BIG MENU, SMALL MENU

Photo: Umami Burger menu June 24, 2009.

In the book Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque (2004), the renowned restaurateur Sirio Maccioni remembers insisting on offering his Le Cirque clients an extensive menu of at least fifty-five items. The ability to offer so much and be so versatile, he believed, was the sign of a great kitchen. In addition, Maccioni prided himself on Le Cirque's ability to produce whatever his guests wanted that wasn't on the menu. Extensive menus meant that the customer would have no need to go elsewhere. While Maccioni was an innovator in many respects, this was not one of them. 

In an era of micro-niche marketing, today what's big is the menu that's small. I can't remember precisely when this trend arose, but I subjectively date it back to the Seinfeld episode featuring the "Soup Nazi." The Soup Nazi did only soup--very, very well. So well, in fact, that the lines outside his food stand, and the fact that he got away with abusing customers because his soup was so sought after, made for the drama's main MacGuffin. 

While the big menu still exists today, the small menu has gained distinction. Restaurants like the Oinkster in Eagle Rock, Umami Burger and Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, and Momofuku in New York thrive on this model. Umami Burger changes its menu frequently, but it will present on its menu only approximately eight burgers at a time. Gordon Ramsay, the chef celebrity host of the BBC's Nightmare Kitchens, is often recommending, when he rehabilitates a failing restaurant, that the owners make their menus more focused, more specialized. Smaller. 

Granted, Ramsay suggests this to restaurateurs with much less experience than he has, and especially for small-scale operations. This makes economic sense. There is greater turnover of ingredients and abbreviations to the menu are manageable for the less seasoned restaurateur. 

But there is more to this trend than the sheer practicality of businesses slimming down to niches they can handle. Focus and specialization have become words of praise.  To me, they sound like the virtues of a culture of expertise. This one is a culture that grafts the aims of graduate school onto romantic ideals of food production, as in "We make only goat cheese on our family farm. It's the best in the world." So, the small, "focused" menu suggests depth of knowledge while simultaneously conjuring associations with the "artisanal." The latter is cultivated by farmers markets and everything related to Slow Foodism, wherein big--industrial-scale--food is deemed bad, and small--family-scale--food is good. 

Small menus stoke appetites, yes, but also intellectualism and a dose of primitivism. Small, of course.

Copyright 2009. Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

BLOG-READY BURGERS

It goes without saying that the burger you order in a restaurant should arrive ready to be eaten. But should it come ready to be photographed, too? With the proliferation of food blogs published by amateur, unannounced, and anonymous restaurant-goers, we may have entered an era when they do.

Consider my photographs from last week's dinner at Umami Burger, a Los-Angeles newcomer to the sophisticated-burger scene. There is nothing special about the photos. I do not have photographic skill. It is the burgers that are extraordinary--albeit in a way easily overlooked because we are used to seeing the effect in question in food-magazine photography. Look again.

Notice the perfectly even sheen on the top bun? From my entire personal history of consuming restaurant hamburgers, I do not recall being presented with a burger so artfully shellacked. Having enjoyed many tasty burgers in my time, including "gourmet" burgers, I conclude that such a feature is unnecessary for taste or as a byproduct of cooking methods.

Of course, I've known shiny streaks and spots and smears--accidental grease. The unintended traces of a fast-moving cook. But at Umami Burger there was such complete coverage, and consistent, too, on every burger carried out of the kitchen. I should mention that the glossiness did not detract from taste. Our burgers did not taste oily, but delectable. So I believe these burgers were deliberately dressed to impress--the eye and the lens, not the taste buds. Put in terms of food porn, our burgers were "fluffed."

More than that, they were prepared to compensate for my unprofessional food photography, my lack of food-stylist help and expertise, and that of all the other food bloggers snapping flashless photos between courses. Our amateur photography cannot be relied upon for public relations to the restaurant's advantage. Perhaps we should see blog-ready food as a tactic in restaurant media defense. Through it, a restaurant can reclaim some of the control over its visual representation that it lost in the proliferation of amateur reportage. 

Copyright 2009 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.