Best Food Writing 2015 (9 page)

Guidara let his statement settle over the room. In the end, he agreed to suggestion #16, but on different terms. Yes, a random table should be thrown a curveball that could transform the evening, but it should be generated by the floor staff, not the kitchen. In the calculus of Eleven Madison Park, another delicious mouthful of something is too easy; if you want to make somebody's night extraordinary—and create a memory—you practice
omoiyari
, and use your intuition to figure out what will make that person happy. Then you talk to the Dream Weaver.

When Guidara and Humm were brought in to take over Eleven Madison Park in 2006 by Danny Meyer, who owned the restaurant at the time, they were asked to turn what was at that point a successful brasserie into one of New York's temples of fine dining. The restaurant already had a strong sense of
omotenashi
(Meyer's book
Setting the Table
is a bible for the hospitality industries), which they further cultivated. By the time they bought the restaurant from Meyer in 2011, the collaboration between the two partners had evolved. The service wasn't just effusive, it was seamless. Both the front of house and back of house shared the belief that hospitality was as important as the food, and that Vidal Sassoon was right: if you don't look good, we don't look good.

“Our service is possible because of him and our relationship, because he believes in it as much as I do,” Guidara said of Humm, as the three of us sat in a windowless office next to the kitchen. “There are chef-driven restaurants, and restaurateur-driven restaurants, and I don't think either can be as good as a restaurant that's chef-driven and restaurateur-driven. There are decisions made in the kitchen that give the dining staff the opportunity to shine. He could easily do it differently, and in another environment I could never challenge it.”

“Trust is important. I trust that if he has an idea, that it's the right idea. I might challenge it, but if something is really important to him, I have to trust it's the right thing,” Humm said. “It's so much more fun, too.”

The chef seems awed and amused by Guidara's consuming need to tinker with what happens on the floor so that service is both more pure (there are no visible signs of technology in the dining room, nothing that will beep or vibrate or strobe and remind you that you are in the 21st century—even the checks are copied by hand on to creamy paper), and more playful (depending on the weather, your final course might be served on the sidewalk outside, where a hot dog vendor will hand you an ice pop—strawberries and cream in the summer, apple and caramel in the fall). When Humm develops a dish, he isn't just concerned with the balance of flavor, texture and composition. He consults with Guidara to discuss how it will be incorporated into the service.

In turn, Guidara has a deep admiration for Humm's cooking, which
has become more confident and fluent in recent years. It's stripped-down: if fine dining sometimes feels overdecorated, Humm's food is a well-lit room with tastefully high ceilings and just the right chair. The restaurant now only serves a tasting menu, a 16-course meal that lasts three hours.

That seems like a long time to keep your own company, but one night I saw a distinguished gentleman in a bow tie alone at a table. He was a regular—according to the Guest Notes, it was his 41st visit. His entry took up more than one page: he likes one table in particular and sparkling water; he doesn't like chicken, mustard or braised beef. He hated the carrot tartare (one of Humm's signature dishes, no longer on the menu), and the Baked Alaska (another signature dish, which was still on the menu). He loves lamb, and a specific brand of gin. He hates oaky wine. When served a meat course, his table is set with a knife engraved with his name.

Most come to Eleven Madison Park for a culinary journey, and to cede control to the kitchen. The restaurant has three stars from the
Michelin Guide
and four stars from
The New York Times
; last year, it climbed to #4 on the list of the World's 50 Best Restaurants. If it seemed strange to me that somebody would sign up for such a specific and expensive experience only to strike through parts of it as if it were a first draft, the captain on the floor that night told me the guest was quite popular with the staff.

“He's the best,” he said with sincerity. “Always alone, always likes things a certain way, always served by the same team. We love him.”

That night there were 40 tables, and 20 different allergies or special diets: a vegetarian, a pescatarian, a person who hates beets. The brother of a heavyweight politician was there with his lithe girlfriend. They sat not far away from a Danish couple with a young daughter who spent the first ten minutes at the table squeezing her hands together with nerves. The waiters modulated how they interacted with each table, leaving the famous alone, lavishing attention on those who might never spend so much on dinner again. The restaurant purred like a Mercedes S-Class, the powerful engine so quiet you couldn't tell when it was running at top speed, and when it was coasting downhill.

That's what happens when you over prepare. Guidara and Humm have worked so hard to thread hospitality and intuition through the
fabric of Eleven Madison Park that every meal is a performance of material already mastered, and not a struggle to get it right. As dinner service picks up, the staff is relaxed and responsive. “We try so hard to achieve something, sometimes you need to stand away for a second,” Humm told me at the end of the night. “You have to let it go. If you don't force it so much you have greater results.”

Coding and Decoding Dinner
Coding and Decoding Dinner

B
Y
T
ODD
K
LIMAN

From the
Oxford American

          
Veteran dining editor of the monthly
Washingtonian
magazine, Todd Kliman—a former English professor at Howard University—addresses the elephant in the room: A racial blind spot in American restaurant culture, which manifests itself in so many unacknowledged, insidious ways.

Southern hospitality is more than what we call “etiquette.” It's a sensibility. A way of being in the world. A philosophy. A spirit. You don't just open your doors to a stranger; you lavish that stranger with kindness, attention, and care. Nor are you simply accepting someone you don't know into your home. In the purest sense, you are accepting that stranger as an extension of yourself.

This is what is known as “welcome” in the South. And there is no thinking of it except in the purest sense. “Welcome” is an almost mythic conceit, one bound up with the very ways the region chooses to think of itself—sun-dappled land of kindness, grace, and mercy.

But if we choose to see the South as it really is, and as it once was—and if we are honest in admitting that in many ways what
is
is not so very different from what
was
—then we find ourselves with a messier, more authentic picture of welcome.

Last year, on the fiftieth anniversary of restaurant desegregation, we celebrated a signifying moment in the long march toward full and equal citizenship for black Americans. But we delude ourselves if we don't
acknowledge that there is a difference between being admitted and being welcomed.

The court order that ended desegregation stipulated that every cafe, tavern, Waffle House, and roadside joint must open its doors to all. It did not, could not, stipulate that whites in the South must also open their hearts and minds to all. Welcome was, and is, the final barrier to racial parity.

We have witnessed remarkable progress over the past five decades, yes, and we should acknowledge this, too. What seemed fanciful, even utopian, a generation ago is now so commonplace as to not bear any comment at all. We have come to expect and accept black and white in the workplace, on the playing field, in politics, in the military, and we congratulate ourselves on our steady march to racial harmony. But our neighborhoods and our restaurants do not look much different today than they did fifty years ago. That Kingly vision of sitting down at the same table together and breaking bread is as smudgy as it's ever been.

I have a day job in Washington, D.C., as a food critic. I've done it for ten years. During that time, the city has become bigger and more cosmopolitan, the restaurant scene has evolved from that of a steak & potatoes town to that of a vibrant metropolis, and people now talk excitedly about going out to eat. But what no one talks about is the almost total absence of black faces in that scene.

I count faces, I have to confess. It's a habit. Something I began doing when I was teaching at Howard University, when I was made to see myself as white in the world—whiteness not as neutral, as baseline, but as an idea, a construct. I began to keep a tally, each night, of the non-whites in the room. I eat out, on average, ten times a week in restaurants that span the gamut from ambitious fine-dining to so-called ethnic mom & pops. So let's do the math. That's 40 restaurant visits a month for 4 months, or 160 restaurant visits. Only 8 times—8 times out of 160—did I see more than 10 black folks in the room during any one lunch or dinner. On more than 90 of those restaurant visits, I did not see any faces other than white faces.

We're not talking about Provo, Utah. Or Johannesburg, South Africa. We're talking about a town enshrined in song, four decades ago, as Chocolate City.

Yes, the black majority may be a thing of the past—the recent census shows that whites now make up a paper-thin majority—but blacks remain a force in local politics. They are heavily represented in both the government bureaucracy and the workplace. And Prince George's County, where I live, is home to the largest black middle class in the country.

So why aren't they coming to dinner? It's a question I've been asking for almost as long as I've been a restaurant critic. And—not that I'm surprised—no one seems interested in answering it. Or even addressing it.

I've tried, for almost ten years now, to get a publication interested in a piece that would go in search of an answer. That's dynamite, one editor told me—and then he immediately sought to make me understand how fraught such a piece would be. I was white, he said, and that meant simply taking on a subject like this, in a candid and honest way, would invite attack or censure. And, he reminded me, most whites would not care.

This was meant, I suppose, to dissuade me from wading too deeply into choppy waters. From wasting my time. But my fascination with the question has not gone away, and, if anything, as the years have gone on, I am more interested in finding the answer or answers, not less.

I mentioned that I've lately been keeping a tally. Well, for the past five years, I've also been making notes and interviewing restaurateurs and industry observers for a piece I thought might never reach an audience. None I have spoken with over the years has been willing to go on the record and put a name and title to the observations and insights they've shared with me. So you'll have to take it on faith when I say that the things they've told me are true.

Most of those folks are white; the men who make decisions in the restaurant world—they are almost unfailingly men—are almost unfailingly white. The common denominator of my honest but off-the-record conversations with these white insiders—the one thing they all spoke to me about—was something I've taken to calling the 60–40 line, a line they live in fear of crossing.

Sixty-forty: that's a dining room that's 60 percent white and 40 percent black. Forty percent is the tipping point, they all said. More than
40 percent black, and suddenly, they said, the numbers don't just flip. More than 40 percent, and—said one—the whites scurry to their holes like mice. Soon, he said, you're looking at a restaurant where the clientele is predominantly black.

I said I thought that might be just a tad paranoid. This one restaurateur, a good, well-meaning man—they were all good, well-meaning men, the men I spoke with—looked at me and said that you could never be too careful when it came to running a business where every day you essentially began from scratch. But 60–40 would seem to me to be a problem to think about only if you have a 40 percent black audience. And there aren't more than a handful of restaurants in the city that can say that.

The black folks in the industry I've spoken with have been similarly reluctant to go on the record, mostly for fear of reprisal; they don't want to be seen as angry or unhappy or ungrateful. One, a former general manager who now manages an underground supper club, told me that it was important to remember that it hasn't been that long, historically. Yes, he said, blacks today have a mobility their grandparents lacked. But that's not to say that they've been exposed to the experiences many whites have. This explains, he said, the glaring absence of blacks from most Indian, Vietnamese, Bolivian, Afghan, Thai, and sushi restaurants in the D.C. area.

When I pointed out that I myself have only been eating sushi for twenty years, he said, “But see, you were exposed to other kinds of food earlier. And that probably prepared you for sushi.”

What about younger blacks who are growing up in a world in which sushi can be found in grocery stores? I asked. And yet you still don't see them in the restaurants.

“Because their parents didn't grow up eating sushi,” he said.

“Well, neither did mine.”

“But your parents grew up eating—I'm guessing—grew up eating all kinds of different foods, right? And you grew up, I'm guessing again, in a world that was not a segregated world. Most black folks, they grew up in black neighborhoods and went to black schools. So: exposure.”

And what about the non-so-called ethnic restaurants?

That's a matter of exposure, too, he said. “To know the protocol. To interact with a sommelier. Whites—not all whites, but more
whites—have been doing it for longer. They tend to know these things. Going out to dinner isn't just about the food. It's a whole system you have to learn. And an etiquette. It's not as simple as just showing up.”

There was a Yogi-ism in here, I said. There are no blacks in the dining rooms, because—there are no blacks in the dining rooms?

“I mean, don't laugh,” he said. “Seeing black faces out front—the GM, the chef, that would go a long way. But we don't have a lot of black chefs or GMs. Having black staff—you know, a third black, for example—that surely would help. But again, you don't see much of that.”

Those who were most outspoken feared reprisal from two directions, from whites and blacks. These, to me, were the most interesting—people whose ideas were likely to disturb folks on both sides.

I shared the former GM's exposure theory with a woman who has been in the food world in Washington for more than twenty-five years, as a cook and a consultant. She said, “Well, exposure, sure. But also the fact that, I'm sorry—black folks are just plain ol' conservative in their tastes. Nobody wants to hear that, but it's true. So you take a fish restaurant, or a fish and seafood restaurant, or a barbecue place, and you're gonna see black folks. Guaranteed. These are the foods we know. These are our comfort foods. Now, you take unusual foods, and in a setting that doesn't feel familiar, and with lots of white folks in the room? Uh-uh. Remember, why do we gather to eat? For most of us—black and white—it's to feel good. To feel a sense of well-being. Of home.”

I thought about her comments recently when the office of the Prince George's county executive invited me to lunch to solicit my ideas for attracting a name restaurant. I said that I thought the right kind of restaurant would be a crossover restaurant, a place that would appeal equally to black and white. Ideally, I said, a fish and seafood spot of such high quality and freshness that diners from all over the region would be persuaded to make the trip. One of the CE's staff members, a woman, nodded her head enthusiastically in agreement.

And then I began talking about the hypothetical menu. Stews teeming with langoustines, mussels, and cuttlefish. Oysters on the half shell and other items from the raw bar. Crudo.

“Crudo?” she wrinkled up her nose. “What's that?”

I told her.

“Raw fish? Uh-uh. Nope. Not gonna work.” She suggested instead
a fried fish restaurant—“you know, something like the Neelys on TV would do”—and began describing the kind of place that, even new, would feel like a relic. A place, in other words, that is unlikely to generate broad excitement.

So much of what I was hearing, on both sides, came down to fear. The 60–40 was about fear. About not taking chances, and not risking a good thing. The exposure theory, the remark about culinary conservatism—these, too, were about fear. Not venturing beyond safe harbor. Sticking with the known, with what's easy. Needing reassurance.

It is no wonder we talk so much about comfort foods, I thought. Food: it's where we run to for safety. It's what we hide behind.

It was a man named Andy Shallal who helped me to understand the possibilities for a better, more integrated future while also reinforcing the manifold problems of the present. Shallal made me understand that no one ever need say, “keep out.” That a message is embedded in the room, in the menu, in the plates and silverware, in the music, in the color scheme. That a restaurant is a network of codes. It's a phrase that, yes, has all sorts of overtones and undertones, still, in the South. I'm using it, here, in the semiotic sense—the communication by signs and symbols and patterns.

I don't see coding as inherently malicious. But we need to remember that restaurants have long existed to perpetuate a class of insiders and a class of outsiders, the better to cultivate an air of desirability. Tablecloths, waiters in jackets and ties, soft music—these are all forms of code. They all send a very specific, clear message. That is, they communicate without words (and so without incurring a legal risk or inviting criticism or censure from the public) the policy, the philosophy, the aim of the establishment.

Today, there are many more forms of code than the old codes of the aristocracy. Bass-thumping music. Cement floors and lights dangling from the ceiling. Tattooed cooks. But these are still forms of code. They simultaneously send an unmistakable signal to the target audience and repel all those who fall outside that desired group.

I spoke to a restaurateur not long ago who told me, “I don't engage in coding.” I responded that I begged to differ. We code even when we're not aware that we're coding. He may not have been trying overtly to
exclude—I know he would never do such a thing—but his restaurant speaks a very particular language. It has a microbrewery on the premises—and, according to the Madison Beer Review, only three percent of craft beer drinkers in the U.S. are black. Its staff is almost exclusively white. Attached to the restaurant is a general store selling penny candy, knickknacks, and other nostalgic oddities that take browsers back to the Fifties—hardly a time that most black Americans want to relive.