Best Food Writing 2013 (4 page)

It was the same hopeful fool who, not long before, had found himself pushing through Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport, headed for One Flew South, chef Duane Nutter's upscale eatery tucked into a corner of Terminal E. Walking in was like entering the
Star Trek
holodeck set on Soothing Restaurant World, and once again I was rewarded, this time by a dish I'd never seen before—a deconstructed fish “chowder” in which rich white miso stood in for cream while a large clamshell held the remaining ingredients: celery, potato, and a cube of fatty salmon. It would have been a pleasing revelation anywhere in the world. I was getting used to this. We all are.

Indeed, there is no place left—geographic or institutional—where good food would be noteworthy simply for being unlikely. Well, not
quite
no
place. . . . At one point, I found myself in a hospital on the outskirts of Raleigh, North Carolina, surrounded by men in white coats. Each, thankfully, was at the top of his field. One described for me the other's credentials, how he had gone to the very best schools and run a successful practice elsewhere before being recruited to this facility. I was in the very best hands, he assured me, clapping his colleague on the back: “You should taste his cannoli!”

I was standing in the vast kitchen serving Rex Hospital, where Jim McGrody has brought the Food Revolution to the shitshow that is American health care. Around us, McGrody's team of sous-chefs, some of whom attended the Culinary Institute of America, were at work: A cook was grilling yellow squash in batches. Another lifted a tawny, glistening roasted pork loin from an oven while yet another mixed fresh sausage with spinach and rice, to make stuffing.

McGrody has been a lifelong institutional chef, first in the army and then at various universities. It was while working at his first hospital, in Washington, D.C., that he began to believe that the food he was in charge of serving seemed antithetical to anything resembling healing. He began to fantasize about a better way. “Cooks in our hospitals know how to make veal stock. They know how to make pan gravy using the
fond,”
McGrody writes in his memoir/manifesto,
What We Feed Our Patients.
“The days of canned peas and three-compartment plates . . . are over.”

The kitchen at Rex went a long way toward fulfilling that fantasy. In an office off the kitchen floor, an army of operators fielded orders from patients in the hospital's 433 beds. Each is provided with a room-service-style menu featuring such items as pecan-crusted sautéed chicken topped with maple-butter pan sauce and lime-and-ginger-glazed salmon. A software program alerted the operators to any allergies or other proscriptions: a diabetic ordering four chocolate “mud” shakes, for instance. Even those patients labeled “non-appropriates”—those who can't swallow traditional food—are treated to dignified fare like fresh peas pureed and molded into actual pea shapes, or blueberry panna cotta made from low-fat yogurt. Ingredients were overwhelmingly fresh. Across the board, the notion that healthy and tasty are not mutually exclusive, a lesson that has perhaps had a harder time penetrating the South than many other places, was emphasized—not by lecture but by example. “When I die,” McGrody
told me, “I want my tombstone to read ‘The Man Who Killed Off Fruit Cocktail.'”

It's instinctive that healthful, good-tasting food sourced locally and served lovingly makes sense in terms of healing and investment in one's community. That, of course, doesn't answer why it's been allowed to happen. The fact that McGrody's program has provided a net gain of $1.9 million over three years does. Partly, that represents a savings over the industrial-catering company that previously handled food service. But it also reflects an increase in revenue from patients who choose Rex over other hospitals—just as they might choose Boise's Modern Hotel and its cocktail program over a motel with a sports bar specializing in appletinis. McGrody heard about one who demanded to be taken to the “Rex Carlton.” Grassroots locavorism and hidden hipster speakeasies are all well and good; it's when the market speaks through once monolithic, indifferent institutions that we know something serious is afoot.

And so finally east, across the amber waves of grain to New York, the land of my birth. To find a proper example of the Food Revolution in New York City was a challenge, only because the revolution has succeeded so wildly here that it's become the establishment. From the windy shores of the Rockaways, toward which cadres of foodies troop each summer to eat tacos from beachfront shacks, to the once industrial lots of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, now lousy with food trucks, there are few cities in which Good Food Everywhere could be taken quite so literally. Even the Upper West Side, which used to be a reliable object of mockery for its lack of decent eating, has a Momofuku Milk Bar.

The only answer was to venture to the one place I would never go on my own: the very bastion of old, stodgy, arrogant New York, the belly of the beast. I speak, of course, of Yankee Stadium.

I will allow that I write from the point of view of a lifelong Mets fan and Yankee hater. Nevertheless, I think it's fairly objective to point out that the mighty Yankees have lagged behind the city's trend toward good food in its sports facilities, whether Shake Shack at the Mets' Citi Field or the Andrew Carmellini menu unveiled last season at Madison Square Garden. Perhaps this is on the theory that their fans can subsist entirely on a diet of monuments. Whatever the
reason, the stadium has stood as evidence that while it is indeed now possible to get good food everywhere, it remains equally possible to get bad food anywhere.

I had never been to the new Yankee Stadium. You enter through an archway in a massive facade at once as oppressive as something from Imperial Rome and as shiny and neon-ringed as a space station. The aesthetic could be called Planet Mussolini. Yet even here, deep in the recesses of the spookily named Great Hall, where one must avert one's eyes lest one be brainwashed by images of DiMaggio, Yogi, and The Mick, among the $9 Bud Lights and the $5 bags of oversalted peanuts, all but ignored though lines stretched everywhere else, there sat a lonesome little booth that marked the end of my journey.

Called Parm, it was a creation of the team behind Little Italy's Torrisi Italian Specialties. The booth looked like any other in the hall, except that if you looked closely, there was an Old World-style display of ricotta-cheese containers and cans of tomatoes on its shelves. Parm offered two sandwiches—meatball parmigiana, and sliced turkey, shredded lettuce, and hot vinegar peppers, both on fresh sesame seed rolls.

I climbed to my seat behind the right-field foul pole. I unwrapped my sandwiches as the national anthem came to a close. Neither was an especially ambitious sandwich—not a slice of hand-cured, kimchi-flavored Kurobuta bacon or hint of reverse spherification to be found. But the lettuce was crisp, the peppers sharp and hot, the turkey fresh. The meatball was light and pillowy, with the funky flavor of real beef. And now the team took the field. And now I took a deep bite of first one sandwich, then the other. And now the umpire took his place behind the catcher; now the pitcher set to throw. And as the crowd rose up, my heart swelled, or maybe it was just my belly. Here on this picture-perfect summer evening. Under the arc lights. America.

 

 

T
HE
E
ND OF
A
NONYMITY

By Bethany Jean Clement

From
Seattle Arts & Performance

As managing editor and food critic for Seattle's alternative weekly
The Stranger,
Bethany Jean Clement is deeply connected to one of America's most vibrant food scenes. In this essay, she asks the million-dollar question: How objective can–or should—a critic really be?

L
ong ago, in a time before Facebook, anonymous restaurant reviewers roamed the earth. In order to experience restaurants just like anybody else—no special treatment—they telephoned from blocked numbers and made reservations under names that were not their own. They lumbered in as any other diner would, assessing astutely yet nonchalantly the performance of the coat-check girl, the host, the bringers of water, and the offerings of wine; the service was scrutinized while maintaining an entirely pococurante front. Some were rumored to whisper into primitive recording devices hidden in their sleeves. Others relied on memory or on the appearance of a weak bladder, ducking repeatedly into the restroom to scribble notes. And the food appeared on the plate, and it was eaten, and it was paid for in cash or with a credit card under an alias.

In the jungle of New York City, where the
New York Times
reviewer could single-handedly render a restaurant extinct, the burden of remaining unidentified was more serious still. Ruth Reichl famously chronicled her efforts in that role in her 2005 memoir,
Garlic and Sapphires.
She went to an acting coach, acquired a wardrobe of wigs, and dressed as a number of specific characters. She enjoyed an unlimited budget and never visited a restaurant fewer than three times—
generally more—always anonymously. She wrote, “You know what it's like when I'm not in disguise: The steaks get bigger, the food comes faster, and the seats become more comfortable.” The presence of a known critic could change the very composition of the furniture—this was serious business. If one needed to wear a mustache, so be it.

But, as Bill Keller noted in the
New York Times
in 2009, “despite all her theatrical dress-ups,” Ruth Reichl “was often made by the maître d'hôtel.” (One might also imagine that she was sometimes recognized
because
of her costumes—e.g., “Who is that lady in the crazy-looking wig on table 12?”) Keller also said that despite subsequent critic Frank Bruni's less dramatic attempts to stay undercover, he'd dined with Bruni “in places where it was clear—from the trying-too-hard service, or the clusters of whispering waiters, or some other tell—that they were on to us.” People being “made,” the “tell”—it was an undertaking of film noir, and as doomed from the start. When Sam Sifton took the
NYT
reviewer post in 2009, he'd held other posts at the paper; while his photo was removed from the website, it was way too late. Gawker posted Sifton photoshopped into proposed disguises—Harry Potter, Frank Bruni, “that partying dude from Australia.” Keller said Sifton would arrive unannounced to review, and noted that “a reviewer's own experience can be cross-checked with intelligence from others. So, while we don't intend to put Sam's face on sides of MTA buses, I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over this.”

Here in Seattle, Nancy Leson—the most powerful person in the industry as the reviewer for the
Seattle Times
for almost a decade—only abdicated her anonymity in 2008, with a “coming out party” revealing her identity on the front page of the food section. The official restaurant-reviewer title was passed on, and Leson became a blogger, excited at the new world open to her “doing in-person interviews with chefs and restaurateurs and getting out to the food and wine events I've long shied away from.”

But from the start, Leson's cloak of invisibility had some unavoidable holes. She'd worked waiting tables for 17 years, five of them in Seattle, before she got her journalism degree; as she said in a column in 2000, she was “occasionally ‘outed' by friends still in the trade.” She was also a freelance writer in the beginning, attending food media events and interviewing chefs in person before anonymity was ever in the offing. She made efforts to stay anonymous, but,
she wrote, “many of the city's high-profile chefs and restaurateurs could pick me out of a lineup,” and as she acknowledged in print, she was known at favorite places like Marco's Supperclub and Le Pichet. During the 2000
Seattle P-I/Times
strike, she told me recently, she waited tables at Nell's in Green Lake for a weekend, just for fun, unpaid. Also working there at the time, in the kitchen: Ethan Stowell, now of his own local restaurant empire.

In 2005, when I was a freelance writer,
The Stranger
asked me to interview a Seattle chef about (presciently!) street food. I chose Ethan Stowell. He owned a restaurant downtown called Union that was about as far from street food as you could get. From across the counter of the pass in the swanky, palatial space, he told me he had a thing for the mobile snack-stands of Mexico: “Oysters that have been sitting out for three hours in the sun, the tacos made in a big cast iron bucket on wheels—most people don't eat it, but I do.” I'd written a few restaurant reviews, but it seemed silly to be concerned about anonymity—this guy only owned one restaurant, after all, and
The Stranger
had already reviewed it, and what was the big deal with restaurant reviewers being anonymous anyway? It didn't make sense to me, while talking to a chef at his fancy restaurant about his enthusiasm for eating quantities of shrimp from street carts in Mazatlan—that made sense, and that wasn't something that would be the same over the telephone.