Dave has a point.
You know Dave. We all know Dave, or at least think we do. Dave, father of Wendy, the proud parent who named his hamburger stand after his darling daughter. Beaming, white-curly-haired, portly, down-to-earth, multi-millionaire Dave.
Normally, I don’t look to tycoons flogging their own products on TV for deep insight into the human condition. But Dave handed me one, on a platter, piping hot like one of his famous square burgers, and I pass it on to you.
Dave, as you know, appears in his own ads, at once giving them that endearing personal touch and thriftily saving a bundle on high fees for hired actors and celebrity endorsements. In this particular episode of the ongoing Wendy’s saga, Dave is in some fancy restaurant with a witty, erudite, relentlessly cheerful young waiter explaining the specialties of the day. As Dave looks up at him with childlike trust, our garçon rattles off some endless list of unusual ingredients and food-preparation methods, ending with “lobster cappuccino.”
“Lobster cappuccino?” Dave asks, one eyebrow lifted in bemusement. “Lobster cappuccino,” the waiter responds with a proud grin. Dave looks at him, looks out at us, then — speaking for himself, but also for you, perhaps, and certainly for me — says something to the effect of “I think I’ll go get me a burger.”
Understand me here. As I mentioned some time back, my son’s a chef. I enjoy all kinds of fancy and exotic food. And I for one think it’s a good thing that, during their off hours or slow times in the kitchen, today’s young food professionals have enough energy and ingenuity to push the envelope, to ask burning questions about cooking, such as, “What exactly happens when you put a cup of lobster pureé under the steam valve of an espresso machine and froth it?” This is how progress occurs in all fields, and it’s to be encouraged, so long it’s between consenting adults and no one gets hurt in the process.
Nor do I mind reaping the benefits of this experimentation. I know I’m not alone in believing that I eat better now than I ever have before in my life — not because I have more money, or go to better restaurants, but because everywhere you go people who cook are testing out all kinds of unusual techniques and ingredients, with the result that even the most humdrum dishes often get a new lease on life. But my basic rule is a variant on President Clinton’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” guideline for the military: Much of what is done to my food I really don’t want to know about at all, especially if I have no say in the matter.
By which I mean that the waiter who informs you about that “lobster cappuccino” is not actually offering you an option on the order of, say, do you want your steak medium or rare, or would you prefer the baked potato or the fries, the green beans or the garden salad? These new dishes are presented to us as seamless, integrated wholes, each ingredient and prep method presumably calibrated to the others with exquisite precision. You’re in no way encouraged to say, “Could you make that a decaf lobster cappuccino,” or “I’ll have a lobster espresso instead,” or to suggest any other variant whatsoever, just as you wouldn’t dream of asking a painter to change that shade of blue she used in the upper right corner of her canvas. That would be crass, uncultured, philistine. These are not dishes, they’re culinary works of art, creative expressions, take-it-or-leave-it deals.
To which I have no objection. I like to think that I can enjoy food as art just as much as the next person. The problem is that while I’m capable of considering, and savoring, the results of such creativity, in my experience the average human brain and palate simply cannot imagine and calculate in advance the gustatory consequences of more than four — any four — ingredients and preparation methods before going into overload, which leads to pushing the philistine food-panic button: “I’ll have a burger.”
The same is true in the other forms of art, by the way. The people who make the objects we usually call art understand that perfectly well (or at least they did before art schools began destroying their minds). So, as a rule, you get to see the goods before you buy or otherwise involve yourself with them. Picasso — trust me on this, if you weren’t there — did not stand before his audience at his openings with his artwork hidden in the back room saying anything like, “Tonight’s specials are a traditionally represented harlequin in muted pastel shades, about three feet high in a vertical format, with a leafless tree on the left and a dark horseman in the background; six naked prostitutes with faces derived from African masks, posed frontally, in a Cubist style, mostly in pinks and browns, horizontally framed, about 6 feet high by 12 feet long; and a full-figure statue of a standing ape with a miniature car where its head should be, cast in bronze with a delicate patina, about one-third life-size. Have you had enough time to decide what you want? Would you like to see our frame list?”
Keeping all this in mind, and following the convention of naming new laws after high-profile victims of one or another form of abuse, then, I’m proposing Dave’s Law: No establishment serving food shall be allowed to list on its menus or announce via its waitpersons more than a maximum of four ingredients or preparation methods involved in any one dish — upon penalty of having to serve the entire party burgers on the house.
Which brings me to a related issue, and Marco’s Law.
Marco Millerini — photographer, digital artist, tureen collector, and celebrated bon vivant — and his lovely, sweet-tempered wife Nacia (a Web designer and poet) left New York City many years ago; with their brilliant, handsome teenaged son Aaron, an aspiring film-maker, they now live in, of all places, Toronto — yes, right up there near the Arctic Circle. (God knows why; the place is lousy with polar bears and walruses. About all they have in common is a taste for smoked salmon.)
If I could build and populate the small town of my dreams, Marco and Nacia would have a house next door to mine; as it is, we hadn’t seen each other for twelve years until mid-May of this year, when I flew to Toronto for a conference. We went out for Sunday brunch in their neighborhood, at a pleasant little café. I asked for eggs and bacon; Nacia ordered yogurt and granola; Aaron wanted French toast; and Marco, dieting for no obvious reason (he’s buffed like a Greek — or at least Grecian Formula — god), asked only for an order of dry whole-wheat toast.
Our food came, and we were about to tuck into it when Marco, looking down at his toast, said, “Just what I wanted — shredded lettuce with my toast.” Sure enough, his plate was dotted with little bits of lettuce — not dropped there accidentally but artfully strewn around for decorative purposes. Turning our attention to our own dishes, we saw that all of them were littered with lettuce. Parsley’s one thing; mint’s another; but lettuce — lettuce, if you’ll forgive me, is a horse of quite a different color.
This led to a round of variously humorful and sarcastic discourse, as we envisioned further consequences of this visual-art approach to food run amok: some over-estheticized sous-chef deciding that your rasperry sorbet needs a touch of green and draping it with some braised spinach, for example. The upshot of our banter was socially productive, however; it resulted in the formulation of Marco’s Law: (1) Whatever you use to decorate a customer’s plate with should be both edible and somehow relevant to the main dish from a taste standpoint; and (2) Not all dishes require decoration.
Especially plain toast. After all, the whole point of dieting, as I understand it from an outsider’s standpoint (never having had to diet in my life) is self-denial. That morning, Marco’s psyche craved the spartan purity of toast, just toast: elemental, tough-minded, basic, no frills, no fun, no nutrition, just roughage. You could argue with his decision, but it was his to make before someone in the kitchen intervened, and we know this for sure — whoever said “man does not live by bread alone” did not have scraps of romaine in mind as the missing supplement.
There oughta be a law. If I can get either of these on the ballot, I’ll expect you to do the right thing in the voting booth.
(With a tip of the Coleman hat to Jimmy Hatlo.)
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