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course of lobster tail at the sort of place that sends shrieks of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" at you from its hopelessly outdated website is about as appealing as a lapdance from Mick Foley.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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Eat like a man

My friend and editor, Robin Goldstein, went to Spain to engage in the debate about molecular gastronomy swallowing the Top Restaurants lists (of course, these lists come from places like the UK and the US, where began the phenomenon of "Famous for Being Famous").

Molecular gastronomy is like David Foster Wallace; I'm a big fan, and I appreciate the interesting, and sometimes even emotional, effects his often-experimental literature yields, but I would kill myself if every good author were doing it. It’s writing ahead of the reader. It's writing for other writers. I never get lost in one of his excellent stories.

I’d like to eat at El Bullí just to see if it makes me as horny as garlic-bomb southern Italian food does. Something tells me it won’t.

When a certain praised-and-praiseworthy restaurant I worked for not too long ago announced they were going to start using xantham gum in certain sauces and desserts, we all felt our dignity was going down the tubes. All the servers associated this substance with Hostess, Little Debbie, Taco Bell. Little did we know or understand that other celebrated kitchens were doing it, and that's—THAT'S–what our guys saw. Not that this totally harmless binding agent was an ingredient often made fun of in mass produced, processed foods, but that it was a permission to use a shortcut—a permission granted by the molecular gastronomy wizards by virtue of all the incredible attention they were receiving. Not only were we ALLOWED to use xantham gum and still be credible, we HAD to if we wanted to stay cutting edge.

It's true, the use of xantham never came up with guests ("What is that delicious flavor I'm tasting!" Hardly.), and I don't even know what it allowed our talented chefs to do that they couldn't before...

Or this: I've seen virtually everything you can imagine turned into a gelatinous ball, thanks to a simple agar solution. Carrots, basil, lychee...I bet you could turn the Brooklyn Bridge into pearls by boiling it down and dropping it in agar.
I bet it would taste pretty awful. But hey, you're eating it: Twitter the world!

Remember when you went to Universal Studios and got the DOTS ice cream, the ICE CREAM OF THE FUTURE? You thought, Wooo, they're dots of cream that melt in your mouth. Crazy! But at the end of the day, you wanted to lick dripping cold ice cream of your fucking hands and then gobble down the cone. And why? Because it engages everything to do so: frustration, panic, joy, sensuality, crunch, slurp, sweet, the salt of your own skin. And at the end you had celebrated a distinctly human tradition.

I never see DOTS anywhere but amusement parks; it is always the empty, lone booth that we walk past and snigger, jerking our thumbs and saying "Remember when we tried that?"

The Culinary Wasteland That Is The Texas Coast

I'm still here, fear not. I just took a few days to go camp out at the Gulf to see these guys. They're called Roseate Spoonbills and they are so marvelously ugly it's beautiful. There's a French word for that, I think.

We ate crawfish tails (I finally sucked out the brains - creamy and sweet! Now I know why Zombies are so mad for 'em), thick-shelled oysters that tasted not unpleasantly like harbor (cocktail sauce fine on Gulf oysters; ask me for some with your Duxburys and I will throw you out of the restaurant myself), and fried snapper (note to Fulton Beach, TX: Panko is a specific type of bread crumb, air-dried in the walls and of a certain delicate crispness - it's not a method of cooking, so you can't call it "panko-fried" if you rolled it in those Italian seasoned bread crumbs from the can... and I know you did.)
But our most charming meal was in the overweight-elderly capitol of the world: Port Aransas. It's a little Italian restaurant called Venetian Hotplate that, while serving Americanized conceits like tortelloni with ham and peas in a Parmesan cream sauce, does so with balance and tasty fresh herbs - and with menu items listed in Italian (usually a trustworthy cue). The glass list is, as expected, a teeny parking lot full of SUVs like La Crema, but the bottle selection has a few small-production pearls on it from the Boot.

Most of VH's success owes to its disarming preciousness - pots of flowers and garden tcotchkes out front, seashell-folded linen napkins on plates, a vaguely double-wide feeling to the structure. You simply don't feel critical here - it's like dining in someone's darkened living room - and this makes everything taste better, allows for some pleasure in the minutaie. And there's this sort of hilarious Renn Faire-Girl music quietly playing, like Enigma and Lorena McKennitt.

Anyway, here it is. If you're down that way, you're probably dying for some decent food.
Anything the Texas coast offers, Mexico and Louisiana are doing better. Please, tell me if I'm wrong, because we plan to go back in summer to see the spoonbills mate. Apparently, they offer each other straw and twigs with their enormous flat beaks. I can think of nothing in the world I want to see more.