Lobby restaurant / lobby bar
Also, first post!
Welcome to the Food Section (a working title). It’s good to have you here!
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This is currently in alpha, and being sent to less than a dozen readers. I hope it will one day get sent to more, but right now I am most interested in your feedback about format, content, or anything at all! I will reach out after sending a few issues, because I’m most interested in how this works for you as a thing that lands in your inbox regularly, week after week. In the meantime, please feel free to drop me a line about anything that catches your eye.
Also, please feel free to ask me to write about something, anything, related to food or drink! I can’t promise it will happen in the very next issue, but it will almost certainly happen at some point.
The proximate cause of your receiving this email is the New York Times review of Bang Bar, which is essentially a shawarma stall opened by David Chang, of Momofuku fame. The review, “Why Does This Fancy Shopping Mall Smell Like Street Meat?”, paints Chang as a sort of trickster god for opening a street food stall in the middle of Time Warner Center (soon to be dethroned as the fanciest shopping mall in New York). Had he done this three years ago, I would have had no hesitation in concluding the previous sentence “where its neighbors include the two most expensive restaurants in New York”, but the those pioneering establishments, Per Se and Masa, sparked such an arms race in restaurant pricing that now I can’t even be sure they’re the most expensive restaurants on their block.
The reason I still read the Times reviews is that Pete Wells really tries to understand and capture the creative intent behind each restaurant he visits, but when I ate at Bang Bar, I found the precise nature of David Chang’s creative intentions rather low on the list of questions I wanted to ask. Mostly, I wanted to ask why he opened the closest thing I can imagine to a restaurant as a tool of repression.
A brief description of the food: Bang Bar serves shawarma, the kind of shaved meat you’d get from a halal food van. A sandwich costs $6, and there are no options - it comes with (slightly overcooked, heavily seasoned) meat, pickled onions, cabbage, and sauce. Everything is made in house, including the bread (like a flour tortilla but square, more flavorful, and more elastic) and the sauces (which are mostly remixes of pre-packaged sauces). There are two dips available for $3 each, eggplant and chickpea, and these come with a different, puffier bread. This bread is laminated, fragrant with whole grains, not quite crisp, somewhere between pita and paratha. I would happily eat this three times a day. The meal as a whole was not unpleasant, but left my palate feeling like it had been accosted by a con artist on the street - the levels of salt and sugar were charming in the moment, but became less charming with time, eventually congealing into a lasting sense of violation.
Wells somehow overlooked the fact that David Chang has just opened the first restaurant in what is obviously meant to be his fast casual chain. The template he has chosen is basically indistinguishable from McDonalds’ - a retail outlet for industrial meat, salt, and sugar, assembled into a menu designed to be produced by completely de-skilled labor, workers as commoditized as the meat and sugar they’re selling.
Instead he wrote, “Bang Bar might make more sense as a provocation than a business concern.”
In a dining landscape where skilled line cooks are impossible to find and even harder to retain, and where fast casual chains don’t so much grow as metastasize, I can only imagine the provocative conversations that must have taken place between Mr. Chang and his investors about the prospect of getting into the fast casual business themselves.
But fear not - there is still a spark of Momofuku-esque anarchy here, since Bang Bar is, as Wells was apparently told by David Chang in a phone interview, “[a] collaborative effort [that] has no chef.” This must be why the only name that appears in the article is David Chang’s. Notably absent: the names of the cooks who came up with the mortadella doner (served at breakfast). The names of the cooks who developed the extraordinary bread that comes with the dips. Absent also, the names of the prep cooks who assemble the spits each morning and laminate the doughs in the wee hours.
When I went the line, clearly audible on the other side of the glass sneezeguards, sounded just like the one at a high end restaurant. “Fire two pork, then one chicken on rice.” “That’s four pork all day, right?” “Four all day!” Japanese knives gleamed unsullied on their cutting boards while two cooks used electric shawarma shavers on the slowly spinning logs of meat. One cook had no job other than to griddle each leaf of bread before it was filled. He did not look like he was communing with the bread and the flame, learning from them and becoming one with the process, in the way that the apprentice toasting seaweed did in Jiro Dreams of Sushi. He looked, in a word, bored. As a consumer, I certainly prefer to have my shawarma sandwich rolled by someone who pays it as much attention as they would a filet of turbot. As a cook, I wonder if this is the kitchen anarchy they were looking for when they went to work for David Chang. At least they get to use high tech shawarma spits.
“If anybody grasps the cultural implications of bringing $6 street meat sandwiches indoors where they can perfume the air breathed by consumers of Pink shirts and Floga furs, it is Mr. Chang,” Wells writes. It is certainly not his landlords at the Time Warner Center, who could have had their pick of a dozen street carts parked outside, or any one of hundreds of food trucks and other food startups in New York, or indeed, nationwide. If Bang Bar actually did make the Time Warner Center smell like a better version of the streets of New York, one in which you only got the appetizing part of the city’s tapestry of scents, that would have been a wonderful thing. But the ventilation system, like a genie or an army of uniformed cleaners, is quick to whisk the smell of the street away.
You can’t have a weekly newsletter without at least two sections, and a photo. So here is a second section, and a photo.
Esteemed diner of the week?
This is my dad, having his first Bacardi and coke in probably twenty five years. Bacardi and coke was a nightly ritual for him when I was growing up. I remember stirring them for him using stirrers purloined from the bars in various hotels. I’m pretty sure he didn’t realize at the time that this was the drink of American imperialism, which was especially funny since he hated the United States’ geopolitical arrogance. He’s sitting in the Atlas Bar in Singapore, easily the most absurd bar I’ve ever seen. It occupies the entire lobby of an art deco office building built in 1999 (sic) which is still one of the most expensive buildings ever erected in Singapore.
Thanks again for reading. See you next week!