I have recently realized that I just am not a fan of “schmancy” food. You know the kind I’m talking about…paying $29 a plate at Tavern on the Green for butternut squash ravioli or $45 for roast dry prime rib au jus (which I would normally enjoy except they cover all the food in this dish in horseradish cream or currants or other weirdness.) Looking at their menu makes me sad because I want to like the things they have there. Really, I do! I so want to be a foodie but anytime I go someplace a bit more upscale for dinner it seems like they go out of their way to fuck up normally delicious foods, almost as if the chef is in the kitchen saying, “You know, these mashed potatoes are pretty tasty…I think I will fill them full of havarti cheese and rosemary so that they no longer have the same delicious taste and texture!”
They even manage to screw up some of the desserts! Come on, white chocolate, strawberry compote and orange jelly?
You know what would be better than creme brulee? Devil’s food cake. You know what would be better than butternut squash ravioli? Spaghetti. Or pizza. Or fried chicken. I would be much happier going to the local chinese place for sesame chicken or getting a burger at the diner down the street than I would be going someplace where the menu is written in french.
I like to think I am pretty decent in the kitchen. I prefer to do my own mac & cheese in the oven as opposed to mac & cheese that comes in a box (the stuff that comes in the box is okay too, though!) I currently have a delicious quiche in the oven right now filling my house with the smell of hickory smoked bacon and sharp cheddar cheese. I make soups and stews from scratch just as often as I buy the premade soups in a can. I enjoy food very much but you will never, ever find me attempting to make coq au vin or ordering puttanesca. I would rather be doctoring up jarred marinara sauce to go over my bowtie pasta at home.
Somehow deep down inside me though I feel like this is wrong. I shouldn’t be the one ordering chocolate chip pancakes when everyone else is ordering eggs benedict. I am a grown up and I shouldn’t eat like I am ordering off of the children’s menu! Is there any way to change the foods that you find appealing? Is it possible to sit down and eat a $40 steak dinner without thinking that I would really have been happier if I could have ordered a burger instead?
I don’t think there’s anything especially unusual or wrong about that. My taste in music is very similar–I’m a real music nerd, but my ears tend to glaze over when I hear fussy and complex arrangements. I’d much rather hear a great three-minute rock song.
In my experience, most “foodies” have a few tales they can tell you about the fancy cuisine they’ve had, but if you want to see the real light in their eyes (and you’re ready for a ten-minute lecture, or a thirty-minute argument if there are two or more of them) ask them where to find the best burger in town.
Many years ago I went to a pizza place that served what seemed to me at the time to be very strange pizzas. Like pizzas with thai spices, or cajun ingredients, or whatever.
I ordered one and at first just couldn’t bring myself to eat it. But then I got an idea. “I just won’t think of this as a pizza. It’s some other completely different kind of food. Happens to be layered over bread, but whatever it is, it’s not pizza. This is a new food, completely different than anything I am familiar with.” And after convincing myself of this–I found I could enjoy the thing. I just had to abstract it from what I was familiar with, rid myself of expectations, and let it be what it was, whatever that was.
Maybe this might help in your case. Don’t think “Aw, they fucked up the mashed potatoes!” Rather, think “I am hereby officially eagerly anticipating an interesting and entirely new and unfamiliar flavor experience.” And whatever you do, don’t think of mashed potatoes!
I’ve retrained myself to love pretty much all vegetables, and tolerate fish and seafood, two food groups I hated until I was well into my twenties. It just took an open mind and persistence.
Stuff-Stuff with Heavy is what Calvin Trillan calls most of the fancified “food” that is being foist upon the unwilling. But there are times when you just have to be open to trying something a little different. I have to be in the mood to do so. If I’m just hungry, don’t try to serve me anything fancy. But if I’m up for a night out, then let’s see what the chef is doing to whatever it is on the menu. If nothing else, it will reinforce your ideas about what you like in the first place. Todd English is a great chef, but I couldn’t eat his food day in and day out. Bobby Flay, maybe.
Eh, you like what you like, and there’s nothing inherently non-foodie about liking simpler stuff.
I personally don’t care for quite a few things that are almost universally accepted among foodies as being the better way to do things. All my baking involves margarine, Blue Bonnet to be exact. And imitation vanilla flavoring. It may be lower-brow, but I think it tastes better. I hate a lot of the ingredients and flavors tv chefs just piss themselves over. Cilantro, coriander, anise or anything similarly flavored…gag. And don’t get me started on sauces on a good steak.
There’s no One True Way of food–not a schmancy one, not a this-is-how-my-granny-made-it one. There’s just what you like or don’t like. But if you never try cheese and rosemary in your taters, how do you know if you like it or not?
If you’re going to try something different, really try something different. Eat something you wouldn’t normally eat so that you have no real basis of comparison. Try something that needs to be skillfully prepared to be palatable to the average schmoe, like organ meat.
On one episode of No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain was eating at a small diner in NYC run by a chef from Egypt that served all kinds of weird meats (testicles, feet, brain, etc). Bourdain made a good point about the chef. Growing up in Egypt, they didn’t have t-bone steaks available. They had to make do with what they had, which meant not wasting any part of the animal. Organs and feet probably aren’t naturally delicious, so they really had to hone their craft in order to make the stuff be not simply edible but tasty.
I’m what you might call a “foodie”, I just think I enjoy food a lot. I just made coq au vin the other night, along with tarte tatin and goat cheese ice cream. Like another poster said, coq au vin is just chicken stew. But done right, it is REALLY GOOD chicken stew. If you use really good smoked pork/bacon, a free-range mature chicken, great wine, and good quality vegetables it is an amazing dish.
To me there is a difference between fancy food and good food; i.e., sometimes they correspond and sometimes not. A lot of peasant food take a good deal of time and experience to make well. A good prime grade steak takes 10 minutes to cook and is fantastic with just salt and pepper. Turning tripe, or ribs, or pork belly into a tasty dish is harder.
There is no reason to change how you eat if you are happy, but if you want to expand your range you could try getting a variety of cheeses, a nice wine, and some grapes and cut-up apples. Try lamb chops rather than steak sometime, and learn how to do simple techniques like deglazing a pan to make a sauce.
I don’t naturally like most of the type of food you’re listing and wouldn’t go out of my way to eat it, but wouldn’t throw a fuss if I had to either. This is largely because if I’m not going to cook for myself I really only prefer to spend the money on the following cuisines-Vietnamese, Sushi, Thai, Lebanese, Mexican, Ethiopian, Indian and on occasion, Italian.
Eating at Per Se or L’Atelier du Joel Robuchon doesn’t intrigue me, but I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity as long as I didn’t have to pay.
That said, I like a variety of fresh vegetables and high quality organic poultry and fish and for my food to be spicy and flavourful. Can’t beat it. I’m not interested in Daniel Bouloud but I’m not interested in Pioneer Woman style recipes made with Ritz Crackers and 80 lbs of butter either.
So I guess if I’m a snob I’m a mid-range snob.
PS: on the butternut squash ravioli. I had that at Sweet Basil in Chicago (I believe that’s the name of the restaurant in Lincoln Park) and I hated hated hated it even though I do like butternut squash in soups and harvesty baked dishes.
We ate at BLT Burger at the Mirage last month. This is Chef Laurent Tourondel’s take on the classic burger joint. Good, but not by any means worth the cost. I’ve had better burgers at The Hat.
Honestly, I don’t think you need to be into the overly fussy nineteen-deconstructed-ingredients-on-a-plate-with-flavoured-foam haute cuisine to call yourself a foodie. That’s just what happens to be trendy in the restaurant scene at the moment is all (whereas you’d probably have felt right at home in the mid-90’s, when it was all about comfort foods like meatloaf and mac n’ cheese and stews)
Take a flip through any cookbook by Julia Child or Alice Waters or James Beard… they’re foodie gods, and yet not a one of them makes mention of fusion cuisine or fancy plating or deconstructed anything. Like DanBlather says, you can be just as much of a foodie by taking the time to make good food using classic recipes and quality ingredients.
As much as I’m a sucker for grandiose feats of molecular gastronomy, that’s a once-a-year treat in my books. I’d distrust any “foodie” who isn’t willing to lower themselves to a simple meal like a nice beef bourgignon with crusty bread.
I hear you loud and clear on the butternut squash. Why has it become so popular? If I’m going to spend that kind of money on ravioli, it had better have something like lobster inside, not some boring vegetable with little taste.
I think the “small portions on a big plate” and “artistic loops of sauce on the unused portion of the plate” things that they do at some fancy restaurants are silly and need to end.
Any kind of food can be cooked badly. Just because it was cooked using a fancy recipe doesn’t mean the person doing the cooking knew what they were doing. The British version of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares has many, many examples of fancy cooking done badly.
I’d recommend a good cookbook, especially if you’re handy in the kitchen. Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything is a good one for expanding your culinary horizons. He has information on buying and cooking a lot of things you might not have tried before.
I’m a former cook and something of a ‘foodie’; I like to try experimental and fusion and whatnot, but I have to admit that a lot of the esoteric culinary creativity ends up being underwhelming or even bad, whereas classic food done well and presented simply and cleanly can be totally amazing without any exotic accouterment. A great bouillabaisse, a grilled halibut with roasted vegetables, or a steak seared perfectly with a Russett baked potato and asparagus can be every bit as satisfying from an esthetic standpoint as more exotic fusion dishes…which is not to say that anything is wrong with trying new things, only that just because it is different and uses exotic ingredients does not, despite some highfalutin perceptions to the contrary, make it automatically good or in any way superior to good simple food.
The box mac & cheese, though? Disgusting. I can understand if it is comfort food from childhood, but by any objective measure that stuff is just nasty. It’s not even real food. Good homemade mac & cheese, though, with a simple béchamel sauce, a nice sharp Cheddar or Gruyère, and some garlicy bread crumb topping, can be a heavenly delight.
I’m not a foodie and don’t really like to cook, so I don’t get the fancy schmancy foods either. I try to think of food in terms of fuel instead of an orgasm of the mouth so I like it fairly simple.
I also like this quote by the fantastic David Sedaris:
“I’ve never thought of myself as a finicky eater, but it’s hard to be a good sport when each entree includes a paragraph long description listing no fewer than eighteen ingredients, one of which I’m bound to dislike. I’d order the skirt steak with a medley of suffocated peaches, but I’m put off by the aspirin sauce.”
They got a wine list?