Mmmm

When I started this blog I figured I'd be writing a lot about food. It had been my exclusive occasion for internet interaction, aside from email. I started on Chowhound some time in the mid or late '90s? not sure when it actually came on line. But I dropped out a few years ago around the time when it was sold to Chow or whatever, because I got fed up with the fastidious censors who removed one too many of my posts, as well as the grinding and obviously sanctioned dumbing down of the conversation. I was searching for something elsewhere on the internet not long ago and came across a count of my CH posts which was somewhere around the 1,300 mark. I was a little impressed with myself. And a little appalled.

I am sorry to have lost CH outlet in some ways (especially when I'm travelling to new places and need to plan food itineraries) but my relationship to products and restaurants and so on has changed too. Maybe it's partly because the CH engagement is no longer part of the experience. I keep thinking I should report here on recent meals at Fiamma, Magnolia Grill, Watts Kitchen, JoJo, Momofuku, Angel's Share, the Palm, B&G Oysters, Savoy, Back 40, El Quinto Pino, Myth, Tadich, Tsukushi, Cho Dang Gol, twice-weekly Greenmarkets and dozens and dozens of oysters & sea urchins at the GCOB (especially, of late, the Caraquets, Ninegrets & Malaspinas);

but documentation is just not that interesting any more. I think the proliferation of amateur food critics on the web, and their photographs (this really upsets me, that people who wouldn't be caught dead behaving like Japanese tourists [actually, the Japanese are more sophisticated now; let's call them Koreans and Chinese] in the streets have no compunction about whipping out their cameras or phones to take pictures of their food), have put me off the effort to consider, describe and engage with others over what I consider to be an incredibly personal and intimate experience: the food and drink I take into my mouth and my body,the people who prepare, offer and present it, the environment in which it is consumed, the language, memory, humor, trepidation, discovery, disappointment, pacification, comparison it evokes-- these are all so fully commodified now, that I can no longer take pleasure in the act of contemplation and sharing that once was voluntary, occasion by occasion; and now has become performative, competitive.

As the productions have developed in variety and sophistication, I have become increasingly less interested in the staging of a meal. Back when it first opened, Craft was my Platonic ideal of a restaurant. Of course it was carefully calculated and executed, but the conceit of each ingredient presented separately and simply was exactly what I was looking for, and even more so now (of course Tom Colicchio has long since abandoned the original and is trading off the reputation at Craftsteaks and other cute variations on the theme in Vegas & beyond. But I digress).

I reject the ideology of authenticity. But I am repelled, now, by the very idea of Atlantic salmon, say, or tomatoes in winter (in NYC). This is not out of any reverence for the idea of 'nature' or the 'local', but because of the specific, documented implications of producing, offering and consuming such 'foods', and the cheat they offer on the plate.

Manneh from Staten Island

It's an easy pun from among so many temptations ('bushmeat'? Look, I'm a paragon of restraint). But I like to think it is not irrelevant to the analysis Stanley Fish makes available to those of us who would avail ourselves regarding a pending case in which a Staten Island resident defends herself against charges that she has violated US customs regulations and illegally imported 'bushmeat'.

According to CNN

A criminal complaint cited evidence that the illegal importation of bushmeat encourages the slaughter of protected wild animals. More ominously, the complaint warned of "the potential health risks to humans linking bushmeat to diseases like Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV, SARS and monkeypox.

At the center of the case in federal court is a modest woman with nine children and a history of domestic discord.

The case dates to early 2006, when federal inspectors at JFK Airport examined a shipment of 12 cardboard boxes from Guinea.

They were addressed to [Mamie] Manneh and, according to a flight manifest, contained African dresses and smoked fish with a value of $780.

Instead, stashed underneath the smoked fish, the inspectors found what West Africans refer to as bushmeat: "skulls, limbs and torsos of nonhuman primate species" plus the hoof and leg of a small antelope, according to court papers.

.... after she consented to a search, the agents came across a tiny, hairy arm hidden in her garage.

'Monkey,' she explained, claiming the arm was sent to her out of the blue "as a gift from God in heaven.

Well, call me a disciple and pass me a thigh.

NO IT DOESN'T
responds Stanley Fish

to the defense attorney's assertion that the case represents a regrettable but inevitable by-product of the sort of 'clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the [thoroughly discredited metaphor of the] melting pot that is America'.

It represents a more fundamental clash: between the imperatives of religion and the rule of law. The question raised by the case is whether the fact of a religious belief is sufficient to exempt the believer from the application of generally applicable laws — laws (like driving on the right-hand side of the road) that apply to every citizen no matter what his or her religious, ethical or moral convictions. Is religious belief a special case, so special that the devout practitioner gets a pass?

If it is, then I guess it's up to God to save the USA.

Mother Earth

I attended an update on the millennium development goals at the UN today and learned that 80 per cent of sub Saharan Africa's small farmers are women. They walk an average of 4 miles a day to get their water, and they produce 90 per cent of the continent's food (elsewhere I've seen reports at 75- 80 per cent. Regardless: a preponderance). But for a variety of reasons, including the fact that (and this may be garbled; at the very least an overgeneralization; but I couldn't stay long enough to clarify during the q&a) they are not considered farmers socially (qua gender, as I understood it), they have the least access to technical and other information to help them improve their methods and lives. Only 17 per cent of the arable land in the region is under cultivation. Almost half of the population of the region lives on less than $1 per day.

(None of this is really surprising, of course. But I am reminded of how much is really at stake in an internationalist feminism: something I've always believed in and at times fought for--but if you live in a wealthy nation and don't commonly find yourself in the academic or activist situations that would tend to remind you--well, it does tend to become an abstraction. Even modest activities such as today's are salutary under such circumstances).

These statistics were offered as part of a presentation on progress toward millennium development goal #1: 'Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger'. The chart that accompanies this update in The Millennium Development Goals Report shows that since 1999, progress (even if slight) has been made toward this goal in every region except for Western Asia, where poverty rates have more than doubled since 1990. The narrative report doesn't comment on this. I can think of a few possible reasons. Check this out, too.

What I brought home from the Farmers' Market today

1 bunch of green garlic
1 bunch of narrow leeks
3 small onions
5 small yellow and green streaked pattypan squash
1/4 lb of shiitakes
5 small heirloom tomatoes, because it won't last much longer, the season
I container of ricotta
1 cup of lemon basil tea (actually, I consumed it on the spot)
1 lb of grass fed minced beef, for the dog over the course of the week
2 dozen littlenecks, for me, soon
a mess of greens

I didn't get flowers as my Wednesday zinnias are still bright; and we're in between for fruit-- no more peaches, and early apples and pears are not that appealing. Some one had blueberries, but I doubt them this time of year, and I don't especially care for raspberries. Oh--loads of grapes, but the best ones, like scuppernongs, have bitter rubber skins, and the lychee inside clings to its pits, and I just don't enjoy the process. That said I bought some sliced and peeled cactus fruit on the way home, so perhaps there's no way around the sacrifice the changing season demands.

It was hot today, and crowded. I enter on the southeast side, from the subway exit on Park Avenue South and 15th Street, then make my way up past the mulchers on the left and the meat folks on the right, who are slow as mulch then never have bison hangar once they get to me, but do offer Ursa bits of jerky. Ursa hates crowds as much as I do and her tail goes down as we press on. I was looking for Yuno. Her stand has the freshest and most exquisite produce, and we chat about haircuts. I'll catch her on Wednesday, at Dag Hammarskjold, and ask why she wasn't at Union Square today. I ate her shishitos last night, and a few of the golden bite sized tomatoes left over from my Wednesday pint. As we head south on Broadway, the sun is in our eyes. I think about eggs from Knoll Crest but there's a line and my arms are growing heavy. There's a pork place with great bacon that's in my freezer right now, and occasionally they have just laid pullets, but not today. An unwitting fellow dog-accompanied marketeer stops to let his retriever greet Ursa, who shows him what's what (or rather, who's who) before I can pull her away. Corn is out of the question today; I have only two arms, and the pull of the lead in addition to the pull of gravity. Corn's getting awfully starchy lately anyway. I skip Ronnybrook, as I have been preferring the non-homogenized milk from Evans that I buy at Murrays Cheese. But Ronnybrook's glass bottles are the best. I actually remember having a tin box on the back patio, where milk was delivered, a creamy morning miracle.

New York green markets

Playing with my food

As a child, I loved games of imagination, and was forever mapping new continents on the local rocks and trees and streams and populating them with hapless neighborhood children assigned to represent complex genealogies of colorful characters with multisyllabic names. In more recent years, my playground, like that of many urban Americans, has been restaurants. The venue, the menu, the lighting, the designers, the company, the relationships with chefs and suppliers and critics and diners are among the multiple variables in an improvisation in which everyone conspires to assist in and be promoted by a winning performance.

I have that in common with at least one other person I have known for whom a successful performance required props on the order of wagyu carpaccio, gold leafed sushi, and magna of Cristal. As tiresome and embarrassing as I found him and his insistence on misrecognizing my own epicureanism as equivalent to his own, there is no way around the fact that I enjoyed many of the benefits of his company and incidental largesse. I might buy local when no one is watching, where he would do so solely to burnish his image (actually this is not a good example, because buying local was not something that registered to him, or his people. That may have changed.), but the uncomfortable truth is that however much I might want to distinguish our values, interests, and styles, we weren't all that different either in our net impact or in our recognition that dining out was about so much more than just the food.

So anyway, this is partial context to how I came to frequent a particular Hollywood restaurant that caters to the self important. Once, Benicio del Toro reached across my table to introduce himself to Don Rickles, who introduced himself to me in turn. On another occasion, Ron Jeremy held court at an adjacent table with a number of very young female--colleagues. Once George Clooney was in the house, another time Robert Shapiro. There was a big menu, but only a few items worth ordering: the swordfish, the steak a la Dabney Coleman, the bouillabaisse, the caesar. And cocktails.

Occasionally it was really a lot of fun, late at night (and they are open late, so it was actually kind of a default or last resort) to show up and be recognized and get a table right away.

I've been away for several years now but ended up on the red vinyl banquette again the other night, for much the same prosaic reason--late hours--that often put me there in the past.

This time, it was no fun at all. The loud parties of tarted up women and botoxed men (some older ones with hennaed hair) and the waiters with their calibrated posture between abuse and subservience and especially the meat-- a steak that I'd enjoyed in the past was just so obscenely thick and fleshy, I might as well have torn into the haunch of a living beast. And then there was the feeling that my friend and I both felt nothing, except that the past truly was past.

One of my favorite LA restaurants was always Yongsusan. This time, the banchan included things like iceberg salad in mayonnaise dressing and dumplings (not mandoo). There was a mingy eun dae gu jorim with bizarrely tablet-shaped slices of turnip (2 of them, actually) and fried bits in the soup and other things tasted old or freezer burnt. The kimchee in cabbage leaf-- the piece de resistance, was soggy and poorly pickled. I even suspect this was frozen. I loved this place but I would now consider it one of the worst Korean restaurants. Barely even a Korean restaurant.

Craft LA was also a disappointment. I was prepared to allow that Century City might have been transformed but in fact it was troupes of conventioneers wearing name tags, and giant portions of food (peas & prosciutto and sweetbreads for me), rather than the small focussed plates that made me fall in love with Craft back in the 1990s. That said, I haven't been to Craft proper in a couple years and maybe they've changed too. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson came and left and looked terrific actually. So what do I know.

Arpege

Everything wonderful arrives obliquely, which is why I should have known better than to have made a reservation at Arpege a month in advance.

It only happened because Pierre Gagniaire, Mon Vieil Ami and so many other top drawer restaurants were ferme le aout, and I was too greedy and too unsure of myself in other respects to leave my 72 hours to chance. I heard that the betterave was worth the 80 or so euros and so it came to pass that after an absence of nearly 2 decades I celebrated my brief and halting return to Paris with a room full of Americans, each of around 15 tables visibly and, in the case of the 8 Texans (including 4 large bottle blondes one of whom told the server very loudly that she couldn't eat anything with cheese, butter or cream, I kid you not), audibly; willing the subdued and open room into the backdrop for their separate dramas. These included a couple of proposals (nerdy men with hair receding from their foreheads and slipping down their necks facing women with straight blonde bobs and black eyeliner, facing the room and each other occasionally and nervously, between exaggeratedly intense moments with their respective partners); a table that may have been from the Korean embassy around the corner, including a couple of delectably dressed and well behaved children; and a few additional couples and allsorts.

Chuckeats had said that Arpege was hit or miss and unfortunately I hit the miss. They offer a coupe de champagne as an aperitif, which was a lovely Billecart Salmon Brut Reserve (magnum), and three amuses, the first a tiny wafer with a bead of mousse (and now I'm forgetting what it was). The texture was a miracle, like popping a caviar egg between tongue and palate. This was followed by the much vaunted Egg which frankly I hated. The moussed white was ok but the yolk was just completely uncooked and pooled at the bottom of the shell like, well, a raw egg yolk. I didn't get the maple syrup either. I should say that I don't like my eggs separated in general, and I'm not much for sweets. But I could have been persuaded by this dish and I wasn't. Happily, this was followed by four more of the exquisite tartelets.

I ordered a la carte as I simply couldn't stretch to 350 euros for the tasting. And the other point that is significant to what follows is that I conducted my order in French. The staff all seemed to speak both French and English (good thing as almost their entire clientele was American, that evening anyway) and graciously asks diners which language they prefer. Part of the point of being in Paris was to exercise my sketchy language skills (the French ones) so it is entirely possible that the entree was my fault.

I ordered the entree for two primary reasons: 1) it was a variety of vegetables, so I thought it would best illustrate this reputed strength of the kitchen; and 2) the name of the dish was poetry-- which I can't now recall, but it was an evocation of the sensual experience of the garden. So the waiter told me that there were two preparations of the dish, the first a crudite with olive oil, and the second-- well, I remember 'melange' and 'salsifis' and 'speck' and 'mousse' and I had some idea that it was a cooked version of the dish, accompanied by a mousse of salsify and speck. Sadly, I missed the part about how the vegetables were all put in a blender with cream and pureed until a uniform beige, plated and topped with a large scoop of salsify and speck mousse.

The whole was oversalted, with zero visual and textural interest. And at 58 euros, that is just not acceptable, even if I did order soup.

The main course was a spectacular dorade that exhibited a depth and range of flavor (noticeably of nuts) that I had not previously encountered with this fish. The vegetables were quite nice but strangely cooked with NO salt, which was, however, amply compensated by the speck foam! that had been generously applied to the entire dish. The waiter had herself suggested the dorade after I had selected the unfortunate entree, and I wish she had alerted me to the fact that I was basically ordering a bacon tasting. What's worse is that the bacon was all vaporised so while everything tasted of speck, it contributed none of its potential crunch or chew or visual contrast.

I tried hard to enjoy myself, but I never fully recovered from the boredom (and lingering aftertaste) of the speck soup. As the evening wore on, the Texans got louder, the staff (I counted 6 front of the house for around 60 covers) were visibly stressed, and I started thinking about brushing my teeth.

I skipped dessert and returned to the metro, seduced and abandoned.

Arpege
84, rue de Varenne
75007 PARIS
Tel : +33 (0)1 47 05 09 06