EATING HISTORY

Heston Blumenthal with Dinner head chef Ashley Palmer Watts. From http://www.dinnerbyheston.com/.

Grant Achatz with chefs Craig Schoettler and Dave Beran--creators of Next restaurant, Chicago. From Facebook.

In Venice, Italy, there's a superb and very old haute-cuisine restaurant, Le Bistrot de Venise, whose specialty is a menu of dishes based on historical Venetian cuisine. The items on this special menu, served in modified form to suit contemporary tastes, are accompanied by the dates of recipes from which they are drawn. Some go back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I thought this restaurant had a fairly unusual concept. Lately, however, historicity is in.

Two recent developments have gotten me wondering about the significance of historicity as an avant-garde food trend. One is the recent opening of Heston Blumenthal's restaurant Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park in London, a restaurant inspired by historic British gastronomy. Go to the website (www.dinnerbyheston.com) and you will first encounter a brief history lesson in a typeface and layout that vaguely conjures old newspapers: "In the past, the main meal--dinner--was eaten at midday, before it got dark. But affordable candles and, later, gaslight saw dinner shift." Check out the menu on the site and, in the appetizer section alone, you will find the items accompanied by dates that range from "c. 1390" to "c. 1820." Blumenthal and Dinner's head chef Ashley Palmer-Watts don't intend these dishes to be faithful copies of historical dishes. They are "inspired" by them. If not actually historical, the concept of Dinner is saturated with the idea of historicity.

Another case is the almost-opened and fiercely hyped Next restaurant. Chicago's Grant Achatz and his chef team of Craig Schoettler and Dave Beran describe Next as a restaurant designed to represent world cuisines from various great moments in culinary history--and the future. They will present four menus per year, each one dedicated entirely to a specific period and place. Unlike Blumenthal, Achatz intends to present dishes in historically authentic form--true to Paris, 1912, say, or Sicily, 1949. But, of course, like Blumenthal, Achatz can't help but be inventive. One of the options advertised for Next is Hong Kong, 2036. Even these masters of culinary history can't have much evidence to go on for the recreation of this one!

Indeed, Next bubbles over with experimental quirks. Achatz will not sell traditional "reservations" but rather all-inclusive "tickets" for particular, differentially-priced time slots at the restaurant. Though little different from a reservation in actual fact, the ticket's association with film or theater changes the psychological game. In that spirit, Achatz has promoted the restaurant through a film trailer that, like film trailers, encapsulates a narrative (in this case, of time travel) and fills the viewer with a sense of mystery and anticipation.

Why have two of the world's most avant-garde chefs made history the theme of their newest ventures? Why are these ambassadors of the hyper-new looking back?

First, let's acknowledge the fact that Blumenthal's and Achatz's concepts and menus are faithful to the past only to the extent that it "inspires" their creativity. They are launching something new in the process--a new restaurant format or an original interpretation of an historical dish. Is history just the latest frontier to excite an ever-jaded audience for the new?

This may be true, but I think it's not the whole story. I would argue that these chefs' choice to put history in the foreground is really an overdue revelation of their culinary practices so far. Every one of the chefs associated with the so-called "molecular" or "techno-emotional" cuisine, as are Blumenthal and Achatz, when charged with culinary futurism, has insisted on their work's profound connection to memory. They take tried and true dishes and "deconstruct" them. Or they take traditional ingredient combinations and alter their relationships in texture, temperature, proportion, etc. The historical reference is integral. The very intelligibility of these chefs' far-out cuisine depends on their experiments' grounding in tradition. It seems only right, then, that their historical aspect become overt.

Copyright 2011 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

"COMFORT FOOD" CONFRONTED (FINALLY)

Photo: Mac and cheese at Otom restaurant, Chicago. By author, December 2008.

What, exactly, is comfort food? We hear the term "comfort food" bandied about with increasing frequency. There are now restaurants, such as Citizen Smith and Boho in Los Angeles, defining their food genre as "comfort food" or "modern comfort food," and Food Network cooking-show hosts have been liberally using the term to describe an expanding roster of recipes. I think it's time to ask what people really mean by it and why it has lately gained such currency.

Can we say which are and which aren't the comfort foods? The most obvious and ubiquitous examples out there--such as mac and cheese, chicken pot pie, meatloaf, hamburgers, fried chicken, pizza--do tend to have a family resemblance. They became standards of fast-casual chains or sold as icons of the family dinner table via mass-media advertising in the decades immediately following World War II. The list of these foods collapses home and fast-food-chain cooking just as their advertising did, by eliding the contradictory notions of modern convenience and traditional hearth. Home-cooked pop-cultural standards were laden with labor savers--instant mashed potatoes, ready-made mixes, and the like--by the growing chemical-industrial food complex. The fast-food chains enlisted advertising to sell the notion of home or family with their side of fries.

Isn't it ironic that the term "comfort food," meant to evoke the aura of home and hearth, the culinary equivalent of mother's bosom, has been conjured by its opposite? Our use of "comfort food" to designate postwar food Americana also suggests that what comforts us about these foods is their pop-cultural familiarity, not really their source of production.

As the term "comfort food" extended beyond this inner core of postwar standards to embrace the more and more ethnic and regional dishes--from Japanese ramens to Moroccan tagines--to enter the pop-cultural vernacular, what does and doesn't count as a comfort food has become difficult to say. Yet, I suggest, the term stays in circulation because its association with familiarity, familiality, and abundance is useful. It has increased circulation because that has become increasingly useful.

But why? What distinction is the term maintaining, and what rising tide is it invoked to defend against? If "comfort food" is on the rise, mustn't some sort of discomfort food be encroaching?

If we think about the pace at which a widening population of diners has been exposed to new trends and experimentalism generally in our chef-admiring era, perhaps we can understand the rise of comfort food as a reactionary response to those demands. The discomfort food is, like the historical avant-garde, challenging. It requires us to wake up and engage new ideas, to be conscious of what we're eating and about the definition of a meal. By contrast, comfort food, like much pop culture, is meant to go down easy. It demands nothing of us, aims only to please, and flatters mere recognition.

Copyright 2009 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.