May 1985: Upscale Madness

 

I think this is what’s called, “pork skin and rice.”
 I think that’s what this is.

What we’re going to do is put a stop to all of this before somebody gets hurt. OK? Now, for all of you out there (you know who you are) still screwing around with cute food, cut it out. You’ve been too long serving us strange foods nobody wants to eat, and preparing everything else everybody loves to eat in such a way even the experts have no idea what it is; or, for that matter, the restaurant critics: self-appointed, professional, or otherwise. The next time you read one of their reviews, try to figure out what the hell they’re writing about.

I’ve eaten food so far removed from the raw product not even the chef who prepared it could tell me what it was. “What’s this?” I ask.  “You tell me,” says the chef.

mmkarabella                                                         

Something’s haywire in the kitchen. I’m not kidding: from appetizers to desserts, everything comes swimming in sauces. Castles of veal come surrounded by intimidating moats of reductions ad absurdum. Main courses look like desserts; desserts (left) look like leftovers. Try ordering a simple chocolate cake (below right) the next time you dine at your favorite restaurant.

                                                                                                                Papacool

A friend and I dined recently at one of the oldest and finest restaurants in San Francisco. The menu offered medallions of beef, so that’s what my friend ordered. What she got were medallions of beef drowning in something that obliterated their taste. What it was was dreadful. Or nouvelle; or an experimental or indistinguishable variation thereof. Take your pick. What my friend did was “clean” her beef (that’s right, she “cleaned” her beef): she scraped off the sauce, reached for a hard roll, sliced it in half, and made herself a medallions of beef sandwich. She didn’t care who saw her. Matter of fact, she hoped the waiter would. He did; didn’t bat an eye. He just went about his business as if what he saw wasn’t so strange; that it wasn’t the first time he had seen someone do that. When the time came to present the check, he said to my friend, “Pretty neat that thing you did with the beef. How’d you like it? It’s one of our chef’s favorites.”

draganica                                                               

My fish was awash in a silly sauce accompanied by colorful piles of mashed vegetables Gerber’s would have been proud of, plus—the piece de resistance—that ubiquitous stuffed and boiled tomato (a relic of side dishes from hotel dining rooms decades ago) that nobody (I mean, nobody) ever eats. If that meal had been prepared at home, I would have throttled the cook.

What’s wrong with a good many upscale restaurants today is that the food they serve doesn’t taste like food anymore; it doesn’t smell like food; it doesn’t even look like food. I’m not sure what it is they’re serving. However, I do know what it isn’t: it isn’t edible.

Don’t get me wrong: nouvelle done well is swell. Unhappily, only a handful know swell from swill. None of the handful labors in—let’s say, just for the sake of argument—Des Moines, yet there and elsewhere all over this planet clusters of chefs bravely hammer away at it, trying to figure out what this new cuisine is all about and how to prepare it. Ultimately, no matter how admirable their efforts, they fall short. A lot of them just give up: it’s not worth it, they say. Know what? Many of them are right and all of us should thank them for their resolve.

Who’s behind all of this? Paul Bocuse (his menu, right), that’s who. Him and Roger Vergé, that’s who. B&V: The Two Mousseketeers I call them. They’re responsible: elevated cooking to a fine art, they did: cuisine minceur, cuisine nouvelle; threw down the gauntlet—the carving knife—and challenged anyone who thinks he or she is serious or wants to be serious about cooking to pay attention. And the likes of Henri Gault, Christian Millau, and Andre Gayot did just that, agreeing among themselves that what B&V and their disciples had come up with deserved a brand new epithet, something lingua franca (of course); something they decided to call, “nouvelle cuisine.”

Said B&V, “This is how it’s done and this is how it will be done forever and ever. If it’s not done the way we say it should be done, then it is not done. It is not food. Those of you who disagree, we will take you to the back of the house and beat you with a whisk to within an inch of your meringue. Amen and glory hallelujah.” 

So, what happened? All of the kids attending culinary schools studying the history of good food, learning basics and classics, upchucked it all, only to mess up everything once they graduated. Some, I’m happy to say, survived the challenge—the authority—of B&V. A lot didn’t; and they are the ones who ruined it for everyone.

Do you know that the kitchens of this country abound with chefs who feel they misrepresent their craft if, for example, they don’t carve birds or something equally fatuous out of fruits and vegetables.

I don’t know what’s gotten into chefs these days. A lot of them believe that if they don’t dream up dishes outlandishly different, we’ll think them unimaginative; that if—heresy of heresies—they ignore basic textbook cooking, we’ll tie bells around their necks, point fingers at their toques, and scream, “Uncooked, uncooked.”

It’s diabolical what’s going on. Thousands of chefs are fooling around with berries and baby vegetables while all the time praying, like priests fingering beads, for culinary redemption and life everlasting in the Great Superkitchen somewhere in Beverly Hills or, heaven help us, Lyon.

My idea is to let them loose at some of the receptions they organize, at some of the buffet brunches where they hold sway, so they can observe what people eat. If they don’t want to do that—are too shy—let them at least sift through Dumpsters when the party’s over. Why is it that guests who attend buffet brunches, receptions, cocktails parties, and the like, ignore the cold fish and the canapés and head for the chipdip, the shrimp, the chicken teriyaki on a stick, the Swedish meatballs, the cheeses, the piggies in blankets, the pretzels and mixed nuts? How come, when it’s time to empty the joint, all of the sushi and the indescribable whatchamacallits remain untouched?

At restaurants where I have dined, I’ve uncovered ways with meat, fish, and fowl that would convert ravenous carnivores to a diet of fruits, vegetables and nuts. I don’t order chicken at a fancy restaurant anymore. When I want chicken I order it at a respectable fast food or midscale restaurant. It may not be top-grade poultry, but at least it’s a lot closer to what chicken ought to taste like than some of the upscale renditions I’ve tried to eat that taste only of the sauces or the reductions or the zests they’ve been cooked in. (Challenge for you: check your mother’s cookbook—the one handed down to her from her mother: look for the word “zest” or “zester” in it. You won’t find either.)

A few months ago, I spent the better part of a day listening to fast food experts discuss—ahem: The Fresh Perception. Without exception, what these experts agreed on was that today’s generation of diners is much smarter, savvier than yesterday’s. What customers demand now is food that tastes like food. No more ersatz glop. They want the real stuff, stripped of glitter and gloss, flimflam and floss. Fast food experts said that—as God is my witness.

Is it as basic as meat and potatoes? Well, you might say that. At least, that’s the metaphor for the decade: real food, fresh food, simply prepared. Nearly everyone, save the prigs who don’t know the difference between peanut butter and pâté (and even if they did wouldn’t care because it’s $45 a person and isn’t price-point, in the final analysis, what counts most and how you measure quality?), is tired of designer food: the manipulations of haute toques who wouldn’t know how to grill a hamburger if their diplomas depended on it. So: to those of you shelling out thousands of dollars to your chefs because they do fabulous things with kohlrabi and kale, watch out. Nobody eats that stuff.

Pork skin and rice: TAGSTOCK1

Afterthoughts: Upscale Madness, Phase Two

Uh . . .cooking ice cream with liquid nitrogen.

So, now, it’s not the 2 Mousseketeers, it’s Ferran Adria (El Bulli restaurant, Rosas, Spain) and copycats like him and something called, “molecular gastronomy,” the latest version of “upscale madness.” It is “madness” because MG (molecular gastronomy), not unlike nouvelle in the early stages of its trendiness, has spawned dozens—perhaps hundreds (no one knows for sure)—of prevaricator chefs test-tube-testing outrageous mixtures and blends that upstage the work of the legitimate few (often working in locations hidden from view) who are capable of dishing up food, tastings and degustations gastronomes and devotees of MG swoon over. 

In a freelance Q&A piece I wrote some time ago for Restaurant Hospitality, I asked Nick Nicholas, chef-owner of a brand new restaurant, Nick’s Fishmarket of Hawaii (Boca Raton, Florida), what he thought of contemporary trends in the restaurant business. He said, “There are no rules. You can cook anyway you want: serve any way you want, design any way you want.

“I’m sorry, I cannot get excited about foam [left] and everything else that foam is about. Just give me some food and quit screwing around with it. It’s a chemistry lab out there. I still think that when people go out to eat they want food that’s delicious served by a knowledgeable staff: they don’t want to have to figure out what it is they’re eating or why it’s so important or politically correct.”

And in our cover story, January 1991, on Julia Child, “Child’s Play: The Joys of Julia,” this brilliantly gifted woman (no one since has followed—dared to follow?—in her footsteps) anticipating the faddish future of experimental cuisine, told me, “From what I can see, I think the chefs in America are being just a bit too creative.”

In an article I wrote for Premier, UNLV’s hotel school’s magazine, I wrote, “What in the name of everything that’s sane is molecular gastronomy? In an article in Saveur magazine Bill Rice (former food writer for the Chicago Tribune) tries to explain what it’s all about; his prose is direct and informative. I like Bill, but he loses (and I might add, worries) me when he writes approvingly of a chef who locks himself (and his recipes) in some sort of culinary laboratory in the basement of his restaurant while he messes with inventions that, apparently, to those who practice this cheerless form of cuisine-art make a lot of sense . . .”

A bonus “Afterthoughts,” this one about Green, The Trend and Sustainable, The Fad. Both are sub species of  this new wave of upscale madness.

Green and sustainable are wholesome whims. Each worthy of our interest, but neither so perfect, so absent of boundaries to have earned, free from disclaimers, the uncompromising praise food writers, bloggers and environmentalists have showered on them. There are options, but the Greens won’t hear of them. There are, options, but the Sustainables refuse to admit they exist.

Here we go.

Green, The Trend: If, in building your restaurant, you build it with discarded beer cans, cardboard boxes, and God only knows what else—the detritus of rubbish (anything you can find digging through residential, preferably upscale, Dumpsters)—and design your restaurant’s interior so that it has all the charm of a lean-to, then you are thought to be Green Trendy, allowed to join the self-absorbed of all things hip.

Sustainable, The Fad: If, in the kitchen of your Green Trendy restaurant, you cook with local, fresh and backyard-grown produce and slaughter your own free range fowl, cow, pig; or, if you find PETA cuddly and lovable and are a vegan dive, cultivate your own garden that is either behind, around, or on top of your restaurant and abstain from cooking any life form that has more than a single cell, then you are thought to be worthy of praise, suitable—no questions asked—for acceptance into the Extreme Sustainables Hall of Fame, eligible for canonization by associations (so many of them) eager to sacrifice a PETA-approved fatted calf at your Temple of Enlightened Cuisine.

There is no such organization as Extreme Sustainables Hall of Fame. But, just you wait: it is only a matter of time.

Cooking ice cream: Kondor 83; foam: Shawn Hempel

(For more on this—a satirical slant, perhaps—see April 1988: Praise the Lard: The Saga of Restaurant Nouvelle)

April 1988: Praise the Lard: The Saga of Restaurant Nouvelle

 

I wrote this essay a year or so after reading reports that televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was found in 1986 to have solicited sex from a prostitute in a motel in New Orleans. The reports got me to thinking of an analogy—an irony, perhaps; something satirical: Given the hauteness of so many fancy restaurants trying so hard (and so-often failing) to establish their presumptive hauteness and given the parallel construct of a televangelist’s whipping into a frenzy his compliant groupies, I could not resist the similarity between Swaggart’s fall from grace and that of the fictitious Jimmy Sweetbreads (better known simply as “Sweets”) and his discovery and subsequent confession that in the real world of foodservice—absent of his Restaurant Nouvelle and its clones—there was, as he says, “real food that was good to eat.”

At the time it seemed like a good idea. Get the interview and in getting it try to find out why a really nice foodservice tradition, so simple and down-to-earth, so comforting and comfortable, had been snubbed and scorned by foodies, writers and critics rushing hysterically to hug and asskiss something christened, by one of them, upscalelegant (pronounced, in the French manner, oop-skall-elli-gaunt) the latest and, some insisted, hottest dining-out fad since Puck and his designer pizzas.

I wanted answers because I had suddenly sensed an undercurrent of rebirth and revolt; of back to traditional values, basics and common sense and I needed to know who was behind it. Had the time come—at last, at last—for restaurants to jettison fads filled to the brim with impetuous imagination, affected impertinence, pompous ebullience, incantations and hocus pocus; to ditch upscalelegant? 

After days of chasing blind leads, staking out dozens of fast food places and food courts in shopping malls, tearing up and down dark alleys and one-way streets, I finally caught up with Jimmy Sweetbreads (known to his intimates simply as “Sweets”), frightened and lonely in a grubby motel room, a half-open box of pepperoni-with-anchovies pizza on the bed next to him; a bratwurst, uneaten on a paper plate next to it.

Everything about the setting was reminiscent of what had led to his unmasking nearly a year ago. Sweets had not forgotten: “Please do not let anyone know where you found me.” 

It had been well over a year since disciples of the organization he heads, The Five S (Society of Swank Swells and Swell Swilling), had stumbled upon him holed up frightened and lonely in a dingy, unlit room of a sleazy motel, guzzling Miller Lite, stroking a tumescent bratwurst and fondling a flaccid slice of pizza-with-everything; irrefutable evidence, disciples said, he had veered from the straight and narrow; or, as one of them (a food writer) ironically characterized it, “the sautéed and poached.” 

“Talk to me, Sweets,” I said. “What really happened?” His clothes, stinking of anchovies and other pungent odors I had difficulty identifying (could it have been the bratwurst?), overpowered me and I backed off a bit.

“Be gentle, dear friend,” Sweets said. “I will tell you everything as best I can,” tears rolling down his chubby cheeks.

Between bites of something other than pizza (could it have been the bratwurst?), he began. No matter how hard he tried to muffle them, burps disturbed his confession and my sense of smell.

“Let me tell you how astray it is I have strayed, how tarnished it is my untarnishment, how soul-less my soul. Yes, I have sinned. I have sinned against Puck, Waters, and Waxman; against Fearing and Ogden; against Soltner and the memory of Beard. But I will tell you—as they are my witnesses:  I did not eat that pizza. I swear it. I looked at it. I lusted after it; and, surely, I may have drooled. But I did not eat it. Here beside me there is proof: let this pizza be my witness as God is mine.” He held up a limp slice and flapped it at me.

 

Inside the pizza box, open next to him on the bed, was the pizza, several slices unaccounted for. I didn’t ask.

Even though Sweets had bolted from the dominion of his master, Jimmy “The Baker” Baker, the so-called “Haute Priest of Haute Cross Buns,” Sweets’s Restaurant Nouvelle still remained the model for dozens of mostly flawed versions throughout the country, all owned, operated, and cash-flowed by a legion of disciples who, with an evangelical fervor bordering on the fanatical, insisted they never adulterated or swerved from Restaurant Nouvelle’s plates of righteousness.

Notwithstanding Sweets’s fall from grace, Restaurant Nouvelle was alive and well, one of upscalelegant’s most venerated icons, now supported and stoked by members of The Five S.  Sweets no longer was engaged in its mission or the restaurant. Had he sinned, a sheep drifting (banished?)from the fold?  I needed to know.

“You want dirt for your magazine? Unbleached grist for your mill? Want to know who pulled the trigger that sprayed pepperoni on the double cheese pizza with everything including anchovies I ordered that fateful night? Is that right?”

I nodded.

“It got to me after a while. It became a religion: thousands every week worshipping at Restaurant Nouvelle, my temple of haute cuisine. Everything fresh; everything made from scratch. Churned butter, ground flour, wheat from chaff. We bought nothing prepared. We were beholden only to the soil and the farm, the keeper of all things sustainable. No preservatives in the bread. Were you ever served bread with no preservatives? Forgive me if I sound hysterical. Just like that: one minute the bread is hot, the next like a rock. It was real food I was serving; and my customers loved it. Preservative-free rolls turned instantly crumbly and cold all because ‘The Baker’ taught me never to profane the staff of life.

“Nevertheless, in my garden—like it or not—I profaned: before they had a chance to mature, I aborted virginal carrots, delectable asparagus, lovable tomatoes, adorable ears of corn and served them, unincubated, to my customers who could not get enough. I could not keep up with their greed, their shameless willingness to pump into my coffers dollars and donations to keep Restaurant Nouvelle solvent. Yet, all was not well in my house. As God is my judge and Mother Nature my life force, I was miserable.

“I cannot tell you the number of times the voices of fast food called on me, beckoning me to their kitchens, tempting me to burn my toque, shred my clogs, and join their cult of heathens deep-fat-frying everything except their cole slaw.

“Get thee behind me, Ronald McDonald, I said. But no one was listening. The voices of The Five S kept calling, rising in tempo and sonority, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’ 

“From a plastic likeness of a real shrub afire with twinkle lights next to the jungle gym of Wendy’s came the voice of the Burger King exhorting me to forsake the single, the double, the triple and, for the love of God, eat a Whopper your way. 

“I could not resist their pleas. It soon became crystal clear, unless I did something drastic—however meager my drasticulating might be—that all food everywhere was in danger of becoming nouvellized: forgettable, unsavory, and inedible. Needless to say, I had been epiphanized. I begged for exculpation. 

“I took my crusade for memorable, savory, and edible food first to Kansas City where I saw thousands smiling seraphically as they waited to be seated at restaurants serving barbecue and ribs, most extraordinary among them, a place called Arthur Bryant’s, known to some as King Arthur’s. And while there, I heard Larry ‘Fats’ Goldberg extol the virtues of ice cream, but only if made with 30-percent or more butter fat.

“In New Orleans the masses consumed cornbread and shrimp etouffee and muffuletta sandwiches and foods dripping with essences of andouille sausage and okra and they laughed wondrously and chatted angelically.

“In Virginia, I walked the beaches and stopped periodically at kiosks to gorge (forgive me) on soft shell crabs.

“In New York, millions passed through the portals of the Carnegie and Stage Delis to eat corned beef on rye and flanken and bagels with lox and schmears of cream cheese already and they were not afraid. On a corner in the garment district a quartet of anti-PETA street performers, wearing nothing but fur coats and leather jackets, sang every verse of ‘Jimmy Foie Gras and I Don’t Care.’ Do you know it?”

“Once in Yountville, I heard Thomas Keller and his special guest, Charlie Trotter, sing it. Please go on,” I said.

“And in Chicago, through the gates of Ed Debevic’s and Ditka’s passed the unclean eating food piled high on plates until the very tables they were seated at groaned.

Chase (left), president with
v.p., operations, Curtiss Gibson

“In Knoxville, Tennessee, Michael Chase (left) sat me down at his Copper Cellar restaurant and served me grilled chicken, strip steak medium rare and french fries made from scratch until no more could I eat and he looked at me and said, ‘Real food, Sweets. That’s what this is. Eat, eat; enjoy, buddy. There’s lots more where that came from. Have another beer.’ Nobody had ever called me ‘buddy’ before. And there was more; just like Mr. Chase said, there was lots more, not just in Knoxville, but all over in places like Memphis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Reno and pierogi-heaven Cleveland.

“Still, I did not understand. I was overcome. I was unconvinced.  I was as a lamb, lost in a godless wilderness. What was to become of The Five S, of Restaurant Nouvelle? Of upscalelegant?

“In a moment of weakness as I tried valiantly to rekindle my calling, I took my message to television and demonstrated step-by-step (as time would allow) how to prepare food religiously with buerre blanc and radicchio and sauces pure, silky, and reduced and I offered recipes for next to nothing except postage and handling and thousands wrote in to box numbers and more befuddled I became.

“Back to Restaurant Nouvelle I retreated like the prodigal owner and knocked lost-sheepishly on the front door. They let me in overjoyed to see me as was I to see them. Still befuddled and still questioning my faith, I implored the chef to add angel hair pasta and monkfish to the menu but they had no taste at all. More befuddled I became. And so it came to pass that in the dark days after my fall from grace, we blackened everything and the food tasted not of their essences, but of cast iron and tree root rot. It was hopeless as was I. I was unblessed.

“The voices of Mr. Ditka and Mr. Chase became louder and louder and were joined by those of Mimi Sheraton and her ilk telling the world to ‘street eat.’ Diners sprung up everywhere as did bistros. Grandmothers donned hairnets and uncovered from between the pages of centuries-old cookbooks dog-eared recipes for meatloaf and lumpy mashed potatoes.

“And of a sudden, among the multitudes, everywhere there was real food that was good to eat.”

Afterthoughts: Irreverent Double Entendre Bites Editor in the Ass.

From 1971 to 1998 (when I was editor), the circulation of Restaurant Hospitality was around 150,000. In addition, it had what our publisher liked to call a “pass-along” readership of five to six times that (I believe that’s correct). The thousands of subscribers who received our magazine would “pass along” their copies to other people in foodservice who wanted to know what we were writing about; they, in turn would pass along their pass-alongs to others. Our publisher would brag to advertisers that “our circulation statement may show that your ad reaches a ‘qualified’ audience of 150,000; but, according to third-party research, if you add our ‘pass-along’ readership—in effect, an extension of our guaranteed base—it’s almost one million.”

Our competition scoffed at our research, maintained that most of the “pass-alonging” took place in the public and employee rest rooms of restaurants. That being the case, no one, they scoffed, had any idea who was reading what; and furthermore, what kind of impact would your ads make on people relieving themselves? Didn’t matter. Third-party research, as noted, confirmed our claim.

Who was reading what? Here’s who.

As you’d expect, many of our readers, both qualified and pass-alongs, lived in the Bible Belt and owned restaurants as well as restrooms there. Some of our readers didn’t like what I had written. They wrote to my publisher and said what I had written was heretical; that I might as well have taken the Lord’s name in vain. They hated the headline, said “praise the lard” was blasphemous. They said Jimmy Swaggert was the most revered televangelist in all of Christendom. Millions, they said, watched his show. One reader said only the Super Bowl had more viewers. Didn’t I know that and, if so, what right had I to besmirch his name? They cursed me; called me godless; they condemned me to a life of eternal damnation. What was even worse: they cancelled subscriptions, for Christ’s sake.

Years ago, we published a cover story about fish and seafood restaurants. We called it, “What Hath Cod Wrought?” Again, Bible-Belt readers, in and out of restrooms, wrote and complained. So hot and heavy were their complaints that years later, as we were planning the layout for a food section about cheese, we thought about, but quickly dropped, like sackcloth and ashes, the headline “What a Friend We Have in Cheeses.”

Years later, “Praise the Lard.” Had I not learned my lesson?