Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (16 page)

Jamie Oliver is a hero for doing the harder thing—when he surely doesn’t
have
to do anything at all. Most chefs I know, were they where Jamie is on the Success-O-Meter? They’d be holed up at a Four Seasons somewhere, shades drawn, watching four tranny hookers snort cocaine off each other.

Brooke Johnson,
the head honcho at Food Network, is a villain. That’s an easy one.

But she’s a villain for being right—not for the cynical, fake-ass, soul-destroying, lowest-common-denominator shit-shows she’s nurtured and supported since taking the helm. She’s a villain for being, clearly and demonstrably, right about
everything
.

On her watch, the network’s audience share has exploded. The number of male viewers most treasured by advertisers expands exponentially every year, demographics of viewers watching Food Network tilting to the good in ways that are the envy of every other network—that prime-quality cut of big-spending, ever-younger male viewers getting larger and larger with each financial quarter. Every clunky, bogus, critically vilified clusterfuck that drops from FN’s hindquarters, still steaming and seemingly dead on arrival, turns out to be an unprecedented ratings success.

Even the FN-branded
magazines
are doing monster business: nearly alone in an otherwise bleak field littered with the dead, they have thrived, becoming plump and then plumper with ad pages.

There is an unimpeachable logic to your argument when no matter what one may say about what you do—or even how true their observations might be—you can respond with two words: “It works.”

Whatever Brooke Johnson has done, it is working. That success ensures that whoever complains about “quality” sounds quaint—even deranged—like some sad Old Hollywood shrunken head, talking about Ford and Lubitsch, Selznick and Thalberg—to an interviewer who has no idea who or what they’re talking about.

And for that, and the fact that she couldn’t and probably shouldn’t give a shit whether she’s a villain or not—she’s a villain.

Wylie Dufresne
is a hero.

Because he’s made a life’s work of doing exactly the opposite of what Brooke Johnson does. At his restaurant, WD-50, where you’re likely to actually find him most nights, he doesn’t care if you don’t understand the food. He will not be moved from his plan if people hate an occasional dish. It doesn’t matter to Wylie if, on balance, most of you would rather have a steak—that he would surely struggle less, and make a lot more money, please more of the dining public, if he only made some compromises. He knows that even if you
love
everything on his menu, his is not the kind of meal that people come back for every week.

Wylie Dufresne is a fucking hero because he’s got amazing skills, a restless mind—and balls the size of pontoons. He’s decided to do the hard thing—whatever the cost—rather than following the much easier path that has always been readily available to a chef of his considerable advantages. He could have been anybody he wanted—had whatever kind of restaurant, whatever kind of career. And he chose…this. To his constant peril, he experiments, pushes boundaries, explores what is possible, what might be possible. In doing so, he develops techniques and ideas that, after he’s done all the work and taken the time and risk, are promptly ripped off by chefs all over the world—usually without any acknowledgment.

For exactly the
same reasons, Grant Achatz is a hero. Only more so—because he not only put what is perhaps the most impressive résumé a chef could have at the service of innovation, experimentation, and the investigation of those things about which he is curious, but he also risked his
life
in order to continue doing so. When you’re talking about commitment to one’s craft—about rigorously and inflexibly sticking with one’s goals and the highest possible standards—there’s really no one who’s demonstrated that so consistently, or been willing to sacrifice so much.

Alain Ducasse,
on the other hand, is a villain. Because he almost singlehandedly brought down fine dining in America with his absurdly pretentious restaurant Alain Ducasse New York (or ADNY, as it was known). While total destruction might narrowly have been avoided, public perception—even among friendlies—of the kind of European-style, Michelin-star place that he aspired to took a serious hit, causing the beginnings of a slow bleed that continues to this day.

Walking into ADNY, I loved the idea of haute cuisine unconditionally. I left, a heretic, the seeds of doubt planted in my heart—like the first toxic pangs of jealousy in a lover. And it wasn’t just me. ADNY damaged, in many minds, the whole idea of luxurious dining rooms and service, made those things dangerously uncool, features you almost have to explain or apologize for these days, something to be overcome by the food.

To use an egregiously overused expression, ADNY was where fine dining jumped the shark. Ducasse revved up the engine of his bike, released his hand from the brake, and took the whole concept hurtling heedlessly across the shark tank, where, unlike in Fonzi’s case, it was doubtful in the extreme that Pinky Tuscadero would be waiting for him.

When he rolled into New York with his bad attitude, ungracious proclamations of how exclusive his new place would be, how unwelcome New Yorkers might be—if they were not already acquainted with Himself via Monaco or Paris—Ducasse did nothing so much as drop a gigantic Cleveland Steamer into a small pond previously occupied by his much smarter and savvier compatriots. And you can bet they saw it for what it was.

Previously, you’d
never
heard members of the old French guard talking shit about one of their own—not publicly, anyway—but this was different. This guy was fucking it up for everybody.

The little tuffets for ladies’ bags, the selection of steak knives to choose from, the waiters who put on white gloves to trim fresh herbs tableside. The fucking
water
cart. The even more painful array of Montblanc pens to choose from so that one might more elegantly sign one’s check. The dark, hideous, and pretentious dining room. All of it conspired to smother any possibility of a good time stone-dead in a long, dreary dirge. Nothing could live in this temple of hubris. The generally excellent food was no match for the forces aligned against it. And it just wasn’t, in the end, excellent enough to prevail against the ludicrousness of what surrounded it.

Like watching
Bonfire of the Vanities
or
Heaven’s Gate
—or one of the other great examples of ego gone wild in the movie business—there were so many miscalculations, large and small, that the whole wrong-headed mess added up to something that wasn’t just bad but insulting. You left ADNY angry and offended—that anyone, much less this out-of-touch French guy, would think you were so stupid.

New Yorkers don’t like to be treated like rubes. Tends to leave a bad taste. And the bad taste one left with after ADNY metastasized into something larger—feelings of doubt about the desirability—and even the morality—of that kind of luxury. Few in the hermetic world of Francophile New York foodies had ever really asked those questions before. Now, they were asking.

There’s been no sign since, by the way, that Ducasse has gotten much smarter. Other than having the wisdom to close ADNY. After initial reviews of a new “brasserie” concept were negative, he suggested publicly that New Yorkers were unfamiliar with this kind of food and that it was up to critics to educate them to the complexities of exotica like
blanquette de veau
and
choucroute
. Which came as news, I’m sure, to the many, many distinguished French chefs who’d been doing exactly that—to great acclaim—for decades.

For being an arrogant fuckwit who nearly ruined it for all of us, Alain Ducasse is a villain.

Terrance Drennan
is a hero because, back in the Stone Age, he was the only guy around who loved cheese enough to lose money on it. For years. Brennan, the chef/owner of Picholine and Artisanal in New York City, was the first American chef to get really serious about the French-style cheese course. It’s not like anybody was asking. It wasn’t like there’d been a popular outcry for soft, runny, prohibitively expensive cheeses with which few Americans were familiar—and even fewer inclined to ever like. Even today, mention “stinky cheese” and relatively few are they who will respond positively.

Sure, heroic cheesemongers like Robert Kaufelt at Murray’s Cheese Shop had been making a good living selling an impressive variety of the world’s great cheeses for ages. But making a go of cheese in a restaurant situation was a very different matter.

Back in the day, the cheese board was, at restaurants of a certain type, an obligatory exercise at best. At the kind of fine-dining Frog ponds where the waiters spoke with French or Italian accents, and the crystal and linens were of good quality, the flowers freshly cut, the menu French or “continental,” cheese was something you offered because that was the sort of thing your customers expected. They’d been to Europe—many times. They knew that after the main courses, cheese is offered. Nobody actually ordered the shit. And had they tried, they would often find a perfunctory display of usual suspects: unripe (or too ripe) Brie, maybe a Camembert (usually in even worse shape), a sad disk of undistinguished chèvre, something hard and vaguely Swiss—and a lonely and unloved wedge of something blue. Probably the same Roquefort used elsewhere on the menu. In fact, the key to offering a cheese course and getting away with it was to make sure that
everything
on the cheeseboard was used elsewhere on the menu.

Cheese is expensive. Very expensive. And perishable. And delicate. Properly aged, stored, served, and handled cheese is even
more
expensive. Every time you cut into an intact cheese, its time on this earth becomes limited. Every time you pull one out of the special refrigerated cave it lives in, you are killing it slowly. Every time you return it, partially served,
back
to the refrigerator, you are also killing it. Whichever employee is serving your cheese? Every uneven cut, every pilfered slice or smear can pretty much end any possibility of a return on your investment. In fact, to properly serve a reasonably excellent selection of cheeses—always at their peak ripenesses and at proper temperatures—one almost
must
accept the imperative of throwing a lot of it out sooner or later, or find a way to use it elsewhere. And the more varieties of cheese you offer, the less likely you will be able to merchandise all of the remnants as ingenious appetizers.

It is very rare, even in the best of circumstances, that a customer will order a separate cheese course—prior to and distinct from—dessert. The arrival of cheeses on a cart tableside presents a potentially awkward situation for a large party: should we wait for the asshole here—who insisted on ordering a few reeking blues and some port—or should we just go ahead and order desserts?

So, cheese is not exactly a “loss leader”—meaning, an expensive or cumbersome item that does not in itself make money but which somehow inspires others to order things that
will
make money. If people
do
decide to have cheese as a dessert course, there’s no way you’re making more money on a nicely aged Stilton than you would be had everybody simply ordered crème brûlée or ice cream, which cost much less to produce.

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese. And that’s a very dangerous thing to be in the restaurant business. One of the great suicidal expressions has always been “educate the customer.” You hear that kind of talk from your business partner, it’s usually way too late to roll your eyes at the ceiling and plead for sanity.

But Terrance Brennan actually
did
—and continues to—“educate” his customers. And somehow to get away with it—even succeed and expand. After introducing the cheese concept at Picholine, he built a whole additional business around it at Artisanal—so far in front of everybody else he’s
still
out front, years later. He not only heroically defied the conventional wisdom of the times, he helped
change
the conventional wisdom. Where there was no market at all, he created one.

The dining public may not have known that it needed a selection of over a hundred cheeses. They certainly didn’t know they needed to know about small-production American cheeses from previously unknown cheese-makers in Maine, Oregon, and even New Jersey. Brennan, by taking a chance on cheese, helped create not just a market to sell cheese—but an emerging sector dedicated to
making
cheese. Finally, for all those lonely would-be cheese-makers pondering the possibilities of great, homegrown American cheese, there was a chef/restaurateur out there who might buy them, promote them, dedicate himself and his business to hand-selling them to the public.

Terrance Brennan is a hero. By taking a series of mad risks, he’s raised all boats—made things better for all of us.

Jim Harrison
is a hero.

Because there’s nobody,
nobody
left like him. The last of the true gourmands—the last connection to the kind of writing about food that A. J. Liebling used to do. Passionate, knowledgeable, but utterly without snobbery—as likely to gush over an ugly but delicious tripe à la mode or order of roasted kidneys as a once-in-a-lifetime meal at a triple-starred Michelin. Harrison, author of many fine books and even more fine poems, has done everything cool with
everybody
who’s ever been cool dating back to when they invented the fucking word. He knows how to cook. He has impeccable taste in wine. He knows how to eat.