Felix Salmon asks: what makes a meal valuable?
I would love to know. I recently paid a lot of money to have dinner at a really nice restaurant. I remember the wine and the fact that my chicken breast came wrapped in tender crispy strips of bacon, a food I haven't tasted in over a year.
The odd thing about exile is that it transforms the most basic things into luxuries. Things like bacon, which in the United States usually comes with eggs in the kinds of restaurants that have a special parking area for trucks.
There's a listing of the best restaurants in the world, which includes Alinea in Chicago, which might be the most famous restaurant in America. I first read about Alinea's desserts in the New Yorker (searching for Alinea brings up 9 results on the New Yorker site, and that list doesn't include the article I read). The chef apparently does avant-garde things like serve food, grouped by flavor, in test tubes. Desserts are little bonbons of exotica served bare on a tabletop strewn with honey, wildflowers and chocolate sauce. Alinea's menu reads like the program for an evening of performance art, which apparently is intentional. The New Yorker profile refers to the chef as the sort of person who savors "theatre" and "dinner" in equal measure. I have to admit that I'm not used to seeing the words "theatre" and "dinner" unless they're preceded by "mystery."
But this post isn't about the classism inherent in food engineering.
My point is that the prix fixe at Alinea costs roughly as much as my dinner at Olive. But I feel a bit cheated - I'm not sure that Delhi's idea of fine dining really matches the global standard. The most famous restaurants in this city serve "authentic" foreign cuisine, but the principle is to replicate something that can't really be taken out of context in the first place. Great ethnic food is always a local phenomenon; transplanting it serves no purpose.
There is absolutely no way that any restaurant in Delhi could serve me a pizza like the one I had on a porch in Rome. The pizza came sprinkled with rounds of fresh mozzarella, chunks of marinated potatoes and barely-cooked eggplant. This isn't to say that I don't like Italian food in Delhi. But it's good for a different reason.
Obviously, the point here isn't to say "let them see Rome," that's pointless. My point is that amazing food, like a truly beautiful man or woman, often reminds you of nothing but itself. The experience is inimitable, which is why it is costly.
Needless to say, if something is really one of a kind, it can't be bought. That's not a market, it's a singularity. It's strange that Delhi's fine dining restaurants don't seem to appreciate this situation, because after all Indian cooks are famous for never using recipes. Every daal, every khadi, every sabzi is a unique entity, made according to an individual taste. That, of course, is what makes home food the most valuable thing of all - the real singularity, the thing that can't be bought.
In the world of commercial fine dining, chefs strive to create a singular experience. Sometimes it's with truly extraordinary food antics, like at Alinea. Lazier - and less imaginative - chefs rely on overpriced ingredients, thinking that if they stuff a foie gras inside a truffle inside a jar of caviar, they've created a masterpiece worthy of spending hundreds of dollars on.
But none of this addresses Felix's question. The value of a meal depends on a million factors that have nothing to do with the way the food tastes. The senses share a strange relationship with memory. A great meal is one that can be enjoyed, not just in the moment but later in countless retellings. Imagine how many cocktail party stories you could get out of a single dinner at Alinea? Isn't that, to a certain extent, what we pay for?
The most memorable meals of my life, in no particular order:
A Mexican restaurant behind on Clarks Street in Chicago. My sister and I ordered a Mexican soup and asked to share it. We each got a massive bowl of orange broth, with tiny drops of oil floating on the surface. Whole green vegetables, unidentifiable but roughly the size of my fist, swam in the soup along with entire chicken thighs. When I went looking for the restaurant six weeks later, it wasn't there.
The tortilla stand under the El tracks in Chicago that served goat tacos all night.
That bagel place on Armitage that served steamed bagel sandwiches, ostensibly, but really something so unusual that I can't even place it. I was working for a guide book at the time. I ate alone but didn't even notice.
In Costa Rica, boiled black beans and rice sprinkled with tiny pieces of a fried meat that I later learned was Spam. Still the only time in my life I've had Spam. Also from Costa Rica: fruit shakes. A blended pink guava shake made with crunchy ice and sweet, sweet milk, whipped to a foam in a blender. Nothing like it, anywhere.
Kerala - pulled over at a roadside diner to eat vegetables in coconut curry with appam. Disproved my long-standing and private theory that most vegetarian food is compensating for something, and never successfully. Afterwards, we rinsed our hands in the cleanest public bathroom I've seen outside of a five-star hotel.
Brussels - swordfish steak. Tasted like wrestling a shark must feel.
Goa - shark. Tasted like smelling an old gym sock feels.
Anyway. I used to work in a coffee shop where customers frequently tipped us 100% over the bill. What was the trick? It had nothing to do with the coffee, which was good but unoriginal. It had something to do with the staff, which was all young pretty girls from the surrounding colleges. But really it had everything to do with the service, with the fact that every regular customer (and there were several) could walk in and know that his order was anticipated in advance. He had been expected.
These are all ways that we create singularities - things that can't be bought. Putting a price on a meal at Alinea or a guava shake in Costa Rica is a matter of caprice, really. Grant (Alinea's chef) could literally charge whatever he wants for a meal - he's settled on $198 not because that's what his food is worth, but because that's the price that fills his 80-cover restaurant to capacity night after night.
Other people, like Olive, copy the price but not really the singularity. Copying, by its very nature, is the process of creating a poor impression. Who wants to kiss a ghost? Who wants to eat imitated food?
I would love to know. I recently paid a lot of money to have dinner at a really nice restaurant. I remember the wine and the fact that my chicken breast came wrapped in tender crispy strips of bacon, a food I haven't tasted in over a year.
The odd thing about exile is that it transforms the most basic things into luxuries. Things like bacon, which in the United States usually comes with eggs in the kinds of restaurants that have a special parking area for trucks.
There's a listing of the best restaurants in the world, which includes Alinea in Chicago, which might be the most famous restaurant in America. I first read about Alinea's desserts in the New Yorker (searching for Alinea brings up 9 results on the New Yorker site, and that list doesn't include the article I read). The chef apparently does avant-garde things like serve food, grouped by flavor, in test tubes. Desserts are little bonbons of exotica served bare on a tabletop strewn with honey, wildflowers and chocolate sauce. Alinea's menu reads like the program for an evening of performance art, which apparently is intentional. The New Yorker profile refers to the chef as the sort of person who savors "theatre" and "dinner" in equal measure. I have to admit that I'm not used to seeing the words "theatre" and "dinner" unless they're preceded by "mystery."
But this post isn't about the classism inherent in food engineering.
My point is that the prix fixe at Alinea costs roughly as much as my dinner at Olive. But I feel a bit cheated - I'm not sure that Delhi's idea of fine dining really matches the global standard. The most famous restaurants in this city serve "authentic" foreign cuisine, but the principle is to replicate something that can't really be taken out of context in the first place. Great ethnic food is always a local phenomenon; transplanting it serves no purpose.
There is absolutely no way that any restaurant in Delhi could serve me a pizza like the one I had on a porch in Rome. The pizza came sprinkled with rounds of fresh mozzarella, chunks of marinated potatoes and barely-cooked eggplant. This isn't to say that I don't like Italian food in Delhi. But it's good for a different reason.
Obviously, the point here isn't to say "let them see Rome," that's pointless. My point is that amazing food, like a truly beautiful man or woman, often reminds you of nothing but itself. The experience is inimitable, which is why it is costly.
Needless to say, if something is really one of a kind, it can't be bought. That's not a market, it's a singularity. It's strange that Delhi's fine dining restaurants don't seem to appreciate this situation, because after all Indian cooks are famous for never using recipes. Every daal, every khadi, every sabzi is a unique entity, made according to an individual taste. That, of course, is what makes home food the most valuable thing of all - the real singularity, the thing that can't be bought.
In the world of commercial fine dining, chefs strive to create a singular experience. Sometimes it's with truly extraordinary food antics, like at Alinea. Lazier - and less imaginative - chefs rely on overpriced ingredients, thinking that if they stuff a foie gras inside a truffle inside a jar of caviar, they've created a masterpiece worthy of spending hundreds of dollars on.
But none of this addresses Felix's question. The value of a meal depends on a million factors that have nothing to do with the way the food tastes. The senses share a strange relationship with memory. A great meal is one that can be enjoyed, not just in the moment but later in countless retellings. Imagine how many cocktail party stories you could get out of a single dinner at Alinea? Isn't that, to a certain extent, what we pay for?
The most memorable meals of my life, in no particular order:
A Mexican restaurant behind on Clarks Street in Chicago. My sister and I ordered a Mexican soup and asked to share it. We each got a massive bowl of orange broth, with tiny drops of oil floating on the surface. Whole green vegetables, unidentifiable but roughly the size of my fist, swam in the soup along with entire chicken thighs. When I went looking for the restaurant six weeks later, it wasn't there.
The tortilla stand under the El tracks in Chicago that served goat tacos all night.
That bagel place on Armitage that served steamed bagel sandwiches, ostensibly, but really something so unusual that I can't even place it. I was working for a guide book at the time. I ate alone but didn't even notice.
In Costa Rica, boiled black beans and rice sprinkled with tiny pieces of a fried meat that I later learned was Spam. Still the only time in my life I've had Spam. Also from Costa Rica: fruit shakes. A blended pink guava shake made with crunchy ice and sweet, sweet milk, whipped to a foam in a blender. Nothing like it, anywhere.
Kerala - pulled over at a roadside diner to eat vegetables in coconut curry with appam. Disproved my long-standing and private theory that most vegetarian food is compensating for something, and never successfully. Afterwards, we rinsed our hands in the cleanest public bathroom I've seen outside of a five-star hotel.
Brussels - swordfish steak. Tasted like wrestling a shark must feel.
Goa - shark. Tasted like smelling an old gym sock feels.
Anyway. I used to work in a coffee shop where customers frequently tipped us 100% over the bill. What was the trick? It had nothing to do with the coffee, which was good but unoriginal. It had something to do with the staff, which was all young pretty girls from the surrounding colleges. But really it had everything to do with the service, with the fact that every regular customer (and there were several) could walk in and know that his order was anticipated in advance. He had been expected.
These are all ways that we create singularities - things that can't be bought. Putting a price on a meal at Alinea or a guava shake in Costa Rica is a matter of caprice, really. Grant (Alinea's chef) could literally charge whatever he wants for a meal - he's settled on $198 not because that's what his food is worth, but because that's the price that fills his 80-cover restaurant to capacity night after night.
Other people, like Olive, copy the price but not really the singularity. Copying, by its very nature, is the process of creating a poor impression. Who wants to kiss a ghost? Who wants to eat imitated food?
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