Today’s Special
IT IS HIS BIRTHDAY, and Hugh and I are seated in a New York restaurant, awaiting the arrival of our fifteen-word entrées. He looks very nice, dressed in the suit and sweater that have always belonged to him. As for me, I own only my shoes, pants, shirt, and tie. My jacket belongs to the restaurant and was offered as a loan by the maître d’, who apparently thought I would feel more comfortable dressed to lead a high-school marching band.
I’m worrying the thick gold braids decorating my sleeves when the waiter presents us with what he calls “a little something to amuse the palette.” Roughly the size and color of a Band-Aid, the amusement floats on a shallow, muddy puddle of sauce and is topped with a sprig of greenery.
“And this would be… what, exactly?” Hugh asks.
“This,” the waiter announces, “is our raw Atlantic swordfish served in a dark chocolate gravy and garnished with fresh mint.”
“Not again,” I say. “Can’t you guys come up with something a little less conventional?”
“Love your jacket,” the waiter whispers.
As a rule, I’m no great fan of eating out in New York restaurants. It’s hard to love a place that’s outlawed smoking but finds it perfectly acceptable to serve raw fish in a bath of chocolate. There are no normal restaurants left, at least in our neighborhood. The diners have all been taken over by precious little bistros boasting a menu of indigenous American cuisine. They call these meals “traditional,” yet they’re rarely the American dishes I remember. The patty melt has been pushed aside in favor of the herb-encrusted medallions of baby artichoke hearts, which never leave me thinking, Oh, right, those! I wonder if they’re as good as the ones my mom used to make.
Part of the problem is that we live in the wrong part of town. SoHo is not a macaroni salad kind of place. This is where the world’s brightest young talents come to braise carmelized racks of corn-fed songbirds or offer up their famous knuckle of flash-seared crappie served with a collar of chided ginger and cornered by a tribe of kiln-roasted Chilean toadstools, teased with a warm spray of clarified musk oil. Even when they promise something simple, they’ve got to tart it up — the meatloaf has been poached in seawater, or there are figs in the tuna salad. If cooking is an art, I think we’re in our Dada phase.
I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly finicky eater, but it’s hard to be a good sport when each dish seems to include no fewer than a dozen ingredients, one of which I’m bound to dislike. I’d order the skirt steak with a medley of suffocated peaches, but I’m put off by the aspirin sauce. The sea scallops look good until I’m told they’re served in a broth of malt liquor and mummified litchi nuts. What I really want is a cigarette, and I’m always searching the menu in the hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable. Bake it, steam it, grill it, or stuff it into littleneck clams, I just need something familiar that I can hold on to.
When the waiter brings our entrées, I have no idea which plate might be mine. In yesterday’s restaurants it was possible both to visualize and to recognize your meal. There were always subtle differences, but for the most part, a lamb chop tended to maintain its basic shape. That is to say that it looked choplike. It had a handle made of bone and a teardrop of meat hugged by a thin rind of fat. Apparently, though, that was too predictable. Order the modern lamb chop, and it’s likely to look no different than your companion’s order of shackled pompano. The current food is always arranged into a senseless, vertical tower. No longer content to recline, it now reaches for the sky, much like the high-rise buildings lining our city streets. It’s as if the plates were valuable parcels of land and the chef had purchased one small lot and unlimited air rights. Hugh’s saffron linguini resembles a miniature turban, topped with architectural spires of shrimp. It stands there in the center while the rest of the vast, empty plate looks though it’s been leased out as a possible parking lot. I had ordered the steak, which, bowing to the same minimalist fashion, is served without the bone, the thin slices of beef stacked to resemble a funeral pyre. The potatoes I’d been expecting have apparently either been clarified to an essence or were used to stoke the grill.
“Maybe,” Hugh says, “they’re inside your tower of meat.”
This is what we have been reduced to. Hugh blows the yucca pollen off his blackened shrimp while I push back the sleeves of my borrowed sport coat and search the meat tower for my promised potatoes.
“There they are, right there.” Hugh uses his fork to point out what could easily be mistaken for five cavity-riddled molars. The dark spots must be my vegetable.
Because I am both a glutton and a masochist, my standard complaint, “That was so bad,” is always followed by “And there was so little of it!”
Our plates are cleared, and we are presented with dessert menus. I learn that spiced ham is no longer considered just a luncheon meat and that even back issues of Smithsonian can be turned into sorbets.
“I just couldn’t,” I say to the waiter when he recommends the white chocolate and wild loganberry couscous.
“If we’re counting calories, I could have the chef serve it without the crème fraîche.”
“No,” I say. “Really, I just couldn’t.”
We ask for the check, explaining that we have a movie to catch. It’s only a ten-minute walk to the theater, but I’m antsy because I’d like to get something to eat before the show. They’ll have loads of food at the concession stand, but I don’t believe in mixing meat with my movies. Luckily there’s a hot dog cart not too far out of our way.
Friends always say, “How can you eat those? I read in the paper that they’re made from hog’s lips.”
“And…?”
“And hearts and eyelids.”
That, to my mind, is only three ingredients and constitutes a refreshing change of pace. I order mine with nothing but mustard, and am thrilled to watch the vendor present my hot dog in a horizontal position. So simple and timeless that I can recognize it, immediately, as food.