Best Food Writing 2015 (7 page)

Cooking's Not for Everyone
Cooking's Not for Everyone

B
Y
M
OLLY
W
ATSON

From
Edible San Francisco

          
Bay Area food writer and recipe developer Molly Watson (check out her delightful blog
TheDinnerFiles.com
) offers another real-world perspective on America's vanishing kitchen skills—reminding us what the high-minded foodie elite always seems to forget.

We are bombarded with this truth: Family dinner is a magical and yet endangered institution. What was once commonplace—lo, quotidian!—for people who lived in the same house is, because of dual-income households and yoga classes and Lego workshops and screens of all sizes and Hot Pockets, going the way of whalebone corsetry.

Sure, it exists, but more as a fetish object than something you pull out and put on everyday.

We must fight for its survival, we are told. Not only is it an insanely effective way to stay connected as a family, but it's even better at getting the kids into Harvard than mission trips to Guatemala and it can coax elves to dance with unicorns in our backyards.

And here's the latest promise coming directly from the better-food movement: It will de-industrialize our food system. That last bit only happens, though, if someone in the house cooks this magical meal. And herein lies the problem.

When people who write about food for a living tell everyone else how easy it is to make dinner (and I'm including myself here), a suspicious
eyebrow should be raised and the obvious question asked: Isn't that like an accountant saying that doing your own taxes is easy?

Look, I'm all about family dinner. We all have to eat. My mom cooked family dinner most nights. So do I. I like to cook—it's part of the reason I write about food instead of, say, the competitive pétanque circuit or the kinship relations of a tribe in Papua New Guinea.

If I'd only ever put dinner on the table while working as a freelance writer, I'd probably still be beating on the “everyone cook” drum kit I used to have. But for awhile there I had a staff job that required a commute. If I left before 7 and drove like my mother, I could make it door-to-door in 27 minutes. When I let up on the lead foot, it took at least 45 minutes, and I quickly saw the problem with family dinner.

It's a beast. A beast that needs to be fed. Every single night. Whether it's easy or not.

I could no longer honestly concur, as I once had, with Laurie David's assessment that “To not be cooking in your own home is to be missing one of the best parts of the day.”

It was a humbling glimpse into the lives of people who don't like to cook, because the lack of time and the fact that as a food writer and recipe developer I'd already spent most of the day cooking turned me into someone who no longer looked forward to making dinner.

Suddenly I understood in a visceral way the trajectory of humanity—the minute people get any money they tend to pay people to do three things: clean their house, watch their kids and cook their dinner. As my husband and I checked in to confirm who was picking up the kid and what dinner might be, I came to understand why so many housewives used to have a “pork chops on Tuesday” weekly rotation: at least the menu didn't need to be reinvented every night.

What had once been a real creative and satisfyingly productive outlet during my day became a dirge. I saw why feminists used to commonly lump cooking in with the rest of housework as mind-numbing, endlessly repetitive labor, the fruits of which were tied primarily to other people's appreciation of it. “The validity of the cook's work is to be found only in the mouths of those at her table,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. “She needs their approbation, demands that they appreciate her dishes and call for second helpings; she is upset if they are not hungry,
to the point that one wonders whether the fried potatoes are for her husband or her husband for the fried potatoes.”

So where I once stood out front twirling a baton in a the-world-would-be-a-better-place-if-everyone-cooked parade, I stopped telling people they should at least try cooking. I no longer pontificated about how easy it was to make a homemade dinner on a regular basis. I started to see the call to whisks and the homage paid to homemade bread that have become part-and-parcel of the food movement as what they are for anyone who doesn't feel like cooking: oppressive bullshit.

First, it's worth noting the obvious: Responsibility for getting dinner on the table still falls disproportionately on women's shoulders. It's changing, for sure, and I know plenty of men who cook for their families. But at this moment in time, calling for people to cook more for their families, without specifically calling out dudes, is asking women to do it.

Equally important, when you tell grown-ups who have a decent sense of what they like and don't like that they have to do the latter, they tend to do one of two things: the healthy tune out, the neurotic feel guilty. Neither of those outcomes gets people to engage more deeply with their food, to know where it comes from, to ask how it's produced.

Don't get me wrong, I believe everyone should know how to cook, at least some basics, but not because learning to cook is “the most important thing an ordinary person can do to help reform the American food system,” as Michael Pollan claims, but because it's a basic life skill. Everyone should also know how to sew on a button, use a drill, change a tire and perform CPR. I no more believe there is some larger good in cooking than I think anyone who doesn't want to should sew their wedding outfit or build their houses or never call AAA or 911.

There is tremendous arrogance, I now see, in the assumption that if people would just give cooking a try, they'd like it enough to become more interested in food instead of getting pissed off that they're wasting so much time doing something they don't like. For many people cooking is like gardening for me: something they're only glad to have done and which they fantasize about paying someone else to take on. Wouldn't it be awesome, they think, to hire a personal chef?

About the connection between everyone cooking and a more sustainable food system—it's bunk. I don't see how it matters whether the
locally grown organic kale salad with a lemon dressing was made by someone in my house or not. That fried foods are easier to produce on a large-scale level than fresh tossed salads (and fresh tossed salads easier to produce on a small-scale, home kitchen level) is a hurdle to people who want to feed their families healthful food without cooking, but it's not a roadblock. That it is a hurdle is something systemic that needs fixing, but everyone cooking their own food isn't a realistic solution. There would be a whole lot less labor abuses in the garment industry if we all sewed our own clothes, but can anyone imagine suggesting more home sewing as a first step towards changing that system, much less present it as a key component of a long-term workable solution?

Home cooking is good for the food system because it leads to or involves other things. People who cook tend to have healthier diets because of what they are cooking; there's no magic fairy dust released during the cooking process that makes the food better (and if there is, I'm pretty sure it doesn't happen when the cook is bitter about stirring the pot).

People who cook are more likely to pay attention to the quality of the ingredients they use, the thinking goes, so there's a greater chance they're going to shop at a farmers market or buy organically grown foods or, at the very least, buy whole food ingredients instead of processed foods.

Yet, it's easy to imagine how the environmental good of more communally produced food might be greater than more home cooking. A more efficient use of resources is certainly possible, both on the raw material side—25% to 30% of food that makes its way into U.S. homes is simply tossed out—and the auxiliary elements like water and power. Baking bread, for example, can be a satisfying activity for those who like it, but there's a reason bakeries took off. It takes a lot of sustained heat to bake bread, if nothing else. Having one reliably hot oven per community makes some good wood-cutting sense. Then having an oven where people can place their pots to cook up their stew or casseroles, after the bread is baked but the oven is still hot, while they tend to other things, as used to be common practice in plenty of rural villages, seems like a decently sustainable practice to the modern eye.

Somehow the food movement's “how can we make people who don't cook care as much as people who do” became “we should try to
get more people to cook.” And I know how that happened: People who write about food, in general, like to cook. If you like to cook, it's easy to say it's easy. It's easy to say everyone else should do this thing that I like to do; less easy to see why people who don't do it don't even want to do it. I know because that used to be me saying it. I have changed my tune.

Along with providing resources for those who want to cook or cook more, those of us who care about the food system should create ways to make family dinner truly easier, more enjoyable, more healthful and more delicious for everyone, even those people who don't want to cook it. That realism, more than all the chiding in the world, would raise food consciousness and make sure everyone cares as much about the quality of that food and how it's produced as we do.

When told we must cook the family dinner to harness all of its power, we need to push back, de Beauvoir style: Is the food system for our cooking or our cooking for the food system?

There is no moral good or bad in cooking. I am always struck by the language people—or, to be exact, women—use when commenting on the amount of cooking I do. They say that I am “good.” It is often followed by a confession about how they are “bad” because they hardly ever cook. It's the culinary Madonna-whore dichotomy.

People who are passionate about quality food and a more sustainable food system shouldn't be out encouraging such nonsense. We shouldn't be proselytizing cooking and fetishizing the homemade. We need to debunk those ideals and get the focus back on making all food—whether homecooked, convenience, order-in or just plain fast—good food.

Me, I would like a better food system for the sake of my cooking. But also so that, when no one in the house feels like lighting the stove, we know whatever food we choose to eat will be as healthful and sustainably produced as possible. No one should have to cook to make that happen.

The Restaurant Biz
The Restaurant Biz

Dinner Lab Hopes to Build the World's First Data-Driven Restaurant. But Is That a Good Thing?
Dinner Lab Hopes to Build the World's First Data-Driven Restaurant. But Is That a Good Thing?

B
Y
B
ESHA
R
ODELL

From
LA Weekly

          
LA Weekly
's restaurant critic since 2012, Australian-born Besha Rodell is still a reporter at heart, continually taking the pulse of Southern California's food culture. In a city where image is everything, it's no wonder that restaurateurs would convene focus groups for new dishes and dining concepts.

The dinner takes place in a Studio City storefront, one that used to be a yoga studio but now feels as barren as any gutted storefront waiting for its next inhabitant. Tables are set up in long rows, a makeshift kitchen in back, a makeshift bar in the corner.

We're well into the meal, and only slightly past the social awkwardness that comes with dining alongside strangers, when the waitress deftly delivers our third course. A hush comes over the table as all 12 diners pick up tiny spoons and dig into what she's given us. Held in small glass pots, a warm, duck egg custard comes topped with a jellied, tart, black pepper jus, studded with halved red grapes. The grapes burst in our mouths, providing fresh contrast to the silken custard.

The diners around me spend a few noiseless minutes tasting, staring intently at their own hands and spoons and food as they eat. Then utensils drop, quickly replaced by pencils. We scribble furiously on the white comment card before us. It's at this point that we begin to
hear some opinions, though they're slightly guarded; the outpouring of honesty is going on paper. You wouldn't want someone to steal your thoughts.

“The temperature just weirded me out,” one woman says to her companion.

“The texture is an issue,” another diner offers.

“This is one of the coolest things I've eaten in a long time,” I think, apparently alone in my opinion.

Welcome to Dinner Lab, the country's most sprawling series of pop-up dinners. Begun in 2012 and now in cities all over the country, Dinner Lab holds up to 19 events weekly, from L.A. to Atlanta to Chicago. It's much like any pop-up experience—odd spaces, prix fixe offerings, chefs trying out new ideas that perhaps wouldn't make it onto a restaurant menu . . . not quite yet, at least.

The difference with Dinner Lab, aside from the sheer scope of the operation, is the feedback component. Each guest is asked to fill out a comment card addressing almost everything about the meal: each course, the wine pairing with that course, the taste and creativity of each plate of food. And that's only what you're asked at an actual dinner. When you sign up for Dinner Lab, many more questions are part of the process, including your relationship status, your drink of preference and how you “rate yourself as a foodie.” (I choose “Early Adopter: I tell people where to eat” from five potential choices.)

This mountain of feedback and personal information from thousands of diners over hundreds of dinners adds up to what Brian Bordainick, Dinner Lab's founder and CEO, believes to be a gold mine. And he plans to use it to open the world's first data-driven restaurant.

“We're going to reverse-engineer a restaurant,” Bordainick explains. “We're going to use our data to open the world's first entirely open-sourced restaurant. A programmable restaurant, if you will.”

How does he plan to do this? Over the course of the summer, Dinner Lab has nine chefs traveling throughout the country. Each chef is cooking at least one dinner in 10 different cities—that's 90 dinners, minimum. At the end, Dinner Lab will gather the data collected, select a chef and pick a city, mainly based on customer feedback. Then they'll open a restaurant. The who, where and how of this, supposedly, will be based almost entirely on data.

All of this poses a number of questions, the most obvious of which—will it work?—is perhaps the least important. But the questions that spring from that initial “will it work?” conundrum are integral to the way we eat and the business of restaurants going forward.

Can you use data to determine trends that have yet to fully emerge? Can you use data to outsmart the restaurant gods and build a business that's less likely to fail?

Are the people who go to pop-ups inclined to have insight that leads to a successful brick-and-mortar restaurant? What's the difference between this and trying to build a restaurant based on an overview of Yelp reviews?

Do people even know what they want? And, in an era in which diners are increasingly opting for unique food events and pop-ups, isn't Dinner Lab's undertaking akin to using the information gathered from a successful personal-computer business to start a typewriter company?

Dinner Lab began as a New Orleans experiment, one driven by the fact that there isn't much to eat late at night in that city, apart from bad pizza sold out of the all-night daiquiri houses on Bourbon Street. While New Orleans is a food city, that food has been mainly limited to just a few genres. “New Orleans has a lot of Creole and Southern contemporary cuisine,” Bordainick says, “but there's a huge dearth of variety.” So in August 2012, he began setting up pop-up dinners with different chefs. The dinners started at midnight.

“It was a terrible idea,” Bordainick says. “People showed up already hammered. It was not a very good decision-making process on our behalf.” But the foundation had been laid for a pop-up business, with Bordainick's startup collaborating with different chefs for one-off events.

After figuring out that regular pop-ups were “a pain in the ass, and don't make very much money,” Bordainick came up with the model Dinner Lab has been using ever since: a subscription-based, membership format. Customers pay for an annual membership and then gain access to ticketed dinners, for which they also pay. Memberships cost between $100 and $200, depending on your city (in Los Angeles, it's $175). The price of dinners varies but is comparable to other dinner events—around $80 per person, including booze and service.

This model worked. It worked well enough that eventually Bordainick and Dinner Lab were able to expand from New Orleans to other
cities. First Austin, Texas; then Nashville, Tennessee; then New York; and then, in September of last year, Los Angeles.

Dinner Lab now is in 19 cities and has about 50 employees.

Despite the membership fee, which effectively adds a big surcharge to the cost of dining out, people have signed up all over the country after hearing about it through word-of-mouth or local media. Most of the L.A. members I ask first heard of its launch through Daily Candy, the now-defunct lifestyle email newsletter.

Bordainick now spends most of his time on fundraising. He has raised $2.1 million to date, much of it from one of the original founders of Whole Foods, even as new investors are being brought on board all the time.

Bordainick himself is very much in the model of startup dudes. Young (28), tall (6 foot 3 inches), white, with a vocabulary that swerves easily into corporate-speak (he talks a lot about being “in that space” when discussing the directions the business might take), he relishes his role as an entrepreneur. When I first met him to discuss this story, he said he'd be wearing “a green hoodie and shorts—typical entrepreneur garb.” If he weren't into food, he could be a character on
Silicon Valley
.

A native of New York's Hudson Valley, Bordainick moved to New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina to work for Teach for America. After that, he went to work in the mayor's office. Then he worked in education technology, where he was immersed in a culture that thought data could save the world.

Now he's trying to use data to save dinner.

Bordainick says the feedback component of Dinner Lab first was requested by the chefs working the pop-ups—often, they were trying out new ideas at Dinner Lab, dishes they thought were too experimental for the restaurants that employed them. A system was put in place, in which every dish at every dinner was rated. As the company expanded and the volume turned the feedback into data, Bordainick became aware of how valuable that much market research might be.

“It got to the point where we could predict trends before they happened. The fact that octopus is a huge ingredient now, that everyone's using it? We knew that way before it happened,” he says.

How? In part because octopus dishes score particularly high at Dinner Lab dinners but also because, when people sign up for a dinner,
they're asked why they bought tickets to that particular event. “We saw people saying they came for the octopus, for instance.”

I find this hard to believe. People are choosing a night out, spending hundreds of dollars, based on one dish? But when I ask my fellow diners at the meal with the warm custard (which also has an octopus dish on the set menu) why they are at that particular meal, three different people say to me, “Because of the octopus.”

Restaurants typically are viewed as risk-filled business ventures. They have a reputation for high failure rates and low profitability, with ingredients for success that are never easy to predict. Studies show that restaurant failure rates aren't that different from other small businesses, but lenders still see them as much more precarious: It's practically impossible to get a bank loan to start a restaurant. Hence the need for individual investors.

And overnight success doesn't always mean a place lasts. While there's little definitive national data on restaurant failure rates, various local studies indicate the rate is somewhere between 23 and 60 percent as you go from the first to the fifth year of operation.

The most extensive research, done about 10 years ago by Ohio State University's Hospitality Management program, showed that about one in four restaurants closes or is sold within the first year of business. At three years in, three in five restaurants are closed or change hands.

It's this riddle that Bordainick hopes to solve with Dinner Lab—to create a restaurant that's guaranteed to succeed.

It's easy to dismiss the very concept of Dinner Lab and the tour as slick gimmickry, but once you drill down past the “data-driven” sales pitch, Bordainick starts to make a lot of sense. The “winning” chef from the tour will be chosen based on his score with diners, and also his ability to stick to a budget, keep food costs reasonable and work well with others. After each dinner, the support crew is asked to rate the chef on leadership, execution and how easy it was to work with him. “If someone is a dick, we don't want to work with them,” Bordainick says.

And so, at the end of the tour, that leaves a chef who has consistently cooked food that the public has enjoyed, who has had national exposure, and who also can manage a budget and be a good boss. That's a hard thing to find in any field.

The chefs are mostly sous chefs and chefs de cuisine from the country's best restaurants. When you look through their bios, names such as Eleven Madison Park, Momofuku and Per Se litter the blurbs. They're exactly the types who are on the verge of becoming executive chefs but don't have an easy path to get there.

The regular route to becoming an executive chef can take years of networking and/or fundraising. With culinary schools turning out more graduates every year, even having a pedigreed restaurant on your résumé doesn't guarantee a job running your own kitchen, and first-time executive chefs hardly ever get a gig where they're allowed to execute their own vision.

Dinner Lab is offering these chefs a way to bypass the hard route of applying for job after job, or finding their own angel investors. They just have to uproot their lives, take to the road, and then beat out eight other highly qualified applicants.

Aaron Grosskopf, the chef who made the duck egg custard, is a Napa-based private chef looking to find his way back into the restaurant world. He says he had to turn his life upside down to accommodate the logistics of the tour, but he has a job to come back to if needed.

For him, it's about road testing his ideas and getting back into the swing of restaurant life. Private cheffing is solitary. Grosskopf knows it would be silly to participate in Dinner Lab just in the hopes of winning.

When I ask him how it would work if he won, we talk about the fact that the restaurant likely will be in the city where a chef's food scored highest. “So if I did best in Denver, that might be where the restaurant would be,” he says, “which would suck, because I don't want to move to Denver.”

But the chefs I speak to all say that the feedback component has helped them. Kwame Onwuachi, a New York chef who gave up his position at Eleven Madison Park to go on the tour, says the feedback is “very helpful,” though he does take it with a grain of salt. “One diner said my beef Bourguignon needed coconut in it, which is obviously outrageous. But some suggestions are really helpful.”