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The twee phrase of the week was "très Brooklyn," a mouthful put together by Julia Moskin in a piece in The New York Times in which she remarked upon the so-called Brooklyn-style food truck invasion of Paris. "Among young Parisians," she wrote, horrifyingly, "there is currently no greater praise for cuisine than 'très Brooklyn,' a term that signifies a particularly cool combination of informality, creativity and quality."
People reacted to this coinage—more even than they did to the news of food trucks in Paris—with shock, horror, acceptance, lots of tweeting, and, of course, blog posts. Some considered it praise, some rejected it whole cloth. We reflected upon the alleged trend in our own piece titled, tongue-in-cheekily, "Paris Has Ruined Brooklyn; Brooklyn Has Ruined France," in which we bemoaned the ill fate of Brooklyn, the fouling of its name and all it stands for, peak Brooklyn saturation, the end of everything we know, and the possibility of having to move to the Bronx.
But those who know more about French culture than we do got in touch to inform us that the Moskin piece was not exactly the widespread cultural indicator it appeared to be. We needn't have worried or have canceled our subscriptions to Brooklyn magazine and our vacations to Paris for the summer, nor even to have slit the tires of our neighborhood food trucks in the dead of night (didn't do it!). All of France—at least according to our sources—was not using that expression. And even if Moskin found one or two folks who had said it, perhaps as a lark, they were not the rule, it seemed, but the exception. Perhaps these "young Parisians" were as capricious and whimsical as the traveling garden gnome subplot in Amélie. Beyond that, said our sources, the food-truck invasion of Paris was questionable, too.