Since yesterday, I have been embroiled in and fascinated with Kohnstamm Kontroversy… Fortunately it landed on a couple of days when my research schedule has been relatively light. My main challenge in Taos has been catching up on all the new restaurants (ha–I typed ‘restrooms’ first by mistake…perhaps also true). I carefully charted out which ones were open for brek, which for lunch, which dinner–and on what days. Seeing how Sunday and Monday are major closing days, it wound up being a little like an LSAT puzzle to hit them all. I mostly had it worked out, but then I was so busy blogging this morning that I missed breakfast, and now everything’s messed up again.

But last night I ate dinner at an old standby: Joseph’s Table. Joseph Wrede made a huge splash here when he opened his restaurant. He was one of the first chefs in the state to really push for local, organic ingredients; he was a Food & Wine hot new chef in 2000, all that jazz. Midway through dinner last night, I remembered that years ago, during a period in which I was looking for A Big Change, I had actually briefly fantasized about chucking my NYC life and moving back here to work at his restaurant.

I went last night not because of this ages-old restaurant crush (like I said, I’d forgotten I’d even had it) but because I’d heard lots of mutterings that the place had gone downhill. Wrede is notoriously flaky–or something, I don’t know, but a lot of deals just don’t work out for him…he was supposed to run the restaurant at El Monte Sagrado, he opened a bakery cafe a couple of years ago, and now I find it’s already shut. So I could believe he’s not really steering the ship away from the rocks at Joseph’s Table.

But, dude, I am here to say: the place is just fine! Oh man. And it was especially heartwarming after my Coyote Cafe experience.

True to form, I drank a couple of glasses of Lillet (first thing on the wine list–how can I not love the place?) and wrote a lot of shit in my notebook while I ate.

It all boils down to: When I eat at a restaurant, I want to be nourished, not dazzled (or, more likely, dulled, as that’s what happens when dazzlement goes awry with too much butter/foie gras/melted cheese/squiggly sauces).

It’s the same standard I set for eating at home, or for cooking for other people in my home.

So why do I go to restaurants at all, then, if I’m so not impressed by your culinary ass-slapping? Well, I go to learn about new flavors. I go to sit in a beautiful room (can the person who painted Joseph’s Table please come do the same gorgeous flowers all over my dining room? And while they’re at it, dust the pussy-willow chandeliers that I want to install, but know are impractical?). I go to enjoy composing a dinner–which appetizer goes best with which main and which dessert? Menu planning is often just as satisfying as the cooking–without actually having to follow through and cook it.

And I go to eavesdrop on other people. Last night was Dining with the Almost-Stars. I did a double-take when I saw Fabio at the next table. Then I saw he had bangs, and I just knew the real Fabio would never compromise his locks in such a way. At the table on the other side, a couple of Afflecks from Massachusetts were complaining to their companions about how people so often misspell their name Asslick–once for a funeral, no less! I have a little more sympathy for Ben now, knowing what he must’ve gone through in school.

I perused the menu. And I did something so genius I can’t imagine why I’ve never thought of it before: I asked for the dessert menu right up front! There’s nothing I hate more than being presented with a half-assed, uninspired dessert menu and realizing I could’ve eaten more savory dishes. Or–let’s be honest here, as it’s more often this way–getting a drop-dead gorgeous list of sweets and realizing I never should’ve ordered an app and a giant main.

So I sat there with my various pieces of paper. It was pretty easy to pull together. Desserts looked good, so I just went for two apps: warm kale sauteed with shallots and a tomato dressing, and a plate of pork liver (from a local farm) in a lemon-caper sauce.

I got the kale because it’s still damn cold here, but I need vegetables. I got the liver because Peter hates it so I never cook it at home. When I ordered it, the waiter practically did a little dance. The best way to endear yourself to the restaurant staff is to order the weird thing on the menu. You can bet they don’t give a shit when you get the roasted token, I mean chicken. And slabs of meat–you already know what a steak tastes like, and there’s nothing a chef can do to make a good steak taste better than just grilling it mid-rare and sprinkling some salt on top. I can do that at home. But something like liver (or the sweetbreads I ordered the other night, at a steak, seafood or steak-and-seafood kind of place), you know the chef has put a lot of thought into how to make that tasty.

And I ordered a glass of Lillet. Drinking my Lillet with my plate of lovely crispy, curly kale, with my wedge of sourdough Frenchy bread and butter on the side, I felt like I could be at home. After a week on the road, that in itself was a treat.

Then my liver came. “If you’re a liver lover, you’re just going to adore this!” said my waiter, with a flourish. I told him I hadn’t eaten liver in a long time, actually, so it was a really special treat.

When I said that, I wasn’t even thinking of the last exact time I’d had liver. But as soon as I had a bite, I remembered. Actually, no–it was the second bite, which I combined with a little spinach leaf from my mixed-green garnish.

The last time I ate liver was in those weeks right after my heart surgery, when Karine and Tamara came to California and dedicated themselves to raising my red-blood-cell count through home cooking. I’m practically crying just thinking about it now. Fucking fantastic friends. They made me chicken-liver-and-spinach salads up the ying-yang. Lillet would’ve gone great with that too, but I couldn’t drink with all my pain meds. Within a week of applying the special leafy-greens-and-liver diet, my blood was back to normal, and I was sleeping a few hours less out of the day. I went outside and walked around the block. The sun glimmered down and the birds sang in the trees.

I am a liver lover because I was raised on it. It was one of those genius fancy-on-food-stamps meals my dad would cook, in the same vein as on-sale steak with homemade french fries and nothing else. “Never let it get overdone!” he’d always proclaim as he seared the liver quickly in the skillet. (And he’d go–and still goes–“Aaaaaagh!” in his signature way when he encountered it overdone in restaurants–or even recalled such an undignified encounter.) A little salt, and that was it. No onions, or I don’t remember any. It was rich, and cheap.

My pork liver would’ve made him proud. I think it must’ve been chilled right up till it hit the super-hot pan, because the outside, the thin edges, were wonderfully chewy, but the inside was almost jelly-like it was so rare. Offal-eating can be such a quien-es-mas-macho sort of thing, but I’m not trying to pull that here, I swear. It was just delicious.

Also, it was doused in a lemon-caper sauce. Now why have I never thought of that? This is what I mean when I talk about learning something new by eating at a restaurant. The lemon brightened it up in the most lovely way, and the capers must’ve been the nice wee salt-cured ones because they looked like they’d exploded when they hit the hot fat in the pan. After I cleaned my plate, I actually ate one of the stragglers right off the tablecloth, where it had landed during my initial omigod-this-is-so-amazing eating frenzy.

I cleaned my plate, and I felt great. I felt nourished–not just from the iron coursing through my bloodstream, but from the fact that someone had concocted this lovely dish for my express delight. For me, the liver lover. I could feel the spirit of home cooking in every bite.

In a swoon, I looked at the dessert menu again. But I’d already decided–the Guinness ginger cake. And another glass of Lillet. It arrived looking like a cupcake, topped with fluffy whipped cream. It was delicious. I ate every bit, and actually did not feel painfully stuffed.

I even felt a twinge of regret at not ordering more. I reconsidered my restaurant schedule for the next day–it would only be a small loss to the greater research plan if I came back the next night to try the risotto cake and the trout with trout roe, and that bay-leaf creme brulee… (Note that I was not thinking thoughts remotely like this at the Coyote Cafe. I was thinking, “Haul this tired, butter-coated ass to bed.”)

On my walk home, I mean to my hotel, I realized my dessert choice hadn’t been random either. During the Great Red Blood Cell Boost of 2006, I finished all my meals with a big slab of gingerbread made with iron-rich blackstrap molasses.

Amazing, in retrospect, that I didn’t get sick of any of these things–greens, liver, gingerbread–or associate them with trauma and never eat them again. Now that’s the power of food cooked with love.

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PS: I completely forgot to mention: this all came in at LESS THAN HALF THE PRICE of my Coyote Cafe dinner. I put that in caps not because I’m a bargain-hound, but because usually I don’t even notice what things cost–and this really struck me. (This probably makes me a bad restaurant critic, but I think of my occasional restaurant outings as an extension of the genius Grocery Store Diet & Budget articulated by some lovely houseguests last year: scrimp on everything else, but let yourself get whatever you want at the grocery store, and you’ll be just fine. Plus, it’s all in the name of research, and making me less cranky about my job at the end of the day.)

PPS: I’ve spent so long typing this post that I’ve now missed dinner hours at the place I’d meant to go tonight. Hm. Joseph’s Table is still open. Tempting. But I don’t want to go and have an only semi-wonderful meal this time, and leave on a lower note, know what I mean?

Because I’m dealing with my incoherent notes from my notebook two nights ago, this post borders on telling you about a weird dream I had. In the same way, it may be just as boring.

My notebook says:

“Here I am at the Coyote Cafe, ground zero of SF trendiness. I am optimistic.”

(The back story: Eric DiStefano, adored/reviled restaurateur of Santa Fe, has bought the place from 1980s celeb Mark Miller, the guy who did haute Southwest way before Bobby Flay. There are no more deconstructed pumpkin empanadas, but the place is hot again.)

On the next page of the notebook, all I see is the word “nosedives.”

What’s odd is that I actually remember that meal fondly–I mean, the taste of it was fine, and there was a general glow to the evening: some amiable chatting with strangers, some occasional expressions of “Mm!” But deep at the core I had some terrible misgivings.

I sat at the “chef’s bar” or whatever they called the counter in front of the open kitchen. A brilliant invention for people eating alone, and also for people who are used to watching TV while they eat, and need some distraction. Another solo woman was sitting next to me. I was planning to chat with her after I’d finished perusing the menu, but then I noticed that she got her short ribs, ate two bites, and then put down her silverware and gestured for the waitress to take it away. She turned to me and swooned about how delicious the food was. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her except, “Then why didn’t you eat it?” Which I didn’t actually say, so I just went back to inspecting the menu until she paid up and left.

After I ate my dinner, though, I was a little more sympathetic to her plight. I saw the gargantuanity of the portions (quadruple-thick porkchops slapped on the grill, three handfuls of gnocchi lobbed in the skillet, etc) and stuck to appetizers. But even so, I could barely finish. The constant smell of fat wafting off the skillets on the saute line in front of me deadened my palate.

The real deterrent to enjoying my foie gras with smoked duck, and my butter-lettuce salad with warm fig dressing was that the grim reality of restaurant line cooking was right there in front of me. So much parcooked risotto, squeeze bottles of sauce, little prepped cups of salmon steak marched before my eyes. So many portions of wasabi mashed potatoes (Whose horrible idea?! Will a food historian please track down the inventor and strangle him with his chili-pepper pants?), green-chile mac-and-cheese and agave-sweetened yams dispensed in massive bowls with an ice-cream scoop. Nothing pleases like soft, butter-laden pap, and seeing it all lined up like that sent me into a spiral of existential despair.

Restaurants have this fiction of “cooked to order.” But what’s really happening is that a number of different pre-cooked or prepped components are quickly combined in a skillet, blasted with heat, arranged on an oversize plate (usually stacked, these days) and topped with minced chives. Voila. Some restaurants do more of this, and some do less, but they all have to do it for simple logistical reasons–or else be like Spicy Mina, where you just know you have to wait an hour while everything’s done from scratch.

And while it may taste pretty good, it just doesn’t seem real–especially when I’m forced to look behind the curtain, from my little perch at the chef’s counter. It’s too obvious this food is not cooked with love–it’s assembled in haste. I’m fine with my meat coming from a living animal–but please do not destroy the illusion that someone has carefully crafted my meal just for me.

This is why open kitchens are a horrible idea. They make people like me kind of queasy. And they make people who don’t know how to cook think that’s the way cooking works. It never occurs to them that someone (someone not cool enough, fast enough or English-speaking enough to work in the open kitchen) spent all afternoon making the gnocchi.

After that, my wine and the high altitude must’ve gone straight to my head, because my notebook moves on from concrete things (the “audible squelch” of the too-gelatin-y panna cotta) to the more abstract.

Here’s where it gets like me telling you about my crazy dream: I devise a grand theory of authenticity, using parallels with current politics! The only thing I can decipher, however, is that The Queen’s Hideaway is the culinary keepin’-it-real equivalent of Dennis Kucinich…except so not vegan, obviously. And Prune is Obama (somehow, it hinges on Goya canned chickpeas, and whether you admit to using them). And my meal at Coyote Cafe was Hillary–nothing really to object to, but trying too hard.

If you’re confused, so am I. Having eaten restaurant meals three times daily since Monday, I am feeling overfed, bloated, greasy, cranky and totally un-smart. Last night I was talking with a painter friend who’s worried that maybe he has effectively spent the last fifteen years huffing solvents, and secretly likes it even as it makes him increasingly stupid. I wonder if I have the same relationship with butter.