Food for Thought

[#1]

Last night, my awesome friend and fellow journalist Lana got us prime, saved seats (second row!) for a talk given by former New York Times food critic William Grimes, the all-around amazing Ruth Reichl (and, not for nothing, also a former New York Times food critic), and chef and local-food advocate Dan Barber. The topic? The history of dining in New York City, spurred on by Grimes’ recent book Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York.

The event was held at the behemoth main branch of the New York Public Library on 42^nd Street—very apropos, seeing as the NYPL has a deeeeelicious culinary collection archive, which, among other things, contains tens of thousands of New York restaurant menus, from nineteenth-century Delmonico’s to today’s uber-cool Diner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

It was raining when I got to the 42^nd Street side entrance at 7pm where, within a few minutes, Lana arrived and together we dashed up the old, stone steps to meet her photographer friend Peter. When we got to the end of the line of chairs set up for attendees, I noticed three more chairs set apart from the rest. On each, was a piece of paper with bold letters declaring, “Reserved for Ruth Reichl;" “Reserved for William Grimes;" “Reserved for Dan Barber”—their holding-seats, I deduced, to keep them comfortable while they're introduced. Our seats? Seven little feet away in the next row back. “Lana—Ruth is going to be right there!!!” I grabbed my friend’s arm and she grinned. 

Of course, I know, this really was Grimes’s night. His book, an incredible labor of historical, city, and food love, isn’t merely a tour through the chop houses and automats and long-shuttered spots of days gone by, but a mirror on all of us: What were we eating when, and why? It's about how trends get started, how they die, and the myriad forms of sustenance that have kept this city of nearly nine million ticking all the way back to when Harlem was countryside and Wall Street didn’t even exist. Before Mario Batali and his orange clogness was even a glint in someone’s eye; when the words “food network” referred to the thousands of meat and vegetable vendors in NYC’s old food marketsy.

When Grimes, Reichl, and Barber took the stage, the talk immediately turned to ghostly landmarks mere blocks away from where we sat—restaurants like Sherry’s that at one time ushered in a new kind of dining scene to New York City, and where Ruth remembers her own Aunt Byrdie spinning tales of wonderful meals in bygone days; or the Craftsman, where in 1913 the iconic furniture designer Gustave Stickley leased a 12-floor building to show off his wares, but left the top floor for a restaurant devoted to nothing other than locally-grown food—Stickley’s way of rejecting his own era’s industrialization of everything. This, of course, was maybe one of the most enlightening notions of the night—that our entire locavore, slow food, farm-to-table late-twentieth and early twenty-first century ideals are actually, kind of a redux. Who knew? “The turn of the last century was in some ways so similar,” said Grimes. “It’s all rehashing of old ideas.”

“But were they eating better then?” mused Barber, whose own restaurants Blue Hill, in the West Village, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, upstate in the Hudson Valley, are both sticklers for maintaining proximity to food sourcing. A good question—especially after hearing that the nearby Meadowlands in New Jersey was the site of game-bird hunting, the Upper West Side of Manhattan a great source for venison, and our own waters filled with a mind-boggling abundance of oysters and other fruits of the sea. In some ways, yes, people ate what was readily available; but in other ways, Barber pointed out, probably not, because of lack of refrigeration and hygienic methods we take for granted now.

An audience member questioned the panel: “What about use of modern techniques and the new implementation of science in the kitchen; isn’t that getting away from appreciating local food?” to which Grimes rolled his eyes: “It’s irritating that you’re supposed to be a luddite to embrace real food.” The other panel members nodded, agreeing that one did not negate the other. But what I really liked was Reichl’s take on the future: She pointed out how we’ve changed as eaters (and who better to do so then the former editor of Gourmet?)—how in the last five years, the craving for chili and hot spice as well as acidic touches like vinegars has exploded; how home cooks and diners are more experimental; how we’ve re-found a love of nose-to-tail eating and yet are finding ways of replacing fat with flavor. “We will only get more and more discerning,” she reasoned, pointing out that now that our eyes are so open, it’s nearly impossible to shut them. “I’m very optimistic about food in this country.”

I bought Grimes’s book on my way out, but the line to get it signed was too long and I had a bit of a journey before I’d see the warmth of my own home. Instead, I paid for my book and quietly ducked out into the night, walking past buildings that used to be who-knows-what, hugging my new book to my chest, and quickly dashing down the streets of my city where people live, work, and eat, feeling at once very small and yet part of something so much bigger than I could actually fathom.