He suggests that bad character and loose morals have led directly to what happened to New Orleans. For one thing, they like food too much, he goes on to say. This from a man who, for decades, has made a living shoving food into his crumb-flecked maw—then writing about it in a way calculated to make us feel like we should care. And we did care. So it’s monstrously disingenuous of Richman to now claim that, perhaps, we care too much:
It might sound harmless for a civilization to focus on food, but it’s enormously indulgent. Name a society that cherishes tasting menus and I’ll show you a people too portly to mount up and repel invaders.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but, here, is Richman really saying, “If only these fat fucks had laid off the dessert cart they could have outrun the flood?”
Having blamed the victims for the carnage—a direct result, he proposes, of their immoral and ungodly behavior—he seems to depict Katrina and the perfect storm of incompetence and neglect that followed as some kind of divine retribution, a punishment for libertinism.
Not yet done, he goes on to question if the food was ever any good in the first place—if New Orleans’s famous Creole cuisine (or Creoles themselves, for that matter) ever existed. Not only is New Orleans not worth visiting now, but perhaps—perhaps—it sucked all along!
Supposedly, Creoles can be found in and around New Orleans. I have never met one and suspect they are a faerie folk, like leprechauns, rather than an indigenous race. The idea that you might today eat an authentic Creole dish is a fantasy…
What the fuck does “authentic” mean, anyway? Creole, by definition, is a cuisine and a culture undergoing slow but constant change since its beginnings, a result of a gradual, natural fusion—like Singaporean or Malaysian flavors and ingredients changing along with who’s making babies with whom, and for how long. The term “authentic”—as Richman surely knows—whether discussing Indian curries or Brazilian feijoada, is essentially meaningless. “Authentic” when? “Authentic” to whom? But it sounds good and wise, doesn’t it?
In the days following Katrina, chef Donald Link of the restaurant Herbsaint was one of the very first business owners to return to the city, the flood waters still barely receded, to slop out the ruins of his existing restaurant, and to—rather heroically and against all odds—open a new one. He staffed his place with anyone he could find, took on volunteers, and served food—whatever he could—in the streets, sending a timely and important message that New Orleans was still alive and worth returning to. Richman chose his restaurant to trash.
I should mention that I visited New Orleans a year after Richman’s article. It was a city still struggling to get up off its knees. The vast dining rooms and banquet spaces of Antoine’s, the beloved institution in the French Quarter, were mostly empty—and yet the restaurant soldiered on with nearly a full staff, unwilling to fire people who’d worked for the company for decades. Everyone I spoke to, at one point or another, would still tear up and start to cry, remembering lost friends, lost neighborhoods, whole lives swept away. It seemed sometimes like all New Orleans had had a collective nervous breakdown, their psyches shattered by first the disaster itself—and then, later, by a pervasive sense of betrayal. How could a country—their country—have let this happen, their neighbors left to huddle like cattle in a fetid, reeking stadium, or bloat and rot, day after day, in full view of the world?
It’s the kind of scenario, the kind of special circumstances, one would think, where even the most hardened journalist would ask himself, “Do I really want to kick them when they’re down?” Richman was not reporting on Watergate, after all—he wasn’t uncovering a secret Iranian nuclear program. He was writing an overview of restaurants. About a restaurant town that survives largely on its service economy. At its lowest, most vulnerable point—right after a disaster unprecedented in American history. And not for the Washington Post, either, mind you. For a magazine about ties and grooming accessories and choosing the right pair of slacks.
But no matter. The truth must be served. Alan Richman knows what “authentic” Creole cuisine means. And he damn sure wants you to know it.
This, alone, was surely reason enough to qualify as a finalist for Douchebag of the Year, but there was also this—another column: Richman’s “restaurant commandments,” in which he imperiously (if rather wittily) laid out a compendium of things which He found annoying and which those restaurants hoping to stay in His good graces should probably take to heart. This kind of article is much loved by writers in the field of restaurants, particularly recognizable ones, like Richman, whose lives are no doubt made easier in their daily rounds once their likes and dislikes have been communicated to their eager-to-please victims ahead of time. Under commandment #19, Richman lists:
Show Us the Chef:
If dinner for two is costing $200, you have every right to expect the chef to be at work. Restaurants where the famous celebrity chef has taken the night off should post a notice, similar to the ones seen in Broadway theaters: “The role of our highly publicized head chef will be played tonight by sous-chef Willie Norkin, who took one semester of home economics and can’t cook.”
As an example of lazy, disingenuous food journalism, one could scarcely hope for a better example. And this kind of cheap populism is particularly galling coming from Richman, because he knows better. If anyone knows the chef is not in, is not likely to be in, and can’t reasonably be expected to be in anytime soon—it’s Richman. He doesn’t live and work in a vacuum. He doesn’t write from a cork-lined room. Like others of his ilk, he moves in a demimonde of writers, journalists, bloggers, “foodies,” freeloaders, and publicists, all of whom know each other by sight: a large, ever-migrating school of fish involved—to one degree or another—in a symbiotic relationship with chefs. For years, he has observed his subjects being shaken down by every charity, foundation, “professional association,” civic booster, and magazine symposium—as well as by some of his colleagues. Many times, no doubt, they have complained to him (off the record) directly. Countless times, I’m sure, Richman has gazed wearily across the latest Fiji water–sponsored chef clusterfuck, over the same tuna tartare hors d’oeuvres (provided by some poor chef who’s been squeezed into service by whatever the concern of the moment is), seen the chef or chefs dutifully doing their dog-and-pony act. He also well understands, one would think, the economics of maintaining the kinds of operations he’s talking about.
Yet he demands, and expects us to believe, that every time a table of customers plunks down $200 at one of Bobby Flay’s restaurants, that Bobby himself should rush on over to personally wrap their tamales—then maybe swing by, give them a little face time over dessert. Thomas Keller, according to Richman’s thesis, should be burning up the air miles, commuting between coasts for every service at the French Laundry and Per Se. Particularly if Richman is in the house.
The whole suggestion is predicated on a damnable fucking lie—the BIG lie, actually—one which Richman himself happily helped create and which he works hard, on a daily basis, to keep alive. See…it makes for a better article when you associate the food with a personality. Richman, along with the best and worst of his peers, built up these names, helped make them celebrities by promoting the illusion that they cook—that if you walk into one of dozens of Jean-Georges’s restaurants, he’s somehow back there on the line, personally sweating over your halibut, measuring freshly chopped herbs between thumb and forefinger. Every time someone writes “Mr. Batali is fond of strong, assertive flavors” (however true that might be) or “Jean Georges has a way with herbs” and implies or suggests that it was Mr. Batali or Mr. Vongerichten who actually cooked the dish, it ignores the reality, if not the whole history, of command and control and the creative process in restaurant kitchens. While helpful to chefs, on the one hand, in that the Big Lie builds interest and helps create an identifiable brand, it also denies the truth of what is great about them: that there are plenty of great cooks in this world—but not that many great chefs.