Relative difficulty: Kinda Challenging, in parts, ***for a Monday***
THEME: REVENGE IS A DISH / BEST SERVED COLD (3D: With 11-Down, proverb about delayed retribution, with a hint to the answers to this puzzle's starred clues) — answers to starred clues are all dishes that are served cold:
Theme answers:
ICE CREAM (20A: *Dessert for which "I scream")
JELLIED EEL (30A: *Traditional English pub order of fish in a set stock)
PASTA SALAD (43A: *Picnic bowlful)
GAZPACHO (54A: *Tomato-based summer soup)
Word of the Day: SKOPJE (4A: Capital of North Macedonia) —
This theme doesn't work. Not that I don't admire the fact that entire adage is in the grid, and that it it divides neatly into two 14-letter segments, *and* each segment intersects two of the theme answers. Architecturally, it is interesting. But conceptually it's just muddled. REVENGE has nothing to do with food, so unless the food is poisoned, what the hell? Also, most importantly: seriously, how else are you going to serve ICE CREAM?! You can see how it might seem, let's say, unexpected to serve eel cold, or pasta cold, or soup cold, but ICE CREAM? It's an inherently cold foodstuff. It just doesn't belong in the grid with these other answers. Less importantly, there is no way that this is a Monday-level puzzle. I guess the undersized grid might mean that you get a solving time that makes you think it's in line with the typical Monday, but any puzzle with SKOPJE is not a typical Monday. It has appeared in the NYTXW a handful of times before, it's true, but just four times, and three of those times was on Saturday (and the other time was Sunday) ("North Macedonia" itself has only been that country's name since 2019!). And JELLIED EEL, as clued, was absolutely brutal for me (I mean, "brutal" by Monday standards, so ... low-key brutal). I needed nearly every cross to even begin to make out a plausible answer. It's an entirely unfamiliar food to me, and though I've heard of it, nothing about that clue was any help at all. ZEKE Elliott was also news to me, but I'll give you him on a Monday—I've completely turned away from the NFL in the past decade, so I can't judge relative fame on that front any more. But SKOPJE and JELLIED EEL, while fine answers, are at least mildly if not very out of place on a Monday. And yet, as I say, the misplaced day-of-the-week issue is far less important than the conceptually awkward theme issue(s).
UPFAKE also felt new (good!) and not-really-Monday (less good!) (63A: Pretend shot, in basketball lingo). Weirdly, for all the interesting and original tough fill that I've mentioned, the rest of it skews somewhat toward the stale end of the spectrum. The ILIA INST, the SRI RBI, the O'ER ORGY, the ETTA IPO. And IRED, hoo boy, not much worse than the non-word IRED (31D: Steaming mad). The unloveable dreck of a bygone age. But overall the puzzle wasn't too unpleasant to solve. Aside from the aforementioned tough stuff, my only mistake was spelling RIOTOR like that (!?), and briefly, very briefly, wondering if GAZPACHO was maybe spelled with an "S" instead of a "Z." The upshot of this mistake / musing combo is that there was a split second where I considered that the three-time Pro Bowler might be named SOKE Elliott. Is anyone named SOKE? Someone should be. It's original, if nothing else. See you tomorrow.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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listen); Albanian: Shkup) is the capital and largest city of North Macedonia. It is the country's political, cultural, economic, and academic centre. [...] North Macedonia (Macedonia before February 2019), officially the Republic of North Macedonia, is a country in Southeast Europe. It gained independence in 1991 as one of the successor states of Yugoslavia. North Macedonia is a landlocked country bordering with Kosovo to the northwest, Serbia to the north, Bulgaria to the east, Greece to the south, and Albania to the west. It constitutes approximately the northern third of the larger geographical region of Macedonia. Skopje, the capital and largest city, is home to a quarter of the country's 1.83 million population. The majority of the residents are ethnic Macedonians, a South Slavic people. Albanians form a significant minority at around 25%, followed by Turks, Romani, Serbs, Bosniaks, Aromanians and a few other minorities. (wikipedia)
