(I Hope) That Something (Will Be) In The Air (Tonight), Fandango

                When I think of tapas, I think of something cold—isn’t there supposed to be a difference between hot and cold items? To say that I have never been to a tapas restaurant would be a lie; my Dad brought me to one a few years back that lay in some secluded country/ suburban area in the affluent town of Naperville, Illinois. The whole thing was set up in an old plantation: white country walls, a wide porch, and the tables strewn about the large, mansion like house while waiters scurried about through doorways and down stairs to bring everyone these appetizer-like dishes. Whenever I eat with my Dad I straddle this paradoxical line between ultra-aware—of everything from cultural significance to dining setting---and lemming –like passivity. He tends to know more about where and what were are eating and it is easy to zone out, so when I think of tapas I just think of what is supposed to be a significant difference hot and cold dishes, because he told me there was one.

                So it might be good if I mentioned the restaurant, no? Fandango and I have only had fleeting glances of one another, as I have passed by on my way to this or that in downtown Kalamazoo. It is easy to miss, but when you do notice it, it sort of snatches your eye, in a similar fashion to that of The Union—out of place, but in a good way. Night-life seems to be an elusive scene to get a grasp of here in Kalamazoo, so it is refreshing to see a bar full of night-hawks capturing a few drinks in a not-so-well lit place in some random part of the city. To be honest, I had no idea the main attraction here was tapas until it was mentioned in class the other day, I just thought it was classy bar. On one of those many trips downtown I always had the “in a few years feeling,” in regards to Fandango, that I wasn’t ready to go yet and wouldn’t for a couple years. It was refreshing when I found out that wasn’t all they are about.

                 Now, I have to admit I am a sucker for nightlife. My mother was a bartender for the first 10 years of my life, and having both lived in and frequented downtown Chicago, I have to a say am a bit of a neo-noir nerd. Give me an atmosphere that evokes that emotive, cool, slick city feel with the hint of grime and I feel right at home. The way to my heart in a restaurant isn’t through my stomach, but how dim the lighting is, how big the bar is, and whether or not the sweet scent of cocktail-liquors waft their way over to me while I sit across from a conversation worthy of any night hawk roof. I hope to find a little piece of home at Fandango.

 *note: I forgot to post this before I left to review, but these were the emotions and feelings that were evoked upon my initial interest to head on over to Fandango

Always Apologetic

-E. Clark

We Don't All Wear Fannypacks and Flower Print Shirts

We have discussed using food as exposure to other cultures before in this class. In “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner” we saw a girl try desperately to achieve the status of authority and authenticity within a culture she felt as semi- foreign within to her through the consumption of food that was what “authentic” American’s ate.

Why do we obsess ourselves with culinary tourism, however? Long, in a socio-philosophical way, constantly references the idea of “otherness,” that culinary tourists actively try to pursue when visiting new restaurants/ restaurants of other cultures, all within the confines and safety of their own culture.  We have spoken much about experiences in class, and I was curious as to how many of us would react upon the assumption that we are all culinary tourists? Do we eat to gain authority? Do we eat to meet a challenge? Or is it just the desire for some late night sesame chicken? Molz describes the “existential, experimental, and experiential tourists,” or those that pride the authenticity of their ethnic experiences within food, use their food tourism as a sign of their “sophistication and competency.” I don’t know about you, but the phrase “I was into [blank] way before it was popular” comes to mind.

While I might claim that I may or may not have more “authority” on a specific type of food over one who hasn’t eaten or cooked it, I feel that an important part of the argument is missing from Long and Moltz’s articles. What I believe isn’t touched is that of individual experiences that expand past the mere location or preparation of the food, but the who, what, and whys of food. Who were you eating with when you went out for Thai food? Were you celebrating someone’s birthday? Perhaps nuptials?

While I would be a bit incredulous to have expected all these factors to be taken into this socio-philosophical discussion of food and travel, I felt it was a little light on the individual experience, and rather focus on trends of middle-class tourism for those that like to go see the leaves change on the east side of the country.  We may all not be food adventurers, but each and every day we form a new experience, and I believe the  same thought process must be utilized when taking food tourism as a series topic.

Stealing Sam's Style

While it may seem that my word salads come across as tamed coupling of clever words and phrases tossed by a talented sous chef, I’ll assure you that this is all a rouse. I have such little control over my word vomit that I might as well be popping ipecac every time I sit down to try and write. Hence why I wanted to set down my frothing keyboard and nervous digits to perform a more educated, in depth look at Sam Sifton’s food writing and just what exactly (I think) make his pieces tick. Please note that all of these are just my semi-educated blatherings.

Character:

This is something that Sifton seems to introduce in each piece that we read, at least those concerning restaurant reviews. In his article “Because The Fat Lady Has To Eat,” Sam focuses on creating a space around Mr. Benno, his cooking, how he interacts with his cooks, and what brought him to the this new restaurant in Lincoln Center. This helps settle some of the ‘whos’, ‘whats’, ‘wheres’ , ‘whys’, and ‘hows’ of the article. Without the background on the chef, or a focus on some character—as he focuses on giving the restaurant Il Matto more character than any other person in the article of the same name—the reader loses a bit of the drive to read the article past “2 Stars.”

Word Choice and Playing with Ideas:

“Mr. Benno’s skills as a pasta technician are high. He is no slouch at the fish station either. His work makes it possible to eat well at Lincoln and, as at Per Se, to savor some bites as if they were sonnets.”

Writing such as this tends to invite me in as a reader. Not to say there weren’t a hundred other ways to say what he had to say, but if I am a reader uneducated in cooking lingo and looking for something more than “the food was good,” comparing food to another topical realm assists the in grasping in what the experience is all about.

Structure of the Piece/ Answering Questions:

Each of Sifto’s pieces had order. It was as if he went in there knowing what questions he was going to ask, and filled the blanks in a little work book tucked into his back pocket in between wine sips. While it may not have been that ordered or benign, each piece made sure to tell the reader a few important things about each establishment:

1. The history of the establishment and/or its cook (aforementioned)

Some more 4 Ws + H going on, helps provide a sense of place and not just some floating restaurant in the sky.

2. What is going on in the restaurant/ atmosphere?

 A much more ambiguous section, but it is important nonetheless. The experience of dining, what the wait staff is doing, is the chef doing handstands, who goes here? “This is their shtick” and “this is why there shtick is/isn’t working” sort of thing. The “so-what” of the piece.

3. Food

 How does it taste, how does it look, to what extent is the chef (or anyone else) involved in its delivery. Always makes sure to head back a few times, and talks about more than one dish. The whole meal is examined, appetizers to desserts. Which leads us to…

4. Drinks

A good meal isn’t complete without the appropriate drink, be it a beer, a chilled White Russian,  a bottle of Cognac, or a glass of chocolate milk—the description and availability of drinks (most often times liquor) leads to a full description of the meal, and insight into a whole important section of food culture, for the reader

5. Price

This one should be a no-brainer for many of us, let people know how deep that mussel shell is going to bury itself into their wallets.

6. The Final Word

So, would you go here? Who would? Good experience, bad experience? Its judgment time, but before you slam the gavel, make sure you have taken all of these other factors into account. It isn’t necessarily a yes or no sort of question. I may love the taco stand around the corner, but I wouldn’t bring anyone there on a first date.

So this is what I gathered from Sifton’s articles, and while they were only a few, I feel rather re-educated. Please feel free to talk about adding to this, editing out contentious bits, and helping me clarify.

Analytically Apparating

-E. Clark

Esperanza's Kitchen (Edit)

Tinged with yellow. Basement stairs. Orange-ish. One window. I am too short to see the beige counter above me, but I can see and feel the pale-grey tiles beneath me which always glean a cool, refreshing aura against my skin whenever I press my face against them. Tia always washes them with a grey rag, rubbing into the dark grout in the between.  Junior is in the basement playing SNES and Tia is wearing a sky-blue dress with white flowers. She is cooking up pale red noodles that are slippery wet and wormy but when she finally serves them up in a bowl, I feel like slurping them down with the little flecks of chili peppers and tomatoes that are flecked in the orange sauce served with the dish. The cabinet is next to the counter top on the left side and is easily 4 to 5 times my size at the age of five. Then there is this gargantuan cast iron stove—black as the grill marks charred on the tortillas she flops right down on the burners. She pulls them out of a plastic baggie littered with bits of Spanish.

Tio is at the grill in the square green back lawn back in Cicero, grilling to the backdrop of the zooming cars at the racetrack and mariachi bands over the radio. Screaming tires moving at 200 miles-per-hour partnered with rich horns and, at the time indecipherable, Spanish in hearty tones.

I know the beef is outside. Tio lets the meat age in raw mounds of salt—sealed away in clear Tupperware containers with oak green and mauve tops. He does the same with hot dogs, except he prepares them differently before placing them on his propane grill. He slits the hot dogs down the sides—not vertically as if you were about to stuff them with cheese or other such Northern nonsense such as that—but three times on one side, and three times on the other. This way, they sear and pucker on the outside, becoming nice and crispy without the meat bursting and losing the crunchy flavor and consistency of the skin. I don’t remember needing a bun, or any sauces.

White smoke billows out of the grill spilling through and over the grey chain-link fence to the neighbor’s yard. I walk through it on my way to Tia. I ask for a sip from her teal colored water bottle with a little nozzle and – with a smile—she hands it over to me. It is (as always) Diet Coke, but so infused with ice that there is a watery, slick after taste that keeps the bubbly carbonation from building up in my mouth or stomach.

Sometimes, on those summer days where you hear the electricity humming in telephone wires, yellow-jackets try to climb down the nozzle and their little black and yellow butts stick out the top. While Tia would shoo them away, and like many kids I was naturally afraid of the stingy buggers, I was always curious to see what would happen if I sipped them up too—maybe it would leave a buzz in my stomach in its attempts to fly out.

Early morning meals are different than the back yard grill-fests. With its dazzling array of salted hot dogs, bistec, and beef tongue, dinner was a bit more of an event, usually with neighbors and extraneous family members. Breakfasts are reserved. Usually Tia cooks up some eggs for the whole family—that family being Junior, Julie, Tio— and to a certain extent me. Junior and Julie are brother and sisters from the same father---Esperanza had been their foster mother since they were little. She had been babysitting just as long---so long that my mom called her my Godmother. But Esperanza preferred Tia.

The eggs are cooked to a slimy consistency similar to…well, snot. Not saying it sounded delicious, and you can be sure I had my own apprehensions at the time, but the only other eggs I could remember eating when I was that young were my Aunt Liz’s.  Rubberized scrambled eggs that were paired with eradiated bacon, both bombarded in enough salt to give my cousin enough cholesterol and sodium problems until he was 24. So while drippy, watery, eggs that cling together with the consistency of glue may sound disgusting to most anyone else, but the difference to me was one between the Sahara and the Atlantic, and I was in for swimmin’.

                Appropriately goopified, Tia poured the bright yellow eggs onto several corn tortillas, occasionally chopping up some green peppers and frying up some chorizo sausage to be mixed into the concoction. Once the cooking was done, Tio sits me up on his lap— there is only three chairs at the small, yellow, semi-circle table that occupy the kitchen—and illustrates to me how to wrap the little breakfast burrito before us. What ensues is a simple--yet perplexing--maneuver of folds that elude me to this very day, leading to a perfectly wrapped meal; egg goop securely trapped within for maximum gooey deliciousness. Did I mention there was cheese in these too? Well, there is cheese, and it only adds to the warm brew of goo waiting to be devoured.

                So this was all quite a lot to take in for this gringito to take, and my poor little pallet hadn’t even tasted the thing yet. Tio takes the first bite, somehow managing not to spill any of it on the plate or himself, and then hands it to me. Oh boy, here it goes, I think. Handle properly, one hand on each side—wait what? Interruption! What is that green sauce you are squirting on to the burrito? Something about jalapenos? What is that? Don’t worry, you say? Well…okay…

                My taste buds were never the same. A spicy, sour, and earthy bombastic combination of flavors carpet bombed my tongue in an assertive militaristic conquest of my future desires in food. Chorizo layered an exotic, tangy, hot grease on my tongue and cheeks while the eggs—runny and barely salted—cut through, providing the sensation of eating a cross between meatloaf and fatty bits of a pork-chop. And while, at the time, I was terrified over the feeling of what I now know are Scovilles (units of ‘hotness’ or ‘spiciness’) and their scorched earth-policy of my mouth, I have had an obsession with hot sauces ever since. It would be a few years from that point until I could buy my own hot-sauces, and a few years more until I would attempt to make my own, but it kept lingering on. During high-school I would skip out on the school lunches, hop off campus, and go to the local burrito den so I could order chorizo con heuvos (eggs and chorizo). Each time I take a bite of Mexican cuisine, or whenever I drop a splash of Tabasco on something, I think of the kitchen away from home in which I spent many of my first years. I see flower print dresses and texas ties, hear mariachi and Catholic mass, smell clean tiles and grilled hot-dogs, and taste a little piece of a world which I haven’t been a part of since.

An Excerpt from an Ice Cream Scrub

Unfortunately for the leather wallet I received as a birthday gift a few years ago, I have only ever had four paying jobs. The most recent one was a stint as an AV guy for Kalamazoo College’s music department last spring, and before that I worked as “Game Advisor” at Gamestop back in my junior year of high school. But before both of those big-figure payrolls I worked as a humble ice-cream guy in two different shops back in my hometown of Bartlett, Il.

The first job I sequestered was at a wee-little antiques shop called “Banbury Fair.” There, a bunch of women in their late 50’s covered in plastic jewelry, plastic leopard print fingernails, and wearing way too much purple make-up that was supposedly going to “make their eyes pop,” had gathered various things from their attics and tried to sell them to the general public. This was the general staff.

Then there was me. Pimple-faced, gangly in arms and legs (as I was a wrestler at the time), and sparse, close-cropped hair, I was your average fifteen-year old, who—for the first time, was told he needed an apron. 

Doe-eyed and unawares. Freshman year.

Being my first job, I was understandably nervous, but I had always been told that food-service was my most likely route of early professional advancement. And we only had soft-serve ice-cream in this little addition to the shop, so I learned how to spin the cone ever-so-slightly to achieve that iconic swirl and curve at the top of the tasty treat. I worked in late fall, so no ice cream would melt and I didn’t have to worry about too many customers—or over-eager consumers (it was a kind of ‘you have to know it is was there’ sort of place) clogging up lines and making life hellish. Life was pretty simple. I ‘needed’ the money to buy my girlfriend the various Tiffany’s bracelets and necklaces she wanted, and this was a low pressure way of doing so. I had reason, means, and the hours weren’t bad enough that I ever had to ignore my school work.

By winter of my freshman year our cliental had become almost non-existent (no one wants ice cream in winter) and I was let go. A year later, there was Oberweis.

Now, I am not sure if you are all familiar with Oberweis Dairy, but it is a sort of a big deal in Northern Illinois. The whole thing is owned by this rich, Republican guy that repeatedly tries to run for some state office and uses his dairy dollars to fund his campaigns.

Everything is overpriced, a scoop of ice-cream costing anywhere between 4 and 7 dollars, and each and every Oberweis goes for a late-1950’s vibe with chrome everything, black and white tiles, and silly hats/ aprons for the staff. Think of Johnny Rockets or Steak n’ Shake except with more cows.

By this time I had broken up with my long-time girlfriend, stopped wrestling, and had no real reason to have a job other than my parents prodding me get gas money.

Oh, and it was the beginning of summer. While all other food industries have their rise and falls, trends in the year, etc., nothing is more hellish than an ice-cream shop during the summer. Hordes of families, children grappling their mothers and fathers by the legs, drooling on their khaki pants demanding a  double scoop of triple peanut butter swirl with caramel and chocolate chips or the four Indian guys that come in fifteen minutes before closing  and ask for twenty---yes TWENTY—shakes, each and every one of them different and then the back of the kitchen is flooding because some let the sink overall while washing the hundreds of little sundae dishes while trying to meet the required service quota of no longer than 2 minutes between order and delivery of product. Whew. Needless to say I did not move at the speed of Oberweis. Thank you Tony, for telling the story of the kitchen scrub.

-Exasperated yet elated

E. Clark 

 

In The Defense Of The Casserole

I defend yee, oh humble casserole, you collection of concocted goodies that as much as I munch and nibble delicately I can never quite keep you in the perfect squares that are advertised on the front of the frozen dinner boxes. You are whatever was left in the fridge—the stone soup of pasta (perhaps) dinners for those of us too lazy to go out to the store and find the “proper” ingredients for a “real” meal.

Do you not beckon the survivor in us? The handy man? The crafty cook? The Kitchen MacGuyver ? Is that an onion I spy—still good (I hope) in the back of my vegetable drawer? A-ha! A can of tomato sauce lying around from spaghetti night a few months ago, in it goes! O-ho! This beef is only one day bad, a good toss in the frying pan will kill whatever decided to feast its fangs, proboscis, or whatever it is bacteria and fungi use to make beef go bad, into it. Add some peppers, tortilla chips, a good ole’ layer (or two) of Kraft cheese product, and voila—a perfectly good taco casserole ready for lunch, dinner, or midnight snacking.

But enough of my rambling—upon reading M.F.K. Fisher’s “Nor Censure Nor Disdain,” I immediately wanted to jump to the defense of one of our most staple, creative, and widely “available” dishes. And while M.F.K. Fisher’s  message may have been obscured by being a victim of her times and the arid humor of the New Yorker, I was under the distinct impression that Fisher believed that the every-day casserole was below herself. “Distinctive rules” of a casserole dish?  Bah! While of course there are rules cooking that we must abide by in order to not turn a croissant into crater and too keep ourselves from adding some extra skin or hair into the mix, but the beauty of the casserole is within its mystery. Cooking a casserole can be fun and (for us starving English majors) sometimes an act of necessity. What Bourdain celebrated, Fisher seems to find quant, serving her own “exceptional” casserole as prime example of what one must do in order to become the casserole cooking champion.

Overall, what I garnered from M.F.K. Fisher was the idea that there is a “proper way to do food,” and an “improper way to do food,”—bringing it down to simple terms—something which I vehemently disagree with. Food can be a celebration of creation, an exploration of palettes, and an act of savory survival—and to restrict it seems to be almost asinine. It changes and grows with us, depending on where, when, what, and who we are. There isn’t a line to define that.

-Sparring with scribbles

E. Clark