Getty ImagesThe theme of today’s post is eating in New York in 2010. We’ll explore this topic in three vignettes.
Episode 1
My friend Max came over for dinner one night. Max being the champ that he is, he brought dinner, ready to heat and serve: lamb ragu and ricotta gnocchi. It was a cool October night. Perfect.
On the afternoon of his visit, he had patronized one of the fashionable new butcher shops, where he quite innocently asked for some lamb, preferably shoulder. The butcher told him he didn’t have any lamb.
Bummer, Max thought. Then the butcher told him, “We have hogget.”
Now, I am not a Saturday crossword puzzle guy. But I am a food person in at least mediocre standing. I have paged through all the relevant texts on meat that have come out in the past few years. And I would have been as slack-jawed as Max, a normal guy with a robust interest in food, when confronted with this information. Hogget sounds like a character from Harry Potter.
With some prodding, the butcher explained that hogget is meat from a sheep that is older than a lamb and younger than the animals that make mutton. It was delicious, this hogget. A concise description of its qualities, so far as I could identify them: it tasted exactly like what has been called “lamb” for the entirety of my 33 years on the planet.
For me, the problem in this scenario isn’t that the butcher wanted to overshare about the specific maturity of the darling woolly creature we ate a few parts of that night, but that my friend was treated like an idiot, then sold exactly what he was asking for, for top dollar.
Why not say, “Sure, whadya want?” And then, while carving a piece of the shoulder of the hogget — which the customer is going to buy and take home and be perfectly happy with as “lamb” even if he never gets to find out it was cut from a teenage sheep carcass — explain the difference in a way that makes the customer feel like he’s taking home a little extra knowledge, instead of administering a faint sprinkling of shame for not being hip to “ovine terms”?
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Episode 2
Last week I was at a downtown coffee shop, one that I like and that I will continue to patronize. An older guy — I pegged him for my dad’s age and sensibilities, the way he made easy conversation with the shop’s employees like they were blue-collar deli men — ordered a drip coffee. This drip coffee is about four times more expensive than it is at the bodega down the block, so it’s not like the older guy is exactly cheaping out on his caffeine fix. Then he asked where the milk is.
The barista said, “You should really try that coffee without milk.”
I started fumbling through my pockets, looking for earphones, hoping I could get some Link Wray blasting at skull-rattling volume so that I wouldn’t have to hear the whole thing play out, but, like a rubbernecker, I couldn’t turn away.
And I watched as the guy, who, I will venture to guess, has been putting milk in his coffee since before the first time this barista guy cried to a Morrissey record, tries it. “Wow, it’s good!” he says, genuinely appreciative.
The barista, taking no joy in forcing Mr. Milk-in-my-coffee to jump into a cup of hot black, said, without even looking up from the latte he was pouring, “It will get sweeter as it cools.”
The old guy: “But I’m gonna wuss it up a little bit and put some milk in it.”
Errrrgggghhh. Making someone apologize for how they take their coffee is the sort of thing for which I think one should be taken out back and spanked. But the customer took it all in good humor, and he obviously digs the shop’s coffee, because he then selected two bags of beans. One was, I overheard, close to $20.
He made some more small talk with the self-appointed coffee mandarins. He made a comment about how everything is so expensive these days and what a shame that is. This is not — so far as I understand the way that humans patter to one another in a retail environment — really a conversation-opener. It’s something to fill in the dead air. But the barista and the cash register guy started in, tag-team style, on it’s how great it’s so expensive because it means the farmers are getting paid more.
I love this kind of coffee. It’s all I brew and buy. I’ve written about the efforts of roasters to put more money into the pockets of coffee growers, which I think is enviable and essential. But for this barista to justify the price entirely as benefiting the growers without even the barest acknowledgment of the serious markup his shop is making on top of it — I’m guessing between $16 and $18 of that $20 price tag is not ending up back in Central America — makes my eyeballs explode.
And then they discouraged him from buying two bags because the beans should be — and I am not making this up — thrown out after two weeks. That’s what they do with this coffee that matters so much from farmers they value so dearly.
My friend Mark summed up the way he feels about such coffee-shop culture with the joke that he’s going to order his next drink as a “cappuccino, no leaf.”
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Episode 3
Back in September, I was sitting outside Japanese Premium Beef, a butcher shop on Great Jones Street, around the corner from where I live. They specialize in American wagyu beef: hyper-fatty stuff, red meat lacy with bright white fat. Most of the meat in their case is too expensive for me to justify buying, but their ground beef, at $4 or $5 a pound, is a steal. The guys who work there are sweethearts, so polite it’s worth remarking upon.
I was sitting outside this shop with my dog and a new guitar pedal (called, because everything in my life ends up being sadly food-related, a H.O.G.), blissfully happy. My friend and her baby were inside; we were going to go back to my apartment and make some butter burgers. I was giddy.
The chef of a local restaurant and his wife walked up the block. He is, in fact, the only person who ever confronted me about a review of mine from the $25 & Under days. He cornered me in a coffee shop and charged that I was unfair to him. I don’t like tepid reviews of what I do either, so I appreciated the passion.
I smiled and said hello after he did. I’m sitting there on the stoop, Captain Space Cadet with a huge guitar pedal on his lap and an unruly dog at the end of a leash, and the chef started in on me. “So you shop here?”
“Yeah.” I tell him good-naturedly about how it’s close to my apartment, that the ground beef is ground fresh to order and that it’s waaaay cheaper than you’d expect from a place that sells such expensive meat.
In my defense, I will assert that I do a lot of the “good” things, like eating vegetables from the farmers’ market and knowing a bunch of farmers and blah blah blah. That’s my life. I read Alice Waters’s books when I was 20 and just getting into food, and the black and white sides of the equation were filled in for me irrevocably because I’d never been confronted with such a passionate, deeply held, humanistic approach to food. Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” made what I felt was such an airtight argument against McDonald’s and soda companies that after reading it, I gladly swept those two twin pleasures of my adolescent life off the table.
So when I swerve across the double yellow line into oncoming traffic — with my once-a-trip visits to In-N-Out when I’m on the West Coast, for example — I feel the difference when that food hits my gut. But choices are what life is made out of, right? I don’t think the wagyu beef I’m buying is local. (It’s from the Northwest.) I don’t think that it’s grass-fed. I think that it’s delicious and fresh and convenient, and I’m buying almost none of it to feed three people for very little money. I’m a dad. I need options like that. I do not feel conflicted about this.
The chef began lecturing. His tone escalated. “You know this is super grain-fed. I have a problem with that. Super grain-fed. I mean…”
His presumptuousness was a buzz-kill. I know how his life works: handsome young farmhands ferry delicately raised animals to his kitchen door, and he gets to mark that meat up to three or four times cost and sell it. What does he know about mine?
When I buy grass-fed beef — which I do regularly, though not exclusively — it’s often frozen and oddly butchered. The unfrozen stuff I buy at Whole Foods is $8.99 or more a pound and is not as minerally and grassy as the stuff over at, say, Marlow & Daughters, which is 30 minutes away.
I could choose to buy grass-fed beef all of the time, but I don’t, because $5 matters sometimes, and time matters sometimes, and I like the burgers I make with this, the meat from the nice guys at the butcher shop around the corner from my house. It may not be the greatest environmental choice, but I feel that wagyu-style beef, like foie gras, also has barrier of a tradition separating it from, say, a box of frozen patties from Gristedes.
As my anger mounted and I got ready to stand up and get into a conversation about it with him, I noticed his wife, standing a few steps behind him, holding a plum tart. I’ve read enough Joan Nathan to know what it meant.
“Happy New Year, chef. Happy Rosh Hashanah.” His name is clearly going in the book of the righteous. Me, not so much. I wished them well and looked down at my new guitar pedal. They got the clue and split.
And I’m left to wonder: Is all this righteousness going in the right direction? Or will the snake eventually eat its own tail? What originally drew me to so many of these better-practice/better-flavor foodstuffs was the joy, the passion behind them. What I’m worried about is that as the food thing gets trendier and trendier, at some point the know-it-alls will scare off the casually interested. Maybe even their fellow foot soldiers. Is that sustainable?
Maybe it’s just me, and New York, and me needing to get out and away from it all. I try not to feel chastised, try not to let the talking-to I got outside the butcher shop bother me. But it does.
The burgers were, by the way, delicious.