Tom Colicchio Doesn’t Want Anyone Choking On It

As Buddy Cole might have said, Put that man in tights!

Yes, indeed, possums, the old Ursus Major himself is being hailed as a hero after performing the Heimlich maneuver on cookbook author Joan Nathan, saving the doyenne of Jewish food in America from an ignominious death.

When the incident occurred, Ms. Nathan was hosting a fundraising dinner party organized by Alice Waters and the sex-crazed wife of “smooth-shouldered” novelist Michael Chabon. This time, though, it was the chicken doing the choking—at least until Colicchio got his “strong” ursine paws on it.

Ms. Nathan, who took a good Heimliching and kept on ticking, told The New York Post, “All of a sudden [Colicchio] got to me and the chicken shot out.” Oh, bubbeleh, he has that effect on a lot of people.

(And kudos to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Post for trying to make a political thing of the near-death experience of the woman who wrote Jewish Cooking in America, The Flavor of Jerusalem, and The Foods of Israel Today: “The culprit was a Persian chicken kebob prepared by Iranian cuisine master Najmieh Batmanglij.”)

Rather than focusing on the crackpot political undercurrents of skewered chicken, we concentrated instead on the visuals in our head. Let’s see. The Heimlich maneuver, to the best of our recollection, involves, um, taking a person from behind, and administering, um, “abdominal thrusts.” Do we have that right, possums?

Well, in that case, business ought to be very good for Colicchio’s flagship restaurant Craft, as all the gay bears and chasers will be flocking there in hopes of, um, choking, or at the very least asking for a hero sandwich. After all, as Ms. Nathan put it, “He’s so strong!”