perfectly normal
To get a burger and a beer at the Minetta Tavern costs $37 before tax and tip. That’s if you order the Minetta burger, the cheaper of the two on the menu. Ordering the Black Label burger, the famous one, will bump your check to $45. Draft beer is $12 of this check. They don’t tell you that it’s a 12oz pour, a decidedly modern measure in a restaurant that is otherwise an old-time pastiche. No one seems to find it strange that the beer is a buck an ounce, not even the old-timers rendered in charcoal on the walls, who probably drank here when pints costs a dime.
The servers wear black and white, with neckties and unfashionable black aprons that reach almost to their ankles. It is the uniform of grim, moustachioed, pastis slingers in Parisian cafes, or weatherbeaten, chain-smoking baristi in truck stops on the autostrada. It looks strange on the pretty young things they have drafted into service here, the way the statuesque host in cocktail garb looks like a Donatello planted in an underpass.
Our waiter has not a hair out of place at scrum o’clock in the dinner rush - it is always scrum o’clock at the Minetta Tavern. He is young and handsome and from California, with an unchanging expression and an unchanging voice, both neutral and smooth as drawn butter. We order one of each burger, and two beers. He asks how we would like our burgers done. We happen to like them medium rare. “They’re going to come out a little less than that, is that OK?” He seems to notice nothing strange about this response.
The Black Label burger is reputedly the best in New York, made of four cuts of dry aged beef. It is not salted properly. It is salted just to the point where the beef tastes neutral and very politely beefy, like a slightly more perfect high-tech meat replacer instead of a cow killed and left to denature very slowly for 6 or 7 weeks. There is pepper on the table but no salt. It is, as our server promised, slightly cooler than medium rare. The patty feels spongy and dangerously juicy, overripe.
The Minetta burger has a mere two cuts in the grind, neither dry-aged. It wears its slice of melted cheese as a badge, a convenient way for a busy crew to distinguish two otherwise identical items. The cheese doesn’t help the under-salted puck beneath. This burger is also explosively overripe and tastes almost perfectly of nothing, a thick, juicy communion wafer. It serves chiefly to demonstrate that the Black Label does have a whiff of dry aged flavor, a delicate spritz of eau de bête.
This is clearly the neighborhood’s restaurant. It is a place in which to feel normal, to be served a perfectly acceptable burger and a beer by an entire team of people who look like models and to pay perfectly normal prices for it. The patinated warmth of the dining room, the reassuring brevity of the menu, the diners in their loosened ties and hooded sweatshirts; all affirm the everyday nature of this place, that nothing about it is special, even the fact that a burger and a beer cost four hours of a cook’s wage.
It actually feels right that a half pound of beef should be priced this way. Beef costs the earth dearly, meatpacking is a brutal job, working in a basement kitchen in New York is a daily battle, and none of the people who do these things really make a living when a burger costs $10. But something about our meal at the Minetta Tavern made me suspect that these reasons had nothing to do with the price of their burgers at all, and that seems entirely normal too.
A few links:
Jenny G. Zhang wrote about The Classist, Sexist Reasons Critics Keep Latching Onto Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Service Background, and it is probably the best thing Eater has ever published. Please read it, because the challenges facing hospitality workers are emotional as much as they are financial, and this aspect of hospitality really isn’t raised enough.
It’s worth noting that the politicians she quotes frame the value of their hospitality experience primarily in terms of the transferable skills they acquired while serving. It’s a painfully capitalist approach that to me diminishes the inherent value of the work they did, and is at odds with the argument that Jenny herself makes.
For more on the enduring popularity of making normal food very expensive, you can read the NYT review of Tommy Keller’s latest joint.
As a counterpoint, I am rooting for this collectively run restaurant in Oakland (which has a painfully minimal online presence). I’ve been wondering for a while if a co-op restaurant would be viable - you see co-op groceries all the time, and bakeries now and again, but I don’t think I’ve heard of another full service restaurant run this way. Anyone know any?
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tw
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