The Role of Restaurants
When I was just getting started in the hospitality business, a friend said something about going out to eat that has stayed with me all these years. She was a well-to-do lady who lived just outside of Harvard Square, and she and I were taking the same art class across the river in Boston during a hot summer. One day we started talking about food, and she told me that as far as she was concerned, the reason to go to a restaurant was to eat a meal that you couldn’t make at home.
My guess is that many people feel the same way, and think of restaurants as places to find ingredients and plated dishes that they might not know how to prepare, or even recognize. It’s easy to see the appeal of sensory experiences that introduce new smells and flavors, which can make a person feel, perhaps, as though she’s traveling. That has certainly been one of the most amazing parts, for instance, of my exploration of wine. To open a bottle of wine in my kitchen, made from grapes grown during a certain summer in a river valley in France, is to feel a little like being transported to a different place.
But of course restaurant visits often happen right in our own cities and towns, and often, hopefully, local menus feature ingredients that were grown down the road. And I wonder: to what extent should restaurants try to take those familiar ingredients, and perform a little sleight of hand, a magic show that causes guests to ooh and aah? I have thought of my old friend from art school many times over the years; and maybe most often, ironically, when I have been in the process of making the simplest foods.
In those moments, I find that I don’t agree that restaurants should be dedicated to performing wizardry with common or obscure ingredients, or that such an approach should even be a primary aspect of the work they do. Sometimes, if not most of the time, I think a much more reasonable (and satisfying) expectation is that restaurants should perform the same work, with expertise, that we haven’t found the time to perform at home.
A good chef of course starts with devoting a lot of time to assessing ingredients. A man I know in San Francisco, whose very well-known restaurant just celebrated its seventeenth birthday, still fights traffic and takes his hand trolley to farmers markets twice a week. He wants to know what he’s buying. Then, he and his staff spend hours over cutting boards, turning excellent ingredients into very delicious food. Whether or not we know, ourselves, how to prepare the bubbling casserole which has been set down on our table in a restaurant dining room — seems fragrantly beside the point.
I’ll lean on the example of onion soup, which is one of my favorite things in the world to make and to eat, to try and bolster the case. The best onion soup is made, even before the onions are sliced, with good chicken, beef or vegetable stock. Making good stock of course takes time, and requires space, and even though I consider myself an avid home cook, I don’t always have the time and the space. Then onions are sautéed, seasoned with everything from fresh thyme and brown sugar to pumpkin pie spice and ground green peppercorns. I like to sautée onions in batches before I add them to a simmering pot, and sometimes I go crazy and deglaze each batch with a different wine.
Needless to say, I don’t make onion soup all the time at home. Just as needless to say, on cold winter nights, if I could go into town for a bowl of great onion soup and a piece of good of warm bread, and maybe a slab of cheese, there’s no telling how often I would patronize that café. It would not matter at all that I know how to make onion soup. I would hug the chef just the same. That I’m familiar with how to make a good bowl of soup would only make me more grateful for the work that was done, while I was off doing something else.
