I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world. Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck. Perhaps there should be an unspoken agreement that in the event of loss of virginity, the more experienced of the partners should, afterward, make the other an omelet—passing along the skill at an important and presumably memorable moment.
Everyone should be able to roast a chicken. And they should be able to do it well.
Given the current woeful state of backyard grilling, a priority should be assigned to instructing people on the correct way to grill and rest a steak. We have, as a nation, suffered the tyranny of inept steak cookery for far too long. There’s no reason that generation after generation of families should continue to pass along a tradition of massacring perfectly good meat in their kitchens and backyards.
Cooking vegetables to a desired doneness is easy enough and reasonable to expect of any citizen of voting age.
A standard vinaigrette is something anyone can and should be able to do.
The ability to shop for fresh produce and have at least some sense of what’s in season, to tell whether or not something is ripe or rotten might be acquired at the same time as one’s driving license.
How to recognize a fish that’s fresh and how to clean and filet it would seem a no-brainer as a basic survival skill in an ever more uncertain world.
Steaming a lobster or a crab—or a pot of mussels or clams—is something a fairly bright chimp could do without difficulty, so there’s no reason we all can’t.
Every citizen should know how to throw a piece of meat in the oven with the expectation that they might roast it to somewhere in the neighborhood of desired doneness—and without a thermometer.
One should be able to roast and mash potatoes. And make rice—both steamed and the only slightly more difficult pilaf method.
The fundamentals of braising would serve all who learn them well—as simply learning how to make a beef bourguignon opens the door to countless other preparations.
What to do with bones (namely, make stock) and how to make a few soups—as a means of making efficient use of leftovers—is a lesson in frugality many will very possibly have to learn at some point in their lives. It would seem wise to learn earlier rather than later.
Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire—to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past—or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty.
Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor.
You knew things were going to get bad when Steve Hanson, without warning or visible regret, announced that he was going to shut down his restaurant, Fiamma. A few months of unsatisfactory receipts, true—but they’d recently won a very effusive three stars from the New York Times; the chef, Fabio Trabocchi, had been getting a lot of favorable attention and a lot of goodwill from the blogs and the food press. It was just before Christmas, no less, and there was every reason in the world—in an ordinary year—for an owner to find reason to believe things would get better, to hang on. But not this year. Hanson had examined the numbers, glanced at the headlines, taken a quick but hard look at the future—and decided he didn’t like what he saw. He shut the doors on Fiamma and another of his restaurants, the Times Square Ruby Foo, in the same week.
Whatever people might think of Steve Hanson’s restaurants, no one has ever credibly accused the man of being stupid. Evil, perhaps. Unlikable, probably. But even his detractors won’t deny his intelligence. If Hanson was choosing this moment, and this time—before the holiday season, no less—to drop the hammer on his show pony, arguably the best of his restaurants, the one all the opinion-makers actually liked, this meant something. This was a warning sign. To seasoned restaurant insiders, this was a blood-chilling indicator that things were not just bad—but that they were going to get a whole helluva lot worse.
In a business that lives and breathes dreams, delusions, superstition, and signs, where everybody, from the busboy to the owner, is always trying to figure out what it all might mean—Why are we busy today? Why not yesterday? When will we be busy again?—everybody scrambled to battle stations, trying to figure out what it all could mean, and what they could do to stop it, hopefully before “it” (whatever “it” was) happened.
The year 2008 was the annus horribilis, as they like to call such times, the year of the Disaster—The Fear. The stock market plunged, retirement funds became worthless, the rich became poor, the gainfully employed jobless, the eminently respectable suddenly targets for indictment. In a flash, thousands of loud, over-testosteroned men flush with cash and eager to play “whose dick is bigger?”—the secret-sharers, the hidden backbone of the fine-dining business—vaporized into an oily cloud, possibly/probably never to return. What “it” meant in real terms was that, nearly overnight, sales were dropping in the neighborhood of 30 percent. Or worse. Most chefs you talked to admitted to 15 to 18 percent. A few more honest ones would grudgingly admit to upwards of 30—while trying to keep the concern out of their voices. This was fixable. No reason to panic, they insisted. To admit how bad things were—and how absolutely petrified with fear many of them were—was bad luck. The accumulated wisdom of the restaurant business dictates that admitting such things, publicly accepting reality, is bad ju-ju. It only makes things worse, spreads the fear, worries creditors—and, worst of all, frightens away potential customers.
But it was worse than that.
It wasn’t just that sales were down at the medium-range and up-market restaurants in town—it was which sales were down. It’s one thing to take in $20,000 in receipts on a given night. It’s another thing if most of that money represents food sales. What a lot of people won’t tell you is that, for many full-service fine-dining restaurants (the kind with elaborate service, freshly changed floral arrangements, “chef ’s tables,” and a private dining room), the prevailing business model before the crash was the reliance on the “whale customer,” the regular patronage of the kind of customers who’d spend a few hundred dollars on a meal—and ten thousand (or more) on wine. The percentages on wine are generally excellent—and it requires relatively little in the way of labor or equipment. The margin on food, however, is razor-thin in the best of times—even when the prices on the menu appear to be outrageously expensive. The best ingredients cost a LOT of money. The quality and sheer number of personnel needed to handle those ingredients also require a lot of money. And by the time those ingredients are trimmed down, cooked off, sauced, garnished, and accompanied by the kind of bread, butter, and service one would expect them to keep company with—there’s not a lot of profit left over.
The many in the finer of the fine-dining rooms of New York were, in some sense, being subsidized by the few who spent big dollars on wine. A few years back at Veritas, a bar customer was pointed out to me. He’d blown through as much as $65,000 in one month, giving out tastes to fellow oenophiles and strangers alike at the bar. That kind of customer can help a chef be a little more generous with the truffles.