Recently, La Tour d’Argent, a standard bearer of la grande cuisine since the 1500s – where kings and emperors have feasted, where the fork made its French debut – posted a horrifying video on Instagram of a soufflé being murdered at the table. It was scalped by the server, then disemboweled by the spoonful onto a plate. As if such a crime could be decorated, the uncapped dome – now deflated – was halved and put back atop its rearranged parts, presumably as a garnish. Just what the hell is going on over there on the Quai de la Tournelle?
What’s going on there and elsewhere – especially in the upper stratosphere of dining, where the air has apparently gone dangerously thin – is a loss of mission. Food seems no longer the focus on either side of those fancier restaurant tables. Instead, we have allowed narcissism to take over. All of the look-at-me self-seriousness – whether feigned for commercial promotion or full-blown cult of personality – has become so predictable, so commonplace, so recognizable that it’s spoofable.
For the better half of two decades now, the restaurant industry has shamelessly gorged at a buffet of shortcuts and self-gratification. Greedy plates piled with gimmicks, grabby reaches for stars and rankings, and – to lend a sheen of selflessness to it all (just in case there are adults in the room who care) – steaming heaps of platitudes to warm the soul.
Chefs, cooks, and restaurateurs yes, but, cringingly, people who identify as journalists and documentarians too lined up alongside groupies, influencers, and the dining public for the gavage, gleefully glutting on foraged lies and copycat sensationalism.
It hasn’t just been a riot of parvenus and upstarts. The old guard was forced to join the circus too, else risk extinction. In doing so, many have betrayed themselves horribly.
And thus, we are finally arriving at the sum of my ruminations over the years.
As predicted, what went up, is finally coming down. And as this farrago of an all-you-can-eat retches to a Cleesian end, what we find ourselves being left with in the aftermath – especially at the high end – are boring restaurants serving boring food to boring people, all packaged into 30-second reels of spinning plates and second-rate superlatives. If everything looks the same, it’s because it is the same – a BINGO card of mini tartlet canapés and tableside skits.
If you’ve scrolled back on this blog and wondered why I keep writing about the same handful of restaurants (and writing less frequently too), here you have it. Excellence left the building long ago, never mind the hope for something unique or exciting.
And what incentives are there to be any of those things anyway? We’ve decapitated meritocracy, the fonthead of esteem, aspiration, quality, dignity and progress. In its place, we’ve cheered to life a modern-day Cerberus, each of its three beastly heads now cunningly disguised as the enlightened Graces of our times: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
But be not deceived. This is a false sorority that is neither virtuous nor champions meaningful progress; the names are merely ornamental. Instead, it fronts a radical, post-Foucauldian ideology (I’m sure there are Foucauldian experts who will justly object to my homespun terminology), one in which everything turns on presumptions made about power and privilege.
What do I mean?
It’s an easy concept to grasp, because it’s terribly reductive.
Under this ideology, power is presumed to have accrued through inherent or inherited unfair advantages. This type of privilege in life, therefore, is the ill-gotten fruit of a poisonous tree. Those who have it – regardless of how it was acquired, whether through birth or hard work – profit from it through the oppression of others and are thereby not only morally compromised, but rendered morally irredeemable.
Those perceived to have less power, on the other hand, are presumed to be victims of the unfairness. In a post-Foucauldian framework, this victimhood, like power, is inherent and can be inherited. Even more dangerous, it can be created or validated at any time upon perception or presumption alone – the new legal standards – simply because the scales of power and privilege are believed to tip the other way. To make up for their lack of power and privilege, victims are granted absolute moral authority over their morally irredeemable oppressors in the struggle to overcome unfairness.
We’ve all witnessed this ideology put into practice with horrifying consequences, in the restaurant industry and elsewhere. There need not be any proof of harm or slight, the struggle need not be demonstrable. Those with power and privilege are always presumed guilty, with no pathway to innocence. For them, there is only contrition through admission or cancellation.
By contrast, victims are given full benefit of the doubt. They must always be believed. And since their suffering earns them moral superiority, under the post-Foucauldian moral equivalency, the oppressed (and anyone who joins their cause) are entitled to all manner of unethical and immoral behavior against their oppressors in the name of social justice.
As most of us know, this is not social justice. Those who adopt this simplified worldview may have good intentions, but they are not serious people offering serious solutions to serious problems. This is social grievance, and often revenge or unprincipled opportunism, masquerading as social justice. This is religion without redemption, a dashboard on full-blink; morality unmoored from the safe harbor of reason, hitched to power, and set adrift in relativism.
What does this have to do with finding a nicely roasted chicken?
Well, who, in that kind of unmeritocratic world is going to bother properly roasting you a chicken?
In an unmeritocratic world, excellence is the enemy of equity. Being excellent means you’ve exerted effort towards distinguishing yourself from others, and so soiled yourself in the toxic pursuit of power and privilege. Excellence is not to be celebrated, rather it deserves moral condemnation. If you think uneasy lay the head that wore the crown in Shakespeare’s day, it’s a whole new ballgame now.
It’s much easier and safer instead to claim asylum among the oppressed masses and to seek shelter in their land, where sympathies defy gravity in flowing upward to their unassailable high ground rich with moral capital.
In a post-Foucauldian world, cooks are not encouraged to turn out a flawless omelet or a nicely roasted anything, just like students at elite colleges and universities are no longer expected to form a logical or coherent worldview. It’s much easier instead to put on the cloak of victimhood and demand sympathy and praise. Or, if you had the great misfortune of being arbitrarily assigned inherently toxic traits at birth – like being white, male, or heterosexual – or, through blood, sweat, and tears have achieved a position of power and authority, your only option is to loudly profess your allyship with those who you or your ancestors are presumed to have oppressed and hope for the best. We’ve seen a lot of this sort of self-flagellatory behavior too, haven’t we?
Awards once given out for excellence have thus been rebranded as tokens of consolation for those perceived as victims of often of ill-defined and unprovable sins. Play these stupid games and you too can win stupid prizes: welcome to the James Beard Foundation Awards.
Meanwhile, in civilized reality – where the rest of us exist – excellence is still an admirable goal. That’s because in reality, it’s possible to be both excellent and morally upstanding. Call me crazy, but in reality, the two can and often do mean the same thing.
In reality, truth and fairness go hand in hand. Call me crazy again, but in reality, you really can’t have one without the other.
It’s true that in reality, even in a civilized one, there is inequality and struggle. Of course there’s inequality and struggle. Those are two defining qualities of reality, unfortunately.
But this is not an excuse to become uncivilized. This only makes it all the more imperative that we find ways of leveling the playing field as much as possible without abandoning due process, our precious presumption of innocence, or any other core democratic value because, in a civilized reality – I just checked again to be sure – two wrongs still don’t make a right.
In a civilized reality, the goal should be equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. And we have and can continue making meaningful strides toward this goal precisely because, in a civilized reality, empathy and merit are not mutually exclusive. Both should be equally encouraged and supported.
The good news I have to offer at the end of 2023 is that many in the restaurant industry have been operating quietly in this reality. It’s not the flashy or trendy place to be, it won’t score you likes on the youth channels. But, reality is a long game, and as the miasma of shortsighted sensationalism lifts, those who have invested in it will come out on top.
Despite my cynicism and criticisms about the industry’s tomfoolery, thankfully, those operating in reality have helped raise the tide of quality overall, lifting most restaurants with it.
Setting aside the crowd at the tippy top of dining – that group is still sorting itself out at the buffet, hoping for an eleventh-hour, plant-based comeback perhaps – what I see is the thick, middle loam of the restaurant industry, where most of us eat, enriched with a far higher standard of cooking than a decade, or even five years ago. For all the cribbing and mimicry ad nauseum, luckily, most of what was copied was the good stuff.
Sourcing high-quality, seasonal ingredients, for example, was a worthy habit that made the rounds. It was so worthy in fact, many were accused of lying about just how seasonal and high-quality their ingredients were.
Chefs were reintroduced to heat. I am pleased. Hearth-style cooking has not only experienced a revival, it’s practically a mania now – cinder blocks and paddle fans being the unlikely power couple of the decade, thanks to early trendsetters like Extebarri, Ekstedt, and Saison.
The rediscovery of fire has sparked a glorious return to Old World ways, bringing with it a renaissance of roasted meats and vegetables, and wood-fire pizzas too. The sudden onset of good pizza has been so intense, so pervasive in fact, that it has given rise to a precious strain of snobbery I could do without. The next time you’re tempted to turn up your nose at a decent slice, just remember the average, blond, flabby wedge that passed for pizza a decade or two ago. For those who are too young to remember, be thankful. What we have now is far better.
Bread-baking and pasta-making – carbs in general for that matter – have become cool again. So cool, in fact, that every restaurant now has a pasta section on its menu, just like every restaurant now has burrata and anchovies on the menu.
The same-ification in that yawning gap between fast casual and luxury – that once-reasonable mid-range, where the check average is now anywhere between $50-$180 (my immigrant parents would never) – is really something. It’s not just that restaurants are all beginning to taste the same, they’re also beginning to look and feel alike too.
If there was a genomic test for restaurants, I suspect that the most relevant species now is something of a cross-pollinate of Chez Panisse and Ssäm Bar, or Angler and St. John. Either way, there’s a suspicious likelihood that Ken Fulk, Keith McNally, or Yotam Ottolenghi jumped into bed upstream at some point too. If you’re unsure whether you’ve landed in Shoreditch or Polanco, a nook in the Marais or at Carbone, or wandered onto the set of a Wes Anderson flick, don’t panic. More likely, you’ve just stumbled upon the newest hotspot in Denver.
On both coasts and in between, restaurants are becoming indistinguishable from each other, a polyglot brew of bistro and trattoria, with a streak of boho, or a dash of Chinese and Moroccan thrown in as an attempt at personality. Steak frites will show up alongside a stew of chickpeas with chermoula, for example. A roasted head of cauliflower and XO sauce is no longer culturally at odds on a menu with tacos al pastor (I hear they nixtamalize and grind the masa in-house). Seafood tower, anyone? How about a plate of finely sliced charcuterie? Don’t forget the pasta section. Oh, and there might be pizza too.
It’s a great problem to have, this overall improvement in the quality of cooking, not to mention its expanding variety and availability. Even better, most of the food is stuff that I actually recognize. This is what I hoped for years ago. The irony, of course, is that the very thing that makes dining out now a dependably better experience than before is the very thing that makes the prospect of finding something truly exceptional increasingly unlikely.
So, I could tell you that I’ve had a lot of solid meals here and there in 2023 (and I have). What’s becoming harder, however, is recommending that you go there instead of here, or here instead of there. By and large, I’m unable to articulate a distinction that truly matters anymore. Increasingly, everything is more or less good, or at the very least, good enough.
Has any newcomer knocked my socks off recently? No. Not in a long time. Maybe, this is the cost of marked progress towards simple, sensible, and delicious cooking for all. Or, maybe I’ve just been around the block too many times and have seen too much. Either way, in recent years, I’ve found myself worrying less about whether I’ll find a decent meal, and having the luxury of focusing more on where I’d like to have it. Given where we’ve been, the silliness we’ve had to endure, I consider this a win.
My worries turn instead, for 2024 and beyond, to the economy. In this respect, I fear too many still aren’t operating in reality.
As the restaurant industry continues to figure out what fair pay means – not just for its workers, but for the people who grow and raise our food – I worry that prices in the growing middle tier of restaurants are climbing beyond the reach of the shrinking American middle class. I’ve never been a particularly strong student at the maths, but this doesn’t seem like a sustainable model.
For better or worse, the pandemic forced a much-needed financial reckoning in the industry. Frankly, it culled a lot of overleveraged hangers-on, many that should never have even opened. However, those that survived, and those that have opened since, have enjoyed a robust, post-pandemic boom. And that’s been great.
But how long will this last, this indulgent stretch of wine, women, and song. The Major Food Group can’t keep opening beautiful restaurants for beautiful people at this pace forever, even if most of us could afford to keep eating at them (and we can’t). Is that why it’s introducing a five-figure private membership club for its high-rolling regulars? As fine dining struggles to regain its footing at the fringes, the middle market is starting to flood again, except it’s looking less like the middle market of yesteryear and more like the new playground for the rich.
How much longer can consumers continue spending in a state of diminishing value, especially as service standards continue to sag and lag? I recently had a $50 plate of pasta in the yawning gap. The restaurant was half-empty, despite the fact that there had been no available tables online for days, and even in the hours approaching dinner. Compounding inflation, worker shortage, skyrocketing rent, manufactured hype, or all of the above?
Given how thin the margins are, and just how much grief the industry has endured in recent years, it seems gauche to complain about restaurant prices. But I find chefs and restaurateurs increasingly joining me in sticker shock, except I’m looking at the check and they’re looking at payroll. If reality is the long game, survival will surely require a recalibration soon, right? Something has got to give eventually. If not, then the reality, I suspect and fear, is that we’re all slowly being priced out of restaurants.
