no. 120: great american

I’ve written much about the Singaporean food I ate growing up: lou arh, chicken curry, kueh. I have not written about the American food. But if you simply count the calories, tuna sandwiches were more important to my childhood than lou arh.

I liked them soggy. My mother had a bread machine, and notions of healthy eating that made my dad complain like an old bed put to vigorous use. The bread she made was branful and wheaty, with a close, tender crumb and a thick suede crust. She didn’t drain the tuna, and had a light hand with the mayonnaise, for fear of the cholesterol in the egg yolks. The purple onion and firm tomato came from the wet market. They were single slice sandwiches, folded like tacos, stuck in a tupperware box the color of the sea, where they sat, unrefrigerated, in my backpack, like treasure, to emerge hours later – maritime, sulfurous, spongy, sodden, lumpen magnificence. I didn’t think of these as American food. To my schoolboy self, those tuna sandwiches were the taste of slightly smothering maternal love. I blame them whenever D tells me I’m being a bubbe today (which happens at least once a month). But where do tuna sandwiches come from, if not the land of the subdivision and the cul de sac, where General Motors met General Foods?

I grew up eating America’s body without tasting its spirit, in a kind of sacramental disunion. The tuna was Starkist, the mayo was Hellmann’s, the flour in the bread was milled in Singapore, but some of the wheat almost certainly came from the Great Plains.

America, of course, had always been there. McDonald’s and I arrived in Singapore three weeks apart. The Straits Times covered one of these events in priceless, opinionated detail. Nearly everything was shipped in, from the machinery to the frozen patties and fries. The only thing made in Singapore was the buns. But when we went to McDonald’s, it wasn’t to eat, but to visit the future.

I don’t think I tasted America till 1990, when the Hard Rock Cafe touched down in Singapore to Apollonian levels of fanfare. It moved into a space just off Orchard Road, which had previously been occupied by the Tuckshop, an early attempt to modernize the hawker centre. By then we had two English newspapers, and both were agog. They covered the deal, they covered the buildout, they fawned over the impresario behind the restaurant, a “Southeast Asian sheikh” (someone thought this was a compliment). On the sheikh’s orders, a Cadillac was sawn in half, painted in flames, and mounted over the entrance, showing the world its tailfins. My ten year old self missed the joke – America mooning our food culture, with pyrotechnic farts.

I was too young to rock n’ roll, so while my parents marveled at the memorabilia, I marveled at the pulled pork sandwich, a configuration of sugar, spice, and pork at once familiar and thrillingly strange. Maybe it was how, for the first time, I felt like I was tasting an idea, something slightly dangerous and slightly true. Maybe it was just the size that mattered, or the volume – of food, but also of the message. Pulled pork will always taste of America to me, of liberal ideals and slavery in a bun.

I’d actually tasted ideas before, and you probably have too. The Hard Rock Cafe was just the first time I knew it was happening, perhaps because it was the first idea I found appealing. McDonald’s was the taste of progress, but I was too young to know why progress mattered. My mother used to make this dessert that lives in her recipe book as “Yoghurt Delight” – yoghurt and syrup set with Jell-O in a pyrex pie plate, topped with fresh kiwifruit and peaches from a Del Monte tin. Her friends loved it, and so did I. At parties it sat next to the platters of kueh and pandan chiffon, daring, exotic, sophisticated. I was too young to care about sophistication either, but old enough to disdain anything remotely like respectability.

Right as the Hard Rock Cafe was opening, “westernisation” was becoming unpopular in the press. I don’t know if this was because its many downsides (liberalism chief among them) were becoming more apparent, or because an opposition MP had come out in favor of the idea. That set the stage for the political discourse of my teenage years – such as it was in Singapore. Somehow McDonald’s and Hellmann’s weren’t westernization, but rock ‘n roll and freedom of speech certainly were. I was a teenager then, and it was becoming hard to imagine teenhood without McDonald’s. The missionaries in my mission school had taught us all about the satanic panic, but now Lee Kuan Yew and the Ayatollah had something to agree on.

I hadn’t thought about the tuna sandwiches in years, the way you don’t think much about your ulna. And then, a few weeks ago, my colleague suggested we have lunch at a Great American Restaurant.

“A what?” I said, while thinking, “are there any?”

“There are like a dozen of them around here.”

I must have looked skeptical, because we went for Chinese instead. But the notion stayed with me.

Just off Route 7, a deep gash runs between the red granite facade of Tiffany & Co. and the painted concrete face of Nordstrom Rack, the chainlink canyon between aspiration and everyday life. At the end of this long slice of DMZ, rising like the Ayers Rock from the blacktop outback of Virginia, sits Patsy’s, perhaps the greatest of the Great American Restaurants.

There are no Great American Restaurants in New York, or San Francisco. There are no Great American Restaurants in the culinary meccas of Austin or Seattle or Chicago, nor the Portlands on either coast. There are certainly none in Boston. But there are 17 Great American Restaurants in Northern Virginia, speckling the pendulous belly of the beltway like oases on the road to Samarkand, scattered through these green and bug-filled woods, this rolling tarmac sea of subdivisions and serpentine highways with arcane tolls, set like cabochons among the churches and McMansions and data centers. The world feels both very close and far away. The built-to-order homes and crumbling malls are filled with grocers from Basra, traders from Addis, cooks from Karachi, the diaspora of all the world. Where else should a Great American Restaurant be but here?

From the outside, Patsy’s is a red brick neologism, a building that simultaneously evokes a warehouse and a cathedral. I suppose a Great American Restaurant is both. I want there to be a flaming Cadillac stuck in the wall, but the parking lot is an honor guard of foreign cars: Maseratis, Porsches, Range Rovers, BMWs for the practical. They march you towards Italianate pilasters with lone star medallions, flanking three massive, glazed Roman arches. A station clock sprouts in the central arch, above a massive beaux-arts awning. On one side, a green Victorian storefront has sidled up to the warehouse and attached itself, with a furtive, afterthought air. On the other side, yellow awnings detract from the symmetry to announce the presence of a Best Buns Bakery, another Great American Restaurant. There are five Best Buns Bakeries, and which of those actually has the best buns is a mystery. The green storefront is a Great American Restaurant too, Randy’s Prime Seafood & Steaks, but the building is unquestionably Patsy’s, and the others are bashful handmaids to her awesome sprawl.

Patsy’s seats at least 300, and nearly every table is a booth, six feet deep with a table a yard across. Everything is red leather, dark wood, and plenty of brass. They couldn’t decide if they wanted the Gare du Nord or the Notre Dame overhead, so they got it all: stained glass, clear glass, ironwork, a station clock, and murals. The bathrooms are Carrara marble.

At Patsy’s you can taste America. There are clams from Virginia and lobster from Maine, Maryland crabcakes and barbecue and prime rib, which comes from wherever prime rib comes from, presumably some beefy state. In their kitchen, food transubstantiates. Shrimp from Mexico and Thailand, salmon from Norway, and beef from Brazil are invested with the American spirit. Some months the asparagus will come from Mexico or Peru, some months the avocados will come from Florida. And America produces essentially no cocoa or vanilla at all. I’m guessing at the precise supply chains here, but America’s appetites outstrip its borders, and labor elsewhere is cheap. Most Point Judith Calamari is processed in China.

But here America has abandoned place, and become a time instead. Tex-Mex eggrolls emerge crisp and golden from the melting pot, their filling a warm, substantial, molten mystery. They seem to be, like me, a child of the 1980s, the taste of morning in America. I later learned the Cheesecake Factory and Chili’s serve them too, perhaps this was simultaneous invention, like the calculus. The spinach and artichoke dip is a boomer, an early triumph of industrial food. It sits on the menu with a gerontocrat’s insouciance, the impermeability of permanence. And of course there is surf and turf, the inalienable right to spend a lot of money on too much food, a baked potato and bearnaise. Are these any less genuine than lou arh? Their origins are as apocryphal as the American myth, but surely America tastes like this, like ease and overproduction, and food cooked by people from elsewhere. I grew up being told to eat every grain of rice on my plate. America has always made that hard.

At seven o’clock on a Saturday night, the wait for a table is 75 minutes. We sit at the bar. All America is here, or at least all America’s suburbs. At the bar are full sleeve tattoos and headfuls of dreadlocks. Quiet conversations between straight-faced men in shalwar kawmeez, drinking sodas. There’s tennis wear and golf wear, trucker caps and Snoop Dogg shirts, Tiffany pendants and too much eyeliner, cotton shirting and plaid. A lawyer with a pocket square and an argyle tie, his wife with her monogrammed Vuitton. They look like sober, serious, and have dressed up for their sober, serious weekly fling. He has a pre-dinner Manhattan, she a pink martini. Evening gowns and tuxedos swoop through, tottering women with plastic faces. Everyone turns their heads and goes back to drinking.

The bartenders are chatty but don’t know how to mix, they shake like they’re afraid of their shakers. The barbacks are older, wiry and hard, like they recruited from the county jail. They hand drinks to a stream of identical servers, the offense and defense of the high school football team, open faces,matching haircuts, and affable bulk. I got the sense that if I asked any of them why they were here, they’d shrug and point at their friends. Maybe the hairstyle spread like a bug. Every martini is poured tableside, whether it’s raspberry lemon drop, mango, espresso, or chocolate. They’re shaken over cheater ice and dispatched in cobbler shakers, and I watch the servers pour with cross-eyed concentration, an utterly guileless, slightly panicked desire to please.

I lose count of the generations – mothers and daughters, artichoke dip and lobster rolls, capri pants, Coach bags, a great many rum-and-cokes. Grandfathers, fathers, and sons, three generations of camo caps, burgers, beer, and birthday cakes. The generations seem compact, as though everyone was in a hurry. In the back, a Chinese clan, a single table too large to count, three generations or possibly four. They’re eating steaks and fries. I try to picture my grandparents here, and fail. My father would order the barbecue ribs, my mother the short smoked salmon and a salad. American food.