Town & Country

No, this isn't about the magazine, nor is it about Geoffrey Zakarian's twin New York restaurants, although the review of Country in this Wednesday's NY Times did provide the final impetus to get this off my chest.

In the review Frank Bruni says,

TO appreciate Country properly, you have to overlook its name, which it got not because it stokes bucolic thoughts or emphasizes rustic dishes

and,

even though Country has a glittery soul that is almost entirely cosmopolitan

Another New Yorker, Regina Schrambling has this to say, about a place that actually is in the country

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.

Closer to home the Chronicle's review of Cyrus alluded to the countrified nature of the Sonoma dining scene.

Full disclosure here: I got a taste of this attitude recently. We had dinner with the corporate chef of a very well regarded Bay Area restaurant group, at least one of the places, to use his words, being a "nationally recognized institution of a restaurant", (even if none of them managed to get into the Chronicle top 100 the last two years). It was mostly a get to know each other dinner but the subtext was my possibly becoming the chef of this "nationally recognized institution of a restaurant". In subsequent email exchanges I came to understand that my lack of "cosmopolitan" experience was one of the major impediments to consideration.

It's true that as a young culinarian I ignored a basic tenet of career building. Rather than getting myself into places like Daniel, or Masa's, or going to Europe (there was no Thomas Keller at the French Laundry way back then), I instead looked to where I wanted to live, and took a job there. My career since has been spent in smaller, country places that make everything in house and where 200 covers is a whopping busy night.

It's also true that if I were in this fellow's position I might also as he does, look for certain restaurant names when sifting through resumes. However, I'd like to think that when face to face with a potential candidate I'd be able to evaluate him or her on their own merits, not whether they have the correct pedigree.

It's also true that I have been a believer in this "cosmopolitan" snobbery. As a young punk in Manhattan I sneered at the "bridge & tunnel" crowd who weren't "cool" enough to get into the Mudd club, even if they were willing to pay. As a New Yorker moving to San Francisco, I thought I had moved to some quaint village, a backwater if you will. Little did I know...

One of the reasons cooking attracted me as a profession was I thought it was a good example of a meritocracy. You could do it well, or you couldn't, and while performance evaluation is subjective, I thought that good work, like cream, would rise to the top. Now of course, not to be entirely cynical, I've had to revise that opinion. When working for a brief period at Savoy in NY I found that things like who sat closest to the chef at staff meal took on the same importance they do around any corporate water cooler.

So after our dinner,  the acquaintance who had made the introduction told me about her idea that had come out of our meeting, for a Slow Food Town & Country Summit. She didn't go into detail about what that might be but between that and the snarky comments by Bruni and Schrambling I started thinking about it.

In the current culinary climate the country is to be revered. If you're talking about a farmer. The prevailing wisdom is only big city chefs would possibly know what to do with the precious jewels coming from the farmer. Of course, the farmer, or the farmer's family, might have a treasured way to prepare their produce, usually something really simple and quaint that fuels the media's fantasy of food as community. Now, now, I'm not saying that food isn't an expression of community, just that the expression most often found in our media isn't accurate. Also, documented transcendent meals in the country are most often the picnic variety, you know, after the visit to the farm, precious peach and hunk of artisan cheese in hand, sitting on the life-affirming earth and reflecting that life is indeed very, very good.

The problem is establishing a fair playing field. As Amy Sherman, in her post on Bay Area Bites points out, comparing La Taqueria to Gary Danko makes no sense. I realize that's comparing economic strata rather than geographic, but it's also indicative of the difficulty reviewers face because of their (and their readers) expectations and ingrained prejudices. It's accepted that the above comparison makes no sense, but why? I don't disagree, I'm just trying to investigate my own response. Because I believe that it's the same response that automatically relegates most country restaurants to the back of the bus. Yes, I am aware that according to the Top 50 restaurants poll the top 3 are actually in the country. However, they are the exceptions, rather than the rule and all three places demand sustained attention over a period of several hours, something easier to get people to buy into in the country, (where you know, there's nothing to do) rather than minutes from downtown.

Do I have a chip on my shoulder? Sure. In some ways I'm still that insecure punk kid, looking for something to sneer at and terrified of being one of "them", whoever "they" might be to me today. So am I really looking at myself in the mirror? You bet. But that punk kid now has a few lines on his face  and a knowledge that "cosmopolitan" means "so sophisticated as to be at home in all parts of the world or conversant with many spheres of interest".

Comments

[jsp]

And let me just add... I have had far greater, sincere, caring service from some of those "bumpkins" than some of the jaded, burned-out, innattentive, "just doing this while I (fill-in-the-blank)" city servers, who dream of moving to the country for an "easier" life.

[Kudzu]

Ah, haddock -- Your last paragraph is superb.