November 1991: Everything New at the Lincoln Park Zoo by Dr. Se*ss

Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, died Sept. 21, 1991. He was 87. With cats in hats, Grinches stealing Christmas, and elephants hatching eggs that turned green when rehatched in “Green Eggs and Ham,” he charmed us all. This month I celebrate his genius and his memory. 

The restaurant down by the Lincoln Park Zoo

Was run not by Levy or Melman or Foo,
But by an entrepreneurial Sioux:
An Indian chief named Everything New.
 
“I do not like things old and rusted,
Or plates and glasses chipped and busted,
Or napkins soiled with food encrusted,
Or unkempt booths help should have dusted.”
 
The restaurant down by the Lincoln Park Zoo
Had elegant meals and a comfort-food stew
That guests could wash down with a microbrew
Or fine vintage wines, just one glass or two.
 
“I want my stainless whistle clean,
So when my cooks do mis en place,
No crumb of food falls in between
The butcher block and counter’s gloss.”
 
The restaurant down by the Lincoln Park Zoo
With its very tall windows—more than a few—
Afforded all guests a spectacular view
Of flora and fauna, and the house cockatoo.
 
“My waiters are deodorized
In costumes uniformly sized;
With socks lint-free, elasticized
And hairstyles slick and stylized.”
 
The restaurant down by the Lincoln Park Zoo
Had crystal, real silver, plates red, white, and blue,
And a glorious Pianola that played just for you
Songs for digestion with beats to chew to.
 
“I make my help clock in à l’heure
Without sweat stain around colleure
For every stain I dock dolleure
To make them feel a lot smalleure.”
 
The restaurant down by the Lincoln Park Zoo
Had lip-smacking chicken and pork barbecue,
And side dishes, salads, and apple pie, too,
Everything nice, but a how-do-you-do.
 
“I rule this roost with an iron fist:
Disobedient help goes on my list
Of miscreants who have not kissed
My ring or worse. You get my gist?
 
“And if I might, here’s some more
Evidence there’s more in store:
If they persist to ignore their chore
My toady here shows them the door.”
 
One day something happened with nary a clue
At the restaurant owned by Everything New:
The profits—they shrank, where once they grew
At the restaurant owned by Everything New.
Guests counts trickled down; New didn’t know who
To blame for events near the Lincoln Park Zoo
At the restaurant owned by Everything New.

Postage stamp: Neftali/Shutterstock.com
 
  

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June 1990: A Phantom of an Operator

What in the name of everything sane are you waiting for? What’s the matter with you?

Up on the Hill in D.C., sticks and stones of legislation pile up in committee, needing but a shove from Congress to trigger an avalanche that will bury you; and you sit there wondering what to do.

Labor pools dry up, covers drop, costs continue to increase. And on the horizon? You: a phantom of an operator, done in by your own apathy—too pooped to cross swords with Government.

Last one out, turn off the lights.

Here are a few quick thoughts on the legislative process: Most legislators (except Jesse Helms) introduce legislation they feel are in your best interests. They wouldn’t think of doing otherwise. That’s why we call them “representatives.” In their wildest dreams they wouldn’t do anything to offend you. Why would they do that? Your vote is their ticket to cushy jobs, jam-packed with perks that would make Chicago aldermen envious.

Every once in a while, however, a mental meltdown afflicts legislators. They propose bills that are not in your best interests. Can you believe that? Were they aware of that hardship, they’d be petrified and penitent. You could look it up. But, unless you remind them that they’ve messed up, they don’t know that they have.

Here’s the sad part: You’re too busy to tell them they’ve messed up. Here’s some of what you’re doing that keeps you so busy: you’re filling out all of those infuriating forms the infuriating Government has asked you to fill out which you wouldn’t be filling out had you taken the time to tell your Government what you thought of their infuriation.

So, because you’re so busy, this is what you think: Let the other guy write his/her congressperson. You know what the other guy thinks? He thinks you’re the other guy. Buckpassing. It’s the American way.

The Elliot Group is an executive search company. Every year for the past six, it’s sponsored what it calls, a “human resource conference.”

One of the speakers this year was Rick Berman, president, Berman & Co. (D.C. and Sacramento), not, by the way, a particular favorite of mine; nevertheless, every once in a while (and I’ve heard him speak every once in a while) he makes sense. Berman’s company provides government relations services to companies that can’t afford to staff someone fulltime to do that. That’s called outsourcing and Berman’s company is the beneficiary. Following a lengthy recitation of bills that are driving all of you bats, Berman looked to the future and cited pending legislation that will drive you battier. How will you cope? Best to understand the ground rules.

Here’s how pending legislation becomes law, is tabled, or dies in committee. Lobbyists. They manipulate logic, imply constituent disaffection, badger legislators, all in the name of their clients’ concerns. Inevitably, legislators succumb to these tactics and carry out the bidding of lobbyists. Right? Not quite.

More often than not, this is what happens, says Berman: the strategies of one group of lobbyists are neutralized by the strategies of an opposing group. Of the thousands of bills proposed, only a handful pass. Those that do (even those that don’t) seldom owe their destiny to lobbying efforts.

Says Berman, “They owe it to grassroots support (or lack of it)—far more influential than the efforts of lobbyists [Berman is one of those, so he knows whereof he speaks]. A clamoring of constituents is far more effective than the badgering of lobbyists.” This, too, is germane: silence is deadly.

“You don’t use your energy,” Berman admonished the group. “You don't use your power.” Right now the IRS is auditing tip income with an eye to increasing the percent you pay FICA tax on. What will you do when the IRS tells you to pay FICA tax on 12 percent instead of the 8 percent you pay now? What are you waiting for?  Now is the time to act, Berman advises.

Foodservice is a nice industry, says Berman. We’re not power-brokers bent on making the world safe from hazardous wastes. People like us. We’re Mother’s Day and apple pie. Legislators will pay attention to us. We’re not adversaries. “Remember,” cautioned Berman, “the science of politics is compromise. Get involved in the process before it’s too late.”

“Before we’re legislated out of business,” someone next to me whispers.

July 1987: Restaurateur Rights

A writer writing in a national publication discusses the plight of the diner, arguing that diners are rarely treated decently. He says that people who eat out don’t have rights. So, he writes what he calls the Diners’ Bill of Rights and lists them. According to the writer, rights are what diners are entitled to and if they aren’t accorded them, they have the right to . . . well, how about the right to call the cops.

Here are some diners’ rights: the right to a check without mistakes; the right to refuse bad food; the right to complain about poor service; the right to get what you ordered; the right to a table at or about the time you reserved it. Speaking of which, here’s what really irritates the author of Diners’ Bill of Rights. You’ll find it in the chapter, The Wait List Paradox. “If I arrive at the restaurant at precisely the time I made my reservation, I am often asked to wait for half an hour to an hour before my table is ready; yet, if I arrive late, say 10 or 15 minutes late, I find I no longer have a reservation or a table. That’s an infringement on a diner’s rights, totally unacceptable.”

There are, you’ll be pleased to know, restaurant-owner rights, too. I’ve divided them into inalienable and alienable rights. Inalienable rights are those you are entitled to. Not so alienable. An alienable right may be tough to enforce. It’s a right based on your relationship with your customer.

Inalienable rights

                                                              Tom Wang

You have a right to the American Dream. No other business (go ahead: name one, but it has to be legal) comes as close to this pursuit of happiness as does running a restaurant. You want to own a restaurant? Go ahead. It’s a right. Don’t be discouraged by the number of them out there now; or by the number of them, a year from now, that won’t be.  So, create a restaurant. If it’s not like any other, has good food and service you’ll make lots of money (see picture of happy restaurateur, right) and friends, some of whom you never knew you had until you opened your restaurant. Never open a restaurant because you think that’s a terrific way to meet people.

You have the right to drive your accountant nuts. There are so many line items in your P&L that adding one more, say, “non-charitable donations” under business expense deductions is OK with us. You can probably think of more.

You have the right never to be sick (this right is a bit tricky). They say that dining out is like going to the theater; and that the courses come and go the way the scenes and the acts of a play flow. The show must go on, you are the lead, and your customers expect you to be there. Break a leg.

You have the right to set any trend you want to set. What you want to do is leave a legacy for your kids, for your country. Talk to Ray Kroc’s wife.

You have the right to open whatever kind of restaurant you want to open and to be whatever kind of owner you want to be. This is America. Your restaurant can be whatever you want it to be: conceive a style that nobody else has thought of and open it; copy a style and improve on it; be real or fake, outlandish, sassy, or smart. Same goes for you: being whatever restaurant owner you want to be is part of the American dream. So, like your restaurant: set a style; copy a style. Be real or fake; outlandish, sassy, smart; philosophical. Be loud, nutty, boorish, gracious, welcoming, fawning, modest, chic, smiling, insulting. Try not to be condescending. Be married, single, gay or straight; black, white, red, yellow, brown, or any combination of those colors. Be whatever. But before you pick a style for yourself or your restaurant or decide to set a style or think about being stylish, know of the consequences of the style you pick, whatever it might be.

Here are alienable rights
The restaurant is your business and your life and you have the right to do everything in your power to keep it solvent. Here are some examples:

You have the right to kick anybody out of your restaurant for whatever reason. That right is your most important alienable right.

For instance you could kick out someone who has written a Diners’ Bill of Rights; or a critic you’re not particularly fond of. It’s been done. If someone complains that your Chinese restaurant doesn’t serve pasta fagioli, kick him out and tell him why you're kicking him out.

Beware the disclaimer, “We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone.”  Use it at your peril. It’s so often been misinterpreted, it could get you into a legal bother that could leave you penniless; or, without your restaurant.

If dining out is supposed to be a pleasure, a palliative to both body and soul, and someone in the restaurant is annoying other diners (infringing on their Diners’ Rights, as it were), kick her and everyone else in her party out.

That goes for babies, too. Your customers want comfort, romance, the subtle smells of food and flowers when they dine out. Babies that howl or hurl in the dining room are a nuisance. So are kids playing with their food. They are not cute. Kick them and their parents out. That’s a right.

Here’s an example of someone enforcing that right: Before he closed Ma Maison, owner, Patrick Terrail, handled annoying behavior this way: he’d politely ask the offending party to stop being offensive. Should it refuse, Terrail would grab the tablecloth at its corners, lift it and whatever else was on it off the table and order the party out. He would then toss the tablecloth and its contents over his shoulder—much like a knapsack—and walk with it to the kitchen often to the accompaniment of customers cheering and clapping.

Finally, if—as stated in the Diners’ Bill of Rights—a customer has a right to expect a check tabulated correctly with tabulations legible then you have the right to expect the customer to call your attention to an understated check. Be advised, however, even though that’s a right, it will never ever happen. As far as the customer is concerned, it is too much a diner’s right—it is as much his or her American Dream as it is yours to open a restaurant. You could look it up.

July 1993: This Mediterranean Diet and Olive Oil Thing

                                                                                                                                                       tetxu

 

Nine days I’m in Italy, one of 30 guests of the International Olive Oil Council. It has arranged a comprehensive program supporting the virtues of olive oil: a symposium on olive oil, a tour of restaurants and olive groves that will introduce us to the merits of olive oil and the delights of the Mediterranean diet.

In Capri at the Hotel Quisisana, we observe cooking demonstrations on the hotel patio timed, unfortunately, to coincide with a coffee break for people attending a different meeting: Conferenza Internazionale Sulla Dieta Mediterranean (it appears the Mediterranean diet is hip). We mingle, weaving in and out of our mingling trying to get closer to the cooking demos. Mind you, as we mingle, we do not socialize with the other group: it would be improper, don’t you agree, to barge in on another’s conference without having paid its registration fee. However, what results from this co-mingling of coffee-break and cooking demo, renders our demo—its ways and means translated into English—indiscernible. Observing the confusion, one person remarks, “It is no wonder the Italians lost the war.”


                                                                                                         Axel Alvarez

The well-intentioned demo is to point out that it’s really OK to substitute olive oil for butter when baking pastries; that it’s OK to substitute olive oil, period, for butter or anything else. A New York foodie with a passion for pastries, samples several sweets and says, “Really pretty good. If that’s what I must put up with to lower my cholesterol, so be it.”

 

Rose Levy Beranbaum, a respected and wildly-successful author of, among others, the best-selling Cake Bible (left) cookbook disagrees. She tells me that the demo maven has offered to edit her cookbook, substituting the appropriate amounts of olive oil for butter. “Why would I want to do something like that?” she asks. She stops short of sacrilege. Had she not—who knows?—an olive oil bigshot might have banished her from the conference. 

That afternoon, we listen to speakers talk of the attributes of olive oil and the Mediterranean diet. “How is it,” says Prof. Dimitrios Trichopoulos, M.D., Dept. of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, “that people in Mediterranean countries who don’t exercise, smoke too much, and have access only to sub-optimal [his word, not mine] healthcare, live long and healthy lives and have a lower incidence of coronary heart disease?” Must be the olive oil, right? “Well,” says Trichopoulos, “the evidence isn’t conclusive, but there seems to be a corollary between the consumption of olive oil and a reduction in heart problems.”

Excuse me, Professor, but before I bite I want conclusive evidence. I’ve listened to and read lots of analyses of and reports on diet and nutrition and the effects of mono- and polyunsaturates on good and bad cholesterol and warnings about high blood pressure and fatty glucose. And, guess what? The more I sub-optimally absorb, the more convinced I am that a lot of questions linger out there begging to be answered.

Trichopoulos’s wife—less a shill than her husband—also spoke at the conference. She’s with the Athens School of Public Health. She said that the Mediterranean diet is not defensible. No kidding. There were, she was forced to admit, contradictions. For example: the Greek diet is high in fat, but the diet in southern Italy is low in fat, high in complex carbohydrates; yet both regions, “have a low occurrence of heart disease and several cancers.” And, say I sotto voce, lots of them smoke.

At a dinner at a fancy restaurant, butter suddenly appears, and then, just as suddenly is whisked away, as if the restaurant had committed an unspeakable impropriety.

Seafood pasta: a Med-diet staple.

OK, OK: given the sponsorship of the tour, I didn’t press my luck. I really wanted to taste butter churned in Italy, but thought better of it. I reminded myself this was a Mediterranean diet adventure, sponsored by the olive oil people and I wasn’t about to challenge its intent, even though a day later we sat down to a meal of Italian peasant food that not only was incredibly flavorful, but ignored, in the cooking and preparation of it, every Med diet rule. But, then again, to echo Mrs. Tricopoulos, the Med diet was not defensible.

I agree: it’s a pleasant enough dining diversion (trendy, too, let’s admit) to dip bread into a saucer splashed with olive oil. Just as pleasant a diversion, I’ll insist, to slather butter or a butter substitute (horrors) on a slice of bread, no matter its carb or fat content.

Moderation in all things, defensible or not. Hippocrates, a Greek, said that.

I laugh a lot. Whatever wisdom I dispense in what passes for my columns/essays, I try to lace with a wit some of you find amusing, others trying. The point? I think wit, humor, jest is healthy; as healthy as olive oil. I don’t think I’d survive without it.

Which is why, midway through the tour while drinking red wine with wonderful breads and buffalo mozzarella, I argued thus: The appreciation of the Mediterranean diet seems to me (correct me if I’m wrong) to be based solely on the consumption of nutritious foods that include ingredients such as olive oil, tomatoes, bread, cheese, wine, etc. Why has no one considered how lifestyle (laughter, anyone?), heredity, culture, gender, emotional stability, mental health, and stress affected the physical well-being of people living in countries that border the shores of the Mediterranean?

At JFK, after clearing Customs with my box of olive oils, compliments of the tour, I head for the Delta terminal and my connecting flight. At the gate, a businessman is pacing back and forth in front of the check-in counter. He is not happy. It appears he is having some difficulty with his reservation. He is screaming at the top of his lungs. “I want everyone to know that Diana Gruber [not her real name] is a mean spirited, black hearted, inconsiderate, and rude person who refuses to talk to me and should not be in the employ of this airline.”

The Mediterranean diet is not defensible. This is: guzzling quarts of olive oil weekly would never help that man live a long and happy life.
Seafood pasta: Andrey Starostin

April 1990: MADD as Hell

 

I watched this MADD person argue sobriety checkpoints on television a couple of weeks ago, upstaged by creepy legalistas, and I cringed. I read her declarations the next day in the press—pronouncements as distasteful as dictatorial manifestos—and I cringed some more.

                                                                                                           Lightspring

The entire scenario reminded me of that dreadful TV show Geraldo Rivera produced years ago: “Live from Miami, It’s Saturday Night Search and Seizure” or something like that. Rivera follows a gaggle of cops as they honk their way into homes of suspected drug-dealers/users and at gunpoint—surprise, surprise—uncover nothing.

MADD is upset. No big deal there. MADD is always upset and rightfully so, I say. Who out there disputes its goals? Is MADD opposed to drinking? Nope. How about getting drunk? Not even that although, nowadays, anyone condoning that risks censure.

MADD is a formidable force, deriving its energy from intelligence well-nigh irrefutable; i.e., people who drink too much must not drive and if they do and are caught, must be punished—not wrist-slapped, but punished: outrageous fines, jail sentences, suspension of driver’s license for a long time, maybe forever. Bravo MADD. Onward. Drunk drivers, MADD says, are a menace; the sooner we get them off the streets, the safer the streets will be for all of us.

In the past, MADD’s voice has been tempered with reason, rising above the clamorous babel of neo-prohibitionist fanatics. Not the case, of late. Recent actions would lead one to conclude that MADD has taken leave of its senses. Some members have begun to sound like the superpatriots I read about who aim to contravene constitutional guarantees to accommodate their programs.  

I refer, of course, to recent developments—given plenty of play in the press—regarding sobriety checkpoints. I have no quarrel with MADD or any other organization that opposes drunk driving. What I do find repugnant are procedures that violate an individual’s rights guaranteed under the Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment that “protects the people against unreasonable search and seizure.”

Roadblocks, checkpoints—whatever—that indiscriminately stop anyone in a motor vehicle for questioning not only ignore probable cause (another guarantee under the Fourth Amendment that, by the way, insists on “warrants supported by oath”), but call to mind similar strategies employed in police states.

Further, checkpoints don’t work. Inasmuch as cops can’t eliminate speeding (scofflaws armed with radar detectors are everywhere), cop-manned checkpoints—erected randomly outside taverns and restaurants or positioned on roads leading from regions where, supposedly, a lot of drinking goes on—won’t put a stop to drunk driving; can’t even hope to curtail it.

Presume for the moment they’re perfectly legal. Deal now with the realities of enforcement. How many checkpoints will you need? Where are you going to position them (outside of Chez Panisse, on every exit road from Bourbon Street, at Morton’s, wedding receptions, neighborhood bars)? How many cops will you need; and, of those needed, what happens to the deployment of the rest where they are really needed? Who’s going to pay for all of this? You? Me? MADD?

What next? SWAT teams storming bars, guns drawn, sniffing breaths, eyeballing tabs (“Hey, check this one out, Harry, smells like he’s been drinking for days.”), and then confiscating the car keys of customers they assume are too drunk to drive? Cops barricading the driveways of homes hosting cocktail parties?

Our politicians squawk out of both sides of their mouths (nothing really new there come to think of it). They condemn inebriation, yet sponsor bills to raise funds for pet projects through aptly labeled “sintaxes.”

MADD? Likewise hypocritical. Its challenge is to educate and advise; and, with an energy that reinforces its convictions, to make sure the media cover its activities. That’s it. Today, however, it’s become an arm of the law; engaging in malpractices that ignore constitutional guarantees.

In much the same way televangelists rely on base sensationalism to whip followers into a fund-raising frenzy, so has MADD allowed its emotions to trump its common sense, hoping, therefore, to drum up support for its cause. No dice. It has lost mine.

April 1995: Stations of the Crass

                                                                                                                 mstanley

 

I am enamored of waiters who go out of their way to accommodate and please. I am—surprise, surprise—enamored of waiters who take time to tell me, genuinely and unobsequiously, who they are. I mean, when was the last time you poked your nose into a group without letting them know whose nose you were? Are waiters the lepers of service? Are they of a caste unworthy of approval; less of an equal than your buddy, the bartender; your pal, the maître  d’, your chum, the host; and your very best friend, the owner? I like great service and I want to know who’s serving it. And, if the service is very, very good, when I return I want the same waiter (if he or she is still there) and I want to ask for him or her by name, not by station, not by description.

Not this time. Not ever.

What I don’t like is being swindled. Never give a sucker an even break? Ha. Once suckered, I learn.

Follow the following: you tell me if I am nuts.

Our magazine is entertaining out-of-town customers at a restaurant they’ve picked because they heard about it and heard that it is very good. We are a party of six. The restaurant is the kind of place where big black cars disgorge white-haired uncles and their nymphet nieces; where wickedly-dressed customers pose at the bar and discuss in stage whispers their most recent clever thing—a clever thing or two possibly, wink-wink, of something unmentionable—while sipping wine spritzers and smoking cigarettes. The activity at the bar is as much a part of the restaurant’s ambiance as the décor.

The restaurant is a fancy steak joint: fancy food and wines (a fancy award from a fancy wine magazine hangs on the wall just beyond the fancy entrance), fancy menu and wine list, fancy prices. Fancy everything.

Fancy this:

The host seats us at a very nice table with a very nice view of nearly everything nice in the very nice room. Most of us are carnivores who wish to wash down our carnivoria with wines. To that end we order two red wines at $60 a bottle. We order appetizers, salads, and large slabs of carnivoria. We order all courses at once so that the kitchen knows to time the order and pace the service.

Within a few minutes out come the sixty-dollar red wines. We examine the labels, sniff the cork, swirl the tasting pour, hold it up to the candlelight (did I mention the fancy candlelight?), taste, nod approvingly to the waiter. He pours the fine red wine. We sip the wine, commenting as we sip how very good it is. We keep on sipping, waiting for our appetizers.

In the meantime, in comes another party of six. It is seated at a table next to ours.

Our water brings some butter and a basket with an assortment of hard and soft rolls. We spread butter on our rolls, nibble our rolls, and sip our fine red wines.

We ask for more rolls, more butter. We sip some more wine.

Finally, out come the appetizers. We are out of wine, so we order two more bottles of 60-bucks-a-pop red wine.

We eat our appetizers and drink our wine. We wait for our salads.

We drink more wine. We wait for our salads.

More time passes.

Our customers are thirsty. We order another bottle of fine red wine. I ask about the salads. “Momentarily” is the answer I get.

Does it matter that the momentary salads arrive after a wait of half an hour? Not to our customers. There is plenty of good conversation going on; plenty of fine red wine. Time flies; no one seems to notice or care that the slow service is premeditated—that it is a con, a ruse that forces us, like it or not, to drink a lot of wine. We are being bilked, played for patsies.

I am angry; I try to curb my anger. My wife notices how upset I am. She wants to avoid a scene, so she cautions me not to say anything. She says the service is slow because the restaurant is understaffed. I say that’s no excuse. This is a popular reservations-only joint. As reservations came in, management had plenty of time to figure out how much help it needed. If they couldn’t get it; if, indeed, understaffing is the problem, why aren’t the manager, the maître d, and the rest of  “management,” who stand around and cozy up to bar-fly regulars, pitching in to expedite, serve, and bus?

What’s going on here? I tell my wife if it were just the two of us, I would cancel our order and ask for the check; or, maybe, not ask for the check and just walk out.

I am doing a slow burn. How come? Here’s how come: the table next to ours is occupied by customers who, I notice, are not drinking. Correction water is what they’re drinking, their glasses not being refilled as often as they should. They are not into wines, fine reds or otherwise. By the time our salads arrive, their entrées have been cleared. By the time we get our entrées, we are into our sixth and seventh bottle of wine; the table next to ours has turned.

I want to send a note to anyone just arriving and being seated to warn them of the wine scam, but I’m not sure exactly what to say. I can’t wait to get out of the place. I think that’s what I ought to say in a note: “Excuse me for interrupting, but my wife and I can’t wait to get out of this place.”  Then, having read the note, they would ask, “Why,” and I would tell them.

The check comes to over $1600. How much would you tip, keeping in mind that each bottle of fine red wine was $60?

Your answer here: $_______.

October 1986: The Substance of Style

It’s time, once again, to profane another sacred cow, the one that lows thus: “All style, no substance.” That’s what a lot of cud-chewing critics say of operations in our business that have lost it. “All style, no substance.” I’m not at all sure what that means. Why I’m not is tough to pinpoint. I think maybe it’s because I’ve heard it so often that—in moments of weakness—I repeat it as if it were gospel. It isn’t. It’s doubletalk.

Without style, there is no substance. Better: style is substance.

We’re not talking physical appearance here. Style has nothing to do with design, décor, ambiance, or menu; stainless steel or carpet weave. What endows your property with style—what gives it substance and nurtures its growth—are your employees and the interactions they enjoy among themselves, between themselves and management, and between themselves and guests. Tamper with any of these interactions and you contaminate style.

Let me prove my point with this example. It’s an ad for The Sheraton Park Place Hotel (Minneapolis). I saw it in an in-flight magazine. The ad is all copy—no photo or illustration detracts from its message.

Here’s the headline: “What if, God forbid, you had to run a hotel?” Here’s the copy: “We wouldn’t wish such a gruesome task on such a nice person. But if you absolutely had to do it, wouldn’t you want to do it right?

“All right, the trick is to remember all the things you’ve hated about all the hotels you’ve ever visited. The indifference. The arrogance. The carelessness. The, well, you get the picture.

“Then you simply decide you’re not going to stand for it, and you become a holy terror, until things get running right. You also watch everyone like a hawk ever after, to make sure there’s no backsliding.”

Please note there is no mention of what a neat-looking place the hotel is or how large its pool is (or, even if it has a pool) or how fluffy its towels are or how marvelous its food is. The thing to remember about food and towels is that—in most places—they are givens: guests expect them and they expect them to be okay. Note also that the emphasis in the ad is not on the flash of the hotel’s filigree or the panache of its pedigree, but—by inference—on employee attitudes and responsibilities. Couple these elements and you have the essence of a property’s style.

Without style, the ambiance of a place—no matter how elegant or breathtaking—decomposes into something smelly and offensive. A lousy reception in the lobby turns it into a tar pit. Arrogance in the restaurant is as nasty as a cockroach scampering along a chair-rail. Sloppy service transforms lip-smacking food into fetid food. On the other hand, stylish service has been known to rescue meals suffering from acute cuteness and cliché.

Here is style, without which there is no substance.

I am in San Francisco attending the restaurant show, staying at one of the city’s great hotels. At the last minute, I arrange with the assistant general manager to reserve a function room so that I can discuss confidentially foodservice issues with two of the Bay Area’s finest restaurateurs. The restaurateurs and I have decided to meet at 4 p.m. The assistant g.m. suggests soft drinks, coffee, sandwiches, and fruit. She assures me that everything will be in order . . . even though it’s now nearly 1 p.m. Pleased with the arrangements, I hail a cab and head for the convention center, only a couple of miles away. A few minutes later, word reaches the assistant g.m. that the restaurateurs cannot meet at 4. Three is best. Three, or nothing. The assistant g.m. knows how important the meeting is. She assures the restaurateurs that the time change presents no problem. Now, all she has to do is find me so she can tell me about the change. She sends a bellman to the convention center to do just that. He does. In time. Style.

In the morning rush hour, when demand for roomservice exceeds the manpower to deliver it, the hotel recruits whomever it needs to get the food to guests on time. Even the general manager? Even the general manager. Who else? I have watched him schlep bags, bus tables. He is style. So are his employees. So is his hotel. Without style, he does not have a hotel. Without style, his hotel has no substance.

Jaguar XK150: Thampapon/Shutterstock.com

July 1991: I Get No Respect

I’m in the second grade. We’re doing fractions in math class. I’m sniffling and in the midst of sniffles, I think of something so funny I want to share it with my classmates. I raise my hand. Yes, says the teacher. “My nose is running,” I say. “Can I catch it?” “You run your nose right down to the principal’s office,” she says.

The principal lectures and scolds me. He tells me never to behave that way again. Or else.

I was in a hotel the other day where I was treated as if I were back in the second grade.

“We have smoking and no-smoking rooms,” the front desk says. “I prefer no-smoking,” I say.

This is not a rates-by-the-hour motel. This is a decent high-rise hotel overlooking a spectacular gorge, patronized by people who can afford the extravagant rates to stay here.

Once in my room, I spot this table tent perched atop the TV. It is the hotel’s version of the principal’s lecture. It is what I’m going to start calling the Or Else threat of hospitality management. Simply stated, Or Else is when you challenge guests with non-negotiable policies they perceive as threats.  No kidding. 


Or Else.

“THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING,” uppercases the table tent. “If smoking takes place, $200 will be charged to defray our costs of scrubbing walls and furnishings, shampooing the carpet and dry cleaning drapes and bed spreads.”

That’s what the table tent says, word for word.

Holy smoke! This is the first time, in all my travels, I’ve seen such a notice. I’m a pretty calm guy under normal circumstances but this, I realize, is no idle threat. This hotel means business. I check the room for smoke detectors; for minicams that might record every move I make. I look for matches, for ashtrays. Perhaps this is a trick: the hotel wants me to smoke; a trick to trap guests into subsidizing the housekeeping payroll. I begin to hallucinate: I need a cigarette.

I rush down to the lobby, bum a smoke from a bellman. I’m convinced I’m being watched as I walk from the lobby to the lounge which is where I’m thinking about lighting up. My eyes dart about the room searching for no-smoking signs. I see none; I light up. Employees are shampooing carpets, scrubbing walls, cleaning drapes. It is a cleaning frenzy. I break out into a cold sweat.

I approach the front desk. “I’d like to switch to smoking.” Very well, says the front desk manager, but there will be an added charge of $200 a day to defray . . . .”

Don’t get me wrong: hotels and restaurants are within their rights to protect and maintain their properties and their bottom lines and to make sure their customers are happy and well taken care of. It’s the way they go about all of this that bothers me.

Here’s another Or Else that’s relatively harmless. It’s a waiver guests are asked to sign when checking into the Marriott in Orlando—not any old Marriott or versions thereof.  This Marriott is a luxurious resort hotel where rack rates are rather steep. “I have requested weekday delivery of USA Today,” says waiver. “If refused, a credit of 25 cents will be applied to my room account.”

I don’t want USA Today. I refuse it. Furthermore, I don’t like at all the hotel’s assumption that it can, shall we say, nickel and dime my daily folio if I don’t refuse delivery. But, let us not quibble. I take advantage of the moment to inform the front desk that, at considerable personal expense, I have brought my own soap, shampoo, conditioner, suntan lotion, cotton balls, Q-tips, sewing kit, quickie shoe polish rag, comb, nail file, shoehorn, Kleenex, shower cap, toilet paper and potpourri; and would management be so kind as to remove all of the equivalent stuff from my room and credit its market value to my account.

Here are some more Or Else demands that border on the absurd; most misfire, triggering confusion and apprehension that often lead to confrontation or, occasionally (as you will see), gunfire. For instance:

No shirt, no shoes, no service. Desserts may not be shared. Two drink minimum. Valet parking only. Tie and jacket required. An 18-percent service charge added to parties of six or more. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Cash only; no credit cards. Bread and butter charge: $3. No split orders.

Good grief!

I’m not about to quarrel with a hotel’s business commandments. I will, however quarrel with the way it communicates them to its guests. Most are communicated, as noted, unconditionally, implying some sort of punishment if guests violate them.

My wife and I are at a restaurant. I order some pie. She wants a teeny bite. I point to The Commandment on the menu, Desserts May Not Be Shared. “Oh, come on,” she says, “Nobody’s watching.” I give her a teeny bite. The waiter shoots her.

Or else photo; PathDoc

Footnote: A version of this essay appeared in the Cleveland Jewish News in 2009.

April 1984: The Age of Xerographic Eats

Vipavlenkoff                                                                                                         

Don’t look now, but everybody’s got biscuits. That’s restaurant reality, folks. Wow: the down to earth, fresh-baked touch of home-sweet-home cooking. Just the other day, a mind-boggling revelation: McDonald’s is cranking out biscuits—making them from scratch. Believe it. What took them so long? Will the biscuit replace McD’s English muffin (which—face it—should have been included in the arsenal the British took to The Falklands)? Stay tuned. At least we suffer no more burnt toast dented with chunks of cold butter.

How about chicken? Where the hell are all of the chickens coming from? The population of chickens in the United States is greater than that of all the pigeons in public squares and plazas all over the world.

The latest chicken shot? Mexican. But I bet you knew that already. Everything’s chicken these days. With Mexican chicken, every morsel—from wings to thighs—is dipped in a spicy sauce and served with side dishes that would mystify Pancho Villa. Soon to come, no doubt, are Mexican burger-biscuit tacos—the ultimate hybrid—stuffed with ground meat, tomato, shredded cheese and lettuce, a special sauce, guacamole and the whole (you’ll excuse the expression) enchilada dipped in sour cream. The fat taco. I’ve even got a name for it: Big Mex.

More? You bet. The new breed of pizza parlor comes outfitted with cuddly computer-generated bigger-than-life animals guaranteed to take the minds of customers off the main course: a pizza that tastes only slightly better than the box it came in.

You do know what’s wrong with all of this, don’t you? At best it’s bandwagon foodservice.  At worst? Well, we’ll get to that shortly.

ml                                                                

It’s getting out of hand. One chain does one thing well, so every other chain cribs the concept. Copycat food: welcome to the wonderful Age of Xerographic Eats. Where’s the distinction; where’s the urge to be different? It’s a lot like what’s going on in television now and will go on forever more. For example: one network produces a series about good ol’ boys driving indestructible automobiles that log more miles than United. Result? The rest of the networks follow with their versions. A network launches a supercilious piece of garbage about How A Family Copes, so the competition mount their equally supercilious versions of the theme. A quiz show on NBC? CBS and ABC are sure to follow.

Problem? None of this is real. It’s super-con. Nobody likes it a bit. Nobody likes it in Television Land. Nobody likes it in Fastfood Land.

How to survive? What’s the real trend? Friends tell me it’s back to basics. Now, even though I’m not completely certain what “back to basics” means, I’ve got some idea; and I can report that in talking with some of my friends (chefs, owners, restaurateurs) all over the country, not one among them denies that what customers demand today (in this brave new age of economic stability) is credibility, reliability, and honesty. Operators who have been around for a while tell me that’s the way it used to be years ago: everything was simpler—far more basic—than it is today.

So be it: back to basics.

You do things well, I’m told. You are original. You don’t do something just because your competition does something and succeeds at it. Aside to McDonald’s: you don’t need biscuits.

You strip the product of its silliness, its artificiality, its phoniness, its mimicry. The examples are legend:

►Get rid of your sauces that do nothing to improve the product; or, worse, mask tastes.

►Dump garnishes that confuse and compete rather than complement.

►Delete the wines on your wine list that have nothing in common with your menu. Delete the wines you’re laying down and have no intention of ever pouring, unless you’re showing off, in which case, you might as well add two or three ridiculous courses to your menu you have no intention of ever cooking or serving.

►Fire your rude and fawning waiters (often one in the same). You know who they are. 

Menu babblings sap appetites,
frustrate choices.

►Rewrite those menu babblings dripping with inane superlatives and inaccurate descriptions. Nobody understands what you’re saying (right). They take away appetites. They could also get you in trouble. Ever hear of Truth in Menu? Of course you have.

►No more dishonest design and decor. Things like paintings on black velvet, crossed swords of polyurethane, flocked anything, downlights, wood that’s not, plants that aren’t.

►Don’t over prepare.

Create a product that’s believable; that’s exclusively yours. No more culinary con. Meat and potatoes coming to McDonald’s? Croissants at Burger King? How about Perrier everywhere?  Well, not yet, but one of these days count on it. Many restaurants pour bottled water because it adds class to the service; also, because in some cities the stuff spewing from the spigot is unfit to drink, but a chemical away from being classified a toxic waste.

The consumer has suffered through years of a debilitating recession. She has learned a lot. She has learned the value of a buck, clung dearly to it, and today spends it only on goods that have “quality guaranteed or your money back” written all over them. Now that the purse strings are looser than ever, she has renewed her love affair with all sorts of capital goods and services. But she has not forgotten the lessons she learned the past few years when she dined with you. Give her quality, give her originality, she’ll buy it. And come back. Give her clone-food . . and . . she’ll . . .well, she’ll switch channels.

No more biscuits.

Menu babblings: Chubykin Arkady

January 1989: The Death of Restaurant Criticism

Social satirist Mort Sahl spins a tale about a crowded airplane that finds itself in a heap of trouble. It is losing altitude. To correct, the pilot jettisons fuel and dumps baggage. Matter of fact, everything dumpable is dumped; but, the plane continues to drop. If the plane is not to crash, it must shed another 150 pounds or so. Someone must jump, commands the pilot. The passengers agree. They decide to select a volunteer in inverse proportion to his or her contributions to society. There ensues a heated argument between a used car salesman and a disc jockey. So ends Sahl’s tale. My guess is that there wasn’t a restaurant critic on board.

With few exceptions (you can count them on the thumbs of both hands), you cannot trust restaurant critics. You do not need a degree in journalism to spot in a publication the connection between a rave review and an adjacent ad placed by the restaurant raved about. Neither does it take a like amount of intelligence to realize that if a restaurant doesn’t advertise, it will never be reviewed or, if and when it is, the review won’t be complimentary. More proof? Most of the consumer magazines that cater to the appetites of gourmands, amateur cooks, and other fanciers of culinary fandango, advise (warn?) readers that their listings of restaurants, usually in the back, are limited to those that advertise. There is honor, at least, among backscratchers.

Most restaurant critics have no idea what they are writing about. They know little of what it takes to run a restaurant, have no appreciation of what goes on in a kitchen, have difficulty identifying ingredients or can figure out why the chef has selected them, know nothing about the history of dining out (hence cannot make sensible judgments about how foodservice, restaurants and their menus have evolved over the years), and, finally, are irritatingly naïve about food products and how their availability, distribution, preparation, and costs shape the style and quality of dining-out. Because critics do not understand the interrelationships of all of these variables, they are not fit to criticize, evaluate, advise, or review.

Furthermore, few magazines, still fewer newspapers, can afford to subsidize competent, thorough, and believable reviewing. Because of limited media budgets, most critics evaluate restaurants, and so tell readers of their merits, based on one visit. Regardless of arguments to the contrary (arguers argue that since the customer has only one chance, why should the critic be any different), restaurants and their staffs do have “off” nights. Now, inconsistency is one thing, malfunctioning equipment or a sick chef, quite another. No responsible critic can appreciate what a restaurant is all about based on one visit. There is just too much to observe, absorb, and analyze; too much to taste; too much to study and examine and just too much to think about writing about and, once written, to convey credibly what you thought as if you knew what you were writing about.

In a letter to the editor of Cleveland Magazine, I admonished its restaurant critic for panning unmercifully two restaurants after having visited each but once. “One wonders,” I wrote, “what your critic would think of the reviewer who, after sitting through a subpar performance, would dub forever the Cleveland Orchestra as unprofessional.” Writers who write about cars don’t just kick the tires, they drive them.

In view of all of the above, is it any wonder the days of restaurant critics and their influence are numbered?

An owner and operator of several dandy saloons in New York City, after reading a particularly nasty review of one of them, shrugged it off: “They have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t affect my sales.”

Curiously enough, people who enjoy eating out regularly have developed palates so sophisticated they no longer rely on critics to tell them where or what to eat. If perchance they have not had the good fortune to dine at a new restaurant, rather than wait for a review (itself, they will tell you, suspect), they prefer word of mouth: to rely on the impressions of friends or acquaintances who are more than willing to share their impressions, either good or bad—far more trustworthy than those of any restaurant critic whose criteria (see below) for reviewing may be fishy or, worse, irrelevant.

Good critics continue to write honestly and objectively (or as objectively as they can when dealing with matters of taste): they know what makes restaurants tick; can separate and identify ingredients and understand why they work the way they do in a particular dish; know what the classic dishes and their variations are supposed to look and taste like and how they evolved and why they are classics; understand and are in awe of the efforts put forth by chefs and their cooks to concoct new dishes; and despise culinary hanky-panky. But, so do most people. Their exposure to restaurants all over the world has provided for most an education in dining out that rivals the expertise of the best critics, surpasses by light-years the juvenile babblings of amateurs, and finally renders most restaurant criticism superfluous.

Afterthoughts: Smoking to Byzantium

 

                                                                                                                  jingjofire

If you want to know which states enforce no-smoking laws and where (as in what buildings and what rooms in them) they are enforced, you soon find yourself trapped in a mystifying maze of byzantine proportions trying to learn which states ban or partially ban smoking in public spaces, which ones exempt some spaces from the law while prohibiting others from it to include or not to include restaurants and bars. Get it? Don’t bother: it is madness to try and not worth the effort. And yes, just FYI, there are casinos outside of Nevada where customers are not allowed to smoke. Most people (Villas excluded) don’t want to sit in a restaurant or at a bar and inhale second-stream smoke (cigar smoke, the worst) while drinking or eating. Ironically, what has taken place—now that many of us regard smokers as pariahs —is that people who like to smoke either don’t when they enter a public space where smoking is permitted, or do so apologetically (“mind if I smoke?”) and ashamedly.

May 2002: No Smoking.

                                                                                                                  wattana

Recently, there came to light some uncalled-for name-calling in the pages of one of our most respected journals, Nation’s Restaurant News.

It was all triggered, innocently enough, by Michael O’Neal, a New York City restaurateur who had the nerve—get a load of this—to call for a smoking ban in New York City restaurants because, according to O’Neal, second-stream smoke is a killer. It can cause all kinds of cancers and wouldn’t the city be better off if the mayor called for a smoking ban in all restaurants. Bars, too. Not only would it be a comfort to diners, but also to employees who must navigate second stream smoke between kitchens and tables. You’d have thought O’Neal was advocating capital punishment for pickpockets.


Non-smoker O'Neal taking in the
Yankees from Steinbrenner’s no-smoking
loge in Yankee Stadium.
 

Wasn’t too long after NRN publishes O’Neal’s plan then up jumps foodie James Villas, a nice enough sort who has written some rather harmless stuff about foodservice and dining-out in Town & Country, Food & Wine, Gourmet and a few other magazines. He’s also the author of several books about cooking in the South. He fires off a letter to NRN in which he disagrees with—no: that’s not strong enough: let’s see, he vehemently objects to O’Neal’s suggestions; and cites, as if to underscore his objections, the reams of research that have yet to prove that second stream smoke causes cancer. How about that?

I thought O’Neal’s plan not a bad idea, but not necessarily for the reasons he cited; and I thought Villas’ response a bit silly, a naive reaction to a proposal that warrants, at the very least, a level-headed discussion among experts who, unlike Villas, know what they’re talking about and wherein said discussion they can address and deal with all of the smoking/non-smoking arguments, their ramifications, variations, and implications.

So, what the hell: I decided to enter the discussion as more or less an amicus curae, not taking sides one way or another you understand, but with the idea of merely offering a point of view that had nothing to do with the health issue—giving Villas the benefit of the doubt—but had a lot to do with the pleasures of dining out as opposed to “eating out” which is what some of us do when we stop by fast food joints that, by the way, the last time I checked, almost universally ban smoking in all of their “restaurants.”

No, this is all about the pleasures of eating in restaurants renowned for fine food, wine, and service. As I said, I entered the discussion, snail-mailing a letter to the editor of NRN. It didn’t print my letter; its right, of course: it’s not that I insisted. Yet, I felt it was germane, made sense and deserved exposure. Here it is:

Will someone please tell James Villas to shut up? His argument that second-stream smoke won’t cause bodily harm is quarrelsome, at best. Michael O’Neal and many of his colleagues think second-stream smoke can hurt you; and so long as they do, they have the right to ban smoking from their restaurants and to insist that every other restaurant does, too. Even if Villas is right (I have my doubts as do countless others), as a food and wine writer and publisher of books about cooking and dining out, one must assume he knows that the wafting of puffed, exhaled or merely lingering cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke in a restaurant disturbs the dining experience. It may not cause cancer, but it sure as hell bothers diners who wish to smell and taste the food they are eating.

Here’s a thought: let’s invite Villas to sit at a booth of his favorite restaurant with three or four or five other people each smoking something and see how he likes it. Or, better yet, let’s arrange to have say, Thomas Keller, serve him one of his degustations in an opium den.

That same journal in which the O’Neal/Villas point-counterpoint took place recently published the findings of a roundtable discussion that talked and talked and talked about what to do about smoking in restaurants—not whether to allow it, but what to do, for Pete’s sake, if it were banned.

Here’s the opening narrative from that discussion: “Some restaurants that want to accommodate smoking as well as nonsmoking patrons are worried that smoking bans will undercut investments in new ventilation systems and other upgrades.” Uh, huh.

Footnote: This essay appeared in the May 2002 Restaurant Report.

June 1987: Separating the Wheat from the Shaft

Here are the sentiments of an employee of a New York ad agency as reported in a national daily. All of this debate over nutrition in fast food restaurants, she begins, is absurd. People don’t go to McDonald’s for nutrition, she continues, they go there for fun. You bet: like when I go to movies, I go there for the popcorn.

One of these days, it will occur to those of us who still insist fast food is a hoot, that the real reason McD’s restaurants pile up such impressive numbers year after year is that people go there to eat, not to fool around. Because they go there in droves, nutritionists and others of their ilk whose obsession with health exceeds the fanaticism of anorexics, are determined to force restaurants (read “fast food restaurants”) to divulge in detail, in the name of all things edible, what’s in the food they serve.

Having defended the rights of any restaurant to serve whatever it wants to (all things considered, I keep telling myself, people dining out eat far better than they do at home), I now find myself agreeing in principle with those demanding ingredient disclosure. Conformity, I tell myself, is the better part of dissent.

It wasn’t easy to shift. I used to fault nutritionists for their madness—their incessant crusade to force restaurants (again: read “fast food restaurants”) to tell us what’s in everything they cook (see August 1978: Lowering Your Nutrition Consciousness). I still think many of them meander around the lunatic fringe, dilly-dallying with their egos, yelling at all of us to eat our spinach. Yet, of late, some of them, in their pursuit of the Holy Kale, have begun to make enough sense to those of us who eat out a lot that we, in turn, have begun to alter our eating-out habits; at least, those of us who take all of this stuff seriously. We now demand freshness; foods free from additives, preservatives, ites, ates, and dyes of all shades and tints; and menus with sufficient options to let us select the foods/courses we think are good for us and, to boot, taste good.

The trouble is that fast food restaurants don’t offer a wide assortment of choices. God knows they’ve tried (who can forget McRib?). There is also this: the perception still exists that fast food is junk food. Never mind how flawed the perception is: it’s persistent enough to send the Ayatollahs of Nutrition into a frenzy, screaming about unacceptable amounts of sugar, sodium, fats, and cholesterol. That they aren’t ever critical of white-collar eateries dishing up, say, the edible organs and offal of everything that moves, is moot. “Hi there, we have specially sauced and broiled bull’s balls today. Want to try some? We fry, sauté, and braise them in beef tallow.” White-collar eateries aren’t so visible or so large a target as a restaurant chain which measures its success in billions of hamburgers sold. The bigger the target, the easier it is to hit.

Now, because millions of us eat billions of hamburgers, tacos, pizzas, and fried chicken, nutritionists believe we ought to know what’s in what we eat. Agreed?

Of course. Reason enough McDonald’s recently launched what I thought was a respectable ad campaign that told us what was in the food they served. While other fast food firms fought among themselves as to how to pitch the product, McD’s, without any fanfare, rolled out its nutrition campaign. It should have silenced the critics. It didn’t.

No sooner had the campaign appeared listing the nutritional values of its menu (such as it was), then foodies, consumer health groups, and the Government lambasted it, finding it flawed and misleading

They would be well advised to back off. McD’s campaign is nearly flawless. So long silent about nutrition and diet, McDonald’s has unveiled a marketing strategy that tells customers what’s in the food they’re eating. Not only that, it is a model of what these campaigns ought to be. McDonald’s has reacted intelligently to the critics who demand to know what’s in its food. And it has done so substantively, rather than gratuitously; objectively, not ambiguously. It has told customers what’s in its food, how much it weighs, and what RDA percentages each item contains, exactly what nutritionists have been begging for. They are not content. Rather, they continue to squawk about junk food and grease. That’s not only unfair and subjective, it’s wrong.

August 1978: Lowering Your Nutrition Consciousness

I’ve had it with this nation’s nutritionists, that rather large, amorphous mass of disingenuous intellects who would have us believe that everything we eat is garbage, that eating-out is hazardous to our health, who would love to legislate what we should eat even to the point of having the Government subsidize the crops farmers farm so that they’re not burdened with a surplus of bad food. (Be that as it may, here’s what I think vis-à-vis our trade balance: before the USDA imposes any crop subsidy, wouldn’t it make sense to first evaluate global food needs to find out how much of an export market exists for bad food. Just a thought.) 

Proposals proposed by nutritionists at hearings before Congressional committees (especially before the now defunct Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs) border on the harebrained. They are, to boot, illegal. Let me put it this way: my tummy is my temple; and if I wish to desecrate it by feeding it potato chips and Pepsi only, that’s my business, not the Government’s, and I’d rather appreciate their keeping their crummy bureaucratic mitts off of my body; and, instead, concentrating on the important stuff like loans to farmers who want to convert all or a portion of their farms to income-producing recreational enterprises. Check it out, go to p. 112 of the U.S. Gov’t Manual.

No thanks.

I think it’s dandy that the Government thinks enough about me to tell me what and how to eat (keep my elbows off the table; don’t talk with my mouth full—that sort of thing), but the minute it restricts my choices and orders me to eat this and that, to give up thus and so, to balance this with that (or else), I recoil. A national nutritional council, I find commendable (as commendable as the president’s Council on Physical Fitness: it never insisted everybody exercise; it merely recommended it as a spiffy way to keep fit), but a national nutrition law, I find repulsive. The Government telling me what to eat is as serious a violation of my freedom as its telling me what to write.

I have watched nutritionists soar to dizzying heights of rhetoric as they condemn as junk the food sold by fast food restaurants, yet the same people blissfully approve—relevant digression follows—the school-feeding programs of Len Fredrick, food director, Clark County School System, Las Vegas. I believe he won a special award (something called the Silver Plate) from the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association for his resourcefulness.

Let me explain. Fredrick, upset because students were throwing away Type A lunches (don’t ask), offered instead fortified hamburgers, cheeseburgers, tacos, fried chicken, sloppy joes, french fries and milkshakes. The kids ate it up. All of a sudden, ersatz fast food was good for them. And if it was good for them at school what could possibly be wrong with eating it all the time wherever the real stuff was sold. Nobody told them it was wrong. They didn’t know the difference. They were kids.

Fredrick, pleased as punch that his program is in the black, has accomplished little more than to encourage bad eating habits among kids; and has set back considerably the cause of nutrition education. Which is not by the way, to imply that Whoppers and Extra Crispy Chicken are bad for you. It is to imply, however, that a steady diet of Whoppers and Extra Crispy Chicken (or what have you) is. As we pointed out years ago, “If we were a nation of fast food eaters only, the incidence of malnutrition would be epidemic.”

I think the reasonings of nutritionists are unreasonable, their findings unfounded, their pronouncements unclear, their articulations muddled, their goals misguided. For example: nutritionists, with the support of Government agencies and Congressional committees, blame soaring costs of medical care on poor eating habits; suggest that if we were a nation of happy eaters, medical costs would drop. That’s the kind of logic that gave us Watergate, folks; and is typical of many of the sweeping syllogisms voiced by nutritionists.

There is no doubt in my mind that restaurants serve good food and nutritious meals—far better than what most of us eat at home. You show me a restaurant that serves Spaghetti-o’s and Froot Loops and I’ll show you a restaurant that serves home cooking.

Finally, if what the nutritionists say about us is true—that we are a nation of sloppy eaters—then who in the name of everything that is sane is eating the tons and tons of onions, scallions, and leeks; avocados, artichokes, and asparagus; apples and apricots, breads and cereals; mangoes, papayas and pineapples; kumquats and cucumbers; okra and oranges; peas and peaches; parsnips and parsley; beans (lima, navy, black, soy, string, kidney, and garbanzo); cabbages and corn; grapes and grapefruit; lentils and lettuce; peppers and pecans; beets and tomatoes; potatoes and peanuts; coconuts and cantaloupes; broccoli and Brussels sprouts? Who’s eating all of that iron, protein, thiamin, riboflavin, calcium, niacin, phosphorous, magnesium, zinc, vitamins A, B (6 and 12), C, D. and E?

For the answers to these and other gripping questions, stay tuned.
Fruit plate: Voyagerix

Footnote: Coming up next week, a change of mind and heart: Separating the Wheat from the Shaft.

January 1992: Marketing: The Future Was Yesterday

In September, just as the leaves were beginning to turn, I went to Montpelier, Vermont for a Futures Conference, the brainchild of Phillip Cooke. The conference was sponsored by his company, Foodservice Associates, The International Association of Culinary Professionals, and The New England Culinary Institute. Students of the Institute, interning at the Inn where the conference was held, cooked and served the food. Several of the most recognizable names in foodservice were there, but to mention them while snubbing the rest—the unrecognizable—would be a disservice to all who participated.

Necessary pause: Conference sponsor, Phillip Cooke, has done more to advance the professionalism of foodservice than anyone else, save, perhaps, those quote-unquote legends (celebrity chefs among them) who spring to mind whenever the names of legends are bandied about, but whose agendas, unlike Cooke’s, are more self-serving than selfless.

Phillip Cooke, right, with lifelong partner Dan Maye.

The difficulty with debates about the future is that they aren’t. They are debates about the present and how patterns of behavior that affect the decisions we make today affect, rightly or wrongly, what we do tomorrow. Or, as Cooke put it in his conference preamble, “To adequately prepare for the future, we must increase our awareness of the issues that affect our industry today.” You bet.

The world is too much with us. Time flies.

To be or not to be wasn’t the question. You can, if you wish, debate conditions that, you think, might prevail five, 10 years from now, but that sort of exercise—a playful cartwheel for the mind—doesn’t provide the answers to troubles that plague you right now.

“What will the future bring and how will we cope with it?” wasn’t the question either, even though it was right there, a line item on the conference agenda.

Most of us know what the future will bring to foodservice: more of the same. Granted, we’ll deal with subtle changes in cuisine, preparation methods, delivery systems, consumer needs and demands, distribution, food and labor costs, labor and management relations, and so forth.  But, by and large:  more of the same. Our strategies for tomorrow, not our survival (always an iffy prospect), will be based on how well we manage our businesses today; and, most important, how we identify and isolate fads from trends marking one unstable, the other permanent.

Which is why—ruts and dumb-luck aside—the paths of our behavior should never be primrose strewn, but rather well-grounded in simple principles and practices employees and guests deem acceptable right now.

Today’s trends are tomorrow’s leftovers. Today’s fads are as fleeting as yesterday.

Every issue debated at the conference was linked directly and immediately to an appreciation of current business conditions, regardless of the environment nurturing them. So that when Cooke handed down bagsfull of issues, it was no accident he knew—not assumed—they had been steeping for months in the teapots of our minds and the minds of everyone else concerned with the “future” of foodservice. No sugar, no cream.

Name them? Of course. Here we go (stop me if you’ve heard any of these): recession, changing demographics, the environment, healthy eating, waste disposal, water shortages, labor shortages, service, management training, and computers.

Neat topics, eh? Indeed. Each provided us with a jumping off point to talk about . . .to talk about what? This: rather than construct new models for future growth and utility, we discussed sound business practices—in place right now—that pumped blood into our efforts; and how, if we were to keep these practices flowing, with occasional transfusions that responded to customer needs and whims, we could heartily face the future several beats ahead of our competitors. 

We talked about business ethics; about our responsibilities not only to ourselves, our employees and guests, and our budgets, but to community.

It didn’t matter what topic we touched on, ramifications existed that scored nerves, that made us aware. . . that forced us to admit that if we were to survive, we would have to address and resolve not only the constraints of our immediate market, but those of every other restaurant, restaurant chain, and foodservice outlet and retailer competing for our customers’ dining-out dollars.

The very same issues that might undermine our capacity to deal effectively with a sound consumer base were the same ones affecting everyone else: from tire dealers to fish mongers, hardware stores to banks, no one or thing was immune to them: immigrants, AIDS, the environment, drugs, an aging population, minorities in management, world hunger, media bashing—all were somehow impossibly and infuriatingly linked to the way we and our competitors would conduct business now and tomorrow.

If a resolution surfaced at the conference it was to address need rather than greed—the needs of employees (and, it would follow, employer), of customers, of community. Agreed: make a buck, invest it in growth. More importantly, invest in people, spend a buck on them. Deal compassionately with everyone who looks to you for commitment and nourishment. Invite them into the debate that maps your growth.

That, we concluded, was the key to our survival and success.

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