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| The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: as unique to Cleveland as are its restaurants. |
Local restaurateurs were impressed he brought his act to Cleveland. Some of the best attended a reception for him. Even Cleveland Mayor Michael White’s office was there. The Mayor himself couldn’t make it, so, in his absence, he dispatched a kid to read a message he wrote. Here’s part of it: “It’s my pleasure to announce that August 2 is Paul Prudhomme Day, so Cleveland could finally be on the map of fine-dining.”
He actually said that? In front of all these restaurateurs?
You want to know what I think? I think the Mayor’s comments were screwy—symptomatic of a patronizing self-consciousness that afflicts mayors everywhere. What puzzles me most is hizzoner’s inference that no fine dining existed in Cleveland before Prudhomme pitched his tent here.
I’m not sure what the mayor was driving at and I’m not about to ask him, circumlocution being a politician’s ace. Suffice to say, he put his foot in his mouth (how’s that for fine dining?), and I’m not about to let him weasel out of this. You can find versions of his thinking, sad to say, everywhere. For example, I know for a fact that people who live and dine in New York City really believe nothing of culinary excellence exists until you get to Los Angeles. Possibly.
Fine dining—very fine dining—exists in Cleveland just as it does in every city. The restaurateurs who sat in that tent and listened in shock to the Mayor’s comments could hold their own anywhere, east of Los Angeles or west of New York.
White’s goof—to get back to what I said earlier—is not so much insulting as it is manifestation of an apologist’s affliction, shared nationally by a good many of his contemporaries: kindhearted city chauvinists they might be, but they’re forever excusing the culture of their city by measuring it against what they believe to be stereotypically excellent. It’s one of the ways, they sense, of communicating their worldliness; their connection with seats and tables of power set in culinary castles far, far away.
Thus, Mayor White’s infatuation with Prudhomme becomes much more than just a love-affair with his cooking; it is, obviously (isn’t it?), evidence of his urbanity: “I’ve been around: I know the difference between Cleveland dining and fine dining.”
So, what to make of all this? Well, if you buy the mayor’s cockamamie argument, it’s that Sammy’s, a fine restaurant, (and the recipient of a number of national awards, comparable, I might add, to those copped by Prudhomme), is not a Cleveland restaurant that serves fine food, it’s a knock-off of a New York restaurant. To use another example, The Amethyst Grille isn’t just a Cleveland restaurant that serves wonderful food in a wonderful place, it’s a knock-off of a California bistro. Never mind clarification or elaboration, either restaurant, ipso facto, is great because “it’s L.A.-like or N.Y.C.-like.”
Point? What Cleveland restaurants have, no other city has. What restaurants in Fargo have, no other city has. Pierce’s 1894 Restaurant is not Boston, not Los Angeles. It’s Elmira Heights. Cafe Johnell is not New Orleans, not San Francisco. It’s Fort Wayne, Indiana. New York restaurants don’t work anywhere else but New York; the same goes for Chicago restaurants. Imagine, for a moment, you’re the chef of the just-opened Commander’s Palace in Manhattan. Because this is New York, not New Orleans you have decided you have no option but to revise several items on the menu. One of the them? You will replace jambalaya with matzo ball soup. But, in deference to its origin, you will have to call it “creole matzo ball soup.”
In 1976, we published a story about George Lang and the renovation, after years of inattention and inactivity, of his restaurant, the Café des Artistes. The associates of his company, The George Lang Corp., creator and inventor of so many amazing restaurant concepts, didn’t like what he did at all and challenged Lang to defend his decision to reinvent des Artistes as his, not the company’s, restaurant. They feared if it failed it would reflect poorly on the reputation and credibility of the company (associates called it “wildly and dangerously self-indulgent”). Lang dismissed the challenge with the kind of self-confidence that was his signature whenever challenged, “We tailor-make, personalize, form-fit every restaurant . . . to fit precisely the needs of a particular market . . . .Everything we do is different and it is different because there is never a situation that duplicates what we have done someplace else. . . . Whatever we may have done in Monte Carlo, regardless of how successful it is, will not work in Des Moines or any other place, for that matter.”
You cannot transplant a culinary culture from one city to another. Morton’s used to be an original Chicago steakhouse, but as it expanded and added copies everywhere, it shed its Chicago-ness and became just one more place to eat a steak, replicating the original until you could not tell one Morton’s from another or it from a competitor. Morton’s attained a consistency of style, culture, and foodservice in much the same way, on its superhighway to success, McDonald’s programmed consistency into everything it created.
You can steal a recipe or two—a Chicago-style pizza, a Boston scrod. But, culture? Impossible.
“For me to go to Chicago,” Jerry Berns of New York’s “21” Club told me years ago, “and compete with Don Roth’s Blackhawk would be unthinkable.” That was before Crickets, “21’s” Chicago double in the city’s Tremont hotel. Even so, all that Crickets brought with it was the “21” Club napery; and it was green checks, not red. Its management and menu were Chicago. Yet, it was a long time after opening before Chicagoans began to patronize it, to accept it as one of their own. For a while there, it was a carpetbagging imposition that brought with it all that second-city Chicagoans felt was repellent about New York. Absent resentful residents, the lion’s share of the clientele—tourists and businesspeople—who came to Chicago and knew nothing of the imposition were delighted to discover the city had what New Yorkers bragged about. But, truth be known, with the exception of the napery and a “Gatekeeper,” it remained—until it closed soon after it opened—a Chicago version of a New York concept.
What’s comfortable about one city’s culture is that it is vastly different from another’s. Dallas is as different from Fort Worth as Minneapolis is from St. Paul. Restaurants are an outgrowth, a reflection of a city’s culture, its demographics, its diversity. Sammy’s is a Cleveland restaurant; likewise The Amethyst Grille.
Which is what Mayor White and others of his class should think about. Instead of apologizing for their homegrown products, they ought to be bragging about how unique they are.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Spirit of America/Shutterstock.com
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