Food, Service, and Play in Restaurant CultureAuthor(s): jennifer burns levinSource: Gastronomica, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 118-121Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2012.12.4.118Accessed: 02-05-2016 18:52 UTC

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gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol.12, no.4, pp.118–121, issn 1529-3262. © 2012 by jennifer burns levin. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2012.12.4.118.

eponymous restaurant; nor does he omit mention of a terri-ble review by Frank Bruni of the New York Times or refrain from describing a largely absentee relationship with his ex-wife and mother of his children . Achatz frankly admits that he has dedicated his life to the single-minded pursuit of fine cuisine . This quest is related in anecdotes that illustrate both the chase and the capture, many involving commen-tary by Achatz’s business partner Nick Kokonas, an unusual and often distracting addition to the text . The quest motif that Kokonas contributes allows Achatz to narrate his many triumphs as battles from which he has emerged victorious .

This rhetorical strategy is most effective in the last third of the book, when Achatz describes the terrible tragedy of the cancer in his mouth, which robbed him of his sense of taste (he regained it after treatment) . The details of the disease’s quick onset, its treatment, the need for drastic che-motherapy and radiation, and the threat to his livelihood provide a vivid sense of drama in the book . Achatz cred-its “the push” of the kitchen with providing him with the drive and tenacity to pull through, just as one would push through a difficult night of service (pp .ix, 290) .

The hard-fought struggle with cancer aside, Achatz’s keen culinary ambition, which plays out so stunningly in life, fails to read quite as well on paper . His book provides more in the way of details about squabbles among the lead-ing lights of the American restaurant industry than nuanced meditations on Achatz’s considerable innovations in cuisine . Both Achatz and Kokonas repeatedly stress the former’s considerable talents, but descriptive sections are largely confined to the reproduction of Alinea investor reports (with their photographs of dishes), and the text too often devolves into an account of Achatz’s being wronged in an industry where unfair behavior is unfortunately all too com-mon . Achatz’s relationship with Charlie Trotter provides the archetypal example of this mode . Disappointed and surly about a young Achatz leaving his service after only two months, Trotter is quoted as proclaiming, “If you do not stay at this restaurant for a full year, you will simply not

review essay | jennifer burns levin

Food, Service, and Play in Restaurant Culture

Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas New York: Gotham Books, 2011

x+400 pp . Illustrations . $27 .50 (cloth)

Dishing It Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience Robert AppelbaumLondon: Reaktion Books, 2011

285 pp . $35 .00 (cloth)

Two new works on restaurant culture, one from the perspective of those who serve it forth and another from those who are served, seek to revitalize our understanding of the contemporary dining experience . The gulf between the expectations of diners and the pressures within the restaurant industry seems to grow larger daily, and it seems unlikely that the two perspectives could possibly comple-ment one another .

And yet, these very different new books find common ground in a surprising place—the notion of play . The first, an autobiography of renowned American chef Grant Achatz, indicates to the reader that the story is about a bright, industrious, ambitious young man who is, above all, lucky . We learn from the first pages that in 2008 Achatz won the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef Award for his Chicago restaurant Alinea, and that Achatz has appeared to beat late-stage tongue cancer that metastasized into his lymph nodes .

The memoir progresses from start to finish as a triumph over adversities: a classic American success story set within the belly of the restaurant industry . Achatz hops from humble beginnings at his family’s restaurants in Michigan to the best possible education at the Culinary Institute of America and on to The French Laundry, where he serves as a respected commis for celebrity chef Thomas Keller . Alongside these laudatory achievements, he does not dis-guise a rough (and short) stint with Charlie Trotter at his

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Keller, but in the book the rarified dish is grounded in Achatz’s personal struggle with cancer: he is making them before his first treatment appointment at Sloan-Kettering, and the fine soft texture of the miniature gnocchi is “about all [he] can handle these days” (p.323). As Achatz rolls out the gnocchi, he reflects on the culinary tradition that he absorbed from The French Laundry, musing on the trompe l’oeil approach that makes salmon appetizers look like ice cream cones. The delight in manipulating a diner’s expectations stems from that playful showmanship, he concludes, stating that it

“makes sense that we play with food at Alinea” (p.323). We also find the idea of playing with one’s food at the

heart of cultural historian Robert Appelbaum’s Dishing It Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience. Appelbaum’s valuable contribution to food studies approaches the restau-rant experience from the vantage point of the consumer—a consumer seeking to transcend consumerism itself by grappling with the complex ethics of dining out. Although he devotes little attention to the labor of the kitchen (and, thankfully, even less to the cult of celebrity chefs), Appelbaum arrives at the same conclusions made by Achatz: a dining experience succeeds when it is about food first and foremost, and when the artistry and hospitality of producers is valued by consumers who appreciate the effort.

For Appelbaum, however, the idea of play evokes jouis-sance, a notion of excessive pleasure that is troubling for the consumer in its excess and can even shake one’s sense of self. Although Appelbaum stresses that we must not be misled

exist to me. Period. That means don’t ever call me. Don’t ever use me as a reference. Don’t put Charlie Trotter’s on your résumé” (p.49). The reader expects another confronta-tion, especially after Achatz opens Alinea in Trotter’s home turf of Chicago, so we are not surprised to read Trotter’s bristly snipe about Achatz’s relative inexperience quoted in Bruni’s negative review of Alinea’s opening day (p.265). But Bruni and Trotter are soon forgotten thanks to Gourmet edi-tor Ruth Reichl, who crowns Alinea the best restaurant in the country after Achatz coaxes her to visit.

We certainly cannot single out or blame Achatz for making himself the star of his story. The rise of the celeb-rity chef has assured marketability and reader tolerance for chutzpah, and the particular style of cooking embraced at Alinea encourages the myth of originary genius at its creative zenith. The book will inevitably be compared to one of the many chef autobiographies published in 2011––Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef––which also cel-ebrates an aggressive and competitive perfectionism.1 But where Hamilton’s dynamic prose connects food with her personal history and colorful travels, Achatz devotes Life, on the Line to his restaurant career. Perhaps either his struggle with cancer or the 2008 publication of Alinea, a beautifully photographed monograph on the restaurant, prompted him not to focus more on food in his autobiography.2 But as a food lover and a food writer who has not experienced Achatz’s culinary alchemy, I was disappointed not to read more about how this accomplished chef’s life story trans-lates into particular dishes.

There is one moment, however, in which Achatz makes the connection I was seeking. Near the end of the book, he describes his process for preparing tiny gnocchi the size of Arborio rice. It is a technique he learned from Thomas

Above: Seven different textures of rhubarb at Alinea: beet sphere in rhubarb juice, dried rhubarb, gin-compressed rhubarb, rhubarb sponge on bay leaf, lavender-poached rhubarb with goat’s-milk custard, rhubarb sorbet on oatmeal streusel, and rhubarb gelee with fennel candy and green tea nage froth.photograph by lara kastner © 2007

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venues, they may find political-economic realities obscured in favor of philosophical possibilities.

The book’s wide-reaching if uneven scope and impres-sionistic ethics do not detract from its pleasures, however. Appelbaum, formerly Senior Lecturer of Renaissance Studies at the University of Lancaster and now Professor of English Literature at Uppsala University, balances his dining anecdotes with a background in European cultural history. His interests in Renaissance literature, food studies, and colonial studies only enrich this latest book, which builds on his previous treatment of food and literature, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup and Other Gastronomic Studies: Literature, Culture and Food Among the Early Moderns (winner of the 2007 Roland H. Bainton Prize).3

The introduction sets out the premise of Dishing It Out: that the restaurant as an institution promises restora-tion and stages pleasure for the diner but is also subject to the vagaries of the marketplace. In the first chapter, one of the strongest in the book, “Restaurants for the Rest of Us,” Appelbaum distinguishes the restaurant from other public institutions. As a place where we dine intimately and can choose our own meals from an offering that is both public and private, individualized and generalized, the restaurant has always generated conflicting expectations for the con-sumer. In chapter 2, “Grimod de La Reynière: Eating and Writing,” Appelbaum explores the post-revolution writing of a French philosopher-critic who saw the old aristocracy as a new class of gourmands fueling the rising industry of res-taurants. Chapter 3, “Nausea,” is an examination, by means of Sartre’s novel, of the “bad faith” or “moral self-deception” among diners and between patrons and servers that under-girds commercial hospitality in the industry (p.79).

Tensions between producer and consumer only mount in chapter 4, “Her Majesty the Consumer,” which theorizes a rhetorical tendency to narcissism in food writing. Like the anonymous food critic, the contemporary food blog-ger lacks personal accountability, Appelbaum argues, and he uses the Internet to critique, or “throw a tantrum” as the “hero of [his] own life story” (p.111). Appelbaum is right to note a lack of charity toward those in service industries among food critics in general. I do regret, however, that this particular chapter is the only section of the book to address gender directly, with analyses of the work of M.F.K. Fisher, Gael Greene, and Ruth Reichl. “Her Majesty the Consumer” is a limiting label for an attitude that male restaurant critics also display, and it also obscures the often thoughtful food writing of citizen journalists and bloggers. By contrast, chapter 5, “Dining Out in Paris and London,” a meandering study of dining in these two cities over several

that the pleasure we receive in being served in a restaurant is anything but a momentary illusion of consumption, he posits that this pleasure can offer a moment of dislocation, similar to Sartre’s nausea, that defines us as human. He argues that the restaurant experience can remind us that we are not merely consumers but ethical beings:

It’s all about play, about not being what you are—even if there should

ever hover over our culinary endeavours the threat of bad faith, of

inauthenticity, of an over-emphasis on that which is aesthetic in place

of that which is ethical, or on that which is convenient or conventional

in the place of that which is free. (p.257)

The consumer, realizing that the pleasure is excessive, must transcend the aesthetic or conventional aspects of din-ing. In return for that moment of pleasure, the diner must recognize his or her place in the system of production and consumption. “It takes a society to produce a restaurant meal, even if it also takes an autonomous culinary artist to produce a good one,” Appelbaum notes. “And it takes a society willing and knowing enough to eat, appreciate and patronize it” (pp.255–256). Like both Achatz and food-lov-ing compatriots with the means to eat well, Appelbaum sets out on a quest, but one that seeks to critique that society of food appreciators in the name of what he calls, somewhat obliquely, “cultural democracy.”

The resulting book, less than three hundred pages in length but packed with exacting close readings that span multiple literary traditions, confesses to being “a little helter-skelter” (p.20): a fair assessment, no doubt. Each chapter explores meals experienced in different times and places by writers rarely considered together, including the first restaurant reviewer Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, food critic Gael Greene, and utopian thinker William Morris. This prismatic work of literary criticism and food theory explores restaurants from the diner’s perspective, drifting from philosophy and literature to accounts of meals high and low that the author himself has experienced. The “In Search” in the subtitle is to be taken seriously. This work, an engaged and erudite meditation on the nature of the dining experience, is better tasted and savored than read as any comprehensive system for theorizing the restaurant. As a whole it lacks a sustained framework for an ethics of dining, and although readers interested in the “scathing indictments of corporate chain restaurants” promised by Ken Albala on the book jacket blurb will sympathize with Appelbaum’s unappetizing descriptions of meals in these

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democracy (a site for “the rest of us” to enjoy a good meal), and his call for readers to support creativity and hospitality in restaurants (p .25) . However, I worry that such an appeal approaches what Americanist literary scholar John Carlos Rowe has called “aesthetic dissent”: meditations on justice that call for change without delineating historical causes and consequences of a particular ethical problem (p .148) .4 For both Appelbaum and Achatz, in different and yet com-plementary ways, play is the saving grace in a rather grim and even moribund institution with layers of inequity built into its very structure . Both of these works imply that in the service of play the restaurant experience can be improved in the back of the house as well as in the dining room . Can play—that surplus joy in convivial and delicious grace—extend to dining service that rewards both eater and server, for example? Can the staff have as much fun as a cutting-edge executive chef?g

notes

1 . Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (New York: Random House, 2011) .

2 . Grant Achatz, Alinea (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008) .

3 . Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup and Other Gastronomic Studies: Literature, Culture and Food Among the Early Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) .

4 . John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) .

decades (in many cases with Appelbaum’s wife, Marion, as his “research associate”), lacks the self-centered punchiness of a good blog rant .

From analyzing consumer experiences of restaurants, Appelbaum delves into literary criticism, examining restau-rant narratives in News from Nowhere by William Morris, Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (all covered in chapter 6, “The Production of Production: Novelists and Cooks”) . In the final chapter, “Culture, Civilization and Resistance,” he theorizes that a critical consciousness can help the ethical diner support the type of restaurant that values those who appreciate the particu-lar efforts expended to offer attentive service and culinary artistry at any price point . In the middle of the spectrum of “elitism and majestic consumerism for the few and McDonaldization for the many,” Appelbaum argues, there must be a restaurant defined by good food and good faith, a difficult task in a trade organized around the many hierar-chies of workers and customers (p .257) .

This last chapter suggests what is missing in all of this, however, and why the notion of playing with one’s food in restaurants run by culinary artists (that notion of the origi-nary genius again) may continue to be a problem for the ethical diner . To detail the bourgeois experience of dining out in a decent restaurant as a site of cultural resistance may be appealing yet fruitless . I applaud Appelbaum’s efforts to approach the restaurant as a potential site for cultural

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