GUEST BLOG / by
Eric Peterson author of “The Dining Car.”
It’s an insidious practice: upscale restaurants are increasingly
serving small plates in lieu of properly portioned entrées. If the trend
continues, a generation of diners will be permanently saddled with the palates
of dilettantes and the appetites of Lilliputians. Fine dining in the
traditional sense will go the way of the Princess rotary-dial phone.
I confess to being a dinosaur: When setting out for a night
on the town, my destination is invariably a top-tier chophouse: dim lighting, white
linen tablecloths, a full glittering bar, and food portions that guarantee I’ll
walk out groaning.
This being my reference, you can imagine my horror when an
online restaurant-industry trade magazine crossed my desk, and the feature
article extolled the virtues of small, shareable seafood plates. According to
the newsletter, called Restaurant
Hospitality Eat Beat, the craze for small bites was hitting trendy, upscale
restaurants in a big way:
“Small plates are really good because we’re in an iPhone
world and our attention spans are getting smaller and smaller as time goes on,”
said restaurateur and Top Chef finalist Brian Malarkey, whose small plate of Buffalo
octopus “stole the show” at Sundance Film Festival this year, according to the
newsletter. “The days of giant steaks and big fish are done,” Malarkey added. “It’s
now one bite of this, one bite of that. I can’t get three bites into something
before I’m like, ‘What’s next?’”
At this point, reading at my desk, I grew faint. The next
thing I knew, my assistant was waving smelling salts under my nose and helping
me off the floor.
The trend toward small-plate, prix fixe menus is
incontrovertible. Such celebrated establishments as Benu, Chez Panisse, and The
French Laundry all follow the despotic formula of “you’ll get what the chef
gives you, and that’s that.” But then, so does the state prison at San Quentin.
What galls me is that these chef-driven restaurants are so
unapologetic about their approach to fine dining, which is an affront to American
tradition, a healthy appetite, and personal choice. On its website, The French
Laundry says, “We serve a series of small courses meant to excite your mind,
satisfy your appetite and pique your curiosity. We want you to say, ‘I wish I
had just one more bite of that.’ And then the next plate arrives and the same
thing happens.”
I have to ask myself, Has the restaurant world gone completely
mad?
I was beginning to think yes—that is, until last weekend,
when my travels took me to Santa Cruz, CA, for a wine-bottling weekend high in
the mountains. On Sunday we had a late-afternoon plane to catch, and this gave my
traveling companions and me the opportunity to grab an early lunch near the
airport.
The restaurant we quite
inadvertently stumbled upon in downtown San Jose was Original Joe’s Italian
Restaurant, a descendant of the Original Joe’s founded in San Francisco in
1937.
Low lighting, crescent
leather booths, white linen tablecloths under a cavernous ceiling—this was a real restaurant. Our server, Jose Luis, wore
a tuxedo. He was perhaps 60. In his 29 years at Original Joe’s, he had personally
tasted every one of the menu’s 117 items. He wasn’t so fond of the sweetbreads
or the liver, he said, but the spaghetti, lasagna, and minestrone soup were
excellent.
“The prime rib is ready to
be served,” Jose Luis added. It was 11:30 in the morning.
At Original Joe’s, the
omelets are made with four eggs. Order bacon and eggs, and you get crispy stout
steak fries and a truckload of bacon with your scrambled eggs. The Bloody Marys
arrive nearly colorless at the top. And the sheer girth of the club sandwiches being
portaged through the dining room made our eyes pop. Imagine what dinner must be like.
My advice to those of you
in the iPhone generation who are putting down a credit card and waiting two to
three months for a table at some small-plate, prix fixe nirvana of gustatory
endeavor: Cancel your reservation. Use what you save to spring for an Uber. Go
to Original Joe’s in San Jose, where a gentlemanly server in a tuxedo will
unobtrusively attend to your every need. You’ll eat what you want and you won’t
go away hungry.
Chew on that with your
minuscule plate of Buffalo octopus, chef Brian Malarkey. ##.
Eric Peterson is the author of The
Dining Car, a contemporary novel about a
former college football player who enlists as bartender and personal valet to a
curmudgeonly food writer and social critic who travels the country by private
railroad car.
Breaking News: Peterson’s novel is a finalist in the Independent
Book Publishers Assn’s 29th annual Benjamin Franklin Awards 2017.
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