Tag: david chang

Happy Mother’s Day: Women in the Kitchen

So it’s Mother’s Day, and I should probably be calling my mom instead of writing on my blog, but it seems like a good time to first say thanks to the woman who made me eat salad every day when I was growing up. And also to talk about women working in restaurant kitchens.

I just read this post by the chef-owner of a restaurant called dirtcandy, about how girls can’t cook. She’s upset that women chefs get a relatively small number of James Beard Awards. Which, on its face, seems reasonable, because so few women actually work in restaurant kitchens. But she also points out that women chefs get very little press coverage compared to men–and of course it’s media buzz that drives the Beard Awards. So it’s not very encouraging for women coming up in the ranks.

This disparity is all due to one thing, I think:

Vegetables.

Let me explain. I started to think about this last year when I noticed that Naomi Pomeroy, who runs the restaurant Beast in Portland, says on her restaurant’s website:

Our food is simple, refined, and–dare we say–feminine.

What constitutes “feminine” food? I pictured some Bronte-esque spread on lace doilies. Meringues. Candied violets. But of course Pomeroy is a lot smarter than that.

I thought back to when I (briefly) worked in restaurants. Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune was, and still is, a singular restaurant. I wanted to cook, but I didn’t want all that “yes, chef” and who-gets-to-wear-black-pants bullshit to go with it. I didn’t want to put garnishes on things with tweezers. I wanted the challenge–the heat, the instinctive action–of the restaurant line, but I wanted to cook food I liked. Prune was the only restaurant in New York that seemed to offer that–and it still is.

What’s the difference? Simply: Prune cooks whole meals, and that includes vegetables. There’s always a salad–a real, good salad, with hearty greens and an aggressive dressing, not a token “mixed greens” salad that the consultant told the chef he needs to put on the menu for the ladies. You have to order vegetables, because they don’t come with the main dishes. And if you don’t order greens, your server (if she’s Tamara) will advise you to, or else you might be in a world of hurt.

In your average (run-by-a-man) restaurant, you get some deep-fried appetizers, maybe a goat-cheese salad if they’re feeling a little livelier than the usual token mixed greens, and then you get your main dishes, which are all big slabs of protein with some sauce and a symbolic amount of Frenched green beans buried underneath. This is why I hate going out to eat.

The only restaurant I’ve gotten excited about recently is Momofuku and its iterations. Those are some meat-heavy restaurants, and a lot of the vegetables are deep-fried. But at least the menu is set up in a way that you can go heavy on the veg and light on the meat. I don’t need or want vegetarian–I just want a little freedom from the tyranny of the protein slab.

America’s food culture is totally screwed up–we all know this. As a nation, we hate vegetables. In fact, as Jamie Oliver recently showed, a lot of Americans don’t even know what vegetables look like. Popular, lowbrow, fast-food culture is largely responsible, but it doesn’t help that high-end restaurant culture reinforces the problem. Perhaps the new obsession in seasonal food will offer a new, non-gender-specific way of dealing with vegetables.

But for now, food that’s “good for you” tastes bad, and when you go out to eat, you “splurge.” This has a lot to do with restaurant machismo. A friend opined that all the big-knife, swearing, meat-obsessed chef culture comes from men overcompensating for the fact they’re doing what’s perceived as “women’s work.” I think she’s right. Restaurant kitchens and their products are for putting on a show, for doing something special–not for doing something as workaday as nourishing people.

Of course there are exceptions to the meat machismo, such as Thomas Keller, who has a vegetarian tasting menu at Per Se. And David Chang has raved about vegetarian restaurant Ubuntu (although his tone had a whiff of holy-crap-I-didn’t-know-you-could-eat-so-well-without-pig-parts about it).

Then there’s the flip side: April Bloomfield is a well-known woman chef and gets praise all the time. And why’s that? Because she serves giant f-ing stuffed trotters. Just looking at the menu at the Breslin makes me tired, like I’ve been following some intractable political situation in the news, and now just don’t want to read another word about it. And if Naomi Pomeroy’s restaurant weren’t called Beast, and she didn’t have pics of herself carrying around a pig carcass, I doubt she’d get much play either.

Aside from Bloomfield, women chefs aren’t popular, because they make you eat your vegetables, just like your mom.

For which I say again: thanks, Beverly.

(Yes, I call my mom by her first name. I don’t know why.)

Forkin’ A: Profanity in Print

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First, can I just say that it’s total bullshit that the only person who got to say ‘fuck’ in Julie & Julia was Stanley Tucci? I applaud Julie Powell for bringing female profanity to the bestseller list. I didn’t realize what an issue this was until mine and Tamara’s cookbook got its cover profanity euphemism (not even real profanity) cutesified, while men continue to get to write On Bullshit and Drink, Play, Fuck. (To be fair, though, at least inside the book we still swear plenty.)

And those of you who know me know that actually, I don’t swear all that much. Only when I’m really fucking pissed. Or excited. And occasionally when it might be funny.

Anyway, on to the matter at hand: Forking Fantastic! (nee F-ing Delicious) is in my hot little hands! A solid month before the proper release date.

That means you still have a month to trot on over to Amazon and preorder your copy. You know you want to. By the time it comes out, the weather will be good and autumnal, just right for baking the bad-ass ham we have in there.

And can I point out that this is almost certainly the only book on the market to use the phrase “like potluck, but for your ass”? Thank you, thank you, for your appreciation of my contributions to the English language. A check is most generous.

And finally, on the same profanity trajectory: There is going to be hella more Momofuku in my life! Not only is David “Foulest Language Ever Documented in the New Yorker” Chang’s cookbook coming out, but a new Momofuku is opening in midtown, in the Chambers Hotel, with a Vietnamese slant, no less. That is conveniently right on Peter’s commute back from John Jay and a dangerously short hop from Astoria. Expect us to weigh twice as much this time next year.

(BTW, in our cookbook…we have a bastardized version of David Chang’s miso butter. I’m just saying bastardized because it’s fun to say, but really…I think it’s a much better way of making it. Serious.)

Momofuku Ko is the new DiFara’s

Went to Momofuku Ko last night, as part of Project Blow the Second Installment of My Book Advance.

It was smoky-rich-briny-delicate-gooey-buttery-fried-fresh-crunchy-soft and delicious, with shards of roast chicken skin on top.

But it was a little weird.

The whole setup was not unlike DiFara’s, in its hushed voyeurism.

There’s a counter with 12 seats, and we all sat around watching three cooks make our meal. There’s an awkward fourth-wall problem. The cooks don’t really talk–they don’t need to, because it’s a set menu, and they know the drill. The customers don’t need to order, so that banter is gone. We could talk amongst ourselves, of course, but you feel like you have to be kind of quiet otherwise you’ll disturb the whole gestalt. And you don’t want to talk about totally inane stuff, because the poor cooks have to listen to the customers chatter all night. Not that that stopped us–we debated the merits of dishwashers for 45 minutes.

Fortunately, unlike DiFara’s, there’s music to fill the void. And in the second (and final) dessert course, the guy sitting next to me was so moved that he had to break the invisible barrier between all of us. “You were talking about which course was your favorite?!” he said to me. (I had not, but whatever.) “I assume you weren’t even counting this thing!” he went on with a swoon.

“This thing” was funnel cake with black-sesame ice cream and lemon curd. And I guess he felt like he had to talk to me about it, because his date was not eating hers. I guess I had signaled my overall enthusiasm earlier by dragging my finger through my buttermilk dressing repeatedly and licking it.

Anyway, I totally appreciate David Chang’s effort to give restaurant cooks some dignity and a good work environment. It was great to watch people cook without the hopped-up vibe in most pro kitchens. It was like the anti-Top Chef, thank god. But I wound up feeling a little stoned because all the cooks were moving so slowly.

Also missing, luckily, was the general nastiness of the open-kitchen-that-should-not-be-open, where you get to see how gross and factorylike the cooking really is.

The softshell crabs were cleaned in front of us, in a mesmerizing surgical way, then, in the only real cooking noise of the night, pan-fried with Old Bay and fuckloads of butter. (Who can argue with Old Bay?) The frozen foie gras was grated onto my bowl in heaps, atop peanut brittle and lychee gelee, creating a kind of ice-cream sundae that should’ve been delivered by a team of singing angel-waiters. The poached egg was cut open to look like Pac-Man, eating a whole mess of dots in the form of caviar. The short ribs were deep-fried and served not with ramps, because I suppose ramps are played out, but with “spring alliums,” which is the new hipster code for ramps, so that foodies can continue to eat them without feeling like they’re wasting their time with last year’s food fetish.

Oh, and speaking of fetishes, the sweetest sea urchin ever was doled out in a mammoth block, served with sugar-snap peas that were actually twee little balls of cucumber laid in the pea pods–which, I’ve got to say, is a rare brilliant leap in trompe l’oeil cuisine, because sugar-snap peas never taste like anything unless you eat them right off the plant, but the pods taste fine.

It was a great dinner. But not a jubilant night out.