Chefs Have Awful Taste in Wine

It's true.

I've worked for a CIA-trained chef in California who drank 375's of Port like a little girl - yeah, he drank 10 at a click and would end up shooting someone in the ass with a BB gun, but still.

Your Pegasus called, little girl, it would like you to brush its glorious mane.

Another chef, a nationally acclaimed sushi savant, favored Rosenblum Zinfandel when I met him. He's since graduated, but with a slow and painstaking babystepping that he probably never, ever had to endure in his Japanese food training.

Just because you've got a preternatural sense for fish doesn't mean you're ready for Burgundy, Daniel-sahn.

The third chef...forget it. Beer. I love good beer, but this is about wine.

So when I come across shit like this:

"Chef Kent (Rathbun, of Dallas fame and Austin jeering) Recommends"

I wet myself with glee. Let's look at the flavor/texture profiles of his favorite wines, yes?

Whites:
Amayna, Chardonnay, Leyda Valley, Chile 2006
Domaine Chandon, étoile , Rosé, Sonoma-Napa County
MacMurray Ranch, Pinot Gris, Sonoma Coast
Patz and Hall, Chardonnay, Alder Springs Vineyard, Rutherford
Roederer Estate, Brut, Anderson Valley NV
Rubicon Estate, Roussanne-Viognier-Marsanne, Blancaneaux, Rutherford
St. Supéry, Sémillon-Sauvingnon [sic] Blanc, Virtú, Napa Valley

So from this, I take it this guy's bag is a giant bucket of buttered popcorn topped with oak chips and a copy of Wine Spectator with which he can wipe his glistening craw.

Not a single Old-World-style wine among them, which has become, for me, synonymous with a lighter, better balanced, often subtler experience.

If I had more time and weren't just writing this to blow off steam between tasks on my steps-to-fucking-Shangri-La-sized to-do list, I'd thoughtfully consider the notion that chefs' palates suffer from an eventual blanding - a phenom that explains why so many guests find things saltier than the chef can taste. Anyone out there know the results of studies done to this effect? Like I said, I'm busy with an actual job. Let the geeks do the work and spittle all over my shirt while they tell me about it.

His red selection is even worse. I won't go into it.

The point of this instruction today is: Don't give a fucking rat's ass what the chef likes to drink. If it were up to him, he'd be passed out in the walk-in with an empty case of cherry Robitussin and an underaged Thai hooker.

The $26 Glass of Veuve (or, No One Wants To Read Your Stupid Manifesto)

So I hate lots of things, but especially this:

Don't skip intro! Don't do it!

You didn't skip it, did you? Good, because I HATES IT and it's so much better to HATES THINGS together.

Unless you're a hundred million, the thought of spending $44.95 on a main course of lobster tail at the sort of place that sends shrieks of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" at you from its hopelessly outdated website is about as appealing as a lapdance from Mick Foley. (Who apparently loves him some Tori Amos.)

Speaking of lapdances, if I'm spending $26 on a glass of Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label (The King of Beers Champagnes!), I'd better be getting a lapdance. Gratuity included.

According to the Mark's website: "Eating" at Mark’s is truly a memorable dining experience.

I suppose "Eating" is in "quotes" because what you're doing isn't "Eating" so much as it is bleeding money out of your spiny-lobster-perforated innards, resulting in a financial sepsis that leads to projectile vomiting, spouse blaming, and - in many cases - a 22% APR.

And if by "memorable" you mean the opulence and showboatiness couldn't possibly be outdone unless you were dining in Notre Dame at midnight while the Bulgarian Women's Choir hooted out Christmas carols to your foot-high platings (is that a croquant set at an angle at the tippy top of my food pile? Spectacular!), then yeah, it's got to be.

Even if the food at this place is now and then really good, there's just no substitute for sincerity - call it the conceit of my generation, but we found the 80s a superbly entertaining bit of triviality, not to be carried on seriously now that we're grown-ups. I listen to 80s music all the time ("incessantly," says certain persons married to me), but I don't want to eat 80s.

We make fun (I make fun) of the bearded Brooklynite who carves his own utensils from co-op-grown bamboo and takes butchery classes (and yet still not butch!) and throws dinner parties devoted to his own closet-festered cheeses...but more and more, this is how I want our restaurants to look and feel. But not because they cynically put on these airs to be interviewed by the eager beavers at New York magazine (who sometimes remind me of the twentysomething babysitter I once had that let us do anything we wanted because he harbored some uncomfortably tangible need to be liked by children). Because their earnest little hearts want desperately to care about something the way our folks cared about Vietnam and civil rights.

Because we have no modern manifestos, but those regarding how we eat and drink. Economics bores our Ritalin-cured brains; politics are only digestible insomuch as they fit on our iPhone screens. Sex blackens and shrinks in a forgotten broiler - too hopelessly damaged and depressing to touch. We'll have to start over from scratch on that one.

But eating and drinking? The long-accepted pleasures of the mouth and bloodstream? That's worth a revolutionary's attention, isn't it?

Brillat-Savarin knew it, even in 1825:

"In the present state of our knowledge, we work on metals with other metals; we take hold of them with iron tongs, forge them with iron hammers, and cut them with steel files; but I have never yet met anyone who could explain to me how the first tongs were made and the first hammer forged."

-- The Physiology of Taste

So, carve on Bearded Brooklyn Boys, as you meander towards adulthood, balls blue with the hope and audacity you couldn't consummate as quickly and ferociously as you'd desired, and a Kiva loan out there somewhere, whittling its own small path through the darkness. Butcher away, you skinny-jeaned seekers of the primitive self, whose extreme measures are misguided (unless a 29-year lifespan is the goal) but dewy-headed with earnestness. Argue into the night about the difference between "real" and "natural" wines, and eschew marketing firms and Mega-purple. Each guffaw directed at your fixie is also a tiny cheer of the heart. For each cleaver swing, each tamp of the muddling stick, each plate of homegrown, homemade, lowrise of not-glistening or architected food is one step further away from blowhard Wine-Spectator-Award-boasting cruiseship aesthetics like this.


Selah.


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This Is Happening

: It's me, bitches. I'm back.

You: Oh, were you gone?

: And I'm here to tell you that although I'm not a waitress anymore, I still have to endure more stupid bullshit on the Internet about food and wine than I can stand. So now you get to hear all about it.

You: You're going to keep making fun of Yelpers, aren't you?

: Yaaaarrrrr. And food bloggerz and Twitter Twats and fucking chefs, and....GRAWRRRR! PR releases!!! I FUCKING HATE PR RELEASES. THEY MAKE ME WANT TO SHAVE MY FACE LIKE BOB GELDOF IN "THE WALL."

You: And, hopefully, you'll keep giving us good recommendations for wines to drink that are crazy-affordable and natural and taste like real actual wine from a place made by people not robots and chemicals.


: Fuck yes. Now I'm about to go down on this 2002 Pierre Peters Cuvée Speciale like Mama Cass on a ham sandwich. Peace out.