You have to be in the right mood for Food Party, a YouTube cooking show hosted by a sprightly girl named Thu Tran, who with sock puppets, potato puppets, and talking plates manages to dazzle and confuse you when you least expect it.
To say that it takes Pee Wee's Playhouse and puts it through the blender with ample amounts of pop cultural references and wink-winks is not enough…it's much much weirder and more hilarious than that (The first episode that I linked above references Scarface and features Jay-Z's talking head).
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If you are in the mood (whether naturally, or um, unnaturally), you
will love the kookiness. If you aren't, you'll probably think it's a
bit too strange for the time of day you decide to queue one up.
But late at night, when no creature stirs, there's nothing more disquietly comforting than watching these bizarre videos in a dark room.
Since its 2008 inception, Thu Tran and her kitchen crew has been discovered by IFC and is now a weekly staple on Tuesday nights. But the YouTube
videos remain a guilty pleasure for me (and have been since I tuned in a
year ago). It's sort of like a lozenge for the mind.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.