Flash in the Pan

An article in the New York Times had me cringing. Here's the gist:

But for some hosts in the age of the armchair Boulud, even a laid-back dinner with friends can be a challenge to their sense of self-worth. They may not care whether they wear Gap or couture. Their place in the Hamptons might be a share. But they would no sooner serve their guests grocery-case Drunken Goat cheese than a Vogue minion would wear an Ann Taylor dress to a party given by Anna Wintour.

Oh, criminies, can we please drop the food as Second Coming (or should that be Second Serving)? When food becomes a status symbol and there's shame in not making your own tortillas (and, no, I'm apparently not making this up, either - wish I were), then you're no longer eating dinner. In fact, you don't even know what dinner tastes like, and you can't take joy in your kitchen skills because they'll never be good enough.

To the tortilla example, someone quoted in the story was "mortified" that he and his girlfriend had used store-bought tortillas. Mortified. I'll grant you that fresh tortillas, which I have made out of curiosity, taste completely different from the disks that come out of a refrigerator case. But it's the taste that should drive the effort, not what people will think. I'm capable of baking a good loaf of pretty much any type of bread that comes to mind, but I'm not going to beat myself because we have people over and I use bread from a store. The essence of good cooking is love for what you're doing and a sincere interest in making the people coming to your home happy. When you obsess as these people seem to do, then it's not about your guests but about you. For example:

Andy Birsh, owner of a letterpress print shop in Brooklyn, would rather make a mad, stressful dash to Brighton Beach for smoked sturgeon an hour before guests arrive for dinner than serve the kind he can buy from a market around the corner. And for him, serving a dish that is on the menu at several good restaurants in the city right now — a fava bean salad with shaved pecorino, for instance — would be like being caught reading “The Lovely Bones” right after Oprah Winfrey endorsed it.

Please. Running out an hour before the guests come to pick up smoked fish? Yes, there can be a big difference in quality - so why didn't he do it earlier, or even a day or two before? Doesn't want "anyone to be able to identify something I made as being from a book or a restaurant?" I see, this former Gourmet restaurant critic doesn't want to give credit where it's due.

My guess is that he and the others like him enjoy the drama and want to be stars. Guess what - you pretty much can't come up with anything so original that no one else has thought of cooking it, and ingredients are important to give guests a good experience, not to enhance your own glory. Or else they could stop serving what everyone else has tried, which will leave ... precious little to be upsetting.

Labels: entertaining, foodies, guests, parties