Redirected: Intolerable Foodie

Kids’ Meal

By Joel Stein — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Illustration by Tim Bower

I will not talk to you about where the best burger in the city is. Or the best cupcake. Because I am not a small child. Yet other intolerable foodies are constantly trying to draw me into nuanced reviews of kid food. Debating which is the best burger stopped being interesting right around the time that arguing over which superhero would win in a fight did.

I enjoy a good hamburger as much as I enjoy an amazing guitar riff or a spectacular set of boobs. That doesn’t mean those things are worth analyzing on a blog post. Yet I have seen people who have eaten at El Bulli parsing whether Short Order is better than Umami. I did not spend all this money becoming a food snob just to discuss things that people who save for their child’s college education can.

We’ve become too lazy. It’s a lot harder to appreciate the subtleties of saffron in bouillabaisse than it is to carry on about how meaty/cheesy/bready/awesomey that burger was. We have normalized surface pleasures so much, the next thing you know, this magazine will devote an entire section to plastic surgery.

Foodies talking about burgers is particularly sad because it’s a bunch of uptight people trying to prove they can be fun—in the wrong way. They’re trying to pair toppings with the perfect craft brew and asking the waitress which beef blends were used. It’s like going to an orgy with a nerd who spends the whole time comparing it to Roman, Greek, and 1970s orgies. Only it’s more boring because he’s talking about a cheeseburger.

All this haute fast food is crowding out real haute cuisine. I have seen the greatest chefs of our generation destroyed by ground beef and pizza dough. The brilliant Neal Fraser is opening a hot dog restaurant. It’s as if our finest literary professors were deconstructing Everyone Poops.

We foodies are the last trench in the battle of adulthood versus permanent childhood. We must save our polemics for bordeaux vintages, regional moles, and sushi rice styles. For if we, too, succumb to the easy pleasures, then the hard ones will disappear. And then we will not be superior anymore.

Naming Names

By Joel Stein — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 16:27:00 GMT

Illustration by Tim Bower

I understand that we live in an every-kid-gets-a-trophy society. I get that in this Monsanto age of factory farming, we should celebrate individuals who grow their crops and raise their animals the hard, right way. I know that, for a great dish, the ingredients are as important as the preparation. Still, I don’t need to know the name of every farmer to make my menu selection. Or see his face (Oh, surprise, a beard!) to choose my rainbow chard at Whole Foods. There’s enough name-dropping in L.A. without supermarkets doing it, too. We are dangerously close to having to watch a Food Network show about four-flap grafting.

First, we idiotically agreed to learn every chef’s name. Then every species of fish, every variety of apple, and every type of heirloom wheat. Now farm names—even those of the specific farmer—are expected cultural knowledge, edging out any chance for poets, painters, and people who rant in magazines about food trends. What will we have to memorize next—the names of the guys who pick our fruit? “Oh, Juan Hernandez picked the strawberries in the sorbet? He’s got a very delicate hand!” Yes, everyone’s work is important, but I don’t have time to give everyone a byline.

If I really like your bacon, I’ll ask who made it, and then I’ll go buy Nueske’s at Trader Joe’s. But your menu is twice as long as it should be because for every meat entrée you have to write “Niman Ranch.” It’s not just restaurants; I’ve had friends at dinner parties tell me that the potatoes in their mash are from Weiser or the beets in the salad are a product of Chino Farm. And I’ve acted impressed because I needed them to know that I’d heard of those places. So, no, I’m not going to be the first brave foodie to stop learning farm names. But there’s no way I’m learning the names of seed companies. Unless they put those on the menu, too.

Fishy Upgrade

By Joel Stein — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 22:53:00 GMT

Illustration by Tim Bower

The waiter at Red Medicine is asking me if I want to add uni to my heirloom rice porridge for $10 extra. Really—uni as a topping? Like adding chicken to your Caesar salad at a chain restaurant? I fear he’s going to ask me if, for another three bucks, I want to throw a cupcake in there, too.

Ten years ago sea urchin was only served at sushi joints in L.A. It was an expensive, sea-sweet, rich delicacy that was dug out of a neon-colored spiny shell. Which was cool. But it was also sickly orange, had a major texture problem, and needed to be described with the word gonads, though smart restaurants tricked you by calling it sea urchin “roe.”

Then American chefs like Mario Batali began addressing the texture issue by mixing uni into pasta sauces or spreading it on bread. Now it’s the new egg, folded into any dish to add easy umami. It’s in a sauce on scallops at Raphael in Studio City, in scrambled eggs at Providence, in pasta at Angelini Osteria and Osteria Mozza, in risotto at the Hungry Cat. Scott Conant makes amazing seafood pasta at Scarpetta by using uni to oceanize the sauce, which is, in fact, a traditional preparation along the Adriatic and in Sicily, where they call the gonads ricci di mare.

Sure, I like uni on my food. I also like eating eggs, cupcakes, and macarons. But I also know when it’s time to pretend I don’t like those things to protect my street cred. So I turned down that offer at Red Medicine, and the waiter liked my call, as if I were a world-weary diner who had just stirred uni into my Cheerios that morning. I wanted to appreciate the subtleties of my heirloom rice. I can’t wait to start hating heirloom rice.

Let’s Get Juiced

By Joel Stein — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 22:52:00 GMT

Illustration by Tim Bower

I am in enemy territory. There are young, superthin, attractive women here. Not just working here. They’re patrons. Worse yet, many of them are doing a cleanse. Cleansing is for science-hating, OCD freaks who believe the body is a bathtub that needs to be refinished, instead of a bathtub that needs to be filled with foie gras.

I’m at a cold-pressed juice joint, one of the many that are everywhere now with horrifying names such as the Kreation Juicery, Moon Juice, Pressed Juicery, Sustain Juicery, and Beverly Hills Juice and menus that relish the words “detox,” “raw,” and “wellness.” I feel about these places like Charlie Sheen does about hookers: I’m happy to pay $7 not for the juice, but so I can leave.

But damn, this juice is delicious—like an intense, brightly colored sauce Jean-Georges Vonge-richten might spoon on the side of your plate. Cold-pressed juice is different from the kind you made five times in that juicer you got as a present before realizing it takes ten beets to make one glass and ten hours to clean beets from a mesh filter. For this juice the fruits and vegetables are chopped, wrapped in cheesecloth, and squeezed in a hydraulic press, which—because no air is blown through to oxidize it—allows it to stay fresh longer. (Sure, it’s unpasteurized, but as we know from raw milk, rich people are immune to pathogens.) These juices combine flavors logically and creatively. Pressed Juicery has a kale, spinach, romaine, parsley, cucumber, celery, apple, and lemon blend that actually tastes like a sweet autumnal salad.

I highly doubt any of these drinks are good for me. But I can slam one on a table like an iPhone 4S, feeling superior to the Vita Coco-wielding plebes around me. They’re slugging back prefab drinks. I’m having an artisanal experience. One that, I have to believe, some bar in Silver Lake will soon add small-batch bourbon to.