Dining for the 0.1%?

I wrote the regular essay again for the City Paper's upcoming Dish issue, and this time around I tackled the topic of the increasing tone of informality that's overtaking the fine-dining world,  which led me to wonder why it is that we go out to eat big-ticket meals in the first place. That piece won't hit the streets for another week or two, but the topic of class in dining--high vs. low vs. middle--is still very much in the front of my mind.

And so, I couldn't help notice this line from a not-so-recent (May 2012) piece in the New York Times about superchefs Thomas Keller and Andoni Luis Aduriz:

While their restaurants may be accessible only to the world’s 0.1 percent, chefs at top restaurants influence the entire global food community with the way they think, write, tweet and talk about food — not just the way they cook it.

We, of course, have heard a lot about the 1% in the various political debates over the past few years,  and when you move that decimal one more place to the left, it suggests that the folks dining at Keller's and Aduriz's establishments must be among the very rarified elites indeed. You know, the kind that actually own their Gulfstream jets instead of just timesharing them.

But I don't think that's necessarily the case. Yes, only a very slim majority of the population will ever eat at one of these restaurants, but it's not because they're somehow "inaccessible" to ordinary people.

Ordinary middle-to-upper-middle-class Americans, that is. The current prix fixe menu at the French Laundry, Keller's flagship restaurant, is  $270 per person. This is an awful lot of money for a single meal, I concede--more than the annual per capita income in some Third World countries. But, any number of not-super-wealthy Americans regularly shell out that same amount for a deep sea fishing charter or a night at the blackjack tables or a shopping spree to a high-end mall--all of which are one-day treat-yourself-to-a-good-time type of experiences. They are quite accessible experiences for a large number of people . . . assuming, of course, that they highly value that sort of thing.

Several years ago, I was on the road for business with two colleagues, and we got to talking and it turned out that all three of us liked good food and sought out nice restaurants wherever we traveled for work. These were not wealthy one-percenters--middle-management corporate types, yes, but not craven plutocrats sitting atop the financial heap. And yet, as it turned out, both of them had been not only to the French Laundry but to Per Se, too--places I've not yet made it to myself (and, yes, I was duly jealous.)

Only a very narrow sliver of the elite could afford to eat at such high end restaurants on a week-in and week-out basis, but isn't that missing the point? Aren't these supposed to be rare, once-in-a-blue-moon, talk-about-if-for-years experiences, not a regular mode of eating? What ever happened to the concept of the big night out when you throw caution to the wind and just let it rip?

I've belabored the point enough, but what it comes down to is this: in our ongoing conversations about food and ethics, I'm increasingly worried that we don't even even have the terms of the debate right. When it comes to farm-to-table issues, shouldn't we be slugging it out at the daily meal level--at the grocery store and the mid-priced eateries, places with enough volume and scale that it might make a noticeable difference on the market? That's certainly where my attention is increasingly being drawn.

The Ordinary: A Review, Based Solely on a Dream

I think it's a pretty good sign that a new restaurant is getting a lot of buzz if you dream about eating there, and last night I dreamed that I was dining at Mike Lata's and Adam Nemirow's new King Street oyster bar venture, The Ordinary. And, I have to say that, based upon my dream, I was not particularly impressed.

For starters, it was really, really loud. As I sat at the bar, which was made of boring brown wood and not nearly as impressive as all the pictures I'd seen online and in the Charleston City Paper, I tried to chat up Mike Lata and get his recommendations on what was good and fresh that day, but I had a hard time hearing him over the roar of the crowd, and I ended up ordering a bowl of chili.

"You can't order a bowl of chili," Lata scolded me. "This is an oyster bar!"

And I found that quite rude. I mean, really, it's your restaurant. If you don't want people ordering the chili, then why is it on the menu?

"So what would you recommend then?" I asked, which is actually what I had just asked a little while before but couldn't hear his answer because Lata's joint had such poor acoustics.

"Try the pizza," he said. "It's really good. Baked in a wood-fired oven."

Which struck me as kind of weird, since why would the chef at an oyster bar recommend pizza? I didn't even know they had a wood-fired oven, but they are all the rage now, and I believe in trusting your chef. So I ordered the pizza.

It arrived, surprisingly enough, in a big Domino's pizza box, and I couldn't figure out if that was some sort of intentional ironic dig at mainstream food culture or just poor planning on the part of new restaurant that had forgotten to order its own pizza boxes. I envisioned Brooks Reitz sneaking down the street and buying an armload of boxes from the closest delivery joint. Either way, it was pretty low rent.

And, when I opened the box, whoever had put the pizza in it had put it in upside down, the cheese all gooshed against the bottom of the box, and I had to flip the whole box over just to eat it. I would have complained to Lata, but by then he had moved on to chat up some other customers. But, despite the cheese being smeared all over tarnation, it was pretty good pizza.

So, that's the Ordinary in a nutshell, at least how I experienced it in my dream: crowded, loud, rude, and downright sloppy on the service.

I'm not sure what people are making all the fuss about.

And we're launched!

It's official. Going Lardcore, my new collection of Southern food pieces, is now up on Amazon and available for the Kindle.

Update (12/16/2012): For the Nook users, Going Lardcore is now available for download at barnesandnoble.com, too.

Here's the table of contents, if you want a look at what it contains:

Introduction
Section 1: That New Southern Thing
Two New Southern “Classics”: Fried Green Tomatoes and Shrimp ‘n Grits
Fried Green Tomatoes: a Southern Movie Star
Shrimp and Grits, the New Fangled Way
A New Old Variation: Shrimp and Rice Grits
Shrimp and Grits: The Irresistible Seductress
Roe is Me: An Odyssey Through the Streets of Charleston in Search of She-Crab Soup
The Curious Case of “The Pate of the South”
A Visit to Benton's
Going Lardcore
Does Authenticity Matter?
Section 2: Good Eats
Serious Burgers
And Some Fries on the Side
Death to the Bistropub
Lowcountry Barbecue
Six-Packs of Sauce and "Fast Casual" Barbecue
Section 3: Boozing It Up
The Bourbon Boom
What About Rum?
Rye Revival: The Forgotten Whiskey of the South Makes a Comeback
90-Proof Yankee Hornswoggling
Section 4: Prejudices & Animadversions
Please Don't Tuck Me Away in a Strip Mall
Barbecue for the Uneducated
Sushi Fatigue
Why Do We Tip?
A Seat at the Chef's Table
The Death of the Entrée
Cracking the Inner Sanctum
I Mean, Really, Can You Even Afford a Coke Anymore?

Going Lardcore: the Cover

Here's the cover for the new collection. It turned out a lot better than I thought it would.

I actually took all the photos myself. That any of them were usable is a bloody miracle.

Going Lardcore: A Pending eBook Launch

Learning the Hard Way: Galley Proofs are Still Important

A couple of years ago, intrigued by Amazon's then-still-new Kindle Direct Publishing, I undertook to publish my own e-Book. More than anything, I just wanted to understand how the whole process worked and what the possibilities were. I knew e-Books and Internet distribution promised to transform the book publishing industry and the business of writing even more than the Paperback Revolution of the mid-20th century had, and I want to get inside and take a look around.

The result was The Fried Green Tomato Swindle, a collection of various pieces I had written over the years. I cobbled the text together pretty quickly because I wanted to get to the actual production of the eBook, which requires everything from creating HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to designing a book cover. I figured it would be a good learning experience, and, boy, was it. I stumbled through various versions and iterations, and perhaps the hardest part was just figuring out what tools to use and how the ePub books are structured and how to make it all work so the text looks good in the end on the various reading devices.

And so it was with a feeling of accomplishment and a little nervousness when I had my "final" file ready. I uploaded it to Amazon (and, subsequently, to Barnes and Noble for the Nook), waited a few days until it had been approved, then purchased it on my Kindle and became my own first customer. The text downloaded to the device in less than a minute, and I was holding in my hands a published version of my writing, all delivered electronically, and all put together by me and me alone (except for the massive Amazon infrastructure, of course.)

"This is really cool," I thought to myself. I could feel the disruptive potential of the technology, how it might open whole new worlds for ambitious and creative authors.

People more ambitious and creative than me, that is. I figured I would probably be both my first and my last customer, since my mom doesn't own a Kindle. So, imagine my surprise when a few days later I checked the stats and saw that three people had bought the book. And every day or two another sale would occur. And, this was just from people stumbling across the book by accident: the extent of my promotion had been to put a link on my blog.

And that's when I realized that I probably should have paid a little more attention to the text when I was rushing to get the thing assembled. There were typos and misspellings, the kind of things that close editing would have caught, as well as numerous issues with formatting and rendering, since I had created the book through a convoluted process of going from word processor to HTML to ePub, which created a lot of styling and markup issues.

Fortunately, unlike printed books, it's easy to make corrections to eBooks and distribute the revised version, except, of course, for the hours of work involved. So, I undertook a thorough proofreading and made extensive revisions . . . and then learned the pain of trying to incorporate changes into an ePub and also updating and maintaining the right versions on multiple platforms. Changes I thought I had made mysteriously wouldn't show up out in the actual ePub ready for downloading, some changes overwrote others, etc., etc.

After a month or two of wrestling with it and still having problems, I pulled the book down and stopped selling it. My plan was to take it all the way back to the manuscript (that is, Word processor) stage, re-do the whole thing, and get it back out there the right way. Which is to say, to go back to the exact same process--manuscript to galley proofs to page proofs--that I knew well from the old fashioned dead-tree publishing world.

And that takes a lot of work, which meant it kept getting pushed aside for more pressing (i.e. paying) projects, and it's been sitting dusty on the shelf ever since. In the years that have passed, I've produced a lot more material on the same themes as the contents of that original eBook--especially, Southern food history and dining in the contemporary South today. Finally, it seemed like I had the critical mass needed to take another stab at a collection. And this time, I started back at the beginning of the processes and, having been through the whole thing before, was able to avoid about 90% of the pitfalls that tripped me up the first time.

And, so, I'm preparing to roll out a new eBook collection, which I've entitled Going Lardcore: Adventures in New Southern Dining. It includes what I felt were the best pieces from the old eBook collection, and adds in a bunch of new stuff, including several long pieces on liquor and cocktails as well as a look at the current state of "good eats" like burgers and barbecue. As a whole, it provides a multifaceted look at a remarkable decade of dining in the South at large and Charleston in particular.

Going back over old pieces and revising and combining them together into a longer form has been quite rewarding, a nice way to look back and reflect on how the Southern dining scene has grown and evolved since I first started writing about it in the early 2000s. All told, it's been a great time to be an eater in the South, one full of rewarding experiences like the ones captured in Going Lardcore.

So that's the backstory. I'm putting the final touches on the "page proofs" (ePub file) right now and should have it out to the world through the magic of the Interwebs in just a few days.

More Rye Whiskey (And a Recipe, Too)

Having just uncorked a post on the enduring appeal of high-end bourbons, I wouldn't be true to my most recent hobby horse if I didn't follow that up immediate with an update on rye.

I recently made the following inflammatory claim in a story on the revival of rye whiskey for the City Paper: "We Southerners need to disabuse ourselves of the delusion that bourbon is the 'quintessential spirit of the South.' Bourbon is about as authentically Southern as Hazzard County, Georgia, and Bo and Luke Duke. . . . Rye whiskey, not bourbon, should properly bear the mantle of the South's favorite spirit."

I stick by that assertion (see the article for the evidence), and also by my prediction that rye's best days are still ahead of it. In recent news, we're seeing more and more of the big boys from the bourbon business agree and starting to move into the rye market.

The latest of the crop is Diageo, which just came out with a 90-proof rye whiskey in its George Dickel line, which previously consisted solely of bourbons.

Retailing around $25 for 750 ml, the Dickel is not quite as cheap as the reliable Old Overholt (which you can consistently find for  under twenty bucks), but it's firmly in that much-needed category of affordable ryes that you can use in abundance in stiff classic cocktails without needing to take out a second mortgage on your house.

I figured it would be worthwhile to try it side by side against some Old Overholt and see how it stacked up. Both have the same sharp, dry bite that is the hallmark of ryes, though the Dickel is a little darker in color, slightly richer in aroma, and a little smoother on the tongue, too. That's a good candidate, in my book, for cocktails with citrus and fruit juices, like the Cherry Rye Sour (recipe below).

Fast on the heels of Diageo, Bacardi Brown-Forman is bringing out its own rye whiskey in its Jack Daniels line. In an interesting twist, it will be an unaged rye whiskey.

Why unaged? The Cocktail Enthusiast relates that the company distilled 800 barrels of rye in 2011, with the intention of putting them into barrels to mature. But, the distillers liked the flavor of the unaged stuff so much that they decided it was worth releasing. In an interview with The Spirits Business, Jack Daniels' master distiller Jeff Arnett added, "We would all agree that white dog is not going to be the best thing to ever produce, but it’s a seller that can be offered as a teaser to say 'Hey, we’ve got this new aged whiskey coming, do you want to try it in its raw state?'”

It sniffs a little of a company trying to play catch up with the market, and at fifty bucks for a 750 ml bottle, it's pretty darn expensive for a teaser (a bottle of the splendid Willet Rye retails for just $40). Perhaps I should wait to judge until the JD unaged version hits store shelves, which it should in the next few weeks, and I can actually sample it. In any event, that rye bandwagon is getting pretty crowded now, and I couldn't be happier.

Rye: the original whiskey of the South. Its comeback continues.

Pappy Just Keeps Getting Harder to Find

The Most Wanted Man
in New York City

About a year ago, I wrote a story on the recent boom in high-end bourbons and highlighted Pappy Van Winkle as the patron saint of the genre. I wondered at the time how long bourbon's vogue would last.

So far, it seems to be just getting stronger. Over on the Atlantic Wire, Jen Doll has a short piece on the scarcity of Pappy Van Winkle in New York City, where a bottle of the 23-year-old stuff can run $250 and customers are harassing liquor store owners to try to get a spot on waiting lists that are already nine-pages deep.

In my bourbon boom piece, I shared what was then the insider's trick for getting a jump on the competition in the hunt for a rare bottle. Watch the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery's Facebook site, I advised, where they announce when each state's allocation ships, and "you can start staking out your local liquor store and hounding the owner for your bottle."

Turns out a lot of people took just that tactic. This fall, the Van Winkles are no longer posting the ship dates for states allocations because, "we had big backlash from retailers and wholesalers who were bombarded with phone calls as soon as we posted that shipments had gone out, even though we would suggest giving it a couple of weeks for inventory to arrive."

So, don't expect to just walk into a liquor store near you and pick up a bottle of Pappy any time soon. And please, let's take it easy on our poor liquor store proprietors. It ain't their fault.

In Case You Just Can't Get Enough Middlebrow

Earlier this week, in the guise of reflecting on Pete Wells's New York Times dope-slap review of Guy Fieri's American Grill and Bar, I managed to sneak an essay on middlebrow culture past the editors at the City Paper.  As is usually the case, my first draft was considerably longer, and I had to chop out a lot to keep from putting the paper's entire readership asleep.

Originally, I had more material musing on the high-, middle-, and low-brow split and why being middlebrow was so contemptible. Here's just a little of it:

Ever heard of the novelist James Gould Cozzens? You might have if his much-anticipated 1957 novel By Love Possessed hadn’t been labeled by Commentary’s Dwight MacDonald as “the latest episode in The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution”, sinking him without a trace from the American literary canon. Cozzens, MacDonald charged, was writing the kind of pseudo-intellectual garbage that made upper-middle-class insurance salesmen feel like they were reading great literature, and off course no self-respecting high-brow would want to come anywhere near that.  

Of course, the vacuity of middlebrows has long been ridiculed in literature and film, from Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt to that one damning word in The Graduate, “plastics”, which sends poor Benjamin Braddock plunging to the bottom of a swimming pool. (Am I the only one who thinks that was actually sensible career advice for a young man?) 

There’s always the question of bias when critics take on the middlebrow, as Mr. Wells can bear witness. Are they lashing out at the thing itself, or do they just not like what the thing represents or the kind of people who like it? Highbrows rarely show disdain for the low, but, of course, the lowbrow poses little threat. The lines are murkier between middle and high. Those booboisee a critic is mocking may well be the exact sort of people the critic came from they came from and desperately needs to separate ones. One's parents from Des Moines might think a night at Guy's American Grill and Bar quite delightful, especially after seeing the matinee of The Jersey Boys and shopping at the Disney Store

To me, that's what makes wading into the waters of reviewing middlebrow restaurants so perilous. Can one step back and ask, am I slamming this thing because I simply don’t like the food and the experience? Or, is it because I don’t like the whole concept of the restaurant? Because I don’t want to be associated with the type of people who like this type of thing? It's a hard line to navigate, but I think it can be done and should be done.

So there it is. And I'm sure all you highbrows out there appreciate it. Not appreciating it would be so, well, middlebrow.

Breaking Out the "Company" China

My Pho

One Thanksgiving a good decade or more ago, my younger brother brought his then-fiance and now-wife to meet his extended family for the first time. This is an experience that, though they don't realize it until years later when they've had a chance to  compare notes and commiserate with their fellow family-by-marriage inlaws, is something akin to a gang initiation or high-school sorority hazing ritual, except that my family has no idea that there's anything painful or even out of the ordinary going on.

So, we were in my now-departed grandmother's house, and my now-sister-in-law Margaret wanted a glass of wine. My brother started to open the china cabinet to get her a wine-glass. "Oh, no, Jim," my grandmother declared, deeply shocked, as if he had begun to micturate on her rug. "That crystal is for company!" Poor Margaret had to make do sipping her wine from a clear plastic tumbler.

I couldn't help wondering something: if my grandmother's future granddaughter-in-law, whom she had never even met before, didn't rank as "company," well, then, who the heck would? Perhaps she was expecting a visit from the Secretary of State or perhaps a Nobel Prize laureate in the next day or two, and we just hadn't heard about it yet.

This whole Thanksgiving memory was sparked by the fact that none of the commenters on my recent review of Mì Xào, Mt. Pleasant's new Vietnamese take-out joint pointed out a slight issue with the photographs.

I clearly indicate in the review itself that, when I ate there at least, everything was served in take-out containers except the pho (a.k.a. London broil soup), which came in a plain white ceramic bowl. The photographs illustrating the review? Elegant blue and white china with ornate wood chopsticks, absolutely beautiful and (unless I managed to catch them on two bad days) nothing like what is actually served to patrons.

This is not at all a complaint, mind you. The food at Mì Xào is delicious and it doesn't need fancy china to improve it. I just found it amusing (and a reminder of why we do these review anonymously) that there's good china socked away somewhere in the back room, waiting for someone super important--like a newspaper photographer--to show up.

But, if you drop in for a bowl of pho and it comes out in a plain white bowl, don't be offended. You may not rank as "company", but I bet you'll still enjoy the meal.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Nate Silver

I somehow managed to spend way much time this morning reading about the recent flap over the New York Times blogger and poll-geek Nate Silver's prediction that Obama has a 77.4 percent chance of winning the election on Tuesday. This, predictably, has raised the ire of numerous commentators (mostly those in the Romney camp) who called into question the validity of the number. And that, in turn, has raised the ire of Silver defenders, who have taken pot shots back at the pot shot takers and accused them of many egregious things, such as not being good at math.

Paul F. Campos's piece in Slate is a good example of the "learn your math, dummy" counter-reaction, and he closes it by raising the spectre of the Monty Hall Problem, an old counter-intuitive chestnut. I hardly think this is fair, since the Monty Hall Problem is a sort of optical illusion of logic that fools all sorts of smart people the first time they tackle it, and it's hardly a good litmus test of someone's basic statistical literacy. The statistical concept here is a much more fundamental one.

It's a fun sort of thing to while away a Sunday morning pondering, but in the end, does Silver's prediction even really matter? Should Romney supporters take a look at the numbers and, disheartened, fold up the tent?

Of course not. What Silver's model is saying is, based upon the way the poll numbers look right now and past performance of those polls, if you ran 100 elections, Obama would win 77 of them. But that also means Romney would win 23, so hope is by no means lost. If your favorite football team was down one touchdown going into the 4th quarter and you knew in similar situations the trailing team lost 77% of the time, would you leave the stadium and quit cheering? Of course you wouldn't.

And, what's more, those polls can still continue to change over the last few days leading up to the election. How much of a move in the polls themselves does it take to adjust that 77.4% likelihood down to 65%? To 55%? To a coin flip?

To my mind, Silver's predictions shouldn't change the behavior of Obama or Romney supporters one way or another. If you are in the Obama camp, you wouldn't want to take the foot off the gas, any more than either of those football teams wants to slack off in the 4th quarter. If you're in the Obama camp, it means this election is by no means a sure thing. Better buckle down and get that number close to 100%. If you're in the Romney camp, it means it isn't over yet. One strong last minute drive and those numbers can totally change around . . .

Hmm . . . I just checked back at Nate Silver's blog. The morning he updated Obama's chances to 85.1%. Not looking too good for the trailing team . . .

In any event, come Tuesday, I predict I am 100% likely to be glad the whole thing's over.