Old Chevy model renamed Sonic / WED 9-12-18 / Literally small ovens / Literally thousand leaf / Attribute for my girl after five foot two in 1920s tune / Historic political visitor to Pearl Harbor on 12/27/16 / Like about 17% of land in Holland

Constructor: Jeffrey Wechsler

Relative difficulty: Challenging (5:23) (3rd slowest recorded Wednesday since April)

THEME: FRENCH CHEF (63A: Julia Child's PBS show, with "The" ... or one associated with the answers to the starred clues) — French food that "literally" means something unfood-sounding when translated into English

Theme answers:

• PETIT FOURS (18A: *Literally, "small ovens")
• HORS D'OEUVRES (30A: *Literally, "outside the works")
• BOUILLABAISSE (39A: *Literally, "boil and lower")
• MILLE FEUILLE (46A: *Literally, "thousand-leaf")

Word of the Day: PETIT FOURS (18A) —

A petit four (plural: petits fours, also known as mignardises) is a small bite-sized confectionery or savoury appetizer. The name is  French, petit four (French pronunciation: ​[pə.ti.fur]), meaning "small oven". (wikipedia)

This will be fairly quick: Nope. First, this is just some French food, and then the rather boring FRENCH CHEF as a revealer. Second, despite the whole "Literally..." thing linking all the theme clues together, there is really nothing of substance holding the theme clues together. You can see this just by looking at the revealer, which, again, contains nothing that would relate it to the whole "Literally..." cluing gambit. A Thud-revealer if I ever saw one. Lastly, BOUILLABAISSE is Not Like The Others. The others are *Literally* literally what they say they are, whereas BOUILLABAISSE does not not not "literally" mean "boil and lower." It contains those roots, but that is very (Very) different from what is being claimed here (i.e. literalness), and it makes that clue stand out badly from the others, where the clue translations are, in fact literal. Literally literal. To recap: nope.

This felt harder than usual, partly because of tricky French spelling, and partly because the parallel longer Downs in the NW and SE made those corners potentially weird. I could not have opened worse, in the NW. Just a disaster. Got ENDO and then eventually guessed ASHE (though that is a bad clue ... I think it's trying to say that ASHE- is a "lead-in to 'ville'" in North Carolina (also), but that is not, grammatically, what is happening in the clue (unless "North Carolina" is being used adjectivally to modify "lead-in," which would be bonkers). Anyhoo, I had Lao-TSO (ouch x 2) and then dropped in AKIN TO at 1A: Just like. Brutal. But not as brutal as what I was about to do next, namely compound the one long error with Another Long Error: faced with H---O---- at 3D: Want really bad, I decided to try out HAS TO HAVE. It's a bad answer because 3rd person present singular verb doesn't work with the clue, but that didn't keep it from feeling right for a few seconds. So I had a mess up there. I had to leave the corner and then back into it with HORS D'OEUVRES before I could even begin to extricate myself. Other big trouble spot was down south, where I couldn't get either LATHS or LOW-CUT to fall, and so the SW was something I had to jump into with no help from crosses. I also couldn't spell FEUILLE because I thought it had to be plural. Gah. Oh, and RECLAIMED was hard for me to see. I guess Holland RECLAIMED the land ... from the sea? Or from Prussia, one or the other.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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