Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (12 page)

Years ago—so many now that few of us even remember—there was a time when most Americans had similar expectations of coffee as they have traditionally had of the hamburger. That a decent, cheap—but not necessarily great—cup of coffee in a cardboard container or heavy Buffalo china receptacle was a birthright. Coffee, it was generally accepted, did, and should, cost about fifty cents to a dollar—often with unlimited refills. Then Starbucks came along, whose particular genius was not the dissemination of such concepts as “latte,” “half-caf,” and “mochaccino,” or new terms for sizes, like “venti.” Nor did their brilliance lie in the particularly good quality of their coffee.

Starbucks’s truly beautiful idea was the simple realization that Americans
wanted
to spend more money for a cup of coffee, that they’d feel much better about themselves if they spent
five
dollars for a cup of joe rather than buy that cheap drip stuff that shows such as
Friends
suggested only fat white trash in housecoats (or people who actually worked for a living) drank anymore—in their trailer parks or meth labs or wherever such people huddled for comfort.

And America wanted to drink its coffee (or, more accurately, linger over it) in places that looked very much like…Starbucks, where young, attractive people (like the cast of
Friends
) sipped their coffees and spent their time and no doubt engaged in witty banter between cranberry muffins. To a faint soundtrack featuring the nonthreatening musical stylings of Natalie Merchant. For five bucks a pop.

A while ago, the guy behind the counter (and he sure as shit wasn’t called a “barista”) asked you for five bucks for a cup of coffee—
any
coffee—he’d better expect an argument, at least. Now? You wouldn’t blink. The entire valuation of coffee has changed while we weren’t looking.

This, I suspect, is what’s already happened and will continue to happen with the hamburger. The fashion industry figured this out long ago. Relatively few people could afford a Gucci suit. But they could surely afford a T-shirt with
GUCCI
printed on it. What’s happening is that five years from now, all those people who could never afford to eat at, say, Craft, will surely be able to buy a Tom Colicchio Burger. And I’m guessing, by the way, that—unlike a Chinese-made T-shirt with a logo on it—it’ll be a pretty good burger.

Things keep going the way they’re going, and the “good” burger, the designer burger, the one you’d entrust your child to, the one you want your friends to see you eating—that’ll be $24, please.

You’d think the major meat-packers should have seen this coming—should have seen that saving 30 cents a pound is all fine and good—but not when, a few years down the line, they risk losing the market. A few more
E. coli
outbreaks in fast-food outlets or school systems, and you’re likely to see a tail-off. Few parents are going to let their little Ambers or Tiffanys eat the stuff that they’re talking about on CNN all the time—next to the pictures of dead children and diseased animals. It’s really only a matter of time until—through a combination of successful demonization, genuine health concerns, and changing eating habits—America will actually start eating fewer of those gray disks of alleged “meat.”

If recent history has taught us anything, though, it’s that Big Food is way ahead of us with their market research. In all likelihood, when and if America sours on the generic burger, they’ll be waiting for us on the other end with open arms. As incisively pointed out in the documentary
Food Inc.
, an overwhelmingly large percentage of “new,” “healthy,” and “organic” alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. “They got you comin’ and goin’” has never been truer. Like breaking a guy’s leg—so you can be there to sell him a crutch. “We’re here for you—when you get sick of, or too frightened of, our other product. Of course it’ll cost a little more. But then you expected that.”

Maybe an early warning sign, the beginning of a major shift in attitude came not from health concerns, or rising awareness, or the success of such excellent books as
Fast Food Nation
and
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, but from whatever devious and cynical chef first came up with the concept of the “Kobe burger.”

He or she can hardly be blamed. The times when this seminal event occurred were surely ripe for it. New York City restaurants were clogged with loud, pin-striped, yet-to-be-indicted fuck-nuts hedge funders who relished the opportunity to showily throw a hundred dollars at a burger. Kobe, after all, was the “best” beef in the world, wasn’t it? It came from, like, Japan, from, like, special cows who get…massaged in beer and shit, don’t they? “I hear they even jack them off!!”

This was the story going around anyway, as high-fiving day traders from some by-now-defunct investment bank or brokerage house hurried, lemming-like, to order the “best burger ever.” Of course, chances are, the “Kobe beef” in that Kobe beef burger had never been anywhere near Japan. It was a distant relative at best—and even if the sublimely fatty product of pampered Wagyu cattle
was
used in the burger, it would have been (and remains) an utterly pointless, supremely wasteful, and even unpleasant exercise.

What makes a Wagyu steak so desirable is the unbelievably prodigious marbling of fat that runs through it—often as much as 50 percent. Its resulting tenderness and richness, and the subtle—repeat—
subtle
flavor. When grinding a hamburger, you can put in as much fat as you like—just reach in the fat can and drop it in the machine—so there’s no reason to pay a hundred bucks for a burger. A burger, presumably, already
is
about as tender as a piece of meat can be—and a taste as subtle as real Wagyu’s would, in any case, be lost were you to do something so insensitive as bury it between two buns and slather it with ketchup.

A six-ounce
tataki
of real Wagyu steak, seared rare and sliced thinly, is about all you want or can eat in a sitting. It’s that rich. It’ll flood your head with so much fat you’ll quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. Even an eight-ounce “Kobe burger” made from real Wagyu would be an exercise in futility—and pretty disgusting.

But no. The cream of big-city douchedom ordered these things in droves, bragging about it all the way. It quickly became clear to chefs and restaurateurs that there was a huge, previously untapped market out there for expensive hamburgers—that customers at a certain income level, clearly, were willing, even eager, to pay more. All you had to do was put a “brand” name next to the word “hamburger” and you could add value. That brand could be the name of a famous chef (many of whom wisely began to flock to the concept) or the name of a boutique producer (something that, like the word “Kobe,” implied specially raised, artisanal, humanely treated, organic, or sexually satisfied cattle). Chefs added “extras” like foie gras, truffles, braised oxtail, the exotic cheeses of many lands.

Restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow’s New York restaurant Kobe Club—a name that implied an establishment where sophisticated gentlemen of the world could gather, mingle with others in the know, share meat-related experiences with like-minded movers and shakers—was meant to be the apotheosis of this concept.

But Chodorow was a little late to the party—New Yorkers had moved on.

Instinctively suspicious of designer labels—as potentially being something they might like in New Jersey—and uneasy with the crassness of the whole Kobe Club concept, New York foodies looked elsewhere for a prestige patty. Perhaps Kobe suffered from its association with Chodorow, a man whom food writers find an irresistible target. It’s almost obligatory for food bloggers to mock his latest ventures—often before they are even open for business. Sneering at Chodorow is like making a mean crack about film director Brett Ratner if you’re a budding film critic. It immediately asserts one’s bona fides as a serious observer. (Chodorow, like Ratner, seems only too happy to oblige: see such absurd, bizarro pastiches of restaurants past as Rocco’s, the reality show–driven abomination; Caviar and Banana, a vaguely Brazilian follow-up; English Is Italian [he isn’t]; and his latest, a jumbo-size attempt to straddle the Asian fusion, sushi, and
izakaya
markets. Even veteran food critics can’t resist giving him a kick whenever the opportunity presents itself. The jokes write themselves.)

In post-Kobe New York, a new way to pay more for a burger was needed. And smearing foie gras or house-made relish on it was not going to be enough. A return to purist notions of the hamburger began to take hold—even an orthodoxy—in such forums where these things are earnestly considered and discussed. A virtuous burger, it was argued by aficionados, was the “original” recipe, a “roots” burger, unsullied by “foreign” or modern flavors, one whose meaty charm spoke for itself. Said burger should come from the very best mix of the very best parts of the very best quality beef from animals of verifiably excellent breeding. And it should be cooked “right” (whatever that implied).

Enter New York’s Minetta Tavern, where the Black Label Burger is of an exclusive blend prepared by Pat LaFrieda from grass-fed, free-range, organically raised Creekstone Farms beef. Seared simply and unapologetically on a griddle—where, we are assured, God intended us to cook our burgers—and served on a bun with a little onion confit, a slice of tomato, and a leaf of lettuce, everything new is old again. Only it’s 26 dollars now.

This
is
indeed one king-hell, motherfucker of a burger—one that would be seriously difficult to top in a blind taste-off of “experts.” Arguably, it’s worth the bucks, if you have that kind of money—and, face it, if you’re eating at the Minetta Tavern, you probably do.

But the speed with which accomplished and forward-thinking high-end chefs like Laurent Tourondel, Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Hubert Keller, Bobby Flay—and even Emeril—made their moves to exploit the new frontiers of the “hamburger concept” has been breathtaking. And all of them, let it be pointed out, indeed serve a damn good burger. It’s already the Next Big Thing—and is likely to stay the big thing for the conceivable future. If anything, it’s only the beginning—a trend that fits perfectly with the times, a relatively affordable (still) luxury item for a difficult economic environment, something that plays neatly into the national mood: the desire for comforting, reassuring food, the backlash against “fancy,” “silly,” or “hoity-toity”–sounding dishes, a growing sense of discomfort with the traditional food supply, and the reverse snobbery of foodie elites who enjoy nothing more than arguing over what might be the most “authentic” version of quotidian classics.

But what of the burger of lore? The adequate, presumably safe (we thought so, anyway) utility burger, draped and leaking clear grease across the bottom of an open bun, accompanied by an unripe tomato slice, a drying onion slice, and a leaf of iceberg that no one will ever eat…a limp wedge of obligatory dill pickle, a single slice of Kraft “cheese food,” half-melted and congealing even now, kitty-corner across the top? Will it disappear like the vivid, brightly colored Americana on Howard Johnson’s menus past? The ham steaks checkerboarded with grill marks and garnished with pineapple rings, and the thick-crusted chicken potpies of earlier decades?

Will more assurances be necessary to future customers before slightly more expensive patties can be sold?

“Now serving our Chaste Quaker Farms mélange of grain-fed Angus beef—minimally dosed with antibiotics and made only slightly uncomfortable during its final days in a dark, shit-smeared shed.”

Or will the default-quality burger—the classic “mystery meat” patty—continue to survive and flourish indefinitely? Simply more expensive by two dollars or so?

Surely the message for the Greek couple at the luncheonette down the road, sizzling up the same frozen patties on a Mel Fry–smeared griddle, like they always have, is that for
some
reason or another, the ass-hats down the street are paying eighteen bucks for a burger. We can definitely get away with jacking up our price by a dollar or two.

Maybe this whole burger thing is part of a larger shift—where
all
the everyday foods of everyday Americans are being slowly, one after the other, co-opted, upgraded, reinvented, and finally marked up.

Look around.

In the hottest restaurants of New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, it’s the rich who are lining up to eagerly pay top dollar for the hooves, snouts, shanks, and tripe the poor used to
have
to eat.

You’d have to go to Mario Batali and slap down twenty dollars to find an order of chitterlings these days. You can look far and wide in Harlem without finding pig’s feet. But Daniel Boulud has them on the menu.

Regular pizza may be on the endangered list, “artisanal” pizza having already ghettoized the utility slice. Even the cupcake has become a boutique item…and the humble sausage is now the hottest single food item in New York City. Order a Heineken in Portland or San Francisco—or just about anywhere, these days—and be prepared to be sneered at by some locavore beer-nerd, all too happy to tell you about some hoppy, malty, microbrewed concoction, redolent of strawberries and patchouli, that they’re making in a cellar nearby. Unless, of course, you opt for post-ironic retro—in which case, that “silo” of PBR will come with a cover charge and an asphyxiating miasma of hipness.

David Chang sells “cereal milk” in sixteen-ounce bottles for five bucks. An infusion, as I understand it, of the metabolized essence of cereal, the extracted flavors of Captain Crunch with Crunchberries perhaps, the sweet, vaguely pinkish milk left in the bottom of the bowl after you’ve drunkenly spooned and chawed your way through the solids. Maybe this is the high-water mark of the phenomenon. And then again, maybe not.