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.