Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (9 page)

“While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock ’n’ roll—individual, fierce and intensely political.” He points to the Kogi truck, which broadcasts its location on Twitter, and similar mobile operations, the advent of “pop-up” restaurants, and the general “hipness” now associated with street food, ethnic, “authentic,” or “extreme.” For a young man with indie aspirations and a modest disposable income, there is now a certain cachet involved in hunting down a shoebox-size Uiger noodle shop in the cellar of a Chinese mall in Flushing.

It ain’t a counterculture, however, unless you’re “against” something. And the first thing to go, I hope, will be bullshit. Of that, there is
so
much to spare. Money may be less abundant but bullshit we’ve still got plenty of.

It’s not that there will, or should, be a tearing down of everything old—as with many revolutions. If this is the advent of a “movement,” it will, unlike all previous movements, move in many different—even opposing—directions. It’s the Great Fragmentation, a reflection of what’s been happening with television audiences, the music business, and print media for some time. Hopefully, the restaurant business, unlike media conglomerates, will be better suited and faster on its feet to deal with these new historical imperatives. They will have to be.

In the months following the crash, as restaurants were closing and belts tightening, there were a few ominous signs: sales of candy skyrocketed—as did sales at many fast-food chains. Fear and uncertainty, it appeared, led many to rush for the familiar—an infantile urge to grab some of what one
knew
: cheap, familiar tastes—in the same old wrapper. At least Twizzlers hadn’t changed. Old Ronald and the Colonel were still there. I wonder, though, how long that will last.

Maybe people will
have
to start cooking again. To save money, and because the cold reality is that people without jobs have more time for that sort of thing.

If any good comes out of all the pain and insecurity, I can only hope that the Asian-style food court/hawker center is one of them. This institution is way overdue for an appearance (on a large scale) in America. Scores of inexpensive one-chef/one-specialty businesses (basically, food stalls) clustered around a “court” of shared tables. When will some shrewd and civic-minded investors (perhaps in tandem with their city governments) put aside some parking lot–size spaces (near commercial districts) where operators from many lands can sell their wares? Sharing tables, as in classic fast-food food courts? Why, with our enormous Asian and Latino populations, can’t we have
dai pai dong
—literally, “big sign street,” the Chinese version of the indigenous food court, like they do in Hong Kong—or hawker centers, like in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur? Or “food streets,” like in Hanoi and Saigon? The open-to-the-air “wet” taco vendors and quesadilla-makers of Mexico City?

Food preparation areas could be enclosed, as they are in Singapore, so food handling and sanitation issues can hardly be an unsolvable impediment: Singapore is the most rigorously nanny of nanny states—with the most vibrant hawker culture.

The hawker center could be an answered prayer for every hard-pressed office worker in a hurry, every blue-collar worker on a budget, every cop on a lunch hour, as well as obsessive foodies at every income level. “Authenticity” artisanship; freshness; incredible, unheard-of variety—and for cheap? All under one roof? This, let us hope, is at least part of our future—whatever happens.

As for what else lies in store? Who knows. Gold is clearly on to something. What this means, and how bad it’s going to get for fine dining at the very top, is a matter of debate. As Eric Ripert says, there will always be room for Hermès. The very best, something people who can afford such things
know
took time and the expert work of many hands to achieve. But what about the other guys? The still very expensive but not quite as good? Will anybody give a fuck about the Versaces of the restaurant business ten years from now?

Gordon Ramsay’s example might be instructive. In the last few years, buoyed by his successful television programs—and his reputation as a Michelin-starred chef—he opened twelve new restaurants around the world. All of them have lost money. He narrowly avoided bankruptcy.

Chefs looking to Las Vegas for a brighter future, a final payday, or a “Next Step” have, it appears, misplaced their hopes. That party has moved on.

And Dubai, which briefly presented itself as the new Valhalla for chefs, has revealed itself as the mostly empty, half-built construction site it always was. It is remarkable that the geniuses of high finance are still unable to see what any small-business owner would immediately have recognized: they’ve been building a lot of structures out there—and selling a lot of land. But nobody has actually
moved in
yet. And, by the way, it’s a fucking desert. So, it’s doubtful that Dubai can be counted on to be handing free money over to chefs anymore…Chefs and restaurateurs will have to go back to their original business model: sell people
food
they like and make money doing it.

If you’re looking for bellwethers, a big fat canary in a coal mine, you might look hard at what happens in Miami—with the multimillion-dollar renovation of the Fontainebleau Hotel and its associated businesses (including the very fine Scarpetta restaurant). Bar and “lounge” business—which has also been a stolid underwriter of restaurant bottom lines—will probably be seeing some major changes. This is a town that has traditionally thrived on bottle service: the selling of a twenty-dollar bottle of vodka for five hundred dollars (with accompanying rights to a chair). How long that sort of douche-oriented economy survives is questionable. While there will always be douchebags, how long there will be enough rich douchebags willing to spend that kind of money for, basically, nothing is something I’d be worried about down there—and at any restaurants that double as “lounges.”

For that kind of money, one can afford to do a lot of drinking at home.

I’m just hoping that, in the future, a night out doesn’t mean you curl up with a gallon jug of Wolfschmitz or a box of wine, turn on the TV, and watch people cooking things on screen that you, yourself, won’t be cooking anytime soon.

On the other hand, this would mean that whatever happens, there will always be work in food porn.

Heavenly wine and roses sing to me when you smile

—L
OU
R
EED
, “S
WEET
J
ANE
”
(
THE SLOW, BEST VERSION
)

I
t’s Christmastime in Hanoi again and
the Metropole Hotel is lit up like an amusement park. In the courtyard, a monstrous white tree with bright red ornamental balls towers over the swimming pool. The decorative palms shine blindingly bright with a million tiny bulbs. I’m on my second gin and tonic and planning on having a third, settled back in a heavy rattan chair and feeling the kind of sorry for myself that most people would be very content with. There’s incense in the air, buffeted about by the slowly moving overhead fans: a sickly-sweet odor that mirrors perfectly my mixed feelings of dull heartache and exquisite pleasure.

I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars—an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss.

Today, this feeling will disappear the second I’m out the door. Once I’m away from the sight of the other lone Western travelers, each, I imagine, with their own weltschmerz-loaded back story, their own unfulfilled longings, sitting there with their Gerald Seymours and their Ken Follets next to unringing cell phones. After strolling ever so slightly tipsy yet confident through the lobby, the service staff in
ao dai
s and traditional Annanite headgear address me (as they do all the guests) in French:
“Bon soir, Monsieur…Ça va?”
I’m through the doors, and suddenly the air fills with the roar of a thousand motorbikes and those feelings are gone, replaced by a giddiness, a familiar rush of overwhelming glee at being back in the country I’m crazy in love with.

The only way to see Hanoi is from the back of a scooter. To ride in a car would be madness—limiting your mobility to a crawl, preventing you from even venturing down half the narrow streets and alleys where the good stuff is to be found. To be separated from what’s around you by a pane of glass would be to miss—everything. Here, the joy of riding on the back of a scooter or motorbike is to be part of the throng, just one more tiny element in an organic thing, a constantly moving, ever-changing process rushing, mixing, swirling, and diverting through the city’s veins, arteries, and capillaries. Admittedly, it’s also slightly dangerous. Traffic lights, one-way signs, intersections, and the like—the rough outlines of organized society—are more suggestions than regulations observed by anyone in actual practice. One has, though, the advantage of the right of way. Here? The scooter and the motorbike are kings. The automobile may rule the thoroughfares of America, but in Hanoi it’s cumbersome and unwieldy, the last one to the party, a woolly mammoth of the road—to be waited on, begrudgingly accommodated—even pitied—like the fat man at a sack race.

Linh is driving—and I’ve finally, after many hours and many times as his passenger, given up on the strictly Western practice of hanging on. Nobody else does. Not the three-year-old child whipping past me, standing in front of his father and mother. Not grandma, riding side-saddle behind her son-in-law and daughter over there, or the hundreds of thousands of young men and women, chatting on cell phones or exchanging comments from the backs of other bikes. Somehow we all manage to stay aboard without gripping our drivers around the waist or shoulders—or even bracing ourselves from the back. Somehow it all works; we manage to move quickly—sometimes very quickly—through space, together and apart, without flying from our seats or colliding with each other. Thousands, millions of us, a moving conversation of words, glances, gestures, and the shrill honks of our horns with an ever-changing cast of characters snaking through Hanoi’s Old Quarter, around its lakes, weaving through crosscurrents, breaking over and around the bigger, sadder four-wheel vehicles like stones in a river, barely noticing the souls trapped glumly and impatiently inside.

Is anyone in this city over thirty?

It seems not. Statistically, it is said that nearly 70 percent of the population are under that age, and, if the streets of Hanoi (or any city in Vietnam, for that matter) are any indicator, that number seems even higher. Nobody among them remembers the war. They weren’t even alive for it. Much like our post–World War II baby boom, they must have gone straight home from the battlefield and done an awful lot of fuckin’ around here. Everyone—
everyone
, it seems—is young and either on the way to eat, returning from eating, or eating at this very minute, absolutely choking the sidewalks on low plastic stools, filling the open-to-the-street shop houses, slurping noodles or nibbling on delicious-looking bits, drinking
bia hoi
, the fresh beer of Hanoi, with varying degrees of joy and seriousness of intent.

My old favorite,
bun cha
—juicy hunks of pork served in room-temperature, sweet-and-sour green papaya juice—are grilling over charcoal by the curb; bowls of
bun oc
, the bright, reddish, steaming mix of snails, noodles, and crab roe–infused broth are recognizable from the hunks of fresh tomato on top as I sweep by. Sizzling crepes;
banh mi
sandwiches—crunchy baguettes overloaded with headcheese, delightfully mysterious pâté, pickles, and, often, a fried egg;
bun bo Hue
—a sort of heartier, more highly testosteroned version of
pho
(noodles heaped with slices of beef and pork); slabs of blood cake—and nearly every delicious goddamn thing you can think of. Tiny electric-red slices of chili peppers, crunchy sprouts, Thai basil, roughly yanked cilantro, mint, green banana slices, wedges of lime everywhere. Everywhere.

Parties of ten, twenty Vietnamese cluster around and hover over hot pots of beef parts and whole fish.

Or they just ride.

If you’re in a car, you’re fucked for any of this. Most neighborhoods have no room for your spaceship to touch down. At best, you can glide slowly by, face pressed to the glass, or—if you care to torture yourself—open the window for a moment, let your nostrils fill with the complex admixture of a thousand and one delights, most of them unavailable to you. Sure, you can park a few blocks away, maybe—but then you may as well have walked. For the scooters and motorbikes, however, there’s the convenience of
valet parking
. Oh, yes. Since nearly every available square foot of sidewalk is packed with tables, there is precious little space for bikes. But not to worry, because every little
com
, coffee shop, street stall, and eatery has a kid outside who will helpfully take your scooter and helmet, scrawl an identifying mark with chalk on the seat, and find some way to jam it in between the scores of others out front. It’s the only way the system works. When you’re done? He will helpfully extract it and have it ready for departure.

Some things never get old. Some things are just…classic. You never lose appreciation for them. Your enthusiasm may wax and wane ever so slightly, but you always come back. Whether it’s the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed” or doing it doggie-style, good is simply…good. There may be other things in life, but you can pretty much spend eternity considering the matter of the former—or latter—and you’d be hard-pressed to improve on either of them.

I feel exactly like this with Hanoi-style
pho.
I may love the Southern versions of this spicy noodle soup fiercely, and appreciate—even need—from time to time the difference, the rougher, spicier, less subtle charms of Saigon’s often cloudier, more assertive sisters. But I wouldn’t marry any of them.

Using sexual metaphors to describe food is a practice blithely, even automatically employed by most food writers—yours truly being a frequent perpetrator. But it seems particularly appropriate when describing
pho
in Hanoi—even though it’s usually a morning routine, as opposed to a late-night, post-bar, fall-into-sloppy-embrace kind of a thing. Visiting a popular
pho
shop, particularly later in the morning, after the first waves of hungry people on their way to work have been through, resembles nothing so much as the set of a porn shoot.

Here, as there, the landscape of desire is strewn with crumpled tissues, the spent expressions of human lust. Short pink plastic trash baskets overflow with little white paper balls, wet tumbleweeds are littered everywhere. Walk three feet up to the counter and they will cling embarrassingly to the soles of your feet, trail back to your table as if you are hurriedly exiting a peep-show booth. Unlike with sex, however, this walk of shame comes
before
touchdown. For one’s efforts, after a long wait on line, the handover of a few
dong
(the unfortunate name for Vietnam’s unit of currency), a jostle, and a squeeze in between strangers at a low table on a sidewalk, one is rewarded with perfection.

Broth—usually (but not absolutely always) the savory-sweet extraction of many beef bone, heavy on the marrow. Not too dark—definitely not too light. Chances are, there are three or four enormous pots of the stuff going now behind the counter, steam rising to the ceiling, the proprietor ladling the stuff straight off the top. Locals will tell you it’s all about the broth. If the broth isn’t right, the best ingredients in the world aren’t going to save it. Rice noodles. And they’d better be right, too. Too soft, too old, or too cooked? It’s shit. Too chewy? Same. Handmade and cooked to order—or at least in constantly ongoing batches, please. Classically, in Hanoi, the meat component is beef—and beef tendon, but preferences vary as to the exact mix. The counter behind the glass of my favorite place in the Old Quarter is stacked with pre-boiled beef shoulders: the perfect balance of lean and fat; and many prefer this—and only this: sliced ever so thinly onto the surface of their broth, where it wilts and relaxes and nearly dissolves into sublime tenderness. Some purists, however, insist entirely on raw beef, sliced at exactly the right degree of thinness and at the very last minute, added to the broth on the way out, so that the customers can “cook” it lightly themselves in the hot broth of their bowl by simply tossing it gently with their noodles. I, like many locals, prefer a mix of raw and cooked. The unattractive-sounding tendon, cooked properly by a master
pho
-maker, should be the best thing in the world—even for the uninitiated. Rather than being rubbery or tough, as one would expect of tendon, it should have just enough bite, just enough resistance, dissolving into fatty, marrow-like substance after just a few chews—a counterpoint to the wispy, all-too-brief pleasures of the beef. There’re usually very few of the slender, translucent little tubes in one’s bowl, and if you’re unhappy to discover one on your spoon, then they’re doing it wrong.

You complete
pho
at the table—and unlike with many similar dishes, where everybody’s got their own way of doing things, in Hanoi there seems to be an accepted orthodoxy. A dot or two of chili paste, a tiny drizzle of chili sauce, a generous squeeze of lime, toss lightly with chopsticks in the right hand—and spoon with the left. Ideally, one wants a perfect marriage of beef, broth, and noodle in each mouthful. Slurping is encouraged. As is leaning down into your bowl. As is lifting the bowl to near your mouth.

There will be a generous plate or basket of greens, herbs, and sprouts next to a bowl of
pho
—usually Thai basil, mint, and cilantro—and one adds as needed, periodically incorporating elements of freshness and crunch and a welcome bitterness to one’s mix, and one can pick idly at the occasional leaf as well, as kind of a palate cleanser.

I am hardly an expert on this subject, by the way—merely an enthusiast. But this is what I have observed and been told, over time. What is not debatable is that a perfect bowl of Hanoi
pho
is a balanced meeting of savory, sweet, sour, spicy, salty, and even umami—a gentle commingling of textures as well: soft and giving, wet and slippery, slightly chewy, momentarily resistant but ultimately near-diaphanous, light and heavy, leafy and limp, crunchy and tender. There—and nearly not there at all. Were this already not enough to jerk a rusty steak knife across your grandma’s throat, empty her bank account, and head off to Hanoi, consider the colors: bright red chilies; the more subdued, richer-red toasted-chili paste; bright green vegetables; white sprouts. Pinkish-red raw meat, turning slowly gray as it cooks in your bowl, the deep brown colors of the cooked meat, white noodles, light amber broth. Nearly all God’s colors in one bowl.

This is a sophisticated and deceptively subtle thing, Hanoi
pho
. I do not pretend to fully understand and appreciate its timeless beauty. Here, describing
pho
as more like love than sex would be more accurate—as there is simply not enough time on this planet, I think, to ever truly
know
it. It is an unconditional kind of love, in that it doesn’t matter where you enjoy it—elevated only a few feet off a dirty street corner or at the sleekly designed counter of an overdecorated lounge. It contains, like the man said, “multitudes.”

Sometimes I think I should feel a little guilty about writing stuff like the above.

It’s porn. Albeit food and travel porn.

I had it, I lived it—and, chances are, most of the people reading this have not.

It seems ungracious to share some experiences. Though I’m sure it’s difficult to accept, my parents brought me up to believe that showing off was a bad thing, a sign of generally bad manners. (I’m not saying those values took hold, just that I might have heard them mentioned.)

Some things I’ve seen, some experiences at tables and counters around the world, I feel a little bad telling people about. I may not hesitate to put them on TV at every opportunity—but that’s…
different
somehow, in that it’s somebody
else
, the evil camera people, the editors, doing the telling. This conveniently lets me off the hook.