to prove that he is who he says he is, Mr. Beef reaches into a small satchel and pulls out a contract from 1975 for Burial Plot 258 in the Fairlawn section of Rose Hill ($175), as well as a receipt from 1996 for the purchase and installation of a granite stone to be engraved NICK BEEF ($987.19).

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It’s not every day that a radio station executive cries on the air while relaying the details of a major staff shake-up. But that was indeed the case Friday afternoon at WBAI-FM in New York as Pacifica Foundation interim executive director Summer Reese confirmed a huge downsizing at the public radio station.

Although she said on the air that 75% of WBAI 99.5 FM staff was being dismissed, she later clarified in an interview with the New York Times that starting today, it is in fact 66% – or 19 of the station’s 29 employees – that are gone. Radiosurvivor.com columnist Matthew Lasar was struck by another aspect of the drastic WBAI cutbacks:

What I found most surprising about this impromptu [on-air] press conference was that Reese announced that she has tapped into former interim KPFA general manager Andrew Leslie Phillips as WBAI’s new interim program director. Last we checked, the Pacifica National Office had put Phillips under “paid administrative leave” at Pacifica station KPFA pending an investigation of complaints against him. According to Phillips, the probe involved charges of racism at the Berkeley signal.

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Social Times: The ad agency guy was actually just joking when he made a reference to summer camp “gynos.” Months later, we’re talking five million YouTube views, a tripled HelloFlo customer base and this companion Google+ hangout

TVNewser: Today’s Joy Behar farewell on The View included some choice words for a deceased ABC News legend. Relax; it wasn’t Peter Jennings.

StockLogos: In this version of the NHL, it’s possible for the Chicago Brockhocks to take on the Dallas Starmies. Seriously.

There was obviously and understandably no shortage of opinion pieces in the Washington Post this week about the Jeff Bezos deal. But today, fellow journalist Bernard Goldberg takes the paper to task for one of those items.

In the lead paragraphs of an August 6 “WP Opinions” item, Ruth Marcus suggested that selling the paper to Bezos was Donald Graham’s “reverse Sophie’s Choice moment.” Goldberg thinks that’s simply ridiculous and, offensive:

Grotesque, I think, comes closer to describing the comparison Ms. Marcus makes. The decision to sell a newspaper is akin to the decision by a mother about which of her two children to save and which to give to the Nazis for extermination? In what universe would that be?

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A very reliable Patch-connected source, who wishes to remain anonymous, has passed on to FishbowlNY the main details of this morning’s company-wide conference call.

As we reported last night, Steve Kalin is out as CEO. The new man in charge, joined at the hip with AOL chief Tim Armstrong (pictured), is Bud Rosenthal. Armstrong sees Rosenthal as an individual who can be a game-changer during the company’s transition to, hopefully, long-term profitability.

Armstrong admitted that “leadership” has been missing for a long time at Patch and that if staffers are looking to blame anyone for the difficult current state of affairs, they should blame him. With one major caveat: those who believe Patch has become a joke should walk out the door, now.

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Keep an eye on Bryan Scott Dugan. We have a feeling this freshly-minted journalism grad is going places.

Along with helping edit Mental Floss magazine, Dugan is also as of July 31 full-time with the New York Times. But he’s not quite in the big city yet. Instead, per a nice write-up on cherokeephoenix.org, this member of the Native American Journalists Association and Cherokee Nation citizen is getting his feet wet in the Sunshine State:

Dugan is working at the newspaper’s editing center in Gainesville, Florida, which serves as an area for copy editors to prepare stories for the paper’s national and international editions and other newspapers that subscribe to receive the New York Times articles.

Dugan is a copy editor for the wire service and a designer for international versions of the newspaper.

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We have been hearing the same rumor today. According to Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, as Patch is gearing up for a very Black Friday August 9, it has already jettisoned two of its highest ranking execs:

Patch president/COO Steve Kalin and chief content officer Rachel Feddersen are out, a former Patch executive who remains in contact with people at the AOL-owned local news network says…

We’ve been unable to get AOL public relations to confirm or deny the news. An AOL spokesperson told us the company is not commenting on Patch personnel matters.

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