Catering Follies

The caterer in question in this post today proposed a literally absurd menu. I excerpt my response below - to be clear, I am being as kind as possible in my note:

"However, to be quite blunt, I have not reviewed the food and wine selections you have proposed, nor anything else for that matter, because the price estimate you have provided is utterly unacceptable. Honestly, I am bewildered that you would have taken my clearly expressed preference that we proceed on a budget (I was quite explicit on this point during our meeting, even mentioning the range of other proposals, which I was not inclined to do) and produced a proposal well in excess of $300 per person (even excluding a gratuity, as I read it) without any prior warning. Of course, you are entirely at liberty to set your own prices, and I am sure others are happy to pay for your services at these rates. But on the basis of your proposal, I am disappointed to tell you that we have nothing further to discuss."

* I have not asked the person in question for permission, because I am just republishing my own message. If they don't like it, they can complain to me.

Will touches on "food and sex"

Even if the premise of the op-ed is true (that people invest more care in what they eat than in who they have sexual relations with - I would dispute that most people today care at all about what they eat, outside an elite cadre), I am puzzled to find that George Will is puzzled by that result. People necessarily care about their physical aspect, and part of the taboo against sexual relations outside of marriage was precisely that. Fear of disease, and above all, pregnancy for women and unplanned fatherhood for men.

Technology has rendered moot most of that concern - the careful, prudent elite that Will (and Eberstadt's underlying article) describes can prevent pregnancy (or, more troublingly, terminate it), and disease can be both prevented and cured.

There is yet no answer to the twin physical dangers presented by food, which I will broadly term fat and cancer. There is no "pill" that governs weight the way the birth control pill governs fertility. Every day, it becomes more evident that bad food (though which bad food precisely, we don't know) causes or exacerbates the dread diseases that end so many of our lives. It is entirely rational when presented with this situation that the elite neurotic will expend his or her energy on food safety rather than sexual safety. Sex outside marriage was the corn finished beef of times past.

Instead, we get this prudish morality play from Will and Eberstadt. Odd.

EDIT: Eberstadt's article is more nuanced than Will's, I now think, and acknowledges some of the above.

Corruption

I'm becoming more convinced that Obama's real job, putting aside our fiscal mess, is to root out corruption, both public and private. Of course, some ambient level of corruption is normal - it is the grist of the political mill and of the world outside. But the fetid stink of now is overwhelming. The latest manifestation is Roland Burris, but the moral corruption in the upper echelons of society is deep (when I say moral, I am implying nothing about religion, by the way, in case anyone thinks my problem is that people have left their churches). Of course, my own exposure to the upper echelons has bruised me psychologically for reasons I'm not going to explain here, so I might well be overreacting to personal experiences that have no broader meaning, but I think I am not.

Also, I am in the middle of reading Obama's Dreams from my Father. Obviously, this will become a part of the modern canon - the actual fairly pure thoughts of a future president when he was 33? It's an incredible historical document that will only become more important as journalism passes into history, like reading Teddy Roosevelt's early works, but better. But what strikes me most is the almost preternatural unity of Obama's vision. His writing then sounds so much like his speeches now that I'm almost convinced he re-edited the book in the 2004 release to insert the current rhetoric. More likely, he is so clever that he understands the compelling power of a consistent, lifelong vision, and so he hews intentionally to what he said earlier. I laugh at the Obama groupies who convince themselves that even his mistakes are part of some sort of deeply subtle underplan, certainly, but those exaggerations shouldn't hide the fact that for those of us on the broad right, he is a subtle and powerful opponent.

Fleeting thought of the day

Why do I become extremely ravenous at random intervals during the day? When I say ravenous, I mean as if I could eat a turkey if it was here. I wish I could ignore it.

Two meals becometh one

"Oh God", said the voice to my left suddenly. "I must have eaten, like, 200 calories of these things". The owner of the voice was a deathly thin man, hair all akimbo, a pastel silk scarf wrapped delicately around his neck, attempting to stop his fingers from going towards the lavender sugar encrusted Marcona Almonds at the iconoclastic Ubuntu restaurant and yoga studio in the city of Napa. Turning back to my own little tray of the nuts, it occurred to me how compelling delicious food is, no matter how thin we are, or controlled, or used to masochistic diets negotiated under the constant frown of calorie counts and fat percentages. Like a mother who sneaks some spinach into her child's morning smoothie, Ubuntu draws in its northern california crowd with the promise of ascetic, macrobiotic, veggie bliss, but what it delivers is something far more primal - big, uncompromising, flavor.


It wasn't just the almonds. Joining them as a convenient pre-meal snack are chickpea fries, no longer the stodgy cubes of custom, but thin, long, McDonald's like strands of chickpea, crispy with a pleasing interior. But it is in the tapas style main courses that Ubuntu hits its stride. Even in the midst of winter, the artichoke salad with leaves, miso (that is, as opposed to the traditional anchovy) "bagna cauda" and olive marmalade was astonishing, the slight shavings of parmesan a deft salty accent to the sweet sauces and the perfect vegetables. But I save my loudest accolades for the next two dishes we tried - the first, a composition of radishes, grapefruit, the best beet "tartare" I've ever had and "fork-crushed" avocado, (the last especially a subtle surprise rather than just its usual jolt of healthy, natural fat) and then a deeply satisfying bowl of carrot gnochetti, with what the menu called "carrot pulp crumble" adding a little more of what I take to be Ubuntu's sweet signature. Not to mention that I'm usually disappointed by dessert, so much so that I normally don't order it, but Ubuntu's vanilla bean "cheesecake in a jar" with sour cherries (which are nostalgic for my fiancee, as the flavors of her mother's childhood Tehran) was terrific. To the extent I had a complaint, it was about our second dessert, which turned out to be so forgettable that I have forgotten it entirely.

That meal I contrast with our less impressive visit to Zuni Cafe, about which I was more excited. I don't mean to say that Zuni was bad, in any way. My rabbit salad was marvelous, if small. And the famed roasted chicken for two, which takes an hour from ordering to arrive, was extremely good. Really very good, a great chicken only enhanced by its treatment in the wood fire, sitting atop pungent mustard greens and peasant bread half-croutons soaked in oil and lemon, both crunchy and chewy and then tart. But did it change my thoughts about chicken? Should it be thought to be the kind of chicken that makes a career? Not really.

I've grouped together these two meals in these notes because they inspired our first meal back in New York. As I sat at Zuni, it occurred to me that my own much plainer roast chicken, even when I use a mere $9 "all natural" Murray's rather than some ultra-premium breeds, is nearly as good as Zuni Cafe's landmark dish. And it occurred to me that what would go perfectly with it was Ubuntu's artichoke salad, albeit without the still quivering with freshness greens, and jarred artichokes holding the place of those just out of the ground. So I roasted my chicken in the usual way, with a lemon and herbs inside, legs tied together, and plenty of fleur de sel, and made a simple vinaigrette to dress the baby spinach and artichoke. The results are pictured below, and we ate with happy memories of our trip out west.

Cav Wine Bar and "tastes"

We arrived at Zuni Cafe too early for dinner, so we went looking for somewhere to have a drink until the appointed time. We ended up at Cav Wine Bar, just down Market Street, where owner Pamela S. Busch was patrolling the front room with reassuring confidence. One innovation that I saw universally in California, and see more and more here, is the "taste" of wine - a half glass, 2.5 oz. pour for half price. It lets you drink variety without breaking the budget, and at Cav, it let me do most of a Pinot Noir tasting "flight" for under $20. We both loved the Dubakella Pinot Noir, and were astounded by a French Pinot that tasted so much of barnyard that it was almost unpleasant. The atmosphere was welcoming and friendly, and we had a great time.

What the heck happened?

I was sitting in a beautiful backyard in Los Angeles with (soon to be) family when they asked me, as a lawyer in the far-away province of New York, what the heck has happened to our economy. Of course I said I don't know, and if I did, I would be working for Treasury. But I've got a guess, and it has nothing to do with regulation, or credit default swaps, or whatever else, at least directly. Here is the story I told.

Imagine you were invited to a casino to play poker. And let's say that you're pretty good at poker - you can grind out some nice cash by beating up on the casual players, the weekend warriors. But when you get there, instead of being allowed to go to your usual table, the pit boss takes you to a special room. In the room, he explains the deal he's been offering to a few special people. "All you have to do is roll this die, which has 100 sides, every five minutes or so. If you get through an hour without rolling a '1', you win $20 million". That's a lot of money, you think. You never need to work again if you win. "But what happens if you roll a '1'"? "Oh!", says the pit boss. "Then you lose $1 billion. We have to get paid somehow. But here's the good part. Someone else loses that money - not you".

A lot of people in finance took that deal. They knew the risk of rolling a "1". Of course they did. Or at least their bosses did. But they took the deal because almost anyone would take the deal, when put to the test. The upside (and I can't emphasize this enough) was generational, lasting, wealth - complete freedom to do almost anything forever. The downside was inchoate. Some really bad stuff would happen, possibly, but not to you.

Would you have played the game?

We're back from San Francisco and Los Angeles.  We had a great time in both places, and I'll lead off with a few observations. 

1.  LA is not my kind of city.  Too many cars combined with too many malls.  It's like the suburban Virginia of my youth, but much bigger and more vacuous, somehow. 

2. I made a couple of mistakes in this post.  The obvious one, as was explained to my back then, is that San Francisco is not tied with Chicago for second best food city in the country, but is a clear #2 under the rubric I was thinking about then.  The second thing is that the whole rubric is wrong.  Yes, New York is the best restaurant city in the country.   But best food city?  The californian supermarkets, in February, are still packed with extraordinary local produce, even if it is somewhat limited.  Here, we have tubers.  If anything, I suspect the gap in the summer is even bigger, as our farms start working, but theirs explode.  I'm not sure what to make of this.

3. Food (still) tastes better outside.

4. Visiting a city occupied by Armenians is pretty disturbing, especially because you can't use Armenian as your super secret language anymore.  On the other hand, it is somewhat amusing to be somewhere where every second person looks like either your uncle or great uncle.

5. Why does anyone live in New York, again, when things routinely look like the below over there?  I need to work on my rationalizations for this seemingly unwise decision again.