The diva chef’s age who acts like an opera or a rock star has been with us for some time. One of my first Philadelphia restaurant jobs was a busboy gig at the Barclay Hotel on Rittenhouse Square. At that time, the Chef changed into a soon-to-be-well-known nearby TV chef who became a global celebrity. His tirades within the Barclay kitchen were covered, appearing out with butcher knives and screaming f-word invectives that filtered out into the ocean of white linen-blanketed tables in which there were constantly groups of hatted girls.
I thanked my fortunate stars then that I was only a lowly busboy, out of the Chef’s firing range, and no longer one of the haggard-looking, psychologically overwhelmed servers wounded from the Chef’s verbal bullets. The Chef was like a mad king because you never knew what could dissatisfy him or when or how he could lash out.
“Chef is having a bad day,” the maitre d’ might announce, describing an intellectual patient in a sanatorium isolation ward. In those days, I could nicely understand why an actual artist like Cezanne or Picasso may throw his paintbrush against the wall or even break a canvas or two. However, I couldn’t wrap my thoughts around the same emotion spent on developing food gadgets. Food is something you consume at a rapid tempo; it is not intended to be an artwork form.
Despite everything, art lasts. It is not something that finishes in the human stomach, lavatories, and metropolis sewers. Food isn’t artwork; a chef isn’t always an artist, regardless of how exceptional.
Working at the Barclay Hotel had its perks. I met many of Philadelphia’s movers and shakers in the dining room. (Years later, while a waiter at John Wanamaker’s Crystal Tea Room, I met Margaret Hamilton, the witch from The Wizard of Oz, whose coated face nevertheless conjured up pictures of munchkins and swirling broomsticks). One day, Philadelphia civil rights pioneer Cecil B. Moore, a flesh-presser recognized for desegregating Girard College, turned to me (in between lengthy puffs of his cigar) and stated, “Boy, get me another glass of water.”
I changed into a boy, but Mr. Moore’s use of the word “boy” that afternoon appeared to have a unique significance. I had a wonderful impression then that Mr. Moore went around to all the restaurants in town and made it a point to call all of the white boys “boys” because he became dead set on making emotional reparations. No doubt, Mr. Moore came out to show a factor approximately civil rights, and I fell into his firing range.
In Wanamaker’s Crystal Room, I barely noticed the Chef there, which suggests that he turned into maximum, not a diva, but more of a chef line preparing dinner, a trifling first amongst equals. The Crystal Room’s largest draw became tea sandwiches and soup, an object with an elegant environment as the standard giveaway in homeless soup kitchens. The Crystal Room chef still wore the classic tall white hat, even though you’d never capture him strolling around the eating place shaking palms with VIP diners because of the “creator” of impressive minimalist dishes.
Today, when a well-known chef walks among diners, he shakes hands like a baby kisser regardless of the truth that his introduction has already disappeared into ratings of digestive tracts.
When I met superstar chef Wolfgang Puck many years ago at a press event in Atlantic City, there was so much fanfare you’d have thought an ex-president was in the room. As fellow journalists clamored to consume Mr. Puck’s trendy advent—flat-iron steak with peppercorn sauce and blue cheese butter—I observed little difference between Puck’s creation and an “ordinary” red meat kebob determined in most Asian eateries. I didn’t dare offer my opinion to the starstruck newshounds who ate with gusto and didn’t appear to have any food troubles, unlike the percentage of newshounds I traveled with to Israel in the past.
During that Israeli tour, one journalist claimed she could only consume gluten-free meals; another said she could consume the simplest kosher meals, while a third became a strict vegan. The meal issues surfaced from our first actual meal when the gluten-free author started bombarding the waiter with questions. Would he list all the menu gadgets that were gluten-free?
At one restaurant, the vegan creator changed into a private investigator. “Is this truely vegan, or is it pescetarian, proletarian, or is it lacto-ovo-vegetarian?”
“Let me see,” the server stated, disappearing into the kitchen to test with the Chef.
Sometimes, boost calls must be placed at eating places to ensure that vegan and gluten-unfastened dishes are available. Our press coordinator is no longer organized to address these meal issues. She nearly had a meltdown while the ritual became especially taxing at a tiny sandwich shop outside Tel Aviv. All expectancies of grabbing a quick bite at the patio of this charming eating place earlier than our bus headed to Masada ended while the server started taking orders. Once again, the excruciating menu analysis of the various foodies became a trial similar to dental surgical treatment. The server, who did now not recognize what gluten-unfastened become, needed to be given an on-the-spot lesson, and even then, she struggled to acknowledge the concept.
The server ended up checking with the kitchen several times during the 25-minute ordering process. Simultaneously, the foodies converted their minds the instant they noticed something “purer” on the menu. When they canceled their orders because they decided they weren’t hungry in the end, our tour manual had it.
“We spent twenty-5 minutes riding that bad server loopy, and ultimately, we walked out,” she stated, shaking her head. But because the excursion improved, matters concerning food were given worse instead of higher.
The quest for culinary purity became so extreme that we couldn’t even stop for water ice or a bagel without reciting the gluten-vegan drill. There became some remedy from listening to it. At the same time, we ate at eating places that offered a buffet wherein I could watch as the foodies went down the buffet line and quizzed every prepared dinner or server approximately ingredients.
Our excursion guide exploded while the gluten-vegan drill slipped into overdrive.
“You Americans and your meals troubles,” she stated, her voice rising octaves. “I’ve in no way visible anything adores it. No, it depends on where we visit to consume; ordering takes 1/2 hour. In Europe, where I grew up, we were skilled as youngsters to consume a touch of the whole thing. Europeans do not have those troubles! You consume a touch of the entirety, and also, you stay healthful!”
I understand lactose-intolerant folks who hate mayo, peas, Brussels sprouts, lima beans, liver and onions, and butter cream. I met my first strict vegetarian in Boston at age 20. He was a tall, skinny man with a completely pallid complexion, and for the longest time, I thought he was grappling with a deadly illness. After he instructed me, he became a vegetarian; I invited him one hundred questions. Is he a vegetarian for spiritual motives? Is it about killing animals? What about fish? Then I asked what he would do if it had been understood that vegetables had a few kinds of consciousness.
Would killing a carrot be like killing a pig? Don’t mushrooms feel pain when they’re picked? I didn’t dare to ask him why the so-called “more healthy vegetarian weight loss plan” made him so dangerously looking. Of direction, there weren’t many vegetarians in the United States in 1974. At that time, vegetarians were related to Indians in India, Hinduism, and the food in American Hare Krishna temples.
Let me say that while I enjoy some vegetarian ingredients, I no longer want to turn this weight loss program into an obsessive culinary orthodoxy. That’s idolatry, and idolatry is forbidden using the Ten Commandments.
Food, now not money, is the basis of all evil.
