Restaurants in this country are no longer content to serve one type of food. They can’t even bring themselves just to be restaurants and respect dishes that have been good enough for centuries. Now you’re likely to be handed a menu listing everything from Thai-ish soup to Frenchified dessert in some establishment billing itself as a brasserie/cantina/grill where the chef is mixing and matching curry and pizza and sushi–on the same plate.
Americans are raised to revere the notion of the melting pot. But to quote the late French journalist and gastronome Curnonsky’s first lesson of serious cooking,“Cuisine is when things taste like themselves.” The trend today is to mix and match until you get a mish-mash. I understand the instinct, but as a cook and a consumer, I can’t condone it. Maybe we’re gaining a new global awareness, but we’re losing respect for cultural differences.
Eating out these days, you no longer have to choose between Column A and Column B as you once did in Chinese restaurants. All cuisines are connected at the bottom of the food chain. Taco Bell serves sandwiches and McDonald’s turns out breakfast burritos. Midrange restaurants start with spring rolls and nachos, progress through pastas and paellas and wind up with tiramisu and green-tea ice cream. And even at the top, the hottest chefs are praised for borrowing accents from Asia and Latin America and Europe and creating one crazy salad. Chocolate dim sum, anyone?
In the last few weeks alone, I’ve been confronted by Thai barbecue pizza, moo shu duck burritos, blueberry soup with lemongrass, french fries topped with melted Gorgonzola. Mexican tamales are stuffed with Norwegian farm-raised salmon; Scandinavian gravlax now has Mexican accents of tequila and cilantro. Bakeries are turning out bagels made with blueberries that belong in a muffin or pancake. On one Santa Fe menu, I found tortilla soup with Chinese pot stickers and swordfish with both tamarind barbecue sauce and risotto. Maybe it’s time for some ethnic cleansing in the new American pantry.
Just as bad as this nondiscriminating attitude toward ingredients is the murkiness over restaurant types. In France, it’s always been clear enough to codify in Larousse: a bistro is a small restaurant typically serving local dishes and cheeses with wines; a caf sells drinks and snacks; a brasserie is a caf serving beer, and a restaurant is an eatery that serves meals at set hours. Italians similarly differentiate among trattorias, hosterias and ristorantes.
But in our confused culture, where a bar might serve only coffee and a tavern is a marketing label, no one wants to risk running just a regular restaurant. Fog City Diner, in San Francisco or in Dallas, is not the dive its name would indicate. It’s a sleek spot that caters to young guys in suits. Mrs. Park’s Tavern in Chicago is no beer hall. In New York City, caf almost always means anything but casual: look at Union Square Cafe, where lunch with wine can run $100 for two.
The nomenclature gets more nonsensical. There’s actually a chain called Macaroni Grill. (I guess the intent is not to intimidate anyone who would think of pasta as elitist, but the idea of noodles and coals in conjunction is alien.) In my neighborhood, that culinary gulch known as the Upper West Side of Manhattan, there’s a place that calls itself a Mediterranean bistro grill–three buzzwords for the price of one. Out in San Francisco, someone told me of a new “Asian tapas brew house.” What next? A French taverna or cantina?
Thirteen years ago, when I first plunged into professional cooking, the big debate was over what exactly constituted American food. Was it what the Pilgrims ate? What the New Mexicans and Texans created? Was it Cajun and Creole or Californian? Endless discussions later, we’re even further from a definition. I admire the inventiveness, but I think we’ve lost any chance of ever developing our own cuisine.
At the same time, we’re dissing other countries’ food with all this cleverness. The chef of one trendy “Spanish” restaurant in Manhattan has taken it upon himself to reinvent the paella. He adds tarragon and grilled shrimp to his “classic” gazpacho, teams Middle Eastern hummus with Italian robiolo cheese on the same appetizer plate and offers risotto and snap peas as side dishes. It all may be cutting-edge food, but the careless translation would cause some pain in Spain.
The saddest effect of all this cross-pollination is that the result is not exciting exoticism at the table but a dreary sameness. Three years ago, when I went to New Orleans, the one city in the entire country with a truly indigenous style of cooking, I was disheartened to find the top-ranked restaurants were just like home. My mouth was all ready for classic gumbo and crawfish touffe and paned veal. But my first meal was at Gabrielle, and I got that middle-of-the-range menu again: crawfish enchilada con queso to start, Margarita pie to finish.
My first trip to Hawaii, a couple of summers ago, was even more disappointing. I found myself still eating in mainland America: blackened fish for dinner, burritos for breakfast, smoked turkey with Brie on a croissant for lunch. I didn’t expect a luau, but I did think there would be some local flavor to savor.
Maybe this new trend is in the great American tradition of diluting flavor. Chinese railway workers are responsible for that bastard blend called chop suey, and the great nuances of Italian cooking were once reduced to a mound of spaghetti and meatballs.
Competitive chefs and trend-seeking food writers have labeled this whole frenzied phenomenon fusion food. In dog breeding they would consider it mongrelization. To me it’s just Mom’s soup.
