Fat Guy
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Did you find the million dollars I left you?
Thanks so much Jonathan & Nina & cows for hosting the event, and to everyone who organized and participated. What a great day.
More after the food coma wears off.
And I would like to ask, Jonathan, please state for the record which state we were in at the time of the pig roast: New Jersey or New York.
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I'm sad that some people won't be coming, but I have a feeling we're going to be able to manage without their food contributions!
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Then perhaps, Matthew, you will enlighten us as to how the Chefs Collaborative and Frontera Farmer Foundation missions and proclamations are ethically compatible with a Burger King endorsement. Is it because putting a chicken sandwich on the menu is "a step in the right direction"? That argument has, I think, been dispensed with already. Is it because Burger King, unbeknownst to us, is actually an enlightened and vigorous proponent of local, seasonal, artisanal, sustainable, environmentally sound ingredients and agriculture? Or is it for some reason that has thus far eluded us?
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And the above statements equal the below in what way?
It seems painfully obvious that both are examples of moral proclamations that are on their own terms 100% ethically incompatible with a Burger King endorsement, and that anybody who says either and then turns around and endorses Burger King is a screaming hypocrite not to mention a shameless lying pimp.
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Visiting his website, you see how commercial he is, hes got advertisements, tons of pics of himself (cus its about the FOOD,) hes got a whole line of tortilla chips, salsa, Margarita Mix, GIFT SETS (!!) that you can PURCHASE!
There's nothing wrong with behaving in a commercially viable manner, nor is there anything wrong with wanting to be rich. But Bayless looks bad even to a died-in-the-wool free-market-loving capitalist like me. Because to me his Web site isn't objectionable on account of being commercial; it's objectionable on account of being tacky, ugly, and beneath the dignity of a significant chef. Which is all quite aside from the hypocrisy.
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See above, all the seasonal, local, artisanal, environmentally sound, sustainable, blah blah blah . . . proclamations from Chefs Collaborative plus his Frontera Farmer Foundation to which you're encouraged to make your tax-deductible donation in order to realize Bayless's vision of "a year-round interchange between sustainable farmers and chefs or market patrons, in which the seasonal products of local agriculture provide the foundation for regional cuisine and the assurance of a sustainable future." Not to mention, "Rick and Deann Bayless, founders of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, along with the restaurants’ staff, created the Foundation out of their concern for struggling farmers and the importance of local produce to the vitality of Chicago’s culinary culture. Small local farms promote biodiversity by planting a wide range of produce, are more likely to operate using organic practices, and add immeasurably to the fabric of their communities by their civic commitments, interactions with restaurant chefs and presence at farmers markets. By their artisanal approach to agriculture, the freshness of their product and the variety of their offerings, these farmers insure the highest quality food. Without these farmers, great local cuisine is unreachable. We welcome your tax-deductible contribution . . . ."
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I'm sure Varmint's will be great. We don't have live music.
We have opera singers. Something can be arranged.
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I also just want to say that our pig event is totally going to kick the ass of Varmint's pig event.
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great looking day today.
It's actually shaping up to be the nicest day of the year. Nor can I think of a better group of people to spend it with, except for maybe the same group minus Slkinsey.
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If one's objection to Burger King is "the food sucks" or one's objection to fur coats is "fur is ugly" then one should consider endorsing Burger King or a fur manufacturer based on a "step in the right direction." Especially if there's a hefty payment involved. But if one's objection to Burger King is "this is an evil, morally repugnant, rotten-to-the-core corporation that is part of a larger evil, morally repugnant, rotten-to-the-core segment of the market, and I'm fundamentally opposed to the entire concept of a business like this continuing to exist for one more second," or one's objection to fur coats is, "those who manufacture fur coats are murderers," then one should not put one's personal and professional reputation behind a product endorsement for that company, regardless of what the product is and regardless of whether it's a coat that's 25% non-fur or a line of non-fur coats representing 25% of production, unless the company totally changes direction or offers a tremendous amount of evidence that it is inexorably moving towards a new way of doing business. Which I assure you all is not happening with Burger King.
Crest is good toothpaste, though.
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I don't see how he will inspire the fast food industry to espouse some of his values if he turns his back on them when they espouse one of his values just a little bit.
Were this his reasoning, he'd be a total sucker: "Hey, we're putting a chicken sandwich on the menu! Don't turn your back on us; we're espousing your values now! Please don't turn away; here's a million dollars not to turn away, okay?" If I found a particular organization to be morally reprehensible to it core, it would take a lot more than a sandwich to convince me that I should all of a sudden give a full frontal endorsement. It would take, at the very least, a sandwich plus a really big check.
Next we'll be seeing the anti-fur people giving endorsements to fur manufacturers that switch to making coats that are only 75% fur. "It's a step in the right direction. There's a lot less fur in these new coats."Not that I find Burger King morally reprehensible or morally anything at all. It's just a corporation trying to sell stuff, and that doesn't bother me. I just think the food at Burger King sucks. I wasn't aware of any of this Chefs Collaborative business, nor do I support many of the stated goals of that organization (at least not as they're phrased). But Bayless's involvement in that group certainly adds a poetic layer of apparently hypocrisy to these actions.
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We have plenty of space, but will have to leave on the early side. Anybody who wants a ride back to NYC at around 4pm can be dropped off anywhere on 96th Street between the West Side Highway and Madison Avenue.
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The meta-issues surrounding Jews and bagels are explored in more detail by Lenny Bruce:
Jewish and Goyish - Lenny Bruce'Dig: I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish. B'nai Brith is goyish; Hadassah, Jewish.
If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish.
Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if the Jews invented it. Chocolate is Jewish and fudge is goyish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime jello is goyish. Lime soda is very goyish.
All Drake's Cakes are goyish. Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish. Instant potatoes, goyish. Black cherry soda's very Jewish, macaroons are very Jewish.
Negroes are all Jews. Italians are all Jews. Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jews. Mouths are very Jewish. And bosoms. Baton-twirling is very goyish.
Underwear is definitely goyish. Balls are goyish. Titties are Jewish.
Celebrate is a goyish word. Observe is a Jewish word. Mr. and Mrs. Walsh are celebrating Christmas with Major Thomas Moreland USAF (ret.), while Mr. and Mrs. Bromberg observed Hanukkah with Goldie and Arthur Schindler from Kiamesha, New York.
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A chef sells not only food that tastes good but his or her sense of taste and style.
That's certainly true in this context, where the chef has an audience far beyond the subset of the population that could ever reasonably be expected to dine in his restaurants.
If a chef has a single restaurant, and all he does is cooks there, I only care about the food that comes out (and the service and such that I get at the restaurant). As long as the food tastes good, I don't care if his home is decorated with black velvet paintings of Elvis and if he subsists on a diet of Fritos and Lipton's sour-cream-and-onion dip because he likes that better than the fancy-schmancy food he cooks for a living. There's a point at which, regardless of food quality, I wouldn't support a raging pedophile or anti-semite or whatever, but on the whole I don't really care what a standard-issue restaurant chef does or thinks as long as he's putting out good food.
But when a chef starts writing books, going on TV, and otherwise injects himself into the larger media world where celebrity is a commodity, he's no longer selling food. It's not likely that even 1% of his audience will ever eat his food, or at least not the restaurant food that reflects his best work. It's in that kind of celebrity/public-eye situation where I think it's correct to say that insofar as the overwhelming majority of the audience is concerned a chef does not sell food that tastes good but, rather, sells only his or her sense of taste and style. Or lack thereof.
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Well, just to really annoy you Peter, here's the definition in US federal law of a professional employee:
PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYEE - Any employee engaged in work predominantly intellectual and varied in character as opposed to routine mental, manual, mechanical, or physical work; involving the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment in its performance; of such a character that the output produced or the result accomplished cannot be standardized in relation to a given period of time; requiring knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study in an institution of higher learning or a hospital, as distinguished from a general academic education or from an apprenticeship or from training in the performance of routine mental, manual, or physical processes.Merriam-Webster doesn't cut this way, but American Heritage does. The first definition in AmH is:
Of, relating to, engaged in, or suitable for a profession: lawyers, doctors, and other professional people. -
There are different kinds of breakdown in a service operation.
Absolutely. But it is impossible to conclude, based on one data point, that you are witnessing the second. Yet it is overwhelmingly likely that almost every single observer of a one-night disaster will, if the disaster is quite complete, conclude that he has just dined at a restaurant in decline. The cognitive dissonance otherwise is just too great.
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Is it our water, our oil, our air? Will we simply and gladly accept sub-standard bagels?
I believe it is the latter, and probably the single biggest problem is that most people outside of NY and CA suffer from extreme fear of crust. I've told the story before of visiting a Manhattan Bagels franchise in Raleigh, NC, with Varmint a few years back. Manhattan Bagels ships high-quality frozen dough (produced in New Jersey) to its franchises. This dough has the potential to make very good bagels. But the owner of the store told us repeatedly that he is forced by consumer preference to undercook the bagels so they have barely any crust and little or no exterior color. The bagels he was selling to the public were mediocre, because that's what the public demanded. But he left a batch in the oven for us a little longer, until it got nice and brown, and those bagels were damn good. Go to one of the Manhattan Bagels locations in Texas, if you live near one, at a time of day when they're actively baking, and ask them to leave a few plain bagels in the oven until they're really dark and crusty. Not charred, just a deep, rich caramel-brown. Eat those and tell me there aren't good bagels in Texas. There are probably plenty of good bagels all over the place, but if they're mostly subject to infanticide nobody will ever get to taste their potential.
Even in New York, the bagels have been getting fluffier and softer over time. There are very few bagel bakeries remaining where you'll get an actual ache in your jaw muscles from eating a bagel.
Making bagels isn't rocket science. Any significant corporation with a budget to do a little research should easily be able to overcome local variations in flour or water (if water is even a factor, and I'm hardly convinced it is) in order to create a top-notch bagel, dough can always be manufactured centrally and shipped, and any idiot can be trained to do the basic shaping, proofing, and baking. But why bother, when people would buy fewer of them than they currently buy of the fluffy, crappy supermarket bagels that are the norm?
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Katie (and Peter), do you not think there's a categorical difference (several differences, really) between pursuit of the arts and pursuit of the professions? Unless you're going to reduce and level the meaning of "professional" to how they used to define it in the Olympics -- as in, a professional athlete (or anything else) is anyone who gets paid to do anything -- I think it's illogical to try to say there's no difference between being, on the one hand, a doctor or lawyer, and, on the other hand, being a painter, sculptor, musician, or chef (note even that last grouping is questionable, as many would seek to distinguish art from craft). Having different expectations of different types of people based on their career choices isn't by definition a "double standard," nor do those varying expectations deny that all these options are careers with professional aspects to them (the artist must engage in time management, sell works, etc., to survive -- it's not all living off NEA grants). It's too easy to throw that terminology around anytime anybody makes a distinction between two categories of people, but it loses its meaning unless it is reserved for instances of outright hypocrisy and attempts to subjugate a group (like women) by holding its members (especially when membership is genetic or otherwise inevitable) to a stricter moral code (such as sexual) than another group (like men). There are in my opinion significant differences between creatives and professionals, which isn't to say creatives are "unprofessional" -- that would be a different use of the word and one has to realize there are several definitions in order to make sense of it.
Especially when you start looking at the top people in a given line of work, the expectations are justifiably different. Nobody looks to a top cardiac surgeon to be a tastemaker. That person is expected to perform complex surgery on people's hearts, and perhaps to conduct research and experimentation that will eventually result in new and improved procedures to do the same. But to any artist, that cardiac surgeon (and the similarly situated lawyer or other professional) is simply what's known as a customer. Whereas, a top chef -- especially a "star chef" with an ambitious public career plan that includes TV shows, consulting gigs, multiple restaurants, endorsements, etc. -- is absolutely a tastemaker, figuratively and literally. That's the whole point of choosing that career path. And the star chef's stock-in-trade is his or her credibility and reputation as a tastemaker. Otherwise there would be no chefs on the Food Network; they would just hire actors to play chefs.
But I don't even think, putting all that aside, we're looking at a double standard here. Many people -- most people, I'd guess -- are a lot more offended by the commercial/capitalist aspect of medicine or law than they are by the commercial aspect of cuisine. I know of lots of countries that have socialized medicine, but none that have socialized cuisine. And across all career lines, most anybody who's good at something has a reputation to protect. I think an eminent doctor would rightly lose respect for endorsing an inferior medical product, just as a chef would and should lose respect for endorsing a food item that tastes like crap.
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to Bayless if Burger King had called up and said, hey, chef, we're trying to make a food item that doesn't suck. Let us give you a consulting fee and you come into our test kitchen for a few days. We'll give you parameters such as cost and available ingredients, and you'll come up with a Mexican-type sandwich for us that you'll be willing to endorse. But from what I've been able to find in the newspaper reports thus far, that is simply not what happened. Rather, it seems "Burger King hastily arranged the endorsement of celebrity chef Rick Bayless of Chicago, who has won top culinary awards for his Mexican cuisine. He will promote the sandwiches in a commercial, and may even dabble in Burger King's test kitchen." (Washington Post, see link in my previous post.) Well, you know what? Rick Bayless created value for himslef by winning those "top culinary awards for his Mexican cuisine" (which came, presumably, in recognition of his talent and reputation). Burger King recognizes that value. And Rick Bayless, it seems, has decided to outright sell some of that value for cash on the barrelhead. That's his right, and perhaps most people would do the same. But there's no point in denying what seems to have happened. You can't have your quesadilla and eat it too. When you sell your reputation, you don't also get to keep it.
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Woody: not trying to pick on you specifically; just trying to use your post as a reference point for explaining the TDG editorial position on this.
The first three headlines in the Weekend Update are:
"Chef Rick Bayless Becomes Shameless Lying Pimp"
"World Doomed. It's Too Late. No Where To Run."
"Grocery Store Hos"
So let me throw out another definition or two (both Merriam Webster):
Satire: "trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly"
Sarcasm: "a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual"
Given the aforementioned context, not to mention the fact that anybody who reads TDG generally and the Weekend Update specifically on a regular basis knows that the publication is rife with satire, sarcasm, irony, etc., I don't think it's accurate to say that "Chef Rick Bayless Becomes Shameless Lying Pimp" is a "highly negative declarative statement." It is, rather, a highly sarcastic, satirical statement.
If anybody wants to read the declawed, non-judgmental, unironic, accepting version of the story, direct your attention to the standard sources, to wit The Miami Herald, The Washington Post, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If you want to see something with teeth, look here. Rick Bayless is getting plenty of money, I'm sure, for this endorsement. That's fine. I'd take the money and give the endorsement too. I'd fully expect people to attack me for it and I'd be laughing all the way to the bank.
Let's put this in perspective a few different ways: First, as mentioned above, this needs to be seen against the context of TDG, the Weekend Update, and the way Jinmyo does these headlines. Second, a "star chef" has endorsed a Burger King sandwich, and while I'll be the first to defend his right to do so and while I'll also be the first to admit that the sandwich could be good, I'm not so naive as to think this won't raise a few journalistic eyebrows and indeed I'd think it bizarre if such an action went unquestioned. Because overall, Burger King sucks. Even to someone like me who is overall sympathetic to chain and convenience food, Burger King sucks. In my opinion it is, overall, significantly worse than McDonald's. And that's pretty low. If an eminent neurosurgeon started doing ads for some questionable herbal remedy and his defense was, well, yeah it sucks but it's a step in the right direction, he'd get raked over the coals in the media and he'd deserve it. (Miami Herald: ''I'm not normally a fast-food kind of person,'' Bayless said during a phone interview. "But I think this is a step in the right direction. It's healthier, fresher-tasting and much less processed.'') Third, welcome to the world of irreverent journalism ala Salon, Slate, and Wired. Examples of some Salon article titles: "Bush is an idiot, but he was right about Saddam," "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," "Media Circus | Unspun: Pimps without portfolio." Example of some Wired article text: "Journalists in this country need to strap on their balls and quit clinging to the lab coats of the lying "objectivists" and their pretenses of "neutrality."" "As usual, the film industry has adopted a policy of lying to the public, and is hoping that no one notices."
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Just speaking from general experience -- and I'd be surprised were this not the general experience of every experienced diner in the world -- any given restaurant, on any given night, can totally suck. It can suck so bad that one is virtually forced to conclude, "This sucks way worse than an off night can explain." This happens to people at Taillevent, in fact it happened to me at Taillevent. It happens at Daniel, indeed more than once to me. This happens to people at Ducasse New York, Paris, and Monaco, though it hasn't happened to me. It happens at Pierre Gagnaire, though again not to me, and I'm sure it happens at El Bulli, though hopefully not when I eventually get there. Even at Gramercy Tavern, where the entire business strategy of the restaurant is obsessively focused on not letting this sort of thing happen (some would say at the expense of some inspiration/creativity), it happens. The only place it doesn't happen is at McDonald's, where the human factor has been beaten out of the system and everything has been automated. But a real restaurant is a delicate machine with numerous interlocking parts. When it starts to spin out of control, and the spin control mechanisms are for some reason not operating, a disastrous evening can ensue. The potential variation is much greater than with a Broadway show or an opera, because the nature of the specific interactions (in the kitchen and in the dining room) is so much less predictable. And it's entirely possible that, the very next day, things can be right back on track.
A related phenomenon: it's tremendously difficult to overcome one's first experience at a restaurant, especially if it's a bad experience, but also to some extent even if it's a good one.
None of which is to make any judgment at all with respect to the specific facts of this case. I'm just saying that, accepting all of Robert Brown's factual observations, which I'm sure are correct and probably even conservatively stated, there is still the possiblity that it was nothing more than an off night. Perhaps not the most likely possibility, but a possibility nonetheless.
There's a lesson for restaurants here, though, especially for "destination restaurants": most people will give you only one chance, and they're coming to you with high expectations. Those people will judge you on one visit, and they have a right to do so because they've paid a ton of money to get to you and to eat at your place. And those customers have friends, and some have even larger audiences.
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I forgot to mention, I also grabbed a bag of like a dozen medium-size aluminum-foil food-service trays, which can be used to serve and contain various food items if there's a shortage of bowls, platters, whatever.
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"Goddamnit, how come every time us Chinese put up a wall, stupid Mongolians have to come and knock it down?"
- South Park, episode 611
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Is Craig Camp, the American Italian, a closet Francophile?
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Rick Bayless and Burger King - Part 1
in Ready to Eat
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Doctor, heal thyself.