The Restaurant Issue
Editor’s Notebook: Kitchen Work Magazine Issue # 6
Last week, on the first cold day of the season, as I sat in a corner at my local Mexican restaurant and tried to immerse myself in the anonymity of a steaming bowl of posole, an old friend in the wine business walked by and blew my cover. “How are things at the restaurant?” he asked. The couple sitting next to me looked up from their own lunches and shifted their attention, as though the entertainment had just arrived.
“You own a restaurant?” the man queried. “I do,” I said, before sinking into a practiced recitation of responses, delivered patiently, one by one, after the same sequence of questions I have fielded since my restaurant opened. It’s called Heirloom Café, it’s in the Mission, the cuisine is European-influenced and ingredient-driven, in the spring it will have been open for ten years. Being a restaurant owner is the closest thing to a brush with celebrity that I will ever know, and while it is nice when people take an interest in the work I do, I always wonder exactly what it is about running a restaurant that piques the curiosity of strangers. Perhaps the experiences they imagine me to have with food and hospitality seem deeply relatable, somehow universal, in ways that the work of an astrophysicist or an architect do not.
The man sitting next to me lived in France for many years, he told me, and his wife is actually Italian, so they don’t go out to eat very often. They’re both very good cooks, the man said, his wife nodding in agreement. Anyway, he opined, there are two big problems with American restaurants. Had I looked at him between spoonfuls of posole in a way that suggested that I had been wondering? Most of them are too noisy, he said. He can’t stand it when restaurants play music too loud. “Why would a restaurant even play music in the first place?” the lady asked, incredulous. “And second,” the man said, pausing before revealing the big news. “Salt is not a flavor.”
I can’t disagree with that, I thought, as I sensed the ebbing of his comments and returned to my posole, which seemed rather deliciously seasoned. The broth itself was a deep red, flavored with delicate ground chile; the pork was tender and succulent; the hominy kernels fat, rich, and satisfying. Thin slices of cabbage, multicolored and julienned, floated on the surface. What a great meal this was, I thought, glad that I had opted for it instead of the chicken soup, caldo tlalpeño, that my neighbor was eating. “How’s the posole?” the man asked. We were friends now, after our exchange about restaurants. He could hear me thinking.
I was in art school in Boston more than twenty years ago when a classmate, a wealthy older lady from Cambridge, told me that she went to restaurants for food she never ate at home. Even then, before I dove into the profession and began wandering through labyrinthine intersections of food and public dining rooms, I thought there was something odd about her approach to going out for dinner. Someone or some team of cooks will put plates together for you, hopefully with some care and expertise, full of different ingredients. You’ll sit in a chair you’ve never sat in, with sight lines through the dining room that expose different pockets of light, and show off a young couple and their parents at a table ten paces away. There will be smells and gestures and sounds and endless movement, and also a fork headed for your mouth with a steaming bite of cheese souffle. Whether cheese souffle is something you sometimes eat or prepare at home seems inconsequential.
The effects of restaurants are by their nature too numerous and too wonderful to count and to characterize. Last night at Heirloom I heard a guest remark, when I served his party of three a bowl of fresh pasta with fennel sausage, a dish of braised artichokes and black cod with paprika aioli, and a roasted chicken breast with Comté bread pudding and hedgehog mushrooms in jus, “These are all beautiful.” I don’t have the sense that very many people get together to be around beautiful things very often, and less likely still is the pleasure of subsequently eating those beautiful things.
That I sometimes have the opportunity to preside over the experiences of people celebrating ingredients — and by extension, the people who grew them and the people who cooked them — is such a great joy that it gives rise to any number of other experiences and satisfactions. One of my favorites, I can’t help but mention it here, is the study of proportion. From time to time, I will have a conversation with one of our cooks about seasoning: “Do you salt both sides of the giant scallop or only one?” And does that consideration, about how much salt is almost enough, and how much is too much, not inform our sense of how much avocado should be in the lettuce salad or how heavily it should be dressed? Does it not cause us to think about whether the bottle of Chablis at table twelve is too cold to be fully appreciated?
A lesser-known secret is that the same sense of proportion often causes us to try to be nice to each other. This or that person has had enough challenge in their day and could really use a couple of hours of someone smiling at them. Every hour of every day brings opportunities to witness examples of sound proportion and balance and to make decisions according to them. There
are countless applications. Perhaps I drank too much coffee this afternoon, I’m feeling frantic. The thing that person did for me was so nice that I should say thank you and tell them how much I appreciated their generosity. I can afford to spend this much money on a new coat. I could use a little more exercise. That serving of pasta is too big. This Vouvray has the most impeccable balance, the deepest savory cut of any white wine I have ever tasted.
After a colleague and I agreed last week that the most important attribute a dining room server possesses is probably empathy, or even humanity, I remarked that I essentially grew up in restaurants — not in the sense that I was crawling on banquettes as an infant, but that I learned a lot of what I know about people while I was waiting on them, cooking for them, and pouring wine for them. I have become a practiced communicator, but perhaps more importantly, I have become a practiced listener. And I suspect that restaurants provide this learning for everyone, no matter whether a person spends eighty hours a week working in one or stops by for a ninety-minute midweek dinner.
When I set out to write this introduction, I thought about the content we’ve assembled here, and reflected on what building this issue, centered on restaurants, has taught me. I have been awestruck for months by the astonishing diversity of the material we received. There are deep dives into the ambitions of an avant-garde Chinese chef, and a dining room in Eastern Europe just as the Cold War was coming to a close. There are riffs on roast beef sandwiches in Massachusetts, a winery restaurant in South Australia, Oregonian pizza, a mystical summer spent working in a kitchen in England, and a comic about the lure of a famous San Francisco diner. We received a piece in which a Mexico City author traces events in the life of her family through their visits to a favorite Japanese restaurant.
The prospect of interviewing restaurant icons from New York and San Francisco for this issue seemed too good to be true until it happened, and I haven’t been the same since. I met first with chef Gabrielle Hamilton, in the downstairs prep kitchen at Prune, on a night so hot in Manhattan that it was quite warm in the basement at 9:00 p.m. There was a fan blowing on us and Hamilton was electric, a woman with so much clarity and grace and sense of purpose that she could only have been doing something she loved for most of her career. Six weeks later I pulled up a chair in Valhalla itself, near the front windows in the dining room at Chez Panisse, the dark wood dappled in late-morning sunlight. Alice Waters sat down across from me with a steaming pot of tisane and two cups on the table between us. I tried to ask her about Chez Panisse and she obliged, mostly sounding the way I imagine an oracle to sound, which might be the effect when a person is so ensconced in beautiful proportions, surrounded by lovely ingredients and cooking, and lovely people, for more than fifty years. I nearly floated back across the bay.
I am thrilled at the prospect that some readers of this issue will be introduced to Brillat-Savarin for the first time. I was reminded of how essential his writing still is, and perhaps always will be, as we approach the two hundredth anniversary of his iconic Physiologie du gout. I had the good fortune to collaborate on the translation with an old friend who used to patronize my restaurant before she moved with her family a few years ago back to the Savoie in France, where she grew up. Brillat-Savarin was a writer with quite a lot of passion for his subjects, and his enthusiasm often led him to construct sentences full of complexity and poetic mystery. With the help of some phone video conferencing, Lara and I spent hours parsing his words, floral phrasings, and elaborate constructions, like for instance what it means, in the context of a dining room, “to make a sacrifice to a lesser Venus.”
I think the most common thread in the material in this issue is finally that our restaurants say a lot about the ways that we care for each other. There has always been and always will be something essential and sometimes sacred about what we eat, whether it’s roast beef sandwiches in North Andover, sushi in Mexico City, or posole in San Francisco. These public spaces where we feed and cook for each other, and enjoy sitting at tables together, in important ways are the crown jewels of our civilization. — MS.
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