Victims of taxonomy
And salmon.
It is still, technically Wednesday, but I’m truly sorry this didn’t land in the morning as it usually does. Sometimes life gets in the way.
I recently had dinner at a small bistro in the West Village, the sort that seems increasingly endangered by a combination of rising rents, changing tastes, and just being too much a part of the New York landscape. This one was less a restaurant than a stage set, a delightful caricature of the Lyonnaise original, twee’d up for the insta-age, packed with as much charm and character as money can buy.
The meal fit the space: carottes rapées, brandade de morue, coq au vin, tarte tatin. Every dish on the menu was named in French, and we ordered Côtes du Rhône from a list on a chalkboard. The food was competent (the tarte tatin much better than competent) and entirely accurate, except for the coq au vin, which came in a thick gravy with a quite distinct amount of tomato and the texture of pureed tomatoes straight from the can. It wasn’t un-delicious, but it also wasn’t coq au vin. The casual discordance between the inaccuracy of this one dish and the high-fidelity of every other aspect of the reproduction, including all the rest of the food, was remarkable.
In a sense the chicken was a victim of taxonomy. The dishes in the French canon, nearly innumerable and highly specific, are separated by swathes of terra incognita. Braise your chicken with cider instead of red wine and you have poulet au cidre. Braise it in Riesling, poulet au riesling. Braise your chicken in a blend of red wine and cider and you have an abomination. Add tomato to your coq au vin, abomination. But in this diorama of a bistro, braised chicken could not possibly have been listed as anything other than coq au vin. Conversely, the kitchen could probably have cooked the chicken however they wanted, as long as it had enough red wine in it to be sold as coq au vin. The dish was a prop, and needed not authenticity but verisimilitude.
The coq au vin wasn’t much more than set dressing because the restaurant had to be a stage set. The American insistence on classifying restaurants is striking. If a restaurant can’t be defined in a couple of words - high-end Mauritian, vegan Salvadorean, street Burmese - it’s too complicated to sell and too complicated to work. There seems to be no room in our heads for complex restaurants, restaurants that defy classification, or restaurants that are just restaurants. I don’t think that place could have survived as a small neighborhood restaurant with a perfectly satisfying dish of chicken legs braised in red wine and tomato. To stay open, it had to be a replica of a Parisian bistro with something listed as coq au vin.
The cultural smorgasbord of modern America means you can find anything you want here, but precisely because you can get anything, the options need to be ordered and made legible. So we reduce meals and eateries to a couple of words prepending “restaurant”, and choose the restaurants themselves as though from a menu. In these circumstances, what else can a restaurant strive to be if not a caricature of itself, the most iconic version of a two-word type? How important is the coq au vin recipe, really, compared with continued survival?
There is, apparently, yet another video platform. This one, at least, still possesses some of that homemade charm that characterized the early days of Youtube, and I am all for people sharing unvarnished views of what they actually do at work. This video of an unusual fish cutting technique, for instance, was a moment of absolute, pure delight.
Of course, this issue wouldn’t be complete without a video of an ingenious automated production line doing much the same thing. I wonder if the production line likes its job.
You’re not a real newsletter until you have a correction or two to publish. Dennis pointed out that the NYT piece I linked to last week, about restaurant servers opposing the elimination of the tipped minimum wage, was the product of successful astroturfing by a lobbying body funded by large restaurant groups. That said, my questions from last time still stand. Whether or not opposition to eliminating the tipped minimum wage is astroturfed, restaurant workers still lack a voice, and restaurants are still trapped in an economic situation where doing the right thing probably harms both the restaurant and its staff (the USHG’s description of the staffing havoc wrought by eliminating tipping is most assuredly not astroturf).
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
best,
tw
p.s. I’d love to buy you a coffee. Drop me a line!