smart casual

the transformation of gourmet restaurant style in america

By alison pearlman

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Alison Pearlman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-65140-8

Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………11 When Fine Dining Met Casual Dining…………………………………112 New Shapers of Trends and Taste……………………………………413 Exhibition Kitchens and the Theater of Manual Labor………………….694 Gourmet Plays on Common Food Faves…………………………………103Conclusion………………………………………………………..137Acknowledgments……………………………………………………147Appendix………………………………………………………….153Notes…………………………………………………………….159Selected Bibliography………………………………………………191Index…………………………………………………………….197

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

when fine diningmet casual dining

Did fine dining die? In 2010, critics were wondering.Several spoke of a growing disconnect between therise of restaurants serving pricey gourmet cuisine andthe decline in traditional accompanying formalities,such as tablecloths, suit-wearing servers, and jacketrequirements for diners.

It wasn’t the first time that writers had ponderedfine dining’s demise. Craig Claiborne, the authoritativefood and restaurant critic who initiated the diningcolumn in the New York Times and also that paper’sstill-practiced star ratings, published an article alongthose lines in 1959. “Elegance of Cuisine Is on Wane inU.S.” claimed that “two time-honored symbols of thegood life—great cuisine in the French tradition andelegant table service—are passing from the Americanscene.”

But what Claiborne blamed for fine dining’s fall isdiametrically opposed to what recent critics think.Claiborne argued that the public who supported restaurants’best work—diners who could distinguishfresh ingredients from frozen, could linger for hoursand not rush proper service—was dying out. By contrast,the critics in 2010 pointed to people’s greaterfood sophistication and demand for culinary excellence!It was a question of priorities, they maintained. Fewer peoplerequired formal service, luxe surroundings, and dressing up, but whatwas on their plates mattered more than ever.

Another difference between 2010 and 1959 had to do with the definitionof fine dining itself. For Claiborne, its meaning was crystalline.It designated specific cuisine style, surroundings, and rituals of service.Contemporary critics were not so sure. They thought new circumstancesrequired a reassessment. By asking whether or not fine diningwas obsolete, they partly meant the relevance of the concept fine diningupheld by the likes of Claiborne.

That the need for new definitions came up repeatedly in 2010 is notsurprising, considering the volatility of preceding years. Between 2005and 2010, restaurant appraisals underwent paradigm-shaking upsets.The accolades heaped on the hypercasual Momofukus were part of apattern: surprising honors were going to places with the most informalstyles imaginable.

In late 2005, when standard-bearer Michelin released its first restaurantguide to New York City (for 2006), Florence Fabricant of the NewYork Times reported on one of its much-anticipated verdicts in shock:”The Spotted Pig, a no-frills Greenwich Village pub with an idiosyncraticmenu, got a star, putting it up with restaurants like Babbo andGramercy Tavern, while respected restaurants like Chanterelle, Felidia,The Four Seasons and Union Square Café got no stars.”

Fabricant had seen nothing yet. The 2011 Michelin guide, compiledin 2010, awarded two out of a possible three stars to a restaurant set inthe prep kitchen of a Brooklyn grocery store. This made it, accordingto Michelin, one of the three hundred best restaurants in the world.The 2012 guide topped that, giving it three stars. At the time of ratings,the Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare’s chef, César Ramirez, was personallyserving a twenty-course tasting menu over a placemat-bedeckedstainless-steel table. It took up most of the middle of the kitchen,which accommodated just eighteen guests on utilitarian metal stools.Meanwhile, the historically high-ranking Manhattan establishmentBouley, the eponymous venue of Ramirez’s superstar chef-mentor,David Bouley, a restaurant with an actual dining room and battery ofservers, received only one star in the same guides.

Unprecedented rankings were coming from other quarters as well.The one most astonishing to me came in the July 2010 “Best New Chefs”issue of Food & Wine. In it, Roy Choi was named one of the ten most”fantastically skilled, creative, and driven” young chefs in America.After sampling Choi’s cuisine, I don’t disagree. The judgment was surprisingbecause it represented the first time that Food & Wine so honoreda chef for opening a taco truck. Granted, the Kogi BBQ truck Choilaunched in Los Angeles in 2008 was no ordinary case. It introducedthe ethnic-fusion dish known as the Korean taco. It also jump-starteda nationwide traffic jam of gourmet food trucks of every conceivabletheme—from vegan-only to artisanal ice cream to, yes, even Frenchhaute cuisine! They multiplied at such a pace that the Food Network oncable TV wasted no time making them the focus of a reality competitionshow. Celebrity chef Tyler Florence began hosting The Great FoodTruck Race in the summer of 2010. That same year and for the first time,the annual National Restaurant Association conference devoted anentire section of its floor show to food trucks so that conferees couldlearn how to start their own. So, yes, the Food & Wine honor went toChoi for a very special taco truck. But, still—a taco truck?!

These upsets were legitimate reasons to question the definitionof fine dining. But they shouldn’t be mistaken as harbingers of theend of formality. It’s just that the gourmet landscape had becomecomplicated.

Consider the trend of increasingly lengthy fixed tasting menus.As restaurants featuring so-called modernist cuisine surfaced in theUnited States in the 2000s, the service of tasting menus reached newheights of ceremony. The extraordinary number of courses multipliedthe occasions of presentation and explanation and made the pacing ofcourses, some being just one or two bites, a matter of tight choreography.At Moto restaurant in Chicago, I had twenty courses. Alinea, inthe same city, served me twenty-six. At minibar, in Washington, DC, Iate thirty. What’s more, many offerings arrived to my table with unconventionalvessels and utensils unique to the restaurant, requiringme to follow a server’s directions to eat. When I opted for wine pairings,the intricacies of service were compounded.

And yet while such formats have raised the level of ceremony, thenew formality has been qualitatively different from the old. No longeris the emphasis on inherited rituals—in manners, use of utensils, andso on. Given the vanguard thrust of contemporary gourmet restaurants,the diner shows aplomb by knowing to expect the unexpected.Furthermore, lengthy tasting menus have required of diners somethingnew: a capacity to concentrate on and appreciate, for a sustainedperiod, the chef’s—and sometimes also the sommelier’s—performancein minutiae.

Also deviating from the old formalities, this new variant of tastingmenu has often occurred in ultracasual surroundings. In the caseof pop-up (temporary) restaurants, a contrast between complex menuand simple digs has been the norm. Creating the mold for Los Angelespop-ups in 2007, instigator chef Ludo Lefebvre launched LudoBiteson designated dates in the off-hours of a bakery and sandwich shop. Ifound the height of incongruity in chef Laurent Quenioux’s pop-up,LQ@SK. He advertised an eighteen-course, all-white-truffle menu for$350 per person at a quick-lunch café that normally services the down-town-LAoffice crowd. It’s not fancy trappings; it’s the uniqueness ofthe menus and the fact that diners must be in the know to make reservationsthat give such occasions cachet.

Nor did formality disappear entirely from restaurant dress codes.Its relationship to fine dining, however, had become variable. In 2010,most three-star Michelin restaurants in America still required malediners to wear jackets even if they had dispensed with the necktie rule.In October, I checked restaurant profiles for two of the highest-rankingregions on the popular reviews-and-reservations site Opentable.com.The French Laundry, the only three-star place in Michelin‘s guide to the”San Francisco Bay Area and Wine Country,” insisted on jackets. Of thethree-starred in New York City—Daniel, Jean Georges, Le Bernardin,Masa, and Per Se—all except Masa required jackets.

The Masa exception signaled changing times. Ironically, as of 2010Masa was in one sense the most exclusive of them all. Its no-menuomakase meal, including some of the finest and rarest sea creatures aswell as other luxe ingredients such as truffles, caviar, and foie gras, wasthe most expensive prix-fixe menu in America. Including one relativelymodest bottle of sake, my solo dinner there in August 2010 came to abefore-tip reckoning of $726.85. And yet on its website (masanyc.com),Masa described a dress code of “casual and comfortable.” So, even atthe Michelin pinnacle a range of formality had come to pass. Relativelyspeaking, formal dress persisted. But gourmets no longer saw the linkbetween it and the finest, most costly dining out as axiomatic.

Apart from the very top tier, the general trend was toward dresscodes relaxing. In 2005, among white-tablecloth restaurants this hadadvanced to a point worthy of special comment by the Zagat survey.Its America’s Top Restaurants guide stated in the introductory assessmentof new trends, “Just a few years ago, jacket and tie were de rigueurat fine restaurants … today, they’re de rigor mortis—’jacket suggested’is the most formal requirement that all but a few America’s Tops placesmake.” White-tablecloth places were increasingly specifying dinerattire by business casual, smart casual, or some other qualified-casualcode.

Compared with the exacting jackets required, the terms business casualand smart casual are vexingly ambiguous. They leave wide room for interpretation.They also seem ambivalent. Their approval of casualnessis hedging. I see the ambiguity and ambivalence as a middle-sectorparallel to the categorical confusion caused by value compression onboth ends of the gourmet spectrum. Despite the enormous range in establishments’level of elegance—the gap between the French Laundryand the Kogi BBQ truck is, undeniably, huge—the gourmet credibilityand influence of places at both extremes had become equivalent.

The decoupling of the traditionally fancy and the gourmet did not,however, happen suddenly after the year 2000. In fact, all the foundationsof a new, omnivorous approach to restaurant style were laidbetween 1975 and 1985. During that time, a new generation of restaurateursbroke with the chandeliered precedent of American fine-diningestablishments. Inspired by the settings and cuisines of modest neighborhoodrestaurants and bars, they produced novel mixtures of fineand casual dining.

groundbreaking restaurant settings

Pioneers of more casual gourmet environments emerged in parts ofCalifornia and in New York City. They influenced gourmet restaurantsacross the country through their high critical regard and by thestrength of their own lineages of chef-protégés and restaurants.

Chez Panisse (Berkeley, CA), 1975

In California, Chez Panisse, which Alice Waters opened in 1971, was theearliest example. Its mix of fine dining and informal setting was sufficientlyevolved, and it became broadly influential. The restaurant tookon national importance in October 1975, when Caroline Bates reviewedit in the prestigious Gourmet. Its novel combination of perfectionismand informality gained further traction by her emphatic and empathicaccount of it.

On the one hand, Bates was impressed by Chez Panisse’s culinaryoriginality and virtuosity. She praised chef Jeremiah Tower, whosemenu, she declared, showed deep knowledge of French cuisine whiledeparting from the “monotonous regularity” she found at most otherFrench restaurants of the time. She also lauded the staff’s constantpursuit of the freshest and best ingredients, evident to her by theirhabitual “blind tastings of butters, creams, and olive oils.”

And yet Bates was also charmed by Chez Panisse’s lack of pretense.She interpreted the service—in which, she noted, the staff had littleexperience—as endearingly sincere. The surroundings also radiated agratifyingly homey quality. Under their spell, Bates wrote, “the two-storyhome looks lived in and loved. It is warm with the honesty ofnatural wood.” She was also taken by the restaurant’s simplicity:

The dining areas downstairs are furnished simply with a few old-fashionedfixtures, unmatching straight-backed chairs, and tablescovered with napery and nosegays. Just inside the main dining rooma still-life table arrangement of flowers, unblemished fresh fruit andglistening fruit tarts suggests that this is a restaurant more interestedin art than artifice.

The décor that Bates appreciated was an amalgamation of severalinformal sources. One was the country farmhouse restaurant. ThomasMcNamee, in Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, explains that Waters visitedmany local restaurants in 1970 in a determined search for ideas forher own place. A farmhouse restaurant in small-town Bolinas struck aspecial chord. Indeed, McNamee’s description of Gibson House parallelsBates’s account of Chez Panisse in 1975: “It was a converted Victorianfarmhouse, surrounded with flowers…. There were flowers everywhereand inside as well, and patchwork quilts on the walls, andmismatched china and flatware.” That Waters furnished Chez Panissewith nonmatching flea market finds of Victorian vintage, and insistedon abundant but rustic displays of flowers, reveals the aesthetic imprintof Gibson House. It must have reminded her of her first exhilaratingexperience of a country-house restaurant in Brittany in 1965,during her initial, and life-changing, trip to Europe as a student.

Other inspirations were the everyday cafés and bistros of Paris,where Waters first fell in love with French food. Aspects of the interiorBates remarked on, such as bare wood floors and straight-backedchairs, were frequent sights at these modest but proud establishments.In addition, the “handwritten menus on the bistro chalkboards” andthe daily changing fare that McNamee says so impressed Waters inParis made their mark on Chez Panisse’s daily fluctuating dishes andoften cursive-scripted menus. I found many in a six-volume compilationfrom the restaurant’s first eight years.

Of Chez Panisse’s various models, those of bistros and cafés hadthe most widespread and lasting impact on gourmet restaurants inAmerica. The Chez Panisse kitchen was famous for incubating futurestar chefs who carried the torch of casual style into their own places.They, too, appropriated everyday genres, whether bistros and cafés orsome other informal types—brasseries, trattorias, bar-and-grills, andso on. Chez Panisse alum Mark Miller opened Berkeley’s Fourth StreetGrill in 1979 and Santa Fe Bar & Grill in 1981. Jeremiah Tower modeledhis renowned San Francisco restaurant, Stars, which opened in 1984,on brasseries in Montparnasse.

Michael’s (Santa Monica, CA), 1979

A further force for informality in California was Michael McCarty’srestaurant, Michael’s. By the time Bates raved about it in the May 1980Gourmet, the restaurant had already garnered a stellar reputation as farreaching as New York and Paris for its combination of a “revelatory”menu and a “casually sophisticated” design.

McCarty had aimed to create what he called a “modern Americanrestaurant.” He went about this by setting it in a 1930s modernisthome, whose unadorned walls he used to emulate the style of a mid-twentieth-centuryAmerican modern-art gallery. Bates described theinterior as “painted art-gallery neutral.” The point of this, she continued,was “to set off Michael’s private collection, which leans to theworks of Richard Diebenkorn, Jasper Johns, and David Hockney.” Michael’swas indeed a novel mixture of restaurant and gallery. The minimalismof the gallery style extended to the furnishings. In the diningrooms at Michael’s, Bates observed “sleek chairs and large sofas withpale pink upholstery.”

The gallery aesthetic cleanly broke with American restaurants’ priorassociation of formality with ornamentation. But it was not by itselfinformalizing. Like temples of gastronomy, art galleries can connotereverence and hushed decorum. And yet, in combination with theservers’ attire, McCarty’s vision of a “modern American restaurant”came to life as a stylish statement of informality. The sofas’ pale-pinkupholstery appeared as an organic extension of the servers’ pale-pinkshirts.

Reading histories of the California gourmet scene, I was fascinatedby occasional mentions of McCarty’s adoption of preppy, pink, Poloinsigniashirts instead of the expected tuxes or dark suits for his waitstaff. But these statements were unsatisfactorily brief. I arranged tospeak with Andrew Turner, Michael’s knowledgeable general managerand sommelier, over dinner at the restaurant. He graciously filled mein. When preparing to open in 1979, McCarty wanted a look for his staffthat wasn’t stiff. Tuxedoes were out of the question. Even suits weretoo uptight. He asked a friend of his in the apparel industry to recommenda designer, specifying that he wanted one both “up-and-coming”and American. The friend suggested Ralph Lauren. With very few andbrief exceptions over the years since, the servers at Michael’s, male andfemale, have been wearing the current cut of pale-pink, long-sleeved,collared Polo shirts and Ralph Lauren ties. They were wearing themwhen I visited in the summer of 2010.

Immediately after Michael’s, other ambitious gourmet restaurantsadopted similarly informal server attire. An early photograph of theyoung chef Wolfgang Puck and his wait staff at Spago, which opened inLos Angeles in 1982, bears witness (fig. 2). It features male and femalestaff wearing long-sleeved button-down-collared shirts in an array ofpale pastels. In 1985, critics were already noticing the emergence ofjacketless servers at their most praiseworthy new places in New YorkCity. When Bryan Miller gave restaurateur Drew Nieporent’s Montrachetthree out of four stars in a New York Times review that year—a rarehonor for a restaurant seven weeks old and with a then little-knownchef, David Bouley, at the helm—he couldn’t help but also note thenovelty of the staff’s jacketless costume: “[Drew Nieporent’s] waitersscurry around the room in black shirts, pants and ties looking like ateam of cat burglars.” Since then, countless top restaurants have followedsuit(less), creating aesthetically coordinated, stylish looks forservers without the dressiness of jackets. From my visits to restaurantsfor this book (see the appendix), I noticed that jacketless and Oxford-shirted,with dark slacks and a waist-down apron, was by far the mostpervasive look for servers.

The increasing informality of servers’ dress tended to go hand inhand with the evolution of a more relaxed style of service. In her reviewof Michael’s in 1980, Bates admired the ebullience of the staff.Theirs was nothing like the slick, aloof treatment she had come to expectat fine restaurants. Per Bates: “The waiters (all innocent of theworld-weary cynicism of the professional) wax eloquent about the evening’sdishes, describing the minutest cooking detail. One learns thatthe garlic in a dressing has been blanched twice for a salad composedof duck legs, foie gras, lobster, and blueberries; or that the peppercornsin another sauce are the romantically mysterious baies roses … grownon an island ‘somewhere off New Guinea.'”

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