Inspired by the recent chick drink thread, and recalling the four years of my life spent in Colorado, I’m tempted to ask “what are yuppie foods?”
A few things to start out with …
[ul]
[li]Basalmic vinegar[/li][li]Anything served at a restaurant with the words “trattoria,” “ristorante,” “cucina,” “bistro,” or “New America Grille” in the name.[/li][li]Whole Foods. Everything edible in the entire store.[/li][/ul]
Hummus
European greens salads
In General, I think yuppie food is anything that people eat simply for an image regardless of taste. Caviar happens to be a good example of that. Vile stuff.
Anything from Starbucks.
Robin
Lessee…
From experience with my sister, I’d have to say:
[li]Baked Brie with almonds[/li][li]Pine nuts[/li][li]Roasted red peppers and Fresh Mozzarella[/li][li]Carr’s Cracked Pepper Water Crackers[/li][li]Godiva Chocolates[/li][li]Philip’s Marinated Mushrooms[/li][li]Fresh herbs from the garden on anything[/li]
(It all tastes good, but I actually think I like Easy Cheese and Saltines and Hershey Bars more.)
I was just talking about this tonight with Mrs. Sasquatch, since she had a glass of merlot with her dinner. Weird.
For me: Anything that isn’t pronounced the way that it’s spelled falls into the “fancy pants” category (ie - “merlot”).
I’d say it’s anything that tastes identical to a cheaper product, but which people will buy to make themselves look or feel sophisticated. The textbook example is most Starbucks coffees, particularly the ones with names that include a foreign country.
Chilean Sea Bass (good stuff)
Any meal where;
[li]A single plate is heavier than the combined weight of all the food served to you.[/li]
[li]The garnish is able to completely conceal the entree.[/li]
[li]No trace of salt graces the meat course.[/li]
[li]The tab is more than a day’s pay and you’re still hungry afterwards.[/li]
[li]The only sauce served with the food is the plate painting.[/li]
[li]The appetizer bread has more than two different grains in it.[/li]
[li]The abomination known as, “sundried tomato pesto”, is on the menu.[/li]
A wine selection is described as “prismatic” or “spiritual”.
Anything that Bobby Flay cooks.
Grilled Marinated Tuna With Radicchio Balsamic and Meyer Lemon
Gold Chanterelles With Sun Dried Tomato Pesto
Strawberries With Fromage Blanc
And Mango chutney everywhere.
While I agree with Zenster on most of his nominations, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that yuppie food is not any particular set of ingredients, or cuisines, it’s the style of combining ingredients and cuisines to impress and scream “BOY, THE PERSON EATING THIS SURE HAS A LOT OF MONEY AND TASTE!”
It’s like foodie food without the emphasis on mis-en-place and complementarity. From selected sections of “American Psycho”:
Sun-dried tomato brioche
Poblano chiles with oniony orange-purple marmalade
Free-range chicken with raspberry vinegar and guacamole
Calf’s liver with shad roe and leeks
Marlin chili
Watermelon-brittle tart
Lobster with caviar and peach ravioli
Blackened lobster with strawberry sauce
Quail sashimi with grilled brioche
Baby soft-shell crabs with grape jelly
And it goes on and on and on. Ingredients chosen for pretention over taste, quality or any intrinsic quality.
It’s like Moe ordering “Your finest food, stuffed with the second finest.” (“Good choice, sir, that’s lobster stuffed with tacos!”) One of the most important qualities of yuppie food is that it be served in restaurants emphasizing style over substance, and that it cost a whole lot of money.
Sorry if this seems like a rant, but the US has such great fresh ingredients, local produce, and regional styles of cookery that yuppie food seems like going on your honeymoon and jerking off in the bathroom to the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Stylish, perhaps, but not as satisfying as the real deal.
Anything served at The Elbow Room in West Hartford, Connecticut. I’m going to leave it at that–feel free to draw your own conclusions.
I think it’s not quite as bad you’re making it out. My definition is “food that sounds better than it tastes.” All the components sound really wonderful, but somehow, when you put it all together, it’s kind of disappointing.
Does it still count as yuppie food if
a) I don’t make it myself
and
b) I serve it to my guests in the same plastic tub it was in when it came home from the middle eastern deli up the street?
“Here guys - I love you enough to get you the good stuff, but not enough to put it in a classy bowl.”
Hey, I like yuppie food! Although I tend not to go to middle-tier yuppie places - for me it’s either cheap ethnic food or (on special occasions) very expensive well-done yuppie food.
It’s worth it too. It’s not just a status symbol - nice restuarants know how to make some delicious stuff, stuff you’ll never get anywhere else. Those meals are unforgetable…
Agree with most of the post, but if you are still hungry at the end of a fine-dining experience, you didn’t order enough food (obviously enough). In my experience I’ve never gone away the slightest bit hungry - and I don’t usually get a dessert.
Good restuarants shouldn’t serve huge portions. Huge portions get tiring after a while, no matter how good the food. So the portion sizes are smaller. Knowing this, I recommend ordering an appetizer or two, which are usually the best part of the meal anyway.
Nope, it is as bad as that.
Stuff that’s selected because it’s the cool new thing to eat rather than because of if it’s any good. Like when quiche hit in the 70s, people were doing quiche with ham, quiche with lobster, white chocolate, crayfish, everything. Most of it stunk, but people ate it anyway. Take the blackening craze, or emulsions, or pan-Asian. It’s usually a food trend cobbled together to make people who don’t really care about what they’re eating feel stylish. I have no problem with sun-dried tomatoes, dark chocolate, and chive oil, in their proper places, but put 'em all on foccacia and it’s nasty. Simple ingredients as well as expensive ones can be wonderful if they’re arranged harmoniously, and skanky if they’re not.
I suppose what I’m emphasizing in criticizing yuppie food is the style-over substance thing. A stylish chef will make quail eggs benedict with smoked wild boar ham and send it out with a mango-habanero hollandaise. A substantive chef will figure out what works and tweak it. One restaurant here in DC makes a “foie gras pancake with mango chutney”. Sounds like a soup sandwich, but because they’ve worked on it, it actually tastes really good, and makes sense.
Foie Gras pancake with Mango Chutney.
=)
Sorry, Zen, but for my money, there is not a more natural or perfect combination in the Kingdom Plantae than tomato and basil.
I can’t stand that place. My friend ordered tuna there and it wasn’t cooked all the way through…yuck
~Kittie