I haven’t managed a restaurant, but I have played the computer game “Diner Dash” to excess. Even in my dreams, I was the omnipotent puppeteer of a tiki-themed bar and grille serving burgers to the blue-haired masses. Did that video game lay the foundation for my unimpeachable time management skills? Perhaps--the sociological study is pending.
The blue-haired customers never understood what a damn luxury it is to be the diner and not the dasher. It’s been a year and I’ve missed the elaborate choreography of dining in a restaurant. It begins, of course, with viewing the menu 24-72 hours beforehand so you can prepare your palette. Going to a restaurant’s website and clicking “view menu PDF” sends a shiver of delight through my body. Then, the dining hour arrives. Maybe you have a reservation! Maybe your family shares an Open Table account and you say “table for Dave,” the hostess right in thinking that you are not Dave! It’s fine because it makes more sense financially to pool the frequent dining points! Or maybe you’re strolling in sans res and asking for a table like the Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago, that you are! Obviously, the bartender has tattoos and everyone in the restaurant is hotter than you.
You’re seated at the table and whoever you’re with is like “what are you gonna get?” and you’re like “hmmm I don’t know….” even though you studied the menu 3 days ago and could recite the entrée offerings as a spoken word poem. The server comes and you ask how they are because you’re not a dick. Sometimes the couple next to you is ill-suited for each other and they’re drinking a lot to make up for it. Against your wishes, you’re entangled in their ramshackle hut of a relationship. At my mom’s birthday dinner, the couple next to us was rocking a 20-year age gap and a vastly different understanding of what it means to look “put together.” They were soused, and at the end of the meal the woman said to the waiter “can we have another one of those honeycomb desserts? They’re so good!” and then, to me, “aren’t they so good?” I was like, look, lady, you don’t need my absolution to order more dessert. Of course, I’m on board. Honeycomb is truly the crackling of angels.*
Enter Marco Pierre White who, much like me playing Diner Dash when I was 12, is constantly lashing out under the restaurant-induced pressure. The Devil in the Kitchen is his memoir of “sex, pain, madness and the making of a great chef,” aka the gamut of life I experience when I make coconut curry lentil soup for myself and eat it for every meal for 14 days (apart from the sex, though). All the meals Marco makes sound truly grotesque like the Chopped basket was a butcher’s garbage. Offal??? Pigs’ trotters???? Why are you eating pigs’ shoes???? I don’t like when humans merge multiple animals in a dish and make it sound like it’s something they wanted e.g. “Surf ‘n’ Turf,” which sounds like a cow is doing a fun Triathalon with her lobster pal.
Marco Pierre White is a successful chef, even though if I had to go to one of his restaurants I would definitely get risotto and feel underwhelmed. It’s impossible to read this book without thinking of the seminal film Ratatouille, a bildungsroman of a rat-chef named Remy, and analysis of exclusion and pretension in the restaurant industry. Both this book and Ratatouille are of the view that food is art and chefs are painting a scenic vista or chiseling stone abs every time they prepare a dish. I think that’s elitist. Often when you eat 4 servings of pickle-flavored chips—potato debris collecting on your sweatshirt, fingertips rendered ineffective from a thick coating of dill dust and MSG—that is gourmet as well.
*Is it clear what I’m saying here? Honeycomb is to angels what crackling is to pigs, in that both are made from crisp, fatty skin. Like honeycomb is made from the crisp fatty skin of angels :) In this scenario angels, not dead humans who have ascended but rather “God’s assistant” type of angels.