Food, Service, and Play in Restaurant Culture

Author(s): jennifer burns levin

Source: Gastronomica, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter 2012), pp. 118-121
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2012.12.4.118
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review essay | jenn i fer burns levi n

Food, Service, and Play in

Restaurant Culture
Life, on the Line: A Chefs Story of Chasing Greatness,
Facing Death, and Redening the Way We Eat
Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas
New York: Gotham Books, 2011
x+400 pp. Illustrations. $27.50 (cloth)

Dishing It Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience

Robert Appelbaum
London: Reaktion Books, 2011

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285 pp. $35.00 (cloth)

gastronomica

118

Two new works on restaurant culture, one from the

perspective of those who serve it forth and another from
those who are served, seek to revitalize our understanding
of the contemporary dining experience. The gulf between
the expectations of diners and the pressures within the
restaurant industry seems to grow larger daily, and it seems
unlikely that the two perspectives could possibly complement one another.
And yet, these very different new books nd common
ground in a surprising placethe notion of play. The rst,
an autobiography of renowned American chef Grant Achatz,
indicates to the reader that the story is about a bright,
industrious, ambitious young man who is, above all, lucky.
We learn from the rst pages that in 2008 Achatz won the
James Beard Foundations Outstanding Chef Award for his
Chicago restaurant Alinea, and that Achatz has appeared
to beat late-stage tongue cancer that metastasized into his
lymph nodes.
The memoir progresses from start to nish as a triumph
over adversities: a classic American success story set within
the belly of the restaurant industry. Achatz hops from
humble beginnings at his familys restaurants in Michigan
to the best possible education at the Culinary Institute of
America and on to The French Laundry, where he serves
as a respected commis for celebrity chef Thomas Keller.
Alongside these laudatory achievements, he does not disguise a rough (and short) stint with Charlie Trotter at his
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture , vol.12, no.4, pp.118121, issn 1529-3262.

eponymous restaurant; nor does he omit mention of a terrible review by Frank Bruni of the New York Times or refrain
from describing a largely absentee relationship with his exwife and mother of his children. Achatz frankly admits that
he has dedicated his life to the single-minded pursuit of
ne cuisine. This quest is related in anecdotes that illustrate
both the chase and the capture, many involving commentary by Achatzs business partner Nick Kokonas, an unusual
and often distracting addition to the text. The quest motif
that Kokonas contributes allows Achatz to narrate his many
triumphs as battles from which he has emerged victorious.
This rhetorical strategy is most effective in the last third
of the book, when Achatz describes the terrible tragedy of
the cancer in his mouth, which robbed him of his sense
of taste (he regained it after treatment). The details of the
diseases quick onset, its treatment, the need for drastic chemotherapy and radiation, and the threat to his livelihood
provide a vivid sense of drama in the book. Achatz credits the push of the kitchen with providing him with the
drive and tenacity to pull through, just as one would push
through a difcult night of service (pp.ix, 290).
The hard-fought struggle with cancer aside, Achatzs
keen culinary ambition, which plays out so stunningly in
life, fails to read quite as well on paper. His book provides
more in the way of details about squabbles among the leading lights of the American restaurant industry than nuanced
meditations on Achatzs considerable innovations in cuisine.
Both Achatz and Kokonas repeatedly stress the formers
considerable talents, but descriptive sections are largely
conned to the reproduction of Alinea investor reports
(with their photographs of dishes), and the text too often
devolves into an account of Achatzs being wronged in an
industry where unfair behavior is unfortunately all too common. Achatzs relationship with Charlie Trotter provides
the archetypal example of this mode. Disappointed and
surly about a young Achatz leaving his service after only
two months, Trotter is quoted as proclaiming, If you do
not stay at this restaurant for a full year, you will simply not

2012 by jennifer burns levin. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2012.12.4.118.

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Above: Seven different textures of rhubarb at Alinea: beet sphere

in rhubarb juice, dried rhubarb, gin-compressed rhubarb, rhubarb
sponge on bay leaf, lavender-poached rhubarb with goats-milk
custard, rhubarb sorbet on oatmeal streusel, and rhubarb gelee with
fennel candy and green tea nage froth.

2007

Keller, but in the book the raried dish is grounded in Achatzs

personal struggle with cancer: he is making them before his
rst treatment appointment at Sloan-Kettering, and the ne
soft texture of the miniature gnocchi is about all [he] can
handle these days (p.323). As Achatz rolls out the gnocchi,
he reects on the culinary tradition that he absorbed from
The French Laundry, musing on the trompe loeil approach
that makes salmon appetizers look like ice cream cones.
The delight in manipulating a diners expectations stems
from that playful showmanship, he concludes, stating that it
makes sense that we play with food at Alinea (p.323).
We also nd the idea of playing with ones food at the
heart of cultural historian Robert Appelbaums Dishing It
Out: In Search of the Restaurant Experience. Appelbaums
valuable contribution to food studies approaches the restaurant experience from the vantage point of the consumera
consumer seeking to transcend consumerism itself by
grappling with the complex ethics of dining out. Although
he devotes little attention to the labor of the kitchen
(and, thankfully, even less to the cult of celebrity chefs),
Appelbaum arrives at the same conclusions made by Achatz:
a dining experience succeeds when it is about food rst and
foremost, and when the artistry and hospitality of producers
is valued by consumers who appreciate the effort.
For Appelbaum, however, the idea of play evokes jouissance, a notion of excessive pleasure that is troubling for the
consumer in its excess and can even shake ones sense of self.
Although Appelbaum stresses that we must not be misled

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photograph by lara kastner

119
gastronomica

exist to me. Period. That means dont ever call me. Dont
ever use me as a reference. Dont put Charlie Trotters on
your rsum (p.49). The reader expects another confrontation, especially after Achatz opens Alinea in Trotters home
turf of Chicago, so we are not surprised to read Trotters
bristly snipe about Achatzs relative inexperience quoted in
Brunis negative review of Alineas opening day (p.265). But
Bruni and Trotter are soon forgotten thanks to Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, who crowns Alinea the best restaurant in
the country after Achatz coaxes her to visit.
We certainly cannot single out or blame Achatz for
making himself the star of his story. The rise of the celebrity chef has assured marketability and reader tolerance for
chutzpah, and the particular style of cooking embraced
at Alinea encourages the myth of originary genius at its
creative zenith. The book will inevitably be compared
to one of the many chef autobiographies published in
2011Gabrielle Hamiltons Blood, Bones & Butter: The
Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chefwhich also celebrates an aggressive and competitive perfectionism.1 But
where Hamiltons dynamic prose connects food with her
personal history and colorful travels, Achatz devotes Life, on
the Line to his restaurant career. Perhaps either his struggle
with cancer or the 2008 publication of Alinea, a beautifully
photographed monograph on the restaurant, prompted
him not to focus more on food in his autobiography.2 But
as a food lover and a food writer who has not experienced
Achatzs culinary alchemy, I was disappointed not to read
more about how this accomplished chefs life story translates into particular dishes.
There is one moment, however, in which Achatz makes
the connection I was seeking. Near the end of the book,
he describes his process for preparing tiny gnocchi the size
of Arborio rice. It is a technique he learned from Thomas

that the pleasure we receive in being served in

a restaurant is anything but a momentary illusion of
consumption, he posits that this pleasure can offer a
moment of dislocation, similar to Sartres nausea, that
denes us as human. He argues that the restaurant
experience can remind us that we are not merely
consumers but ethical beings:
Its all about play, about not being what you areeven if there should
ever hover over our culinary endeavours the threat of bad faith, of
inauthenticity, of an over-emphasis on that which is aesthetic in place
of that which is ethical, or on that which is convenient or conventional

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in the place of that which is free. (p.257)

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The consumer, realizing that the pleasure is excessive,

must transcend the aesthetic or conventional aspects of dining. In return for that moment of pleasure, the diner must
recognize his or her place in the system of production and
consumption. It takes a society to produce a restaurant
meal, even if it also takes an autonomous culinary artist to
produce a good one, Appelbaum notes. And it takes a
society willing and knowing enough to eat, appreciate and
patronize it (pp.255256). Like both Achatz and food-loving compatriots with the means to eat well, Appelbaum sets
out on a quest, but one that seeks to critique that society of
food appreciators in the name of what he calls, somewhat
obliquely, cultural democracy.
The resulting book, less than three hundred pages in
length but packed with exacting close readings that span
multiple literary traditions, confesses to being a little
helter-skelter (p.20): a fair assessment, no doubt. Each
chapter explores meals experienced in different times and
places by writers rarely considered together, including
the rst restaurant reviewer Alexandre Balthazar Laurent
Grimod de La Reynire, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, food
critic Gael Greene, and utopian thinker William Morris.
This prismatic work of literary criticism and food theory
explores restaurants from the diners perspective, drifting
from philosophy and literature to accounts of meals high
and low that the author himself has experienced. The In
Search in the subtitle is to be taken seriously. This work,
an engaged and erudite meditation on the nature of the
dining experience, is better tasted and savored than read
as any comprehensive system for theorizing the restaurant.
As a whole it lacks a sustained framework for an ethics of
dining, and although readers interested in the scathing
indictments of corporate chain restaurants promised by
Ken Albala on the book jacket blurb will sympathize with
Appelbaums unappetizing descriptions of meals in these

venues, they may nd political-economic realities obscured

in favor of philosophical possibilities.
The books wide-reaching if uneven scope and impressionistic ethics do not detract from its pleasures, however.
Appelbaum, formerly Senior Lecturer of Renaissance
Studies at the University of Lancaster and now Professor
of English Literature at Uppsala University, balances his
dining anecdotes with a background in European cultural
history. His interests in Renaissance literature, food studies,
and colonial studies only enrich this latest book, which
builds on his previous treatment of food and literature,
Aguecheeks Beef, Belchs Hiccup and Other Gastronomic
Studies: Literature, Culture and Food Among the Early
Moderns (winner of the 2007 Roland H. Bainton Prize).3
The introduction sets out the premise of Dishing It
Out: that the restaurant as an institution promises restoration and stages pleasure for the diner but is also subject to
the vagaries of the marketplace. In the rst chapter, one of
the strongest in the book, Restaurants for the Rest of Us,
Appelbaum distinguishes the restaurant from other public
institutions. As a place where we dine intimately and can
choose our own meals from an offering that is both public
and private, individualized and generalized, the restaurant
has always generated conicting expectations for the consumer. In chapter 2, Grimod de La Reynire: Eating and
Writing, Appelbaum explores the post-revolution writing of
a French philosopher-critic who saw the old aristocracy as
a new class of gourmands fueling the rising industry of restaurants. Chapter 3, Nausea, is an examination, by means
of Sartres novel, of the bad faith or moral self-deception
among diners and between patrons and servers that undergirds commercial hospitality in the industry (p.79).
Tensions between producer and consumer only mount
in chapter 4, Her Majesty the Consumer, which theorizes
a rhetorical tendency to narcissism in food writing. Like
the anonymous food critic, the contemporary food blogger lacks personal accountability, Appelbaum argues, and
he uses the Internet to critique, or throw a tantrum as
the hero of [his] own life story (p.111). Appelbaum is right
to note a lack of charity toward those in service industries
among food critics in general. I do regret, however, that
this particular chapter is the only section of the book to
address gender directly, with analyses of the work of M.F.K.
Fisher, Gael Greene, and Ruth Reichl. Her Majesty the
Consumer is a limiting label for an attitude that male
restaurant critics also display, and it also obscures the often
thoughtful food writing of citizen journalists and bloggers.
By contrast, chapter 5, Dining Out in Paris and London,
a meandering study of dining in these two cities over several

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democracy (a site for the rest of us to enjoy a good meal),

and his call for readers to support creativity and hospitality
in restaurants (p.25). However, I worry that such an appeal
approaches what Americanist literary scholar John Carlos
Rowe has called aesthetic dissent: meditations on justice
that call for change without delineating historical causes
and consequences of a particular ethical problem (p.148).4
For both Appelbaum and Achatz, in different and yet complementary ways, play is the saving grace in a rather grim
and even moribund institution with layers of inequity built
into its very structure. Both of these works imply that in the
service of play the restaurant experience can be improved
in the back of the house as well as in the dining room. Can
playthat surplus joy in convivial and delicious grace
extend to dining service that rewards both eater and server,
for example? Can the staff have as much fun as a cuttingedge executive chef?g
notes
1. Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a
Reluctant Chef (New York: Random House, 2011).
2. Grant Achatz, Alinea (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2008).
3. Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheeks Beef, Belchs Hiccup and Other Gastronomic
Studies: Literature, Culture and Food Among the Early Moderns (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).
4. John Carlos Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002).

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decades (in many cases with Appelbaums wife, Marion, as

his research associate), lacks the self-centered punchiness
of a good blog rant.
From analyzing consumer experiences of restaurants,
Appelbaum delves into literary criticism, examining restaurant narratives in News from Nowhere by William Morris,
Isak Dinesens Babettes Feast, Anne Tylers Dinner at
the Homesick Restaurant, and Monica Alis In the Kitchen
(all covered in chapter 6, The Production of Production:
Novelists and Cooks). In the nal chapter, Culture,
Civilization and Resistance, he theorizes that a critical
consciousness can help the ethical diner support the type
of restaurant that values those who appreciate the particular efforts expended to offer attentive service and culinary
artistry at any price point. In the middle of the spectrum
of elitism and majestic consumerism for the few and
McDonaldization for the many, Appelbaum argues, there
must be a restaurant dened by good food and good faith, a
difcult task in a trade organized around the many hierarchies of workers and customers (p.257).
This last chapter suggests what is missing in all of this,
however, and why the notion of playing with ones food in
restaurants run by culinary artists (that notion of the originary genius again) may continue to be a problem for the
ethical diner. To detail the bourgeois experience of dining
out in a decent restaurant as a site of cultural resistance may
be appealing yet fruitless. I applaud Appelbaums efforts
to approach the restaurant as a potential site for cultural

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