Decades of defeat

You can get goat in parts of New England. Consumers of Portuguese origin create a market unparalleled elsewhere in the US. In Boston, as I recall, Savenor’s used to sell camel and kangaroo. Few meats are too un-American for New York City. Ottomanelli, purveyors to whatever is left of the Four Hundred, still has venison of the quality they sold to the Upper East Side in the Gilded Age. Los Paisanos in Brooklyn stocks alligator, turtle and caribou. But the great days of the 1950s, when a club in New York served porcupine, caribou, muskrat and armadillo, are fled. With the closing of the American mind has come the narrowing of American appetites. Americans’ self-image is of enterprise, pioneering, innovation, adventure and the call of the wild.

Readers of a certain vintage will recall when any listing of fancy restaurants in a big city had a heavy French accent. Look at the ‘Let’s Eat Out’ section at the back of an old issue of Gourmet magazine from the 1970s for the evidence, at least for New York but, if memory serves, it was true for London as well. (The Italians probably ran second, then the Chinese, then a big falloff to other countries but still mostly European ones.) The way it worked at Gourmet — you got a listing if you bought an ad — only understated things. Lots of good places never advertised at all or simply did not aspire to the tony status that association with the likes of Gourmet conferred. Names like Le Chamberlin, La Caravelle, Le Chantilly, Mon Paris, announced their sole culinary allegiance.