Best Food Writing 2013 by Holly Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

is an achievement that even a mediocre chef can aspire to. In Somerville, near Boston, the young, self-taught owners of a restaurant called Journeyman made tasting-only menus a part of their business plan, along with the usual local/seasonal/carted-from-the-farm-or-raised-in-our-window-boxes ingredients. When I dined there last year, the inflexibility of the dour, dogmatic servers would have been comical had it not been so infuriating. As more and more restaurants adopt this model, tasting-only menus will empower formerly well-meaning, eager-to-please cooks and servers to become petty despots, and more and more diners will discover that absolute power irritates absolutely.
    Service for All!
    Even as a new army of fresh-faced Stalins prepares to spread tyranny across the land, at recent dinners at Noma, Next, and even Eleven Madison Park, I saw the seeds of, if not democracy, then perhaps a limited attempt at glasnost.
    At Noma, the diner feels desired and attended to, in a way that comes across as collegial, not obsequious or didactic. A main reason is that Redzepi sends aproned, working cooks to the table bearing dishes. They’ll explain as much or as little as you like about what they give you. They make you feel a part of the action, not just the passive subject of it. At the Sicilian-themed dinner I got tickets for at Next, I saw similar glimmerings of a kind of warmth that has never figured in the severely gray-and-white Alinea. To be sure, there were some eye-roll-inducing touches, like the earnest, handwritten notes to each table signed by the chef and the waiters explaining the philosophy of the meal (dictatorships thrive on theoretical manifestos).But, shocking from a chef whose presentations have been manicured and tweezed, there were also dishes served family-style and looking positively sloppy. It felt a bit forced, like a seersucker-and-bow-tied dandy putting on a dirty T-shirt and torn jeans. But I was heartened by the effort.
    As for Eleven Madison Park, it comes across as less forced than Per Se. This is because of its origins as a restaurant in the empire of Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group has democratized service in luxury restaurants much as the Four Seasons did in luxury hotels. Humm also added the Noma-like touch of sending aproned cooks to the tables, and he himself makes the rounds of tables at every meal.
    How far will this as yet very modest evolution go? A lot farther, we can hope. No one wants a return to the reign of the smirking, tip-taking, tyrannical headwaiter, who indeed put the needs of the diner first (the needs of the richest and most famous ones, at any rate)—an era defined by Henri Soulé, of Le Pavillon in the 50s and 60s, and Sirio Maccioni, of Le Cirque in the 80s and 90s. Obsequiousness is seldom far from its twin, contempt. But, ah, how nice it would be if at the world’s most celebrated restaurants we could get back to the point where the paying customer picks what and how much she or he eats, guided by helpful but not overbearing suggestions as to what a diner might enjoy most.
    Could it be that France, the culinary Forgotten Man, the birthplace of haughtiness, will show us the way forward? I recently came upon two signs it could be trying to fight its way back from the unaccustomed gastronomic shadows by adopting an even more unaccustomed humility. One was a radio interview with Jacques Pépin, the masterly, ebullient, encyclopedic teacher and writer on French food in America, who corrected the host when she asked about the chef as artist. “I never equate a great artist with a great chef,” he said with unexpected vehemence. “Food is taste,” not art. “A great chef is still an artisan.” And in an interview with the Financial Times, the Michelin-starred, much-admired Parisian chef Alain Passard replied to a question about whether the customer is always right by saying, “Yes, always. I am there to serve others’