Restaurant Culture

Mitchell Davis, the vice-president of the James Beard Foundation, expanded the thought: “We have a very different relationship to authority. In the 1960s, Craig Claiborne [the New York Times' first critic] could ‘educate’ his readers. But now we’re a bit different. We’re democratizing everything. If anyone can be president, why can’t we all be critics?”

I wondered about that, and I can’t help feeling that it’s because we view restaurant critics very differently than cultural critics, the best of whom don’t concern themselves simply with whether or not you should shell out for that movie, say, but who bring thoughtfulness and perspective to their subjects, who challenge our interpretations and assumptions and create a larger dialogue not just of the film, but around it. We invest in them a sense of authority that we appreciate and don’t begrudge.

Though the best restaurant critics have entertained and transported us through their descriptions and narratives, it seems to me that for the most part today, people read restaurant reviews because they want to know if they should eat there, what dishes are good, and how much it’ll cost. If you just assembled a chart with that information on it, maybe with a dash of snark, most people would be perfectly happy with it. (And if you quantify it, all the better: Just look at the pre-Internet dominance of the Zagat guides, and now, of course, at Yelp.)

But Davis takes a larger, more generous view of the role of restaurant critics. In his recent dissertation (congratulations!) on the cultural impact of restaurant criticism of the New York Times, he writes:

The popularity of user-generated-review Web sites, such as yelp.com, means the restaurant reviews and food discourse increase exponentially by the day … [but there is still a] continued dominance of elite media in matters of opinion making about food, chefs, and restaurants. Traditional restaurant reviews, especially those in the New York Times, continue to exert a significant influence on taste that is demonstrated in a number of different ways, such as the similarity of the rankings of top restaurants across media outlets, including consumer plebiscites, such as Zagat Survey, expert-driven tribunals, such as the Michelin guide, and even user-generated review Web sites, such as yelp.com, which at times appears to be nothing more than a sounding board for consumer reaction to the opinions expressed by the Times. Now, more than ever, a favorable Times review is what chefs and restaurateurs are hoping for, whether their restaurants are located in New York City, or not … [T]he overwhelming amount of information of unknowable origin available online, which makes the opinions expressed in traditional reviews written with an adherence to journalistic ethics seem more trustworthy.

So here’s a question for you: Do you read professional restaurant critics, and if so, do you read them for information on where to go and what to eat, or for some other reason? Help me think this through! 

It was early spring and it was a dish very much of the moment, the bird served with wilted ramps, spring onions, pearl onions and a sauce of cream infused with onions. A few baby spring turnips. All things with bite, mellowed by youth and cooking. As I ate, I thought, “What makes duck more delicious than onions?” And also this: “In a few weeks, when spring is gone, this dish won’t be here anymore.”

Franey’s cooking is elegant, muscular and ephemeral. He refers to “microseasons,” like the part of the onion season when the onion is most delicate. As a result, his cuisine is ever-changing; it’s a cuisine of creativity and spontaneity; it’s a cuisine of what’s new. It’s about a sensibility and a philosophy more than it is a collection of established “signature” dishes. Of course, Franey’s not alone in this — it’s the prevailing ethos of most ambitious young American chefs. Which is why it seems a little strange that the wildly talented Franey’s first executive chef job is at Canlis — 60 years and counting of marriage proposals, anniversaries, and meeting the in-laws. It’s a vibrant restaurant, not a museum, but it’s still known for the signature dishes it started out with, dishes that include a twice-baked potato.

Here’s a snapshot of what American fine dining was like back in 1964. On the cover of “Famous Foods From Famous Places: Specialty-of-the-House Recipes From America’s Leading Restaurants,” there is a bowtied waiter wearing a bright red sportcoat, drowning bananas in orange glop. The big, wilty magnolia blossom on the table is passing out from the heat of the chafing dish, looking like a sea monster dying to crawl back to the water. Bon appétit!

Inside, there is a section on Canlis, then 14 years old. Restaurant years being similar to dogs’, Canlis was already an elder statesman, and the book describes its speciality-of-the-house dishes: broiled steaks, steak tartar, prawns sautéed with vermouth, and, daringly, a Canlis Salad that, “with no apologies to Caesar, contains mixed greens tossed with croutons, minced bacon and grated cheese,” prepared by “pretty Japanese girls wearing bright colored kimonos.”

The meaning, the very point of a signature dish is that it doesn’t change. Rarely do chefs themselves set out to create one; it’s a designation conferred by the public, and yet, once you accept it, it becomes a pact with your diners: If you come here, you can have this thing. It’s both an honor and a bind. So how do you deal with that if your entire culinary philosophy is based on change?

Through most of its history, Canlis was considered a steakhouse. And while the ’90s redesign of the stunning mid-century modern building left a gorgeous, sleek, muted space, there is no missing its history: A massive, copper-plated grill station juts into the dining room like the prow of a mighty ship, where the Chef-cum-Captain, be-toqued and grand, would stand at the helm, meat sizzling before him.

“Back in the day,” Franey said, pointing to the grill, “the chef would call into the kitchen on a microphone for his plates. They might have all had the same vegetable, the same potato, the same garnish. He’d just put the steak on and send it out from the grill.” Fifteen years ago, Canlis made the shift to being a modern restaurant under chef Greg Atkinson, focused on seasonal Northwest cuisine, but the first thing Franey did was change the structure of the kitchen. Literally. He personally sawed down all the racks in the middle of the line so he could have his own station in there, cooking with his crew.

And this is what I mean by cooking: curing venison in pine ash. Slicing opakapaka into sashimi, serving it with fennel pollen. Spherifying a Tequila Sunrise. And also searing steak teriyaki, sautéeing prawns in vermouth, and plating massive Canlis Salads that dwarf almost anything else coming out of the kitchen.

The classics are delicious, to be sure, but isn’t their unyielding presence frustrating for a chef so inspired by newness?

“I’m not driven by my ego,” Franey said. “I work for this family, and those legacies are part of this family. Mr. Canlis said to me, ‘My name is on the door, but this place is bigger than me. It’s bigger than all of us.’ I’m here to cook for the guests. If you’ve been coming here for 30 years, and you’re thinking, ‘Don’t mess up my steak teriyaki!’ I need to earn your trust.”

It was a lovely answer, but, frankly just a little too diplomatic. Pressed, he eventually admitted that it would probably be easier to start a menu from scratch. But then he smiled and added, “But what’s the fun in that?” Learning to make really killer Peter Canlis Prawns was, too, a form of change.

We got back to talking about the duck. Even just remembering it made me a little wobbly. “What did you … do to that thing?” I could only manage to ask.

In his modest way, he said, “Well, we roast it at 450 degrees for 16 minutes.” Then he added, “We rub it in honey first.” I asked about brines or injected marinades or sorcery — what gives it that crazy, amazing flavor? “Oh,” he said casually, “and we dry age it for 14 to 24 days first.”

The aging, for which he works exclusively with specialty butcher Tracy Smaciarz, gives the duck a wild flavor, flavor you can’t make in a lab or a kitchen, flavor that is the handiwork alone of enzymes and bacteria and time. Coming out of the oven, it’s a powerful scent: the unparalleled aroma of browned bird skin, the sweetness of toasted honey, the floral perfume of the herbs stuffed into its cavity. But the thing, the thing that you can’t miss, is the funk. The funk the bird casts off like a lure, a smell like the edge of a prosciutto. If you get close enough to be impolite, it’s a bit like the part of the cheese counter where only eagles dare to fly. Woven into the taste of the meat, the funk is subtle, a backdrop of complex, floating, lingering flavors you can’t really place. It tastes deeper than duck you’ve had before, darker, weirder, and yet also somehow lighter. Less bloody and mineral, sweeter, a cheese-rind-tang rising through the fatty succulence. It tastes like genius.

“How did you think of that?” I asked.

“Well, I learned it from Daniel Humm,” he said, matter-of-factly, referring to the chef he worked for at Eleven Madison Park in New York. “And he learned it from his mentor, Gerard Rabaey.” And he probably learned it from his, and so on. It turns out that the tradition of hanging game birds to age is, well, very, very old. Medieval. Franey smiled. “Daniel said to me once, ‘We don’t really make anything new. We just do it well.’”

After I left the restaurant, I tweeted about my incredible meal at Canlis. The tweets came flooding back: “Did you have the duck?” “The duck!” and “Please say you had the duck!” I laughed. Looks like Franey has a signature dish on his hands.

So I called Steve Dublanica, author of the blog and book “Waiter Rant” and the forthcoming “Keep the Change: A Clueless Tipper’s Quest to Become the Guru of the Gratuity,” to talk about the relationships — and strategies — of tippers and tip-getters.

OK, well, first of all, do pleasant, efficient waiters get better tips?

When I was a waiter, I cultivated a friendly arrogance. That was my M.O. [laughs]. A good waiter adapts to every personality. There are people who like the archly reserved waiter, ones who like someone who will kid them a bit and give them a slightly hard time. Others who like the joke waiter, the entertainer.

But the thing that’s always amazed me is that the quality of service has almost no effect on tipping. When I first started out, I thought, “If I’m nice and efficient, people will tip me well!” Not true!

When I was researching for my book, I read a reader survey by Zagat where 80 percent of people said, “I tip based on the quality of service,” but self-reported behavior isn’t always true. No one’s going to say, “My girlfriend left me, I’m in a bad mood, and I’m a cheap tipper.” But a study by Professor Michael Lynn at Cornell found that the customer’s perception of service affects the tip only 2 percent of the time. He said, “Service affects tipping as much as whether the sun is shining outside or not.”

If you’ve waited tables, you know this is true. I learned this on the job years ago. You can give people amazing service and they’ll stiff you. You can give them horrible service, and they can give you a great tip. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. If only 2 percent of the tip is based on the service, what are the other 98 percent doing? If they’re not tipping on service, they’re tipping on psychological processes that are happening.

So what do people base their tipping on?

One is the social norm of tipping. For most people, they don’t want to stiff a waiter even if the service is bad because they don’t want to seem cheap, or they don’t want to feel guilty, or they don’t want to upset the waiter. Other people wanna be down with the working man. Or they want to reduce the server’s envy, like, “Here I am having a good time and you’re working.” We don’t exactly know where the word “tip” comes from, but the first recorded instance of the word meant “drink money,” so there’s a “Have a good time on me” element to it.

I knew a waiter who was a drug addict. He didn’t bathe a lot. He would come up to the table and people would say, “This guy smells!” They still tipped him. Waiters can be pleasant, they can be unpleasant, and that will have almost no effect on your tip. People will often still leave you that 15 to 20 percent.

But if your tips don’t reflect the quality of the job you do, why does any waiter bother?

First, if you’re a professional, you’ll try to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. That’s a matter of pride.

If customers get badly treated at a place, they will still tip — maybe even tip well — but they won’t come back. So there are external controls. Some waiters say, “I don’t need to be nice. I don’t need to put on a show.” But management might watch you, they might put on the pressure for you to perform. Your service will influence people’s return patronage.

Where waiters can make better money is if they cultivate a stable of regulars, people who they know are good tippers. You remember their favorite wine, their anniversary, their favorite table. You make them feel special so they’ll feel loyal to him or her. Smart waiters know that even if there’s no rhyme or reason to how people tip, they know there are people who tip well, so they try to get them to come back and to improve the odds in their favor. If you’re supposed to be kind of diffident, kind of rude, then you’ll do it. If you’re supposed to be a joke teller, then you’ll do it.

And being a good tipper will improve your service, because we will remember you. One customer would tip me $200 to $300 at the holidays, and she never had a problem at my restaurant. She could call me on a busy Friday, and I would move heaven and earth to get her a table. You don’t care why they’re good tippers, but you want them in your section.

Something that’s interesting to me in this conversation is that we keep using the tip as a sort of proxy for how satisfied the customer is with their experience. But since studies show that’s not actually an accurate indicator, how do you then gauge how happy a customer is with you? How do you develop customers’ loyalty?

You have to feel out every table from the beginning, and figure out what they want. Some people like a little repartee, a little battle of wits. Some really like to have their chains pulled. Some are trying to win the waiter’s approval.

In those cases you play it like a girl playing “hard to get.” Because they want to say, “This waiter was difficult and I turned them around, because I’m so good at dealing with people.” That’s what the customer wants from that experience. They’re looking for the waiter’s approval, not for their service. There’s a psychological need that the customer is trying to fulfill. In my first book, I write, “You have to find a customer’s personality and mine it for all it’s worth.” If you can tell the customer wants you to be their friend, you have to play hard to get, and come around in the end so they’ll leave happy.

Why do some people like to be abused, or like an aloof waiter? Some people like that. And some people like being whipped, dragged on a chain and told they’re a bad boy. You’d need far more psychological experience than me to figure that out. When I go out to eat, I want my waiter to take my order, bring my food and be nice.

The room is certainly beautiful — warmly lit, gorgeous old metals and woods, plush and intimate. But the menu opens curiously. Printed goofily like an old-time newspaper, it features stories describing featured drinks, including “The Best Bloody Mary in the World,” yours for only $85. And if you’re into wealth-porn enough to flip it over, you’ll find novelty cocktails with prices clocking in at the four figures. There’s also a note: “This menu available for purchase.” I’d heard incredible things about a genius bartender here named Colin, a walking encyclopedia of cocktail history and creativity, so I was confused about the gimmickery that lay before me. But then it occurred to me: The Bar Hemingway is what would happen if the Hard Rock Café managed to knock up an heiress in a library.

And so, despite the handsomely dressed servers and the high-end hush, I was only half surprised to hear a brash voice from the bar: “I love Europe! You can get laid in Europe. And China. In China, you don’t even have to wait ’til you get to your hotel. You can get laid in the airport in China.”

I turned to see where that nugget of cosmopolitan wisdom came from. A large, 40-ish bald man with a spherical torso was wrapping his lips around potato chips and making conversation with an attractive, country-club-thin woman and her slightly bemused husband. “It’s too hard to get laid in America,” he continued. “People are too uptight. Why do I spend the weekend in Paris? Because I can. Why does a dog lick his own balls? Because he can. Why would I stay at home in Orange County, where the women want to have sex two times to have two kids and miss Ronald Reagan?”

The woman laughed an expensive, tipsy laugh and visibly enjoyed it when the man continued, “Of course, you’re a beautiful blonde. You wouldn’t know anything about it being hard to get laid.”

The woman said something about Gary Coleman, and the bald man asked the room for a moment of silence for Gary Coleman. I sipped my very pricey apple juice and started to think that I’d done the right thing by coming here.

“What do you mean ‘don’t be an asholay’?” I heard the woman ask a few minutes later. “What’s an asholay?”

The bald man wrote in a legal pad and held up a word: “Assh o le”.

“Oooh! Asholay!” the woman blurted, pleased and drunk. “Asholay! I love that. You taught me something! I’ll remember that the rest of my life!”

I began to wonder if she would even remember the rest of tonight by tomorrow morning. At some point, the bald man turned and started talking to me and my friend Brandon, asking us why we’re in France. We mentioned something about eating, and the woman exclaimed, “I love to eat! Food is my hobby!” and proceeded to name some of the more luxe restaurants in the Western world. “And you know,” she said, “Paris is great for food,” before launching into a story about getting bad fish at a restaurant called Voltaire and being kicked out when she complained about it. “I said, ‘I can smell this fish! It’s been dead for hours!’ I would know. I’ve been to …” and out came more restaurants I’ve only read about.

“Well, where would you recommend I go for dinner tomorrow?” I finally asked.

She thought for a second. “Oh, go to Voltaire!” she said, her voice lingering deliriously on the last syllable.

“Um, isn’t that where you complained about the fish?”

Her husband laughed, relieved. “I’m glad someone’s paying attention!” he said.

The woman stepped away to the restroom. Before she left, though, she said the words “the French Laundry,” and soon the entire bar was in a debate about whether that particular world-class California restaurant had slipped since its sister Per Se opened in New York.

Brandon and I got the check and lightened our bank accounts. As we got up to leave, I heard one more musing from the bald man: “Your wife’s been gone a long time. You want to know what I think? I think she’s taking a shit.”

“I can’t believe you’re single, Michael,” her husband replied.

Walking back home, past couture shirt makers and watch stores where one modest specimen would pay my rent for a year, I wondered what Ernest Hemingway would think of his Parisian legacy. And Brandon said, “Well, my drink was kind of bad. But if I paid that much for a theater ticket the show wouldn’t have been nearly as good.”