Well, that was a wall-of-text week last week. Got that out of my system. Back to a more manageable pace. I am thinking also about how to get back to talking about reading, viewing and playing on a more regular basis—I have been reading some interesting things but I’m sometimes at a loss trying to boil down the experience of a particular text in a way that feels sufficient and responsible.
We had some great meals out while travelling, but I also feel like I crossed a subtle boundary when it comes to how I think about eating out. We had one very expensive meal just before New Year’s and while I don’t begrudge it exactly, there was just something about the experience that really put me off the more and more I thought about it. It was a venerable, well-known New York City restaurant where I’d been to the more casual front side of the place before but not the very elegant tasting menu in the back. The food was impeccably prepared, but in some way I can’t quite articulate it was also boring. I felt like I flashed over during the meal and thought, “I feel like an old person being served lobster thermidor and suddenly realizing that it was never that great.” It’s not like the room was full of old people—there were a lot of young and some flashy-rich folks there too. There was just something too much about the entire thing, and that wasn’t just the prices. It was the small army of service people, the way that the whole thing was almost as focused on turnover as a smart-casual place would be, the sense that every dish was about separating out each ingredient to be looked at, tasted and appreciated for each ingredient’s distinctive and expensive pedigree, as if a dish where everything came together in a new combined taste would be a bad thing.
We had a much more exciting, clever and less expensive meal the next day at Atoboy, and our meals in Boston were more modest but a lot of fun. (This is the aftermath of the Atoboy meal—I’m actually not very fond of photographing each dish as it comes out.)
On processing, I think I’ve come to this conclusion: I don’t really want “fine dining” of that certain kind any more. I want food that’s more playful (not in the ultra-elaborate Wylie Dufresne sense, either), more casual, more interesting, more willing to combine tastes. I want to taste new things that come from combining affordable ingredients rather than have the novelty be about a new protein I’ve never tasted or a smart-but-too-smart pairing of two or three items. I want fewer people hovering around me for service, even if they’re exquisitely trained to read what any given party of diners wants or doesn’t want. I want to go to an excellent restaurant and see that there’s a really great chili on the menu, or an imaginative paella rather than three slices of venison that was kept in a pen with Italian leather sofas for it to rest on served alongside four individually harvested brussel sprouts that were grown in a bed of fermented-yak milk and Irish peat moss on a Brooklyn rooftop and a sauce of reduced Canadian ice wine combined with Norfolk Island spruce sap and reindeer blood. I’ve never really found that conventional sort of complaint valid in the past, but something in me just shifted this time after these meals.
(The place that turned me off also served us two cocktails where the price wasn’t on the menu and I didn’t think to ask, and they were 1. excellent but ordinary and 2. $35 each, which was WTF, really? I get that it was the holiday season, it was NYC, and it’s a famous, award-winning place, but hey.)
One other thing that I’ve found weird in Philly, NYC and Boston in the last year? High-quality restaurants that don’t serve tea or coffee at the end of a meal, including an izakaya we went to and Philly’s newly acclaimed My Loup, and seem confused about the request. That feels like it’s a change that’s about trying to push turnover—that if you’re going to linger, they want to make you pay through the nose for an expensive cocktail. But come on, tea and coffee at the end of a meal is a basic thing to offer, at almost any price point, but especially at the higher end of the scale.
Anyway, as I put my chef apron back on, what have I been up to?
I finally made my last two long-fermenting chile sauces. The one I thought was going to be just too hot, because I put some Carolina reapers in it, was actually really good and distinctive—it has a long, slow heat that is never unbearably sharp or painful. The main non-pepper in the mix was a couple of medium-ripe plaintains, so I’m going to remember that combination and try it again next year. The peach-based one was also good but more sharply hot, with a fair amount of acid from some limes I added.
I started off my cooking week with two roasted chickens with the intention of using the roasted meat throughout the week. A very basic thing but it works, and I did, most productively in some chicken quesadillas with some chile verde salsa in them.
I had some cubes of pork around and I decided to sort of half-ass a Thai-style curry stew, since I had one can of coconut milk, two half-full jars of green and yellow curry paste, some onions and ginger, and some chicken broth and white wine. I also decided to cube some old potatoes to get rid of all the green areas near the skin. Worked pretty well, except that the pork needed to cook longer. Probably should have done it in the Insta-Pot.
Decided to sheet-pan roast some sweet potatoes, potatoes
and turnips, some mushrooms, and some lamb chops coated in harissa, lemon juice, schwarma spice mix, and garlic. Put some za’atar on the mushrooms. Worked pretty well. Lamb overcooked slightly, but with loin chops I don’t feel as eager to keep them medium-rare.
I took the plunge and started a sourdough starter again. I had one that lived for a long time during the height of the pandemic, and then I neglected it during a couple of busy weeks. The second one never really took off. We will see this time.
Weirdly, I was thinking the other day about how I just don’t care about elaborate cooking anymore. As you know, John and I went to a lot of world class restaurants in our day, but now…I just don’t think I care enough to want that experience again. Or to pay for it, either. The $35 cocktails really put me off, as did the not offering coffee/tea at the end of the meal. I would like to eat some good, basic food that is made of decent ingredients and that isn’t pretentious. I like the look of what you’re cooking, Tim.
Maybe, Tim, you have located the moment of the turning of the tide. Perhaps we no longer have to pay to verify the standards of another. Is there the question of the workings of hegemony in here somewhere? How people participate in the construction of their own domination? Thanks for this.