Finished reading through benu, a cookbook/book of essays about the restaurant and Corey Lee, the chef behind it.
I had my first fine dining experience recently for my girlfriend’s 30th birthday and it was really wild. The whole time I was thinking about the experience, politics around food, how on earth any of this stuff could be this expensive, and how it felt more like a trip to an art museum than it did an actual meal to nourish.
So after it I looked up books about fine dining and this one stood out because it 1. wasn’t about french cooking 2. leaned a lot more into the personal essay stuff 3. was a local restaurant in the Bay Area and 4. I could get it from the library lol. And I really enjoyed it! I think it gave some really valuable insight into, at least, their approach to food and it definitely explained why I felt more like I was looking at art than I was food. The presentation, approach, sourcing, etc is all thought out and planned to such an extraordinary degree that it feels like an installation of some kind. The skill needed to present ingredients in such a way, with flavors that tell a story. It’s pretty staggering. And the cost required to do so makes more sense too. When you’re only sourcing quail from some weird Napa Valley recluse who has in life only raised the most beautiful quail to ever exist or getting seafood from eldery Korean women who dive for it. Yeah, I can see why the cost is so high and why the end result is so special.
The part that I keep coming back to though is how prohibitive that cost is to pretty much everyone out there. Many forms of art have their costs of course. But a three hour meal for hundreds of dollars isn’t exactly the same as a three hour trip to a museum for the price of a GA ticket. Or for a movie ticket. Or a library book. This kind of really special food preparation could excite and delight and motivate a lot of people in the world, I feel. But they’ll never get the opportunity because of how it costs, where it’s located, and how hard it is to really get across by just being shown pictures. And then I think well…if this kind of thing really only benefits or is available to an extremely small part of the population then does it really even need to exist at all? Is this really adding much to the lives of anyone beyond the people who already have invested time and money into it? I haven’t really reached a conclusion on that but I do think that as far as food politics go anything having to do with fine dining is very low on the list of priorities. COVID-19 restaurant closures, food deserts, corporate interests in keeping bad food available cheap, food labor issues. All so much more important! Anyway that’s a rant but also I’d love to get some reccs if anyone has any food related books they’ve enjoyed!
My latest library trip got me a couple more cookbooks and the first two Book of the New Sun books. I started Shadow of the Torturer already and it’s early goings but I’m liking it.
