Spectator Life

I have written before in these pages about declining standards in the restaurant world, which has less to do with the food than with the whole “experience” of dining out: the lack of tablecloths, the napkin-wrapped silverware, the to-go boxes, the slovenly informality of staff and customers alike. I stand by every word of it, which is why discovery, or rediscovery, of rare holdout occasions, in this diner-out, is sheer joy. One such exception, long known to me, Jimmy Kelly’s Steakhouse in Nashville, is exceptional in another sense, too. It has been in operation without interruption and under the same family ownership for eighty-nine years.

Everyone loves guacamole, even food puritans. It’s like ice cream or donuts ­— but healthy and good for you. (No need to ask about the fried tortilla chips or calories.) On Super Bowl Sunday, it is estimated that Americans will eat 120 million pounds of avocados, mostly in the form of guacamole. It’s the brownish-green fruit’s big day. Not by accident, Mexico’s avocado trade association runs elaborate ads each game. "The fruit that can change the world, alter history, and make everything better" is its 2023 Super Bowl offering promises. Avocados are a happening food item worldwide, and Mexico leads in sales. Valued at $3 billion last year, its avocado exports were greater than tequila or beer.

Does it seem these days that everyone you know suffers from a food allergy, sensitivity or intolerance (don’t ask me to explain the difference)? It seems inevitable that eating out in a group entails someone in the party requesting a menu item be made vegan, keto, gluten-free, dairy-free, tree nut-free, sulfite-free, etc. (I usually just hope the meal itself is free). Blame it on seed oils, soil depletion, genius marketing, the Liver King — whatever. The fact is that our toxic world makes party-planning a royal pain. How do you accommodate a bunch of people whose dietary restrictions turn menu-making into a culinary Sudoku puzzle? Fortunately for you, The Spectator associates with a lot of cool, accomplished, clever people — one of whom is Chef Andrew Gruel.

Six months of the year, I’m a (wannabe) Lisboeta, “a person from Lisbon.” A peripatetic British food and travel journalist somewhat scuppered by Brexit, I’m allowed in the Schengen Area for up to ninety days in any 180-day block. I max them out before I’m sent packing. I’ve come to think of these moments in time as “chapters,” in a half-hearted attempt to romanticize the loss of my border privileges. Lisbon is the object of my affections — and has become my base for European chapters from which I breathlessly ping between countries. I try new dishes and try not to fall in love with anyone before I’m ordered home (rather inconvenient: "getting married for the visa" jokes grow less and less funny).

Who is Ali Slagle? A fan of New York Times Cooking might recognize the name: nine of their fifty most popular recipes of 2022 are credited to her, the most of any of their contributors, including household names like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Melissa Clark. But despite the tremendous popularity of her recipes, Slagle herself is a bit mysterious. She crops up, cheerfully and occasionally, on NYT Cooking channels. Her 142,000 Instagram followers are a mere fraction of the followings of her food-celebrity contemporaries, like Molly Baz, Alison Roman, or Claire Saffitz. She doesn’t appear to be developing a platform; she has no Twitter, no Substack, no YouTube channel. She appears to live in a camper van.

It takes four people, according to the French, to get a salad dressing right: a spendthrift for the oil, a miser for the vinegar, a wise man for the salt and a lunatic for the pepper. A tough cast to assemble, you might think, but the freehanded, the tightfisted and the insane aren’t such rare birds. The true needle in the haystack is the wise man who would have anything to do with a recipe involving four chefs. Cooks, broth, too many — enough said. Most wise men would be out of town before you could say “smoked oak salt flakes” ten times fast. But the point stands: getting the salt right isn’t a walkover. The rookie has to steer a tight course between undersalted Scylla and oversalted Charybdis.

After twenty-three years in Japan, I have concluded that the much-lauded, worshipped even, cuisine is overrated. And I am getting a little tired of being told how awe-inspiringly wonderful Japanese food is, often by people whose only experience is high-end sushi or designer tempura in a showpiece Tribeca eatery, a world away from the standard fare available on the backstreets of Shibuya. Part of the problem is that much of what delights the Japanese about their food is unrelated to its actual taste.

The pandemic of the past two years had many casualties — everything from lost lives to faith in bureaucratic and medical expertise. All-you-can-eat buffet restaurants were among the hardest-hit subsectors of the service economy. Buffets were already in steep decline nationwide by 2019, owing to evolving American preferences for fast casual dining and farm-to-table menus with Golden Corral as arguably the sole remaining buffet chain in America. By 2022, even that venerable franchise  — a Raleigh, North Carolina-based symbol of American excess and dependent on high gross revenues to offset narrow per-order profit margins — had seen its footprint shrink 25 percent, down to a mere 360 restaurants after losing eighty due to pandemic-related closures.

I’m hungry, so I know it has begun. December. The month when the kitchen transforms into a battleground, no soldier safe from its vigilant sniper’s gaze. Seemingly innocuous snacking is off-limits: one must assume that everything edible — everything — has been squirreled away for festive drop-ins, cocktail parties and The Big Day. “Wait! Don’t open that. It’s the Christmas wine.” “Hey. Don’t even think about it. That’s a gift for Auntie Jo.” “Put those back! They’re the Christmas Eve cashews.” We must struggle with bizarre concepts like “having a banana” or “waiting until dinner.” Or, do as I do. Continue in vain, scribbling an IOU list that grows as long as my belly grows round. I’ll buy it back tomorrow. Of course I will.

Joshua Weissman’s number-one bestselling An Unapologetic Cookbook is misnamed. You won’t catch the potty-mouthed, long- haired chef saying sorry for making a mild ethnic slur against Italians or a penis joke, but in a philosophical sense, apologetics is exactly what he’s doing: he champions the joys of home cooking to an uninitiated audience. Weissman’s unlikely following is made up of the type of guys who consume a lot of quasi-educational content on YouTube and Wikipedia. They won’t buy the latest Barefoot Contessa volume, but they are curious about how things are made, whether it’s bridges or Big Macs.

To celebrate my birthday, which falls six days before Christmas, my mother used to make gingerbread houses for me and a dozen of my friends. Every December, she set to work baking sheet after sheet of gingerbread. The baking would take up the first week of the month, and in the second she would assemble the houses, laying their icing foundations and sealing the four walls with crisp white frosting. These would dry in the basement laundry room, taking up every available surface. After school, I would peep at the houses and dream about my party. On the big day, my mom set out each perfect house at the formal dining room table, and we convened to decorate them.

There are some characters who infuse literature and life with disproportionate zest. The nature of their vocations is less relevant than the fervency they bring to the job, which is what makes them stand up off the page and sail through time. Lucius Beebe, who kept a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, favored bowler hats and evening dress and wrote a column for the old New York Herald Tribune in the 1930s and then for Gourmet until his death in 1966, sits high up on my list of zestful characters who go the distance: militantly old-fashioned, never out-of-date. The association with the estimable, sadly deceased Gourmet justifies talking about Beebe under the food heading as much as any other, even though he did not always write about food as such.

Horizontal, deep into a book and ever deeper into a mojito, is how I’ve spent most of my week. A private beach under the Caribbean sun should have been relaxing. And it would have been, if it wasn’t for the vibe squad. What is a "vibe squad," you ask? Well, picture it: you’re nearing the end of a Patti Smith novel, and naturally you’re crying. It’s mid-afternoon, you’re contemplating a nap after the next drink. When all of a sudden you and Patti Smith are covered in booze, startled by a young girl in a bright top screaming, "are you ready to part-aaaaaay?" I was not, in fact, ready to part-aaaaaay, and the girl quickly moved along to the next unwitting tourist too polite to tell her to sling her hook.

As one of eight children, I feel deep kinship with others who come from big families. Bunk beds, hand-me-down clothes, abject chaos at dinnertime — these are the staples of big-family life. Tieghan Gerard, the author of the food blog and cookbook series Half Baked Harvest, is one such kindred spirit. She comes from a family of ten, and began cooking as a tween to help with frenzied mealtimes. She soon started creating her own recipes for a food blog, which became three bestselling cookbooks and a four-million-follower Instagram. Her big-family backstory blends with her wholesome, rustic aesthetic: feeding a crowd, after all, involves creativity, resourcefulness and well-loved tools. I hoped I’d recognize some high-volume cooking tricks in Half Baked Harvest: Super Simple.

When I’m out on small New Jersey roads — sometimes Virginia roads, but I don’t see them there as often — I always take an extra second to look at ice cream stands. You know the place: a basic, boxy building with a little awning, an ornamented, angular front, one or two counters to order, and more often than not no inside seating or even a customer entrance. The staff are usually high-schoolers, maybe retirees. The prices, like everything, have crept up, but they’re still wallet-friendly. They’re refreshingly un-trendy, too. Nobody manhandles your ice cream on a frozen rock. I love these places. I have many fond memories of my parents pulling off the road for ice cream, sitting at a simple table on gravel under an awning and enjoying a treat. Simplicity. Contentment.

The restaurant world was devastated this week after learning a fact our cousins across the Pond have been telling us for some time: that James Corden is a huge douchebag. The Late Late Show host found himself on the blacklist of swanky New York haunt Balthazar, after owner Keith McNally described the Brit as his “most abusive customer.” Now, one enterprising company that provides signage to restaurants is offering its clients a “free digital sign” to Iet Corden know he’s banned from their establishments too. Australia-based Mandoe Media breathlessly rushed the signs out in a press release. A bit too quickly for Cockburn’s liking, as the company appears to have skipped the spell-checking stage. One reads, “DONT BE LIKE JAMES: TREAT STAFF WITH RESPECT!

I recently got engaged. After the celebratory Champagne and indulgent restaurant meals my fiancé and I enjoyed in our month of post-betrothal bliss, reality set in: soon I must fit into a wedding dress. Of course, dresses come in all shapes and sizes, just like brides. But have you seen the price of a wedding photographer lately? I’d like to look my best. These days, the main weight-loss food trend seems to be the ketogenic diet. Like the Paleo and Atkins diets, eating keto means cutting carbs. Unlike these other diets, keto isn’t high in protein; it’s high in fat. The idea is that depriving yourself of carbs and protein will cause your body to burn fat for energy — starting with the bacon and eggs you ate for breakfast and ending with your thighs.

The dominant wolf gets the liver, at least according to the podcaster Joe Rogan. In one episode, a bodybuilder called “CarnivoreMD” (real name Paul Saladino) tells him: “If you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male... or alpha female.” Offal has taken a markedly macho turn in recent years. No longer consigned to memories of the postwar school cafeteria, organs have become the preferred food of a certain type of gym bro. The word “offal” implies wastage — from the Middle Dutch for offcuts — but it can also be a delicacy. Foie gras is only the most obvious example. For the most part, though, the West has become squeamish about what was once called “variety meat.” But a new wave of offal-lovers is reviving an interest in organs.

The other day I attempted to have sushi rolls for dinner. I ended my night disappointed, and excited to go shopping for overpriced groceries. Back in college, in central Jersey, I used to go to a Japanese restaurant in town, order the triple spicy roll combo, claim a student discount, and walk out with a perfect dinner for about $13. The filling was just pure fish, and enough spicy mayo to complement it. No crunchy flakes, no cucumber, no cost-cutting measures. Sure, it was a lot of rice despite feeling healthy, but I told myself the hours of studying would burn it off. So the other night, with my wife at the office and out for a work dinner, I was on my own for dinner and went searching for my old college favorite.

Summer is fading fast, and though, according to my calendar, “the Autumnal Equinox” (is that the newest model of Hyundai?) isn’t until September 22, all the things we love about the season — swimming, county fairs, outdoor drinking, the August congressional recess — are essentially over after this weekend. And while people mark Labor Day in different ways, one of the best is with a barbecue, one of the few culinary traditions America can truly call its own. Smithsonian Magazine tells us barbecue has its origins in the first indigenous tribes Christopher Columbus encountered, who had a “unique method for cooking meat over an indirect flame, created using green wood to keep the food (and wood) from burning.

Inflation having topped 9 percent this summer, Americans are looking for ways to cut their spending. Rising prices at the grocery store are impossible to avoid, but we can learn to adjust. There’s no better inspiration than M.F.K. Fisher. Fisher, a food writer who hung around with Julia Child and James Beard during her lifetime, felt the pain of wartime rationing acutely. Her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf addressed the problem of hunger — “the wolf on the doorstep” — with a few clever recipes and a great deal of philosophy. Survival of the crisis, she predicted, would require first and foremost an attitude of abundance. Fisher ascribes virtues like honesty, dignity and nobility to simply prepared foods.

Cockburn saw Papa John last week at CPAC — and he had some strong words about his old stomping grounds. John Schnatter, founder of Papa John’s Pizza, was ousted from his company in 2018 after saying the N-word on a conference call. Cockburn thinks he had it coming. Schnatter, who ate 800 pizzas from the chain over the last eighteen months, claims the company is now “down with Little Caesar’s,” among the gravest insults you can level in the pizza business. The Pizza Papa made it clear that he knows why the company is losing its way: "We built the whole company on conservative values. Conservative ideology has two of the most critical attributes: truth and God." Without truth and God, he said, the pizza had gotten worse.

They were neighbors and friends. Harold Loeb, an economist, writer and heir to the Guggenheim and Loeb fortunes, and his wife Vera lived down the Saugatuck River from us on Snake Drive, at the end of Buttonball Lane. Harold was better known as having been betrayed by Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the 1930s — Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises was modeled after him. Harold got even in The Way It Was, published in 1959. He asked my father to sketch him for the book’s back cover. Among other things they had in common a gift for gardening. My father, known for his charcoal sketches of celebrated locals of Weston, Connecticut, planted a large, Walden-inspired plot surrounded by a white picket fence, where weeds were allowed as long as they didn’t interfere with the crops.