Reading Response: Restaurant Reviews

So, for these, I was fascinated at the descriptions of the food. Everything was “tangy” or “robust” or “sharp” or “aggressive” and all sorts of things I wasn’t aware food could be. I'm used to thinking about what makes the flavors—for example, something may have a nice cilantro flavor but need more garlic while a different dish might have too much salt and not enough almond—it would seem that I’ve just been assuming that people understand how these things taste. I’ve never had to describe something like that before, because I've always been around people who knew what I meant if I said something along the lines of “next time, more cinnamon, less vanilla.” I also have to say that I was flabbergasted at the prices of the food—I mean, who pays $24 for a single scallop?—and while I understand what a wine list is, my total experience with wine includes one sip of a very, very dry red at my grandfather’s funeral a couple of years ago so all the studd about mixed drinks and wine lists went way over my head. Reading these articles was also kind of amusing though, because I just kept thinking…what would it be like to make that?...or…if I made that would I be able to charge the same amount, or would it have to be cheaper because I have no formal training?

The best part of reading these though, at least in my opinion, was also getting to see how the critics formed each restaurant as if they had personalities; habits and quirks that made them sound almost like people. There was the over-the-top restaurant, the minimalist one, another that was full of dishes that were a teensy bit insane (that was the Il Matto one and probably my favorite next to the one about Kenmare); places where the people eating the food are more interesting than the food itself, the list goes on. The fact that each restaurant had a particular “personality” really brought home for me the fact that it’s not just the food that the critics are looking at, it’s the entire package deal, the whole part and parcel. It made me wonder about just how much if the chefs get any say in how the restaurant looks. This seems unlikely, but one would think that the chef would be the best person to ask about what sort of environment would most compliment the food that was going to be served within it. At least, that’s what makes sense to me. But maybe chefs have really bad senses of style when it comes to interior design, I don’t know.

            Finally, I think the fact that each review also had a specific voice that was always engaging and sometimes downright hilarious really emphasized that the way one tells a story is almost as important as the content of the story itself. In reading these, I have discovered a new respect for food critics. They are in fact very good storytellers who don’t actually have to imagine any of their material, because they simply go to a restaurant and their material comes to them. Being a writer of mostly fiction and fantasy, thinking about the simplicity of this is causing pangs of jealousy. However, I think that having to eat like that and write like that ALL THE TIME in order to earn a living would probably drive me nuts. Not to mention that there’s probably a lot to restaurant critiquing I don’t know, seen as I have exactly zero experience doing something like that. There’s probably a lot more to it than going to a restaurant, eating food, and writing about it. I bet it’s harder than it sounds. Most things usually are.

Being Human (Memoir: Final Draft)

My family and I belong to the largely undefined social group of Weird. I first learned this in elementary school, but it continued to be a theme until I graduated from high school. We lived on a dirt road far outside the city proper in the middle of a part of the county full of those people, meaning mostly farmers and migrant workers. We might technically have had the money to be considered as upper middle-class, but in the eyes of the largely white, largely conservative community of the city of Grand Haven, we were not one of them, especially not at school. This fact was driven home during various conversations with classmates over the years that usually included these three things at some point:

PLACE OF ORIGIN:

Other Person: “I live on [insert local street/sub-division name here]. What about you?”

Me: “I live on 136^th Avenue.”

OP: (Brief silence.) “Uh…where?”

Me: “Ottawa County.”

OP: “Where’s that?”

Me: “Robinson Township.”

OP: “Oh, you live out there. Weird.”

SCHOOL OF ORIGIN:

            OP: “I went to Mary A. White, where did you go to elementary school?”

            Me: “I was in the Voyager Program.”

            OP: “What’s that?”

            Me: “An open-classroom program at Ferry Elementary.”

            OP: (Brief silence.) “You went to Ferry? Weird.”

FAMILY SITUATION:

            OP: “Well, I mostly live with my [insert primary parent/guardian here] but I sometimes spend weekends with [insert secondary parent/guardian here].” (There were also variations to this situation that included a more even split of time spent in each household.)

            Me: “Oh, I live with my parents and my brother and sister.”

            OP: “Your parents are still together?”

            Me: “Yeah, why?”

            OP: “Dunno. It’s just weird.”

Don’t get me wrong, I had friends and knew people whose parents were also still together, and there were also some people who knew about Ferry and where I lived, but on the whole, my family was something of an anomaly. We were Weird because of things my siblings and I were not allowed to have. We never had—and to this day still do not have—cable television. We didn’t have dial-up internet until I was in seventh or eighth grade, and even then the only thing we used it for was my mom’s work email. We had enough money that while my siblings and I might not have ranked among the rich kids at school, we never had to worry about how much things cost. I remember it drove me nuts thinking about the things I could have had but didn’t because my parents wouldn’t buy them for me. I was painfully aware that there was very little difference in monetary worth between myself and a large portion of the other kids at my school; the difference was in how my parents used it. This was important, because what school taught me—besides what I learned in class—was that when one had money, one spent it on things to make oneself look cool. The latest hairstyle, brand-name clothes, the coolest accessories. These were not the things my parents spent money on. I also learned that the most important things one could have were money, looks, and the ability to manipulate people—a trait I lacked. It seemed to me that everyone lied, everyone cheated, and everyone had an ulterior motive for talking to me—usually because no one voluntarily did that unless they were a teacher or I’d been friends with them for years. The moral of the story was to never let people get too close or they’d turn around and stab you in the back. To me, everything in school was a game, a perpetual power struggle between the labeled social groups. Everyone was a part of some group that saw only itself and regarded everyone else as Other; we were never just teenagers going to the same school, never just plain old ordinary human beings.

            But it wasn’t just what my parent’s didn’t buy that set us apart; it was also what they did buy. My mom made my brother and me lunches nearly every day—we’d gotten over our love of hot lunch rather quickly—and the looks I got when I opened my lunchbox were often confused. Most people didn’t recognize whole wheat bread, because it didn’t look like the “whole-wheat” fluff bread one gets at a large chain store like Meijer or Wal-Mart. Our bread was thick and brown, not thin and white. It did not squish down into a ball the size of a shooter marble, plus—horror of horrors—it had crust. Even the things my mom made for dinner set us apart. I remember one conversation I had with a classmate about spaghetti sauce, where I mentioned that my mom liked to put onion in hers when she made it. The classmate then looked at me like I had three heads.

            One dinner in particular comes to mind when I think about my family and our perpetual title of Weird. It was the summer between junior and senior year of high school. It was in late July, maybe August, and it must have been a Saturday because blue fabric Meijer bags were all over the kitchen floor full of fresh produce from the farmer’s market downtown, and my mom always goes to the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings during the summer and early fall. We had some friends coming over for dinner that evening, which was a big deal because they were coming all the way from Asheville, North Carolina, and we hadn’t seen them since they moved there a few years before. Due to the fact that my brother liked to have whatever had been for dinner for breakfast the next morning, my mom was used to making enough food to have leftovers, but she also had a rule that said to always make extra whenever one had guests. This particular family got even more extra food not only because they could eat so much, but because they had very little money. My parents were big on sharing what you had with people who had less. We referred to this particular family as a unit: The Gerhardts. They were comprised of Yvette and her three children, Ben, Claire, and Anne. All of them were over five foot ten and about as big around as telephone poles. We loved them like family, not only because my family had known theirs since before I was born, but also because they liked and appreciated good food just as much as we did. I was aware of the gap between the incomes in our families, and because school had taught me that mattered, the fact that everyone around me ignored the gap sat badly with me, poking me in the back of my mind every so often.

            On the day I’m remembering, my mom had started preparing for their arrival before I even hauled myself out of bed somewhere around noon, putting pieces of chicken and vegetables in her special marinade and letting them chill in the fridge. By the time the Gerhardts showed up somewhere around five thirty in the evening, the chicken was in the oven and my brother was cleaning some green beans. Once they arrived, there was much hugging and happiness, and then my mom set us all up with things to do. I was on corn-shucking duty with Anne. We went out and sat on the back deck, listening to the cicadas and enjoying the evening. I remember the sun was at that golden summer angle that makes the tops of the trees look like they’re on fire. The deck faces west, and I could tell it hadn’t rained in a few days because I could smell the dust from our road, even though it was on the other side of the house.

I was sitting there finishing getting the last of the silk off the last ear of corn when Anne mentioned casually that the chicken in the oven sure smelled good and boy was she hungry. This led to a general consensus from the rest of us that we were hungry too. The sound of dishes inside meant my brother and sister were setting the table, but my mom yelled over the sound of the exhaust fan above the stove that dinner was going to be a while, so she’d “come up with something to sooth the savage beasts,” I believe were her exact words. What she came up with was garlic.

In my family, one can never have too much garlic. By that I mean when a recipe says something like “add two cloves of garlic, crushed,” my mother puts in four or five. When she cans pickles, she’ll add six or seven cloves to the jar along with the brine and cucumbers, and when we were little my parents had to make a rule that all the pickles in a jar had to be gone before anyone could eat the garlics at the bottom. Even friends of our family like the stuff, and you can tell who we consider good friends because we always ask how much extra garlic to put into a dish rather than if they actually want any extra. The more they ask for, the better we like them and the more probable it is that we’ve been friends with them for a very long time.

Garlic itself is a root vegetable, in the same family as onions, leeks, and chives. Like potatoes, you probably shouldn’t eat it raw, but according to both my mother and Wikipedia, when cooked it’s good for keeping your blood pressure and your cholesterol levels low. Maybe that’s why this memory has so many relaxed, happy feelings attached to it. My mom washed four very large heads of garlic and put them in her favorite white ceramic baking dish with the orange flower painted on the side, then stuck them in the oven and let them bake. It didn’t take long for them to get done, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, but it seemed like longer at the time because we were hungry. My mom said she didn’t want us to dirty the dishes on the table before we ate dinner off them, so instead she and Yvette herded us out onto the deck, and then we proceeded to eat it. Plain. It was one of the most delicious things I think I’ve ever had. Then Claire decided that she needed some bread to go with this delicious treat. That was an absolutely decadent idea. Roasted garlic has the same consistency as hummus, so it’s easy to scoop with a spoon, plus it’s spreadable. When I slathered a slice of bread with a spoonful of garlic topped with just a dab of butter, it was like eating summer. Summer is supposed to be full of relaxation, family, good friends, and fun, right? That was what this was. My mom had bought a baguette that she had planned to serve with dinner, but, I’m not sorry to say, it never made it to the table. It took us maybe fifteen minutes to finish every last bit of both the baguette and all four heads of garlic, fencing against each other with our spoons in mini-duels if there was a particular clove that two of us wanted. All that was left after that were crumbs, the papery skins, and the ceramic dish with its orange flower, still warm from the oven.
           I think it was somewhere in the midst of spoon-dueling with Claire that I realized I had been viewing this whole Weird situation completely wrong. I had been thinking about how the Gerhardts ranked even higher than my family on the Weird Scale because they’d been homeschooled for a long time, but then it dawned on me that there was no Weird Scale at my house. There never had been. Nobody there cared about who was prettier, who was more popular, or who had more money. It was suddenly clear that my parents could have bought me everything that would have made me “cool,” I could have bent over backwards to fit in, but it I would have been just as miserable as I usually was in school even with all the “right” things. On the back deck in the summer heat and mosquitos, it occurred to me that all this time I had been trying to force myself to be happy with the things that other people were telling me should make me happy, only to figure out that just because something was true for a large number of people didn’t necessarily make it true for me. What made me happy was exactly what was going on right then: I was in a comfortable, familiar place surrounded by people who knew and loved me for myself, flaws included. I knew then that my house was something rare and almost magical; the only place I knew of where everyone was simply human.

The back deck, only imagine it in August instead of October. Apologies for the glare, I took this through a window.

Secret Inredients Part I: Reading Response

           The thing that really struck me in these essays was that were so many images. The descriptions of the steaks and greasy drunk people, trying to imagine all the different courses at La Pyramide…it’s practically impossible to fathom how human beings can come up with food like that and then proceed to stuff ourselves on fast food. I think Gopnik pretty much sums up my feelings about both French cuisine and restaurant food in general when he says “It is the unforced superiority of the cooking in the ordinary corner bistro—the prix-fixe ordinaire—that seems to be passing” (Gopnik, 69). For example, I can think of only one restaurant in my home town that I would go to over and over again simply for the food. His essay reflects my own thoughts again when he says “it was the invasion of American fast food, as much as anything, that made the French turn back to their own tradition and, for the first time, see it as something in need of self-conscious protection. Looking at America, the French don’t see the children of M.F.K. Fisher; they just see the flood tides of McDonald’s, which, understandably, strike fear into their hearts” (Gopnik 77). I don’t blame them. Fast food IS terrifying. I mean, you leave it sit out in the open and it NEVER ROTS. It just petrifies. If that's not scary I don't know what is.

            The Tony Bourdain essay was so recognizably Tony Bourdain it was funny. After reading A Cook's Tour, the style of the essay is an exact match to the narration of the book. In less than five pages he manages to rip on vegetarians, vegans, and anyone who doesn’t like all meat as well as mentioning—among other things—murder, hidden-camera TV shows, and his own renown. It’s like reading someone with ADD write in stream-of-consciousness that manages to make me disgusted, hungry, and intensely jealous of the comradeship that the people who work in kitchens apparently have all at once. Someone should teach me how to do this. Maybe then I would be famous too. Or maybe I should just become a chef.

            It seemed to me that throughout these essays there was a running consensus that French haute-cuisine was the best, although there was some discussion as to whether it is still the best or whether we just like to think it is still the best. My French food experience being a croque-monsieur (a grilled cheese with ham on top) and the efforts to imitate American food that they throw at tourists, I’m not really qualified to say, but on the whole I think I’d rather just go have dinner with my family. Maybe it’s not a thirty-something course lunch with accompanying wines, but at least at home I know the meat will be cooked the way I like it and there will be at least two vegetables on the table at dinner. Since it happens to be fall, there will probably be homemade applesauce as well and pie with a from-scratch crust for dessert. French cooking can be the most famous in the entire world, but I’ll still take my mom’s chicken over pâté.

Come On Dracula, I Dare You (Memoir)

            In my family we have a saying: you can never have too much garlic. By that I mean when a recipe says something like “add two cloves of garlic, crushed,” my mother puts in four or five. When she cans pickles, she’ll add six or seven cloves of garlic to the jar along with the brine and cucumbers, and when we were little my parents had to make a rule that all the pickles had to be gone before anyone could eat the garlic at the bottom of the jar. Even friends of our family like garlic, and you can tell who we consider good friends because we always ask how much extra garlic is going into a dish rather than if they actually want any extra garlic. The more garlic they ask for, the better we like them and the more probable it is that we’ve been friends with them for a very long time.

            I remember one summer—I think it was between junior and senior year of high school—when we had some friends over that my family has known since before I was born. We refer to them as a unit: The Gerhardts. They include Yvette and her three children Ben, Claire, and Anne. All of them over five foot ten and about as big around as telephone poles. We love them like family, mostly because they like food just as much as we do, they just have never had a lot of money to spend on food, so every so often my mom and dad invite them over and we have large amounts of lovely food together. My mom always makes extra when the Gerhardts come over, because Ben, the oldest, can put away half a chicken all by himself. This particular summer was when they came up to visit after they had moved to North Carolina a couple of years before, so this was the first we had seen them in a very long time. It was late July, maybe August. I was shucking sweet corn on the back deck of my house with Anne, the youngest. The deck faces west and is on the opposite side of the house from our road, but we live on a dirt road  and I remember I could smell the dust in the air. The sun was at that golden summer angle that makes the tops of the trees look like they’re on fire.

            I don’t remember exactly why we suddenly decided that we needed food; maybe it was Anne saying she was hungry after smelling the chicken that was baking in the oven, I don’t know. But I do remember getting the last of the silk off the last ear of sweet corn and setting it aside in a pile with the others. Ben, Claire, my brother, my sister and I all chorused that we were hungry too. The sound of dishes inside meant my brother and sister were setting the table, but my mom yelled over the sound of the exhaust fan above the stove that dinner was going to be a while, so she’d “come up with something to sooth the savage beasts,” I believe she said. What she came up with was garlic.

            Garlic itself is a root vegetable, in the same family as onions, leeks, and chives. Like potatoes, you probably shouldn’t eat it raw, but according to both my mother and Wikipedia, cooked garlic is good for keeping your blood pressure and your cholesterol levels low. Maybe that’s why this memory has so many relaxed, happy feelings attached to it. Anyway, that evening—it must have been a Saturday, because my mom had some extra heads of garlic she had just bought that day at the local farmer’s market downtown—my mom got a rather delicious idea. She washed four very large heads of garlic and put them in her favorite white ceramic baking dish with the little orange flower painted on the side, then stuck them in the oven and let them bake. It didn’t take long for them to get done, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, but it seemed like longer at the time because we were hungry. It was an especially tough wait because within five minutes the entire kitchen smelled like roasting garlic. In ten, the entire house smelled like garlic.

            My mom didn’t want us to dirty the dishes on the table before we ate dinner off them, so instead she herded all of us—including Yvette—out onto the deck, and then we proceeded to eat the roasted garlic. Plain. It was one of the most delicious things I think I’ve ever had. Then someone—possibly Claire, but I don’t remember exactly—decided that they needed some bread to go with this garlic. That was an absolutely decadent idea. Roasted garlic has the same consistency as hummus, so it’s easy to reach inside the skin of the garlic and scoop out the innards with a spoon, plus it’s spreadable. When we put just a tiny dab of butter on top of the bread slathered with a spoonful of roasted garlic, it was like eating summer in food form. My mom had bought a baguette that she had planned to serve with dinner, but, I’m not sorry to say, it never made it to the table. It took us maybe fifteen minutes to finish the baguette and all four heads of garlic, fencing against each other with our spoons in mini-duels if there was a particular clove that two of us wanted. All that was left after that were crumbs, the papery skins of the garlic, and the ceramic dish with its orange flower, still warm from the oven.

            Our house smelled like garlic for days after that, much to our amusement. To this day, we eat so much garlic that I think the essence of it has soaked into the ground around my house and into my blood.  Sometimes after a particularly garlicky meal, one of my parents will joke that there won’t be any danger from vampires after they're asleep, but I like to think that there has been so much garlic for so long—close to twenty years now—in and around where I live that no vampire would come within a hundred yards of me or my house. Not even Dracula.