Knife's Edge - Restaurant Rants & Raves

How to be a vegetarian at a restaurant

This really should be a subheading of the "how to be a customer" guide that all diners need to read but we can just start with this piece.

Here in Northern California we seem to have the greatest concentration of self-styled vegetarians in the US. Not too many of them meet my (and most chef's) definition of a vegetarian which is simple. You don't eat dead animals, period. In my book, vegetarians don't eat fish or poultry. They don't order tofu with gravy that contains chicken stock. They do eat milk and cheese. I'm pretty iffy on the egg thing. I mean, you don't want to eat the dead animal but you'll eat the egg ? That somehow seems more barbaric, if your motive for vegetarianism has to do with treatment of animals.

Most vegans seem to be clear about their definitions, although I have served calamari to a "vegan", albeit without aioli because he didn't want to eat the eggs, and know a "vegan except for bacon" woman who claims her body needs the bacon.

To get down to it. If you're one of these "vegetarians" who really eat everything under the sun, but prefer a mostly vegetarian diet, don't proclaim yourself to the waiter as a vegetarian. Just look at the menu, find what looks like fits your particular fantasy of vegetarianism and order it. If you're unsure, ask your waiter, but again don't claim to be vegetarian. Doing so just makes real vegetarians look like nuts to food professionals.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating any particular diet or combination of foods as being better than another. I'm advocating an end to hypocrisy. Eat what moves you, enjoy it, be who you are. Just don't tell me you're a vegetarian and tuck into a nice roasted chicken.

Death, incomprehensible, large & small

At the same time the death tolls from the tsunami were steadily increasing, I got a call from a friend telling me my dearest friend had succumbed the night before to a long illness. Death is not something I can comprehend, on any scale. The magnitude of the horror is Southeast Asian astounds and numbs me. The current death toll there equals more than 17 times the population of my small town. I can't even begin to come to terms with that.

In trying to to come to terms with Giacinto's death I am just as lost. I certainly was far more prepared for him to go than for a disaster of monumental proportions but it doesn't seem to make much difference. My home is filled with his artwork (he painted the image at the top of the post), including his self-portrait. I said goodbye to him a few times when he was close and had talked to him at his home in France a week or so before he died. I suppose it still really hasn't sunken in. Another close friend had died a few months ago, in fact the husband of the woman who called me about Giacinto, and I am only now starting to realize he's not coming back.

Some of you I'm sure are much more comfortable with death and dying than I am. I'm sure as I get older and my contemporaries start going more frequently I will get there as well. For now I'm just shell-shocked.

One thing we can do. Donate to Doctors Without Borders . They've set up refugee camps and are probably the most efficient of all the relief organizations.

I realized that thus far most of my posts have had little to do with food, or restaurant operation. Life has been happening. I'll post a restaurant related thing next.

Food Arts Sinking

It may be just me but it seems like every issue of Food Arts gets worse. Since being sold on the newsstands, which admittedly happened a long time ago, this magazine has gone from being an industry specific, useful publication to a basically consumer-oriented magazine supported by the worst of the foodservice manufacturer's advertising.

The events calendar is a joke. I got the current issue (December 2004) 8 days ago. The featured calendar is for December. The "plan ahead" section includes January & February. Show me any person of responsibility in a professional kitchen who can plan on participating in an event with a month and half's notice. There's a new recipe supplement, sponsored by Simplot, Clear Springs Foods, et al that is just garbage and the review of the new round-up of chef's coffee table books belongs in Gourmet.

Don't get me wrong. I love recipes, I love coffee table books, but there are other places for me to read about them. The same for Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich's culinary foray to Sardinia or Rick Bayless' latest adventure in Oaxaca. I don't need to read about the same handful of 15 chefs every other publication features.

Hospitality Design on the other hand is a treat. Partly because I haven't been reading it that long but mostly because it's a real trade magazine. The articles and profiles aren't aimed at the home decorator with restaurant fantasies. Plus it's fun to see what a multi-million dollar budget can do. A guy can dream, no ? Particularly when we spent $43,000 on our entire restaurant, from building the  kitchen from scratch, buying the equipment and smallwares, furniture, fixtures and opening food and wine inventory. Undercapitalized ? I'll say, but we're here 6 years later.

Party before the storm

Last night we had our crew party. Similar to years past although this one filled with ghosts of friends or former employees who have died. One was playing on the random rotation of the cd player and it was beautiful to hear his voice fill the room. Another, who built the place for us was there in spirit watching over his wife and daughter. The daughter works for us and the wife is a dear friend. There were other ghosts as well, people who used to work for us who have now moved on, they were invited and many showed up and while a good time was had by all I had to reflect on how much we have changed since opening.

And stayed the same. We are still faced with the perpetual problem of trying to be employers to people we feel close to. It works great when everyone rises to the occasion and mostly everyone does, but each of them have these niggling faults which drive us crazy. Probably always will.

Part of the problem is in our area we have a labor puddle as opposed to an actual pool. The other part of the problem is ourselves, the grandchild of a Communist organizer, with a hippie musician dad, married to someone who grew up traveling around the country in a horse van with a ragtag bunch of gypsy hippies for parents don't make for the most accomplished capitalists.

We're more restaurant as social experiment rather than profit making venture. Makes you feel good about yourself. Until the mortgage is due. I'd like to think there's some point at which we will arrive, where we've figured out how to make a living and still maintain our personalities and dignity.

The storm is coming tonight, hungry families getting together for their annual bloodletting. Thankfully, we're closed tomorrow but the day after Christmas is also full moon and anyone who deals with the public knows what that means. John Q. Werewolf, his bride and progeny will be out howling at the waiters.

Hope we don't howl back.

Ok, maybe not Adria

After writing the last bit about Ferran Adria, I realized El Bulli is out in the middle of nowhere, on a tortorous road, yet still is doing these experiments, to much fanfare and financial success. It is a perpetual mystery to us at what level of pricing, service, location, etc. do some of the ridiculous problems and complaints about food and service disappear.

There is certainly what William Grimes called "the Zagat effect", where people are willing to believe something is good because they've been told it is. But there's something more. I doubt you see this scenario much at Charlie Trotter's or El Bulli. 4 top comes into the restaurant, takes a table, messes up the setting, gets water, gets up and leaves because they can't find anything they like. Perhaps once a year, if that. We get it about twice a week, almost nightly in the summertime. And we do basic, contemporary American food. No foam, deconstructions, challenging ingredients, etc.

Taking reservations would help, but requires more staff, leading to more payroll, leading to higher pricing which our country bumpkins won't support.  Raising prices might not be such a bad thing, but I'm not convinced it would raise the sophistication level of our customers  correspondingly.

I know we're not alone in this. The book, "Wife of the Chef" by Courtney Febbroriello describes the same problem (and many others the small restuarateur has). How do we fix it ?

So I lied

After saying the next post would be a puff piece/hatchet job thing, I realized the entire blog would be exactly that.

I was never much of a diarist and blogging seemed somewhat foreign to me but 3 blogs changed that.

The first, Saute Wednesday , I don't really think of as a blog but I've read it religiously for at least a year. The links to food sections around the country and around the world are invaluable for those of us in the boondocks trying to keep abreast of what's happening out there.

The second is chez pim . I met Pim unknowingly at a restaurant in San Francisco. She was dining with 3 friends and as we were all sharing the same small counter we started talking. Of the 4 she was certainly the most erudite, down to earth and friendly. A week or so later I saw a link to her blog on Saute Wednesday and found all the same qualities there. Her choice of typepad convinced me it was the way to go.

The third is gastropoda.com , Regina Schrambling's ramblings. At first I was enjoying her vitriolic attitude but quickly felt like I was in a roomful of bitchy queens. The first 10 minutes of bon mots are funny but quickly get tiresome and sad until you feel like you have to leave the room and take a long, hot shower. I'm usually of the "if you can't say anything nice, come sit by me" stripe but I realized one of the most tiresome things about her site was there was no mention of anything she enjoyed.

I'll try to combine the informativeness of the first, the erudition of the second and the honesty of the third, with a liberal dose of things I like as well.

Speaking of Ms. Schrambling, I have to take issue with her on at least one thing in her review of Blue Hill at Stone Barn, the joint venture between David Rockefeller and Dan Barber.

Country restaurants tend to be staffed by country bumpkins. Anywhere else in the world, service is a serious profession. Here, it’s a way to make some change, and rarely enough to squander on a meal where you get to see how the other half eats.

True enough, except the anywhere else in the world part. The world yes, this country no. However, the reality is, far more so than the staff, the diners are country bumpkins, even in well-touristed areas. Try delivering professional food and service in a restaurant where you routinely have to explain what polenta is (in an area populated by the families of Italian and Portuguese immigrants). I'd like to see Ferran Adria or the execrable Grant Achatz try their hand here.

 

Sharpening

In a busy kitchen a sharp knife is your most important tool. With continual use, it dulls, but much like watching yourself slowly age you don't realize it's gotten quite as dull as it has until you find yourself using massive force to cut an onion. It's time to sharpen.

The Knife's Edge is my attempt to sharpen your other most important tool. Your mind. After years of owning a restaurant in a small Northern California town my wits have become dull. My once strong opinions have been shelved and most of my thoughts are kept to myself in the interest of not offending potential or existing customers. This blog will be a whetstone to regain my edge.

Once I get a few pictures to post, I'll start getting this to look right. And since it's been a long time since this tool has been sharpened, there's going to be a lot of debris flying for a while. The next post, the promised rants and raves a la John Waters' wonderful Puff Piece and Hatchet Job, from his book Crackpot.