A SUBSTANTIAL PART OF THE POPULATION of Manhattan and its environs — for a host of reasons that generally have nothing whatsoever to do with what a customer ought to expect of a restaurant — believes the words of fairly well known food columnists with the same faith that Christians have in the Bible and Moslems in the Koran.
That kind of reader devotion, I imagine, is also the secret dream of some Italian journalists who are more familiar with gastritis than they are with gastronomy, but, fortunately, Italians are able to read between the lines thanks to the lens of providence’s gift to our nation, its sense of humor.
I remember a time when the fearsome critic of the New York Times came to try our food and drink. The news that he was in the restaurant spread via winks and discreet thumb-pointing in the direction of his table. I immediately instructed the waiters to pretend he was not there. Everyone should do the usual things and act as if they had never seen him before. The famous food critic ought to be served and treated just like any other customer. He was seated with a friend, and they had ordered risotto and carpaccio.
That news was also relayed at once. We all sighed with relief. It was an easy order, we were fully armed with risotto and carpaccio. But I was worried about the way he looked. He looked more like a bookkeeper than someone who tasted food from morning till night. He was as thin as a rail and wore thick-lensed tortoiseshell glasses.
You see, my idea is that the ideal gastronome ought to be a fat man, with a reassuring air of opulence, a hearty appetite, and an inclination to laughter and forgiveness. Instead the critic looked like a special envoy from a company board of directors sent round to check the books. Yet there he was preparing, with the detachment and attention to minute detail of a pathologist, to analyze the sophisticated secrets, the hard-won recondite flavors, the subtle refinements, and the veiled whispers of my dishes, the quality of the butter, the correct gestures of the service, the temperature of the containers, the erotic and tremulous consistency of the béchamel, and the hidden truth of the Brix index of our sorbets.
I assigned two trusted waiters to serve him, two men who could transfer a risotto from an ovenproof dish to the plate and set it down delicately without compromising its soft elegance, and do so in constant awareness of the work of all the men and women who had helped bring it to the table, including the backbreaking work of the women who had planted the rice and the perspiring, anxious care of the farmer who’d tended its growth. Attention to every detail, just the way we were taught by Madame Valentina Schlee, renowned designer.
A reassuring calm prevailed in the kitchen. Chef Nicola lowered his lids and said: “Rest easy!” while the French cook Philippe was vigorously and lovingly mixing the semirefined grains of dwarf rice that were taking on the golden color of the lightly sautéed fresh onion. And the American Bruce was preparing the filet for the carpaccio.
When the famous food critic was served, he sat for a moment in careful observation of all the points of form. I saw his nostrils dilate as he breathed in the aroma. With the expressionless mien of a great poker player, he took the fork and held it delicately. Then with a light gesture he skillfully slid some of the risotto on the tines of his fork and brought it to his mouth.
I trembled as I saw all the waiters stop and look, the way a herd of African gnus stop to watch a lion that suddenly appears on the crest of a distant hill. The famous journalist whispered something to his companion, and the two of them nodded. Disaster. At a distance I could read their lips. He’d whispered: “Salt.”
I believe that cooking is in real danger. Cooking in the past twenty years has often seen cerebral onanism take the place of healthy masturbation. The preachers of this new route to “pleasure” are food writers who work off their frustrations by waging war against hated tradition.
The danger first appeared in the early seventies, after the revolution of 1968, which, it is common knowledge, was not fostered by poverty or social inequity but by well-being. This totally unlikely event also struck cooking via the rejection of all the ways food was prepared in the past. There was a total lack of humility and of any understanding of man’s history, customs, and needs; and under the banner of the pure and the genuine, cooking all but stopped.
Without the essential component, namely flavor, the art of cooking has in recent years turned into a glorification of image. Indeed, cooking in the 1970s produced a host of painters and many sculptors, but very few cooks. Sauces were banned, except — who knows why — for cream sauces, and the pursuit of poor, undercooked food was fostered as a natural reaction against any dangerous signs of opulence. The results were negative acculturation, total loss of content, and pseudoecological dietetics. A real trump of snobbery. Equality in mediocrity in a so-called free form.
The authors of the gospels of gastronomy swooned in delirium over the “new” and over “angels at table” as they tried to elevate the soul of the poor “bourgeois” accustomed solely to the humble level of the neighborhood diner.
Now the poor fool was forced to contemplate and eat petals from heaven. He was made to believe that he was close to paradise. A very great deal of responsibility for this state of affairs is also due to the big hotel chains that were being taken over by rampant financiers and bookkeepers. Jimmy Sherwood’s lesson was taken to heart.
Until 1960, hotels, especially luxury hotels, set the standard for service and cooking. I do not claim that the results were always stirring, but the hotel chefs were meticulous teachers and carried forward the tradition that was the foundation of great cooking in the first half of this century.
In the 1970s service was replaced by service management. The guest of a luxury hotel, the nameless client, was obliged to read written communiqués from the hotel office and be kind enough to complete a written questionnaire before checking out. A true scandal.
In an attempt to be both brief and optimistic, I shall say only that at least two things are starting to become clear. One, people are beginning to be fed up with eating in the stern company of the angels; and two, man, to our great good fortune, is and remains a sinner. So I foresee a wish to return to tradition, a longing for quite human opulence, and an almost irresistible mania to free the tongue from its condom and once again taste the flavor of friendly foods.
It seems to me that the time is ripe to bring real cooks back to the stove. There will be a new revolution. The exact opposite of the other. The revolution of the eater. For my part, I seriously suggest we begin by beheading Gault and Millau and their ilk, bombing the refrigerator bar, tossing service communiqués into the fire, and confiscating the hotel-chain hotels and turning them over to dirt farmers. The future of cooking, and the future of the world, ought to be back in the hands of human beings.