You could see how that might be offensive. Especially when he airs out all of his condescensions to a 31-year-old chef who had just presented him with a biscuit made from wild rice flour and topped with persimmon butter.

“I begin to ask him how a kid in Indianapolis has the life experience to produce food at this level, then wonder to myself whether I’d be asking the same of a 31-year-old chef in LA or Chicago,” he writes.

I think we know the answer to that.

Throughout the piece, he drops tantalizing hints of what it is that makes the Brooklyn restaurant scene so fabulous that every other city on Earth wants to emulate it.

They serve local craft beer. The hipster patrons wear snowflake sweaters from Woolrich, “and everybody — literally everybody — is flaunting freestyle forearm ink.” The people there raise their own chickens, wear overalls to take butchery classes and make their own pickles.

In the self-absorbed world of Bon Appétit — Birdsall makes clear that his story was an assignment — these things could only begin in Brooklyn and then spread across the country through some sort of all-consuming envy.