The Chef as Artist

"Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: give me leave to do my utmost." - Isak Dinesen [from "Babette's Feast"]

I got into a heated debate with a colleague the other day. This man often tells me exasperating stories about his family's fickle dining behavior. He will cook dinner to his children's precise specifications instead of defining the parameters of the meal himself. If their whims suddenly change, he will indulge them by cooking another meal over again from scratch. One child will eat only certain classes of foods and only with a particular condiment. The other will overdose on sugar if left unchecked. Neither of them eat balanced meals of their own volition, which prompted me to ask how they came to be so fussy. He conveniently blames his wife for instilling these bad behaviors, but I listen to him bitch and complain daily about the countless foods he dislikes and his convoluted, self-imposed dietary restrictions based on old wives' tales.

I bite my tongue through most of these stories, but I finally had my breaking point with his latest anecdote. He and his wife went to an expensive restaurant with a highly regarded reputation. There was a spicy dish on the menu that his wife was adamant about having, yet she doesn't like spicy food. Preparation of the dish required the spices to be deeply infused into the ingredients, so there was no easy way to make it less spicy. Instead of ordering another dish, my colleague told the waiter to tell the chef to thoroughly wash off the ingredients and gave further instructions on how to cook the rest of the dish.

I was aghast. My face probably had the same dumbfounded expression that the waiter displayed -- an expression that my friend apparently found puzzling.

To begin with, I have never been able to understand food fussiness. I'm not talking about managing allergies or digestive intolerances, making health-conscious or ethical choices, or the avoidance of tainted food. I mean the arbitrary, irrational dislike of a particular food. I say "irrational" because there is no logical argument for why a person should hate strawberries, for example. Friends have often heard me say that I hate brussels sprouts, but this isn't an accurate statement: I have no trouble eating them if they're on my plate, and will admit that they are pretty good when fried with bacon. (After all, almost everything tastes great with bacon. Even chocolate.) It's been my lifelong mantra to try anything once, and when it comes to food, there is nothing that I wouldn't consider eating if cooked well.

Human beings have an instinctive but retarded fear of anything unfamiliar. I'm old enough to remember a time when sushi grossed out everybody who wasn't Japanese. "Ewwwwww," the grade school twits would castigate me as I ate the food of my cultural heritage. Today, it's both gratifying and contemptuously ironic that you can't pass a downtown block without stumbling across someone peddling sushi. It makes me rebel by embracing everything.

I've also long argued that a person who claims that she hates something, probably just had an isolated, unfortunate experience with a rotten or badly prepared version of that thing. I've successfully tested this theory with a number of people, including (and especially) myself. For most of my life, I didn't see the point of super-hot and spicy flavors, because all I felt was the burn. Then one day, it was explained to me that good quality chilies and hot sauces have a discernible flavor that isn't overtaken by the heat. One taste of a lovely habanero mango hot sauce purchased at a hot sauce specialty shop turned me around completely. I haven't looked back.

Yet the greatest affront in my colleague's story was that he told the chef how to cook the chef's own dish. This place wasn't Harvey's. My friend argued that as a paying customer, he has every right to dictate how he is to be served. I couldn't have disagreed more. The way I see it, you are not paying to be served -- you are paying for the honor of experiencing one particular person's interpretation of food. The chef is an artist and the restaurant is his/her gallery. What idiot would tell Picasso to stop painting Cubist people with eyeballs where their shoulders should be? What douchebag would tell Francis Ford Coppola that he should have cast someone other than Brando in "The Godfather"? What moron would tell Mozart that "The Magic Flute" would have been better without all that singing?

When I was in Miami a few years ago, I took the opportunity to dine at Nobu. Chef Nobu Matsuhisa is a legend in the world of Japanese fusion cuisine. Without any second guessing, I immediately went for the full-course omakase menu. Omakase loosely translated means "I leave it up to you"; it is the chef's personal selection of dishes. No clue is given as to what will be served: the element of surprise is the objective. The price for all of this was steep. Yet I had no inclination to complain or dictate what was presented to me. Every bite was a revelation.

If I ever have the extraordinary fortune of experiencing something like Heston Blumenthal's Perfect Christmas Dinner, it would be an honor to let him dish out whatever he's got. If Blumenthal wants me to eat his brussels sprouts, you betcha I will and I'll be damned happy about it.

The same etiquette applies when dining at a friend's house. If someone spent hours slaving over the stove to make a special meal for me, I'm not going to sulk in my chair that the rice wasn't cooked the way I like it, or that brussels sprouts were put into the casserole. I'll eat it all with gratitude and great relish.

My colleague retorted with another story. There is a steakhouse that he frequents because their steaks are his "favorite". Yet there too, he tells them to butterfly his steaks before grilling them because they never cook it to the right doneness. Was he not justified in making this request?

First of all, why is this his "favorite" steakhouse if the cooks are too incompetent to know how to grill a steak medium-rare? Second of all, there's a vast difference between the expectation of something that was offered and promised vs. demanding something that is above and beyond what the chef has committed to do in his/her menu. Expecting a steak to be cooked medium-rare when that's what you ordered is perfectly reasonable. If it wasn't cooked right, the reasonable thing to do is send the steak back. (If poultry isn't cooked right, you better send it back! You can get salmonella poisoning or worse.) It's not reasonable to change the process and procedures already established in the kitchen.

I have zero tolerance for high maintenance dinner guests ("can you replace the tomato with a red pepper, make my croutons extra crispy, hold the garlic, put the marinade on the side even though I know the chicken is supposed to be marinated in it, make sure you drain those fries on a paper towel, and do you use olive oil or vegetable oil in this dish?"). There is a funny scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm in which someone orders a Cobb salad but asks for virtually every main ingredient to be substituted for something else. In the end, what the person is asking for is another kind of salad that is on the menu, but instead of ordering that, the person insists on having the Cobb salad.

My impatience for people who create unnecessary complications, combined with my Japanese abhorrence for stepping beyond one's place, are admittedly personal biases. Perhaps there is justification for telling a chef how to do his/her job. But given how arbitrarily people develop their personal preferences, how far can one encroach on an artist's right to free expression?