the meaning of doors to nowhere
Hullo to readers old and new. Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a formerly-weekly newsletter about food systems and food, attempting to become weekly once again. This newsletter is free and a labor of love. If you like it, the best way to show your support is to share it with someone else.
As we approached the city of Buffalo, the car filled with the smell of popcorn – it came from one of the three factories that make every Cheerio sold in America. We were coming along the coast of Lake Erie, going to a place called Las Puertas, on the north side of the city. Highway signs warned that Canada awaited those who took a wrong turn. Off the highway, we found ourselves in a neighborhood that smelled of the cooking of other places. The drive felt like the perfect prelude to our first restaurant meal in coronatime.
Las Puertas nestled in a residential neighborhood, in a house that mostly looked like all the other houses around it. A server came out to greet us, two glasses of water in his hand. We could see his smile under his mask. The gesture was so warm, so sincere, and so familiar that I wanted to cry.
The dining room was an empty lot, with large divots everywhere and ankle deep grass. They’d set up a handful of tables, with old doors between them serving as screens. The doors turned out to be propped up with bags of playground sand. The arrangement was delightfully slapdash, the kind of thing you do when you can’t stop to think about what happens next.
The sky shaded lilac as we drank a rosé named Queen of the Sierra. We breathed, wondered who lived in the houses around us, and watched the guests at other tables eat. The evening was already impossibly delightful. When we walked through the dining room, it was spare and light, and you could hear how it would have sounded when full, the servers crab-walking their way between tables, the expediter calling over the hum of the hood. The kitchen was the size of a mattress, there were three people in it, and their conversation was cheerful. Back at the table, one of us asked the other, “what is this place going to do in winter?”
The plates came one after the other. Sweet potato tamales in a vegetable broth that had simmered for 4 days. Lychees and corn. Two kinds of squash in a dish that brought out both their earthiness and the fact that squashes are fruit. Thick knots of cavatelli in a voluptuous bath of corn and cream. Seven courses of something not quite Mexican, not quite American.
The kitchen was clearly trying for complexity as well as deliciousness, seasoning with bitterness and sweetness as well as salt and acid. Sometimes, when other people cook for you, the food invites you to parse it, because it was made by someone whose thoughts you don’t already know. It rarely happens at home, because most home cooking is about maximum deliciousness for reasonable effort. It doesn’t happen when the food is made chiefly to turn a profit. And it almost never happens in fancy restaurants. So it’s a very occasional delight to be given, without fanfare, something so good you stop to ask why it’s so good, and that happened here.
The food made you ask who was appropriating whose culture and norms. Why was this structured as a tasting menu, the tamale framed as “a bread course”, the food served on plates from Japan? Why was there pasta? Most of the team was latinx, and they were enthusiastic as they spoke about the food – would they rather have been cooking something else, or were they happy to be cooking at all? These questions seem unavoidable now, even as the kinds of restaurant that provoke them disappear.
Everyone brought food: the dishwasher, the cooks, the lone server, the chef-owner. Most people spoke to us, the dishwasher hung back. The cooks talked about the pork and beans with pride (a plate of pork belly, spice encrusted, black beans I could have happily eaten for weeks, a reduction as deep as Lake Erie). The server gushed about the wine. He would probably have gushed about every one of the five on the menu. Did the staff actually want to be there, or would they have preferred to be isolating at home? Were they actually as enthusiastic as they sounded, or was this just unpaid emotional labor? Coronatime has made these questions unavoidable too.
Restaurants have become transparent, in a way they never could have been before. The masks have stripped the power dynamic naked. The staff wear masks to protect the diners. Diners, unmasked, put the staff at risk. The staff are there because they need to earn a living. We essentially pay them to risk their lives (and serve us dinner), and we pay minorities and immigrants even less than we pay everyone else, and confronted with this truth, we start to talk about whether we pay restaurant workers enough.
An equitable wage is obviously a necessity, but to focus on that feels like asking how much we need to pay restaurant workers to make it OK to treat them as disposable. We’re not asking why we don’t consider restaurant work meaningful. It feels like the conversation about wages basically says, “yes, these jobs are crap, the least we can do is pay people enough to live on,” rather than asking “why do we not value this work in the same way we value the work done by doctors, or lawyers, or the people who make mortgage-backed securities?” The idea of value precedes the idea of pay, and extends beyond it.
I wonder if, now that coronatime has deprived us of the opportunity to eat in restaurants for a few months, we value eating out differently. Sitting sated in an empty lot at dusk, watching this team smile with their eyes, and looking ahead to a Buffalo winter, I wonder if we value it enough. Enough to realize that restaurants create meaning as well as meals, and it’s hard to say who, the staff or the guests, this is more important to.
I am sitting in Singapore, in quarantine (more on this next week). I’m here on a necessary family visit, which includes 2 weeks of solitude on an island offshore. Fortunately, my mum brought me some homemade pandan chiffon. This is a little paler than it should be (my photo doesn’t help), because she used frozen pandan juice, a common pantry trick that hurts color more than flavor. But that crumb! We’re supposed to make one together once I’m home.
Once again, this newsletter is free and a labor of love. If you like it, the best way to show your support is to share this with someone who’ll like it too.
If you’d like to give it a shout out on social media, you can find me @briocheactually on both twitter and instagram.
best,
tw
p.s. I’d love to buy you a coffee. Drop me a line!
This was a wonderful read. So much rang true: the worry, the risk dynamic, the undervaluation of work. Thank you, TW, so happy to be a new subscriber!