1.

Not many people will remember the story of Pittsburgh food critic Mike Kalina. But, as strange as it may seem, I think we should remember him. 

Kalina's story is quintessentially of his era. He wrote restaurant reviews for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the late ’80s and early ’90s under the name “The Travelin’ Gourmet,” which was also the name of his television show and his 1990 cookbook. That book is out of print, but you can still find copies online for as little as $0.99 US. It has recipes for things like Chicken Wings in Oyster Sauce, Crab Cheesecake, and something Kalina called Enraged Spaghetti, which was his cute name for that Italianate standard of last-minute gourmandery, spaghetti tossed with garlic, hot pepper flakes and olive oil.

These dishes reflect the culinary zeitgeist of Kalina’s day. I think of that period as the Great Era of Culinary Evangelism in North America. The reinvented Graham Kerr, the soon-to-be disgraced Frugal Gourmet, etc. We were all suddenly hearing about how we could have a close and personal relationship with food. Flavor was novelty. Schmeck was the aesthetic of the day. Culinary zeal was high.

Kalina’s photo on the book gives emblem to this enthusiasm, the same setup as on a dozen cookbooks of the era: the author standing behind a cutting board with a still life of kitchen gear and ingredients laid about. Apples, some pastry mid-prep, copper pots and a rolling pin. And always a very particular facial expression: a commingling of astonishment, delight and encouragement. Hey, the author-cook seems to be saying, you can do this too! So Kalina, on the cover of The Travelin’ Gourmet, stands with his hands spread and a look of beatific evangelistic joy across chefly-florid features.

All the more shocking, then, that Kalina killed himself just two years after the photo was taken, in February 1992. Chefs, we understand from the news, do occasionally suicide under the tremendous pressure of their trade. Bernard Loiseau, Jerome Girardot, Bryan Drysdale come to mind. Italian television chef Antonio Carluccio would be on the list too, but he merely collapsed a lung when he stabbed himself in the chest with a chef’s knife.

But food critics? Whoever heard of a critic killing himself? And while the truth about Kalina may never be known, strong evidence suggests that his suicide was professionally motivated. Specifically, strong evidence in the form of a Postal Service and US Attorney investigation into Kalina at the time of his death, relating to allegations that he had been paid money by restaurants for positive reviews.

Food payola. Think about that for a second. So great was the perceived breach of faith that Kalina took his own life rather than face a world that would know the truth about him: that he had not been objective in his appraisals, nor even had he been giving voice to genuine-but-subjective opinion. He’d just been reporting on a set of restaurants that were part of his act. And that truth unveiled—from the Greek word for revelation, apokalupsis—was indeed the end of it all.

I was talking about the idea of food-critic impartiality with a friend, Ed Hundert, not long ago. We were having lunch at Fuel Restaurant on West Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano. Hundert is a retired philosophy professor and a specialist in the writings of Enlightenment greats Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Bernard Mandeville, the 18^th-century voices that articulate with greatest clarity the seminal arguments about consumer culture in the West. (They called this The Luxury Debate, back then. Mandeville was pro, Rousseau con, roughly.)

Hundert had heard other stories about critics disgraced for taking bribes, which he shared. Then he put his fork down next to his ploughman’s lunch, the hand-crafted fixings of which—salami, rillettes, gherkins, etc.—would have been so alien to the Kitsilano of 1968 that first drew him to Vancouver that they might have originated on another planet. And here, he shook his head and gave voice to the brutal irony of Kalina’s death.

Hundert said: “But today, if a food critic were paid by restaurants for their reviews, it wouldn’t make much difference, would it?”

Insightful, that. Worth remembering for foodies everywhere, but particularly in Vancouver, which, more than any city I’ve ever visited or lived in, cherishes the legend of its own culinary prowess. Kalina was the end of an era. Kalina was the very moment of an era’s demise. What era was that? It was the era when we still assumed that the critic was outside of the phenomenon described. It was the era before food passed beyond objectivity and subjectivity and moved over into the wholly mimetic realm, the fun-house mirrored hall of fashion.

2.

Test yourself. Which of the following statements by local food critics were published in the past decade?

“Vancouver eating has never been better.”

“Never have we eaten so well, and never has our knowledge of what we eat been so great.”

“Vancouver has emerged as one of the leading culinary laboratories on earth.”

“These days, it seems Vancouver is the It Girl of global food cities.”

“The story of British Columbia’s climb to culinary stardom is written in the constellations…”

“Vancouver food critics all seem to have drunk deeply of the purple Kool-Aid.”

Right. Of course the last one is mine, and I am being facetious. But the quotes preceding it, and many, many similar examples, have appeared steadily over the course of the past 15 years. The issue isn’t whether the critics are right or wrong. The issue is that enthusiasm of this uniformity, over an extended period of time, reveals as its root motivation more a desire to boost the local food scene than to subject it to independent critical analysis. But nobody needs to feel any shame knowing that fact, and certainly nobody needs to feel suicidal. Because all of us—the writers and readers, the diners and the restaurants—we’re all in on it.

3.

Food, food. Sometimes you just have to step back and ask: How and why did we all get so hepped up about food? True story: I was at a literary festival. My first novel Stanley Park had just been published, a book about the trials of a young chef. After the reading I was answering some questions and a woman asked me—tentatively, exploring the possibilities of the word, “Are you a… foodie?”

I should have answered more seriously. But instead I said, “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a foodie.”

Big laughs. But laughs that tapered quickly. Surprised laughs. Slightly deflated laughs. I knew what was going on the instant I make the joke. There wasn’t a person in the room, of several hundred people, who didn’t self-identify as a foodie. I may not have offended anybody, but I had no doubt confused them.

Sure enough, a man came up to me at the book-signing table an hour later. I could see what was coming before he said a word. The sentiment was etched on his brow, in the troubled creases around his mouth. He said to me, “You know, I just have to say how very disappointed my wife and I were to hear you say that you’re not a foodie.”

He still bought a book, and he still wanted it signed. I was tempted to write: I’m sorry. But there’s no being sorry for these things.

4.

I was raised in Vancouver, but went away in my teens. Then I came back married and with my first job. I’d been gone just over a decade. This was 1987. My wife and I moved into an apartment at the corner of Thurlow and Burnaby, just off Davie. We had a narrow galley kitchen with glass-front cabinets and a creaky old gas range. I had two cookbooks, which I’d worked my way through, front to back. La Technique and La Methode, by Jacque Pepin. Salmon with beurre blanc. Stuffed squid stewed in tomatoes. Poulet a la crapaudine. (Crapaudine is not a particularly nice word, is it? But then, they say spatchcocked in English, which is worse.)

So I cooked and cooked, up and down the Pepin repertoire. And when we weren’t doing that, we hung out at La Bodega, which was our “third space” before Starbucks colonized the term. A rotating crew of a dozen of us would gather there, and I still remember the menu almost verbatim. Patatas bravas, chorizo. Chicken livers, calamari, ceviche, ensalada Bodega (which was like church-picnic potato salad with peas and bits of shrimp and red pepper in it). Anticucho and morcilla. (These last two were always written on the chalkboard up front, never on the paper menu.) And sangria, of course, the “secret” ingredient of which was coke. The only thing nobody ever ate on that menu, as I recall, was the “delightful little pie,” the Spanish name of which I forget. Although we also never failed to read it aloud from the menu, as if we might order it.

“How about a delightful little pie?” someone would ask. Nobody would ever answer.

La Bodega, in the end, was a victim of its own success, which is what happens to things that find themselves adrift on fashion’s sea. Discovery, popularity, decline. That is the mimetic spiral of fashion, having nothing to do with objective value or subjective experience, and everything to do with perceived esteem. Fashion lives in the eye of the observer and, as Rousseau lamented, those beholden to fashion must therefore look to the observer to find the very sentiment of their own existence, which is to say, the validation of their own worth and public esteem.

La Bodega was only one example of the broader phenomenon going on in Vancouver then, that monumental phase change, food ascendant in many minds. But at La Bodega it meant lineups stretching out the front door. It meant that coveted front table under the bull’s head becoming impossible to get. It meant, as if by arithmetic arrangement, the appeal of La Bodega diluted, the esteem value of each experience there beginning to plummet.

And all that would have been bad enough without me trying to write a story about the scene, at the very apogee of the craze, like an elegy. A poetic fiction set at a restaurant called The Cosmo, where a gang of late 20-somethings gathered and ate tapas and drank sangria and talked about hating their jobs, or being broke, or the films of Errol Morris.

I cringe, thinking about that now. The Cosmo story was far too “sticky,” as John Updike once said about everything Scott Fitzgerald wrote other than The Great Gatsby. Which is to say, far too embarrassingly transparent on the topic of what the author wished the world to think of him. My story strained to evoke an author who was that archetypical person who had so recently become magnetic to esteem: tapas-literate, secret-ingredient knowing, front-table sitting, film-discussing, all-round-cultured, plugged-in, food-savvy dude.

The world was turning, fast. Mike Kalina was dead in his car in Pittsburgh, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. His secret had been revealed. The era of Fashion Food was on us. It was 1992 and nothing was ever going to be the same.

5.

We had our homegrown evangelists in Vancouver. James Barber is the patron saint of that period. He is also the greatest contribution to food that ever came out of this city, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. He was an anti-self-aggrandizer. He stated things in plain terms on the plate and on the page. He once summed up his entire career in 14 syllables when writing on the topic of stew.

“It’s simple and delicious. So quit being such a snob.”

Vancouver should have that inscribed somewhere, prominently. Perhaps in marigolds on the embankment south of Grant McConachie Way, for people to read as they exit YVR-land and enter the city. But it won’t ever get this treatment. You know it and I know it. Barber was pre-Fashion Food. He believed that there were good and bad ideas in the kitchen. Fashion doesn’t believe in anything. Fashion is endlessly relative, a moving target. Fashion is a chancer. I’m sorry we lost food to the Fashion Food Era, and that’s really what I should have told the man at the literary festival.

I bumped into Barber and partner Christina Burridge at Feast of Fields once. There were grateful crowds around the heirloom tomatoes and people standing out in the middle of fields, having their moments. I wrote a scene for Stanley Park based on that day: I had Jeremy’s sous-chef Jules making crostini with mushrooms, which of course I saw being made there. I didn’t have her making pine-needle sorbet, however, which was also being handed out. I knew Jules well enough by then to know that she wouldn’t have made anything as silly as pine-needle sorbet.

I’d met Burridge previously but had never met Barber. He was in my culinary pantheon, though, up there with Jacques Pépin and Julia Childs. I felt like asking him for an autograph, but was too nervous. So I tried to impress him instead, casting about for something suitable to say, and coming up with pine-needle sorbet. “Have you tried it? You really have to.”

Barber’s face was all squinted up, a rictus of incredulity. “Pine needles?” he said. “Did you say pine needles? I could have sworn you said pine needles.”

What was I doing? I didn’t even like the pine-needle sorbet. Jules would have thought the pine needle sorbet was silly.

6.

I’m not going to name a bunch of food critics in this article and heap criticism on them. I’ve met most of them and I like them, and I’m not just saying it. They tend to be smart people who landed one of the most coveted jobs in the world. The competition is stiff. Here’s what I think, though. I think that some critics write positive reviews and others are in a state of perpetual peeve, and that it makes no difference. In the end, each critic is a flavor, a dish on a menu that readers choose based on mood and taste.

The critic is the subject of contemporary food criticism. Welcome to the Food Fashion Era in Foodville.

1996. A food critic in Vancouver wrote a “review” of Diva at the Met, which was then the jewel in the city’s culinary crown. I’d argue that this review is an important document in the evolution of culinary Vancouver, in that it’s the first full-on revelation, by a critic, of his/her helpless entanglement in the subject.

This review did not gush praise, it hemorrhaged praise. It died operatically of praise. It chose words as if to emphasize that it wasn’t criticism at all, but rather a single homage designed to obviate any requirement for further discussion. Once and for all, the review seemed to say, let’s just have done with the sheer, untrammeled perfection of the Diva. The bar was “glamorous.” The barstools were “seductive.” The staff was “the city’s most stellar culinary talent.”  The room was—wait for it—“candlelit and romantic.”

When the critic started eating, however, not even praise would suffice. Ingredients prepared with “infinite care and patience” eluded the grasp of language. So we must make do with pledges on behalf of the critic’s experience. “A write up of Maria Callas at her finest could probably substitute for a Diva review.” And on the wine list, we are assured, “pages could be written.” Here the critic fell on his/her own pen, surrendering in a crash of timpani to the incommunicable excellence to which his/her palate had been submitted.

Maybe Diva really is that good. I wish I could tell you, but I only ate there once and don’t remember a thing except that it was quintessentially Food Fashion Era food: bits of things and swirls of goop and lotion on a plate.

Other critics on Diva:

“Sometimes the best clings to your senses like Velcro.”

“Eating his food was a revelation; seeing such grace, elegance and finesse in such a young man was humbling.”

“Diva at the Met is doing a menu that has me festively anointed with drool.”

Well, come on. Who’s going to argue with that? The critic is drooling.

7.

We all went gaga for Lumière and Rob Feenie after that. I ate the tasters menu myself, once. My agent was paying. This is the kind of place you only go if your agent is paying. Forget the fact that Lumière was once considered reasonably priced. And forget all this simple French cooking business.

“…the backbone of Feenie’s cuisine is an emphasis on taste and simplicity…”

“…simplifying the components of each dish to their raw essence while making the total result even more complex…”

Or this one: “…simple, shining results.”

Here is Feenie being simple and shining: “ratte potatoes and Périgord truffles with cauliflower puree, spinach, foie gras emulsion and red wine beef jus.”

Foie-gras emulsion, folks. Of course, this up-talking the simplicity of Lumière has been going on since the beginning. Back in the mid-’90s, a reviewer inadvertently wrote something funny about Lumière. “Why is it difficult to get a really good bowl of pasta in Vancouver at a reasonable price? Many suffer the pizza topping syndrome of too many ingredients. More is not merrier when it comes to noodles.”

A couple blocks down the street from Tang’s Noodle House, which at the time was one of Barber’s picks, the reviewer’s long quest for simple noodles was at last over at… Lumière. Here it comes: pappardelle tossed with shredded duck confit, roasted garlic, tomatoes and basil.

Shredded duck confit? Delicious, no doubt. But was its application to a bowl of papparadelle the solution to an established simple-pasta deficit in Vancouver? It was not. So why say something is simple when it’s clearly not simple? Why the tout-worthiness of the word simple? Who said simple was necessarily good in the first place? Well, Rob Feenie did. And Feenie’s face was on the back of buses.

Jacques Lacan: We desire the desire of the other.

Or, as the literary theorist-philosopher-psychoanalist might have it in this case: We desire the desire of Rob Feenie, which is to say, we desire the adoration he attracts.

Of course, there came a point when that mimetic equation didn’t work anymore. When Feenie disappeared from view, like magic, we all suddenly desired the desire of West’s David Hawksworth. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to my agent. A serious gourmand. He springs for the tasters menu with flights of wine. I remember that when our little foie-gras ap came to the table (goops and lotions, check, check), he pumped his fist. Yay! Foie gras! But then something unexpected and funny happened. I knew a waiter who worked at the restaurant next door to Lumière (separately owned at the time, a mid-market casual joint). He had somehow heard that I was in Lumière, celebrating the publication of my first novel with my agent, and he sent over a drink.

He sent over a drink from one restaurant to another, which I—alone in the room—found very funny. It was funny because he carried it in through the front door and handed it to the maitre d’, who had to carry the thing across the dining room, as if people were just ordering in extra booze off the street. And it was also funny because, into the minceur minimalism of Lumière, my friend chose to send me a massive margarita. It was in this enormous glass. It almost didn’t fit on the table. Of course I remember the margarita. How am I ever going to forget it? I also remember Feenie—pink-faced, strapped into his whites—peering out the kitchen door at my margarita.

But I don’t remember a thing about the foie gras. OK, maybe one thing. I remember that, like my margarita, the sauce was green.

Mike. That was the name of the waiter I knew from the place next door. If I didn’t ever say it before: Thank-you, Mike.

8.

What does Fashion Food get us? Experimentation, which can be a good thing. There’s that old saw about the man who ate the first oyster. Somebody has to experiment. Does it always work? Uh, no.

Dishes on which I think I’ll pass:

Lobster hot pot with black beans, garlic, ginger and miso. This is what you might call gilding the lily. Assuming that tasting the lobster is part of the reason you pay for one, I wouldn’t go the black bean, garlic, ginger and miso route.

Smoked foie-gras ravioli with sweet-and-sour sauce. Multilevel grotesquery, this. I am dubious about the needless smoking of the liver of a force-fed goose. I distrust the loading of it into ravioli. I am repulsed by the idea of sweet-and-sour sauce coming anywhere near anything else on the plate.

Steak in Marsala sauce with Risotto al Barolo. Marsala and Barolo. I assume the vegetables that accompany this dish have been poached in Sauternes. Perhaps Asti Spumante as an accompaniment.

Smoked eel and pineapple with a red-wine sauce. Ay caramba. I couldn’t make that one up. Swirling in the mimetic cyclone of Vancouver fine dining, however, Chef David Hawksworth was up to it. If this was delicious, anyone, please write to the editors of this magazine. Sounds dreadful to me.

9.

We need to talk about West Restaurant, since all critical roads lead to West these days. It has been the ne plus ultra of the local scene now for several years.

But we can’t get to West without a word about Chef Rob Clarke’s Restaurant C first, which occupies a special place at the wailing wall of Vancouver food criticism. It is the kind of restaurant that critics agree is a very fine example of fine dining, but to which they never give the ultimate praise of being named, by someone, the city’s best. And that withholding of the gold star has any number of reasons, only one of which (in my mind, anyway) is that putting gold leaf on an oyster is bullshit. There, I said it. Gold leaf on anything you eat is bullshit. And C does that (or they did it the time I was there). And I think we all know, in our heart of hearts, that eating gold leaf is what people do right before the end of civilization.

Aside from that, I had a solid meal at C. And yet, I would still beg to differ with the ecstatic tone of the C press, which seems designed to compensate the restaurant for the senior accolade that is perpetually withheld. No, I do not view C as filling “…a big void in reminding us that Vancouver is a coastal city.” I am reminded of the ocean hourly in more prosaic ways, like, say, by looking at the view, smelling the sea air, etc. And sorry, but I would not rate C as “…a national treasure…” either. Does C “take diners deep inside the lexicon of our local fishery”? Okay, possibly. But the day I think that C Restaurant is Vancouver’s “social conscience” is the day I leave this city. Our social conscience is people trying to eliminate homelessness or find a cure for AIDS. Sustainable harvesting of our natural resources is critical, yes. And Clarke is to be commended for leaning his cuisine hard in that direction. But this kind of thing…

“Talk about leadership… C, you’re a Best in the West winner in the best sense of the word. Thank you from all of us.”

Oh, good grief.

Which brings us to West, whose fortunes, I believe, link back to Rob Feenie.

Feenie flamed. An unhappy story. He was the Lumière brand. It speaks volumes that the owners had to go to Daniel Boloud to make sense out of the aftermath. Feenie left a hole in that place the size of Boloud, in other words. And you have to give Feenie credit for making Boloud necessary in Vancouver. I admire that, even though I never fell in love with the Lumière métier.

Nevertheless, Feenie’s fall was sharp and epoch-shifting. One minute he was described as Scheherazade and Glenn Gould and Bach, all in the same review. (Why not Rimsky-Korsakov himself? Why not Mozart for that matter?) One minute he’s earning spittle-spackled praise for “…layering suave flavors built on contrapunts of texture.” The next minute he’s at the Cactus Club, and West is winning all the category-killing praise. First under David Hawksworth, and now under Warren Geraghty.

West, it is now widely agreed among the critics, is best. And an evening there is nothing if not impressive. I went, at staggering personal expense, so that this article would not languish in the realm of the theoretical. Even walking to the bathroom was impressive, because on the way you pass down a hallway where hangs the gallery of West/Ouest honors. Dozens of awards, local and international, for the wine, the service, the food. And, of course, the local press has been stellar too. Maybe not quite “written in the constellations,” but not for lack of trying.

“Sophisticated, excellent, innovative and always impressive.”

“….the most technically assured cooking in the city, exacting use of ingredients from the butter on the table to the tea and coffee after the meal, a comfortable room and excellent service….”

For an appetizer, my wife had pan-seared arctic char with grilled-fennel coleslaw, dill hollandaise and blood-orange dressing. I ate a terrine of smoked rabbit and lobster with a tarragon white-bean parfait. Across the table, our friends had cream of Jerusalem artichoke soup with a Dungeness crab crepe floating in it, and ravioli of calamari braised in white wine with potato-and-chorizo cassoulet and crispy calamari. I’m typing out all that to make the point that this is clearly sophisticated and impressive food. It is certainly not “rigorously casual local food,” as a critic wrote. Neither is it “quietly exciting.” These are plates with an orchestral array of ingredients. Sitting in front of us, they reminded me of the artist Joseph Cornell’s little diorama boxes, dibbed and dabbed with color and sprouting with a perplexing array of tiny bits. I found myself imagining a troop of culinary Oompa-Loompas at work with microscopes and tweezers. Although, watching from our table—just in front of the service window—I could see that assemblage fell to Geraghty and his sous, who hunched next to each other over each plate, faces inches from the food, piling things on with their fingers or scooping off dainty spoonfuls of this or that garnish or sauce to dollop and adorn the plates.

Artful, make no mistake. My terrine was swirled around with something Melmac green. Very pretty. My wife’s arctic char was balanced on the little bird’s nest of slaw, tiny cubes of blood orange spilling to the plate. The Dungeness crab crepe was tied shut with a chive. Etc., etc.

The verdict on taste? All solid except mine. That was strange. I love rabbit anything. But in order of their menu appearance, all the elements of my $16.50 terrine went rather demure on my palate. I couldn’t taste much smokiness, rabbit or lobster. But then, I’m not at all clear why there was lobster in a rabbit terrine in the first place. Innovative but not excellent. Still, everyone else enjoyed theirs, so Geraghty was three for four.

Mains, however, didn’t do as well. I have to drop another review quote on you, because this is more or less precisely what our dinner was not:

“A transcendent food experience… When the elements come together, my being goes ‘Wow!’”

The critic’s being went wow. Holy smokes. I’m ready for some of that action. But I have to report that while my being remained interested, it was un-wowed.

Here were the plates: (1) veal sweetbread wrapped in smoked tongue with Nova Scotia lobster sweet-fennel puree and crispy shredded veal and bisque jus; (2) braised pork belly au poivre with a tournedos of Kurabuta pork, creamy polenta, citrus-glazed winter vegetables and quince puree; (3) duo of Vancouver Island venison, roasted loin and rich braised shoulder, crisp-toasted potatoes and watercress; and finally, (4) curry-scented ballotine of Maple Hill chicken, cauliflower and sweet raisins, sag aloo ravioli.

See Joseph Cornell and Oompa-Loompas, above. The plates glided onto the table linen looking as if a crew with thousands of kitchen hours of experience had worked them over with micrometers and laser levels. The chicken arrived in three perfectly tubular portions, each recloaked in its skin and topped with garnish. The veal sweatbread had been wrapped in the smoked tongue and sliced. The tournedos (singular) was about the size of a golf ball and seemed to tremble in place next to a smudge of quince puree. Very sophisticated.

But flavor? In each case, I regret to say we were underwhelmed. The tiny coil of pork belly on my plate was tasty. The rest was a bit pale. The sweetbreads scored, but the smoked tongue was overcooked, very dry. The crispy veal garnish was crisp to the point that its only flavor was crispness. It could have been filaments of pork rind. My friend who ordered the venison said he wished he’d ordered the calamari ravioli appetizer again as a main course. And the chicken order fared even worse.

“The roast chicken you made us the other night?” my friend said. “Way better.” And that was a Maple Hills bird too. Salt and pepper. 425 degrees for about 70, 75 minutes. A splash of white wine into the pan to make some sauce.

So, West. A transcendent experience? I just can’t agree, and we sampled half the menu. Fun, certainly. We enjoyed ourselves. The service is great. The room is lively and attractive, although the duodenal mirror-sculpture thing on the ceiling has to go. But when I’m out with friends, I want to eat and talk and get full and taste stuff. Perhaps West is too subtle for me. And I’m guessing that, after dropping $500 for a party of four, a lot of people will find the West experience too subtle. Unless, that is, they derive significant value from the fact of their presence at the epicentre of Vancouver culinary fashion, and the momentary convergence of their own behavior with that of Vancouver’s food critics.

The best Fashion Food going. I believe it. But then maybe that’s all that has to be said about Fashion Food right there. Critics like it because it’s fashionable and if Geraghty hangs in there, critics will like whatever he decides to do next. He is, for the moment, the chef in whose eyes they derive the Rousseauian sentiment of their existence. And if you think that’s over-dramatic, read this one bad review that West received, and you will see that yearning etched in its every hysterical line.

“…find a new butter supplier and pile it on. Stick to your original version of frog's legs coddled in rich cream (whoever told you to go with a vinaigrette was mad or anorexic). Bring back the foie gras.

Give us sweetbreads and calf's liver.

Stop pulling your punches.

Show us something new and exciting.

Right now you look like a French chef in North American drag.”

Those paragraph breaks are in the original too. Can’t you just see the reviewer’s finger falling onto Geraghty’s chest? Poke, poke, poke. Give me what I want. Give it to me now.

And then, a pleading tone creeps in.

“I know that's not you, Mr. Geraghty.

So why don't you step up to the plate and show us something this city has never seen before.”

 I hear: Warren, Warren. We’re lost without you!

10.

My friend Ed Hundert, with whom I shared that meal at Fuel on West Fourth, wrote a paper a couple of years ago called “Mandeville, Rousseau and the Political Economy of Fantasy.” In it, he described the so-called Luxury Debates of the 18^th century, in which people argued about the significance (good or bad) of a brand-new phenomenon in Atlantic-rim Europe at the time. This was the massive increase in the consumption of non-essentials—everything from new clothes to fancy new foods. It was a hot topic. And everybody weighed in: Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith and others.

But in the disagreement between Mandeville and Rousseau, we find the very heart of the debate.

Mandeville’s position was influential and simple: Conspicuous luxury gave rise to envy, which gave rise to people trying to emulate each other, which gave rise to people buying things, which gave rise to a robust economy, which was a tide that raised all boats. Rousseau agreed that envy and vanity were driving forces in consumer economies, but he thought that people were losing themselves in the process, surrendering their very identities to the whims of fashion. “We now seek our happiness in the opinion of others,” wrote Mandeville. Rousseau agreed, but unlike Mandeville, he thought it was a terrible development.

That’s fashion, right there. Clothes fashion. Music fashion. Food fashion. Forget objective qualities (the very best pinot noir, ever). Forget subjective tastes (the perfect foie-gras preparation for my palate). It’s all about reflected esteem, which is to say, the opinion of others. And you’ll know you’re in a Food Fashion restaurant when you examine what’s great about the experience—really, truly now, looking deep into yourself and interrogating your root motivations—and find that the best thing about it is the possibility of being seen there.

I liked Fuel, for what it’s worth. I respond to this whole meaty-food thing going on. It’s not new. In fact, it feels a lot like what trended through London in the past few years, to the point that you can hardly walk into a restaurant over there now without encountering a pig’s knuckle. I may not get much real, visceral, tasting pleasure out of West, or Lumière before it, or Diva before that. But I know how to enjoy a lamb-shoulder sandwich, even when it’s served in a fashionable place like Fuel.

You just eat the thing. Talk to your companion. Don’t think about Mike Kalina. In fact, pretend there isn’t a food critic in the world. Except Barber, maybe, whose 14 syllables may be muttered under the breath from time to time, an incantation to be invoked after catching your reflection in any restaurant mirror.

“It’s simple and delicious. So quit being such a snob.”