“This” Without “That”
Welcome to our Thursday edition, where we feature a great new recipe. Tuesday is for features.
IN THIS ISSUE: The Gourmet Taste Kitchen continues to Get It Out of Our System, plus Restaurant Critics Gone Wild.
Appetizers
The Star(giver)s, They’re Just Like Us
Perhaps the hardest thing about being a restaurant critic is having to hold your tongue. There is a fine, blurry line between critiques and petty judgements—the former an important part of the discourse, the latter…a bit unprofessional. So we asked a handful of Important Restaurant Critics to anonymously furnish us with their most unpublishable opinions on dining out today, the things they hold back for fear that they would tarnish their credibility as even-handed commentators able to give any establishment a fair shake. (Though if you wanted to guess their identities, be our guest…) —A.B.S.
“Self-consciously handmade ceramics may be a little played-out aesthetically, but at least there is a statement about craftsmanship being made there. What I can’t abide are the kinds of factory-made, faux-wabi sabi, Webstaurantstore.com ceramic dishes that you see at a particular flavor of restaurant. They’re nauseating to look at, horrible to take photos of, and just generally a horrible vibe.”
“Fuck you if your menu calls out that you use Niman Ranch. That’s not special!!!! That’s a massive massive factory meat producer!!!! Like sure it’s better than Sysco slop but if you’re bragging about it then I question your overall sense of quality. They’re owned by Purdue!”
“It is basically impossible for me to have a good time in a restaurant with very high ceilings. It feels unfair because the real estate market is hard, and sometimes a good restaurant ends up in the first floor of a new mixed-use development, but the whole experience feels…unbound somehow. I feel exposed, like I’m at risk of being drone-striked.”
“I don’t eat at restaurants that serve burrata. It’s one of the creepiest foods.”
“When I go to a restaurant’s Instagram account and like half of their photos are collab posts with influencers it tends to bode poorly. I get why restaurants lean on influencers, but it's just so tacky. I have reviewed places like that and the food was good but there's just something so sort of late-stage about it all. It really cuts through the air of mystique when the first thing you see is a dark dining room lit by ring lights. It’s the thing that makes me prejudge a restaurant the most.”
Waldorf Mediocria
I ate a subpar Waldorf salad at the Waldorf Astoria a few nights back. The jokes write themselves (you had one job! etc.), but I’m here to report the facts as I ate them.
Armored in a rented tux, I entered the palatial, chandeliered halls on a recent evening for an event tied to my Other Life. It turns out I was overdressed and was, in fact, promptly mistaken for staff (the guy made up for it by saying he was “asking everyone” where the bathroom was; well played!). Anyway, in the name of service journalism, here are some highlights and lowlights.
Lowlight: Aforementioned salad. By the time it was served, I was one martini and two vodka sodas deep, so I obviously forgot to take a picture of the menu. But based on a blurry picture of the dish itself, it seemed to contain some walnuts, soggy radicchio, pepitas (I think?), and I believe cubed apple. There may have been a halved grape or two. These are indeed all elements of the salad, so I’ll give them that. The notes I remember were: “wet” and “salad.” C-
Highlight: Stiff martini. The bartenders were doing their best among the throngs of mostly cocktail-attired people (what does “black-tie optional” even mean??), and their best was more than enough for me. When I asked for a martini, my guy winked at me and began a theatrically long pour of gin directly into the shaker; no measurements here. He then took the bottle of vermouth, poured a mere tipple into the cap, and trickled it in. Is that class? I am certainly not the arbiter, but I’d say so. B+
Lowlight: Crab cake. I don’t remember much about the crab cake other than it wasn’t that good. C
Highlight: Mini viennoiserie! A two-tier metal plate with tiny, sugary confections—don’t mind if I do. The churro was passable, but the Paris-Brest! Oh, the Paris-Brest. Perfectly one-bite, not too sweet, and the pâte à choux was perfectly crispy, a real feat for a large event. Would eat again. A
And if you see the guy looking for the bathroom, tell him it’s down the hall and to the right. —C.G.W.
“This” Without “That”
By Amiel Stanek
Ask not how you can make crispy wings without deep-frying. Ask whether they need to be crispy at all.
There comes a brief moment each year, right around the end of January, when the American culinary hivemind turns its attention wingward. Boneless, skinless breasts and thighs can rest easy in their cold cases for now. The Big Game is on the horizon, and the people must have their chicken wings. Vast quantities, many, many birds’-worth for each citizen, a collective craving that, if you work in food media, serves as a call to action—an opportunity to be seized upon. During this period, a question begins to float through the ether. How do you make crispy chicken wings without the hassle and mess of deep-frying?
It is time-honored framing. This without that. An object of desire dangled; a problem proffered; a proprietary solution presented. What goes unspoken, however: “This” is never actually…“this.” Who can honestly say they have eaten a baked or air-fried anything that was as gloriously, shatteringly crisp as it would be if it emerged from a vat of hot oil, still sizzling on its way to a resting rack, every molecule of moisture on its crystalline surface squealing? Without “that,” the thing in question simply cannot be “this.” It can be delicious, wonderful even, worth making and making again. But it cannot be “this.”
Want to make carnitas without all the fat? Bolognese without the wait? Why? Why when there are so many pork dishes that are not confited, so many Italian pasta sauces that don’t require hours of simmering. If “that” is to be avoided for whatever reason, it feels like a failure of the imagination to stay stuck on “this.” We, editors and readers alike, are all drinking the same very contemporary, very American flavor of Kool-Aid, keeping up the charade that we can have everything we want and nothing that we don’t, even as our lives feel harder and tighter. Perhaps our time could be more productively and pleasurably spent imagining that another world is possible.
Why not just ask a different question? Like: What if crispy wasn’t the only thing that chicken wings could be? What if they wanted to be…wet?