Two Ways of Food

Had a conversation with CouplingChaos’s brother-in-law about food, he and I both love to cook the traditional peasant food – cassoulet, braised brisket, stuff what cooks for hours in one pot and gets ladled into your dish with the most deep luscious sauce imaginable, it’s about being comfortable and satisfied. But, remembering some of the cookbooks in Donnie’s apartment, I’m thinking “Hey waitaminute dude - you love the honest, hearty, peasant fare? Then what the hell is The Alinea Cookbook doing on yer shelf?” Well ok, I admit – we love down-to-earth traditional food, and sometimes we want to ride the express rocketship into absurd foodie orbit. Those are the two poles of food appreciation: there is the traditional food evolved and vetted over generations of families and restaurants, it’s sole purpose to make you happy. It wants you to love it, it gives you a big warm hug, its pockets full of garlic and rosemary and thyme and butter. Lots and lots of butter. And then there’s food that wants to challenge you. Food with a crazed glint of genius/madness, fusing ingredients, cuisines, and techniques that would never have met before cheap air transport and global electronic communication. A painfully exacting monument of How-Did-They-Do-That?, which hopefully does not crash and burn in a smoking heap of artifice and ego. We appreciate these extremes; sometimes I don’t want a wankyfucking grapefruit-wasabi foam perched on a sliver of black bass in a bed of Jerusalem artichoke dust, I want steak frites. Not truffle frites, godammit, just potatoes and oil and salt.

I’d wish that were a part of restaurant reviews, a sliding scale, labeled Wants To Make You Happy at one end and Wants To Challenge You at the other. Me and Couplingchaos are planning our next big night-out dinner at No 9 Park, for which I think the slider rests a couple of notches towards Challenge, but still within sight of the Happy.