Instinctively suspicious of designer labels—as potentially being something they might like in New Jersey—and uneasy with the crassness of the whole Kobe Club concept, New York foodies looked elsewhere for a prestige patty. Perhaps Kobe suffered from its association with Chodorow, a man whom food writers find an irresistible target. It’s almost obligatory for food bloggers to mock his latest ventures—often before they are even open for business. Sneering at Chodorow is like making a mean crack about film director Brett Ratner if you’re a budding film critic. It immediately asserts one’s bona fides as a serious observer. (Chodorow, like Ratner, seems only too happy to oblige: see such absurd, bizarro pastiches of restaurants past as Rocco’s, the reality show–driven abomination; Caviar and Banana, a vaguely Brazilian follow-up; English Is Italian [he isn’t]; and his latest, a jumbo-size attempt to straddle the Asian fusion, sushi, and izakaya markets. Even veteran food critics can’t resist giving him a kick whenever the opportunity presents itself. The jokes write themselves.)
In post-Kobe New York, a new way to pay more for a burger was needed. And smearing foie gras or house-made relish on it was not going to be enough. A return to purist notions of the hamburger began to take hold—even an orthodoxy—in such forums where these things are earnestly considered and discussed. A virtuous burger, it was argued by aficionados, was the “original” recipe, a “roots” burger, unsullied by “foreign” or modern flavors, one whose meaty charm spoke for itself. Said burger should come from the very best mix of the very best parts of the very best quality beef from animals of verifiably excellent breeding. And it should be cooked “right” (whatever that implied).
Enter New York’s Minetta Tavern, where the Black Label Burger is of an exclusive blend prepared by Pat LaFrieda from grass-fed, free-range, organically raised Creekstone Farms beef. Seared simply and unapologetically on a griddle—where, we are assured, God intended us to cook our burgers—and served on a bun with a little onion confit, a slice of tomato, and a leaf of lettuce, everything new is old again. Only it’s 26 dollars now.
This is indeed one king-hell, motherfucker of a burger—one that would be seriously difficult to top in a blind taste-off of “experts.” Arguably, it’s worth the bucks, if you have that kind of money—and, face it, if you’re eating at the Minetta Tavern, you probably do.
But the speed with which accomplished and forward-thinking high-end chefs like Laurent Tourondel, Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Hubert Keller, Bobby Flay—and even Emeril—made their moves to exploit the new frontiers of the “hamburger concept” has been breathtaking. And all of them, let it be pointed out, indeed serve a damn good burger. It’s already the Next Big Thing—and is likely to stay the big thing for the conceivable future. If anything, it’s only the beginning—a trend that fits perfectly with the times, a relatively affordable (still) luxury item for a difficult economic environment, something that plays neatly into the national mood: the desire for comforting, reassuring food, the backlash against “fancy,” “silly,” or “hoity-toity”–sounding dishes, a growing sense of discomfort with the traditional food supply, and the reverse snobbery of foodie elites who enjoy nothing more than arguing over what might be the most “authentic” version of quotidian classics.
But what of the burger of lore? The adequate, presumably safe (we thought so, anyway) utility burger, draped and leaking clear grease across the bottom of an open bun, accompanied by an unripe tomato slice, a drying onion slice, and a leaf of iceberg that no one will ever eat…a limp wedge of obligatory dill pickle, a single slice of Kraft “cheese food,” half-melted and congealing even now, kitty-corner across the top? Will it disappear like the vivid, brightly colored Americana on Howard Johnson’s menus past? The ham steaks checkerboarded with grill marks and garnished with pineapple rings, and the thick-crusted chicken potpies of earlier decades?
Will more assurances be necessary to future customers before slightly more expensive patties can be sold?
“Now serving our Chaste Quaker Farms mélange of grain-fed Angus beef—minimally dosed with antibiotics and made only slightly uncomfortable during its final days in a dark, shit-smeared shed.”
Or will the default-quality burger—the classic “mystery meat” patty—continue to survive and flourish indefinitely? Simply more expensive by two dollars or so?
Surely the message for the Greek couple at the luncheonette down the road, sizzling up the same frozen patties on a Mel Fry–smeared griddle, like they always have, is that for some reason or another, the ass-hats down the street are paying eighteen bucks for a burger. We can definitely get away with jacking up our price by a dollar or two.
Maybe this whole burger thing is part of a larger shift—where all the everyday foods of everyday Americans are being slowly, one after the other, co-opted, upgraded, reinvented, and finally marked up.
Look around.
In the hottest restaurants of New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, it’s the rich who are lining up to eagerly pay top dollar for the hooves, snouts, shanks, and tripe the poor used to have to eat.
You’d have to go to Mario Batali and slap down twenty dollars to find an order of chitterlings these days. You can look far and wide in Harlem without finding pig’s feet. But Daniel Boulud has them on the menu.
Regular pizza may be on the endangered list, “artisanal” pizza having already ghettoized the utility slice. Even the cupcake has become a boutique item…and the humble sausage is now the hottest single food item in New York City. Order a Heineken in Portland or San Francisco—or just about anywhere, these days—and be prepared to be sneered at by some locavore beer-nerd, all too happy to tell you about some hoppy, malty, microbrewed concoction, redolent of strawberries and patchouli, that they’re making in a cellar nearby. Unless, of course, you opt for post-ironic retro—in which case, that “silo” of PBR will come with a cover charge and an asphyxiating miasma of hipness.
David Chang sells “cereal milk” in sixteen-ounce bottles for five bucks. An infusion, as I understand it, of the metabolized essence of cereal, the extracted flavors of Captain Crunch with Crunchberries perhaps, the sweet, vaguely pinkish milk left in the bottom of the bowl after you’ve drunkenly spooned and chawed your way through the solids. Maybe this is the high-water mark of the phenomenon. And then again, maybe not.
When and if the good guys win, will we—after terrifying consumers about our food supply, fetishizing expensive ingredients, exploiting the hopes, aspirations, and insecurities of the middle class—have simply made it more expensive to eat the same old crap? More to the point, have I?
Am I helping, once again, to kill the things I love?
Lower Education
My wife and I are speaking in hushed tones directly outside our daughter’s bedroom door, where we’re sure she’s pretending to be asleep.
“Sssshhhh!! She can hear us,” says my wife, with a theatricality intended to sound conspiratorial.
“No, she’s asleep,” I hiss—a little too loudly. A stage whisper. We’re talking about Ronald McDonald again. Bringing up the possibility of his being implicated in the disappearance of yet another small child.
“Not another one?!” gasps my wife with feigned incredulity.
“I’m afraid so,” I say with concern. “Stepped inside to get some fries and a Happy Meal and hasn’t been seen since…”
“Are they searching for her?”
“Oh yes…they’re combing the woods…checked out the Hamburglar’s place—but of course, they’re focusing on Ronald again.”
“Why Ronald?”
“Well…last time? When they finally found that other one? What was his name—Little…Timmy? The police found evidence. On the body…They found…cooties.”
This is just one act in an ongoing dramatic production—one small part of a larger campaign of psychological warfare. The target? A two-and-a-half-year-old girl.
The stakes are high. As I see it, nothing less than the heart, mind, soul, and physical health of my adored o
nly child. I am determined that the Evil Empire not have her, and to that end, I am prepared to use what Malcolm X called “any means necessary.”
McDonald’s have been very shrewd about kids. Say what you will about Ronald and friends, they know their market—and who drives it. They haven’t shrunk from targeting young minds—in fact, their entire gazillion-dollar promotional budget seems aimed squarely at toddlers. They know that one small child, crying in the backseat of a car of two overworked, overstressed parents will, more often than not, determine the choice of restaurants. They know exactly when and how to start building brand identification and brand loyalty with brightly colored clowns and smoothly tied-in toys. They know that Little Timmy will, with care and patience and the right exposure to brightly colored objects, grow up to be a full-size consumer of multiple Big Macs. It’s why Ronald McDonald is said to be more recognizable to children everywhere than Mickey Mouse or Jesus.
Personally, I don’t care if my little girl ever recognizes those two other guys—but I do care about her relationship with Ronald. I want her to see American fast-food culture as I do. As the enemy.
From funding impoverished school districts to the shrewd installment of playgrounds, McDonald’s has not shrunk from fucking with young minds in any way they can. They’re smart. And I would not take that right to propagandize, advertise—whatever—from them. If it’s okay for Disney to insinuate itself into young lives everywhere, it should be okay for Ronald. I see no comfortable rationale for attacking them in the courts. They are, in any case, too powerful.
Where you take on the Clown and the King and the Colonel is in the streets—or, more accurately, in the same impressionable young minds they have so successfully fucked with for so long.
My intention is to fuck with them right back.
It’s shockingly easy.
Eric Schlosser’s earnest call to arms, Fast Food Nation, may have had the facts on its side, but that’s no way to wean a three-year-old off Happy Meals—much less hold her attention. The Clown, the King, the Colonel—and all their candy-colored high-fructose friends—are formidable foes. And if the history of conflict has taught us anything, it’s that one seldom wins a battle by taking the high road. This is not a debate that will be won on the facts. Kids don’t give a shit about calorie count—or factory farming, or the impact that America’s insatiable desire for cheap ground meat may have on the environment or our society’s health.
But cooties they understand.
What’s the most frightening thing to a child? The pain of being the outsider, of looking ridiculous to others, of being teased or picked on in school. Every child burns with fear at the prospect. It’s a primal instinct: to belong. McDonald’s has surely figured this out—along with what specific colors appeal to small children, what textures, and what movies or TV shows are likely to attract them to the gray disks of meat. They feel no compunction harnessing the fears and unarticulated yearnings of small children, and nor shall I.
“Ronald has cooties,” I say—every time he shows up on television or out the window of the car. “And you know,” I add, lowering my voice, “he smells bad, too. Kind of like…poo!” (I am, I should say, careful to use the word “alleged” each and every time I make such an assertion, mindful that my urgent whisperings to a two-year-old might be wrongfully construed as libelous.)
“If you hug Ronald…can you get cooties?” asks my girl, a look of wide-eyed horror on her face.
“Some say…yes,” I reply—not wanting to lie—just in case she should encounter the man at a child’s birthday party someday. It’s a lawyerly answer—but effective. “Some people talk about the smell, too…I’m not saying it rubs off on you or anything—if you get too close to him—but…” I let that hang in the air for a while.
“Ewwww!!!” says my daughter.
We sit in silence as she considers this, then she asks, “Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald’s it can make you a ree-tard?”
I laugh wholeheartedly at this one and give her a hug. I kiss her on the forehead reassuringly. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know where you get these ideas!”
I may or may not have planted that little nugget a few weeks ago, allowing her little friend Tiffany at ballet class to “overhear” it as I pretended to talk on my cell phone. I’ve been tracking this bit of misinformation like a barium meal as it worked its way through the kiddie underground—waiting, waiting for it to come out the other side—and it’s finally popping up now. Bingo.
The CIA calls this kind of thing “Black Propaganda,” and it’s a sensible, cost-effective countermeasure, I believe, to the overwhelming superiority of the forces aligned against us.
I vividly recall a rumor about rat hairs in Chunky candies when I was a kid. It swept across schoolyards nationwide—this in pre-Internet days—and had, as I remember it, a terrible effect on the company’s sales. I don’t know where the rumor started. And it was proven to be untrue.
I’m not suggesting anybody do anything so morally wrong and unquestionably illegal.
I’m just sayin’.
Posting calorie information is, according to a recent New York Times article, not working. America’s thighs get ever wider. Type-2 diabetes is becoming alarmingly common among children.
It is repugnant, in principle, to me—the suggestion that we legislate against fast food. We will surely have crossed some kind of terrible line if we, as a nation, are infantilized to the extent that the government has to step in and take the Whoppers right out of our hands. It is dismaying—and probably inevitable. When we reach the point that we are unable to raise a military force of physically fit specimens—or public safety becomes an issue after some lurid example of large person blocking a fire exit—they surely shall.
A “fat tax” is probably on the horizon as well—an idea that worked with cigarettes.
First they taxed cigarettes to the point of cruelty. Then they pushed smokers out of their work spaces, restaurants, bars—even, in some cases, their homes. After being penalized, demonized, marginalized, herded like animals into the cold, many—like me—finally quit.
I don’t want my daughter treated like that.
I say, why wait?
I don’t think it’s right or appropriate that we raise little girls in a world where freakishly tiny, anorexic actresses and bizarrely lanky, unhealthily thin models are presented as ideals of feminine beauty. No one should ever feel pressured to conform to that image.
But neither do I think it’s “okay” to be unhealthily overweight. It is not an “alternative lifestyle choice” or “choice of body image” if you need help to get out of your car.
I think constantly about ways to “help” my daughter in her food choices—without bringing the usual pressures to bear. “Look how nice and thin that Miley Cyrus is” are not words that shall leave my lips, as such notions might drive a young girl to bulimia, bad boyfriends, and, eventually, crystal meth.
So, when I read of a recent study that found that children are significantly more inclined to eat “difficult” foods like liver, spinach, broccoli—and other such hard-to-sell “but-it’s-good-for-you” classics—when they are wrapped in comfortingly bright packages from McDonald’s, I was at first appalled, and then…inspired.
Rather than trying to co-opt Ronald’s all-too-effective credibility among children to short-term positive ends, like getting my daughter to eat the occasional serving of spinach, I could reverse-engineer this! Use the strange and terrible powers of the Golden Arches for good—not evil!
I plan to dip something decidedly unpleasant in an enticing chocolate coating and then wrap it carefully in McDonald’s wrapping paper. Nothing dangerous, mind you, but something that a two-and-a-half-year-old will find “yucky!”—even upsetting—in the extreme. Maybe a sponge soaked with vinegar. A tuft of hair. A Barbie head. I will then place it inside the familiar cardboard box and leave it—as if forgotten—somewhere for my daughter to find. I might even warn her, “If you see any of
that nasty McDonald’s…make sure you don’t eat it!” I’ll say, before leaving her to it. “Daddy was stupid and got some chocolate…and now he’s lost it…” I might mutter audibly to myself before taking a long stroll to the laundry room.
An early, traumatic, Ronald-related experience can only be good for her.
I’m Dancing
Well I don’t want some cocaine sniffing triumph in the bar
Well I don’t want a triumph in the car
I don’t want to make a rich girl crawl
What I want is a girl that I care about
Or I want no one at all…
—JONATHAN RICHMAN, “Someone I Care About”
I’m dancing.
The twist, actually—or something very much like it. And though I am mortified by the very thought of dancing in front of witnesses, I am not alone in this room. Around me, nine or ten Filipina nannies and their charges are also swiveling their hips and moving to the music in their stocking feet. My dance partner is a two-year-old girl in pink tights and a tutu. The red stuff beneath my fingernails is, I suspect, vestigial Play-Doh.
This, I am fully aware, is not cool. This is as far away from cool as a man can get. But I am in no way troubled by such thoughts. I crossed that line a long time ago. If anything, I’m feeling pretty good about myself—in the smug, Upper East Side, Bugaboo-owning, sidewalk-hogging, self-righteous kind of a way indigenous to my new tribe. I am, after all, the only parent here on this fine Tuesday afternoon, alone among the gyrating nannies, the little Sophias, Vanessas, Julias, Emmas, and Isabellas. My daughter, grinning maniacally as she jumps and twists about three feet below me, is very pleased that I am here. “That’s right, I do love you more than the mothers of all these other children love them. That’s why Daddy’s here—and they’re not. They’re getting their fucking nails done, having affairs, going to Pilates class, or whatever bad parents do…I’m here for you, Boo…twistin’ my heart out—something I would never ever have done for any other person in my whole life. Only for you. I’m a good daddy. Goooood Daddy!”
Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Page 12
