I like food

I'm not entirely certain if I qualify as a foodie. I have a sort of ambivalent relationship with a passion for food. Imagine that, a relationship with a feeling. How odd.

As many people who know me can attest, I can be quite passionate about good restaurants, great food, skilled chefs. I spend a good deal of time researching restaurants and learning about the chefs that run them. One of my more common opening questions on msn is to ask if the person on the other end of the keyboard wants to go to a cool restaurant. Note that this is not specific to an eatery, but to a group of them. This group is fairly arbitrarily defined, and mostly composed of places I have yet to visit.

I think I must be inclined toward the degustation method of sampling restaurants. Most places, I have little interest in prociding with repeat business. Once is usually enough, even if the food is good. For me to really want to go to a restaurant I have already been to again, there has to be something about the experience that stands out in a way that strikes me in a very particular manner. I dream about such places, I really do. It goes beyond the food, the service, the room. It is some amalgam of the three, but then again, not. There are restaurants with truly sublime food, the type that you cannot believe that you really are tasting. Take the first bite, and you stop, thinking that it is simply impossible that you are tasting what you are tasting. The second bite confirms the impossibility of it. Nothing could really taste quite as delightful, or rich, or quirky. The third bite, and you are down to earth again, marvelling that you had risen so far, but never reached new heights of your own. Eating someone else's food is like admiring a painting. You may observe and experience it, but it is never a part of you. You don't know what went into it, not really. Even if you were to watch the artist, all you would see is the act, not the thing.

Think of it as a play. The playwright, director, producer, actors and audience all experience the play differently. Who has the true understanding of it? No one, for each aspect is as true as it is impossible to find. Yet each aspect is as complete as it needs to be.

Pointless drivel aside, I find it very hard to define what exactly it is that will keep a restaurant on my list of places to go to. I adore Babbo in New York. I'm not really sure why. The food is fantastic, the room decent, the service acceptable. It is also tremendously overcrowded and impossible to get a table at earlier than 10.30 pm. What could it be that keeps me going back? I really do not know, for all of the above can be found in other restaurants. Similarly, Les Nomades is snooty, with pretty decent food and a very sedate room. I cannot imagine why I keep going back, except that I do. I enjoy my time in that place, more than in other restaurants, with better food, service and a prettier room.

Perhaps it is personality. Restaurants are like people. Some people you like, some you do not. Logic always fails to explain this. The people whom you cannot stay away from are often characterised by the most annoying habits. You find it profoundly irritating when they are too chirpy, or act petulant, or demand far too much from you. Yet you give in, pretending that everything's ok. Then those people who are exactly the sort you imagine yourself spending a lot of time hanging out with, turn out to have exactly zero chemistry with you. Yes, chemistry. Just like cities, restaurants have a certain energy about them that either works for you or not. Well, alright, works for me or not.

I have no interest in chefs personally, only their food and philosophy when it comes to creating a dining experience. There is a reason that I almost always order the tasting menu whenever I can. It is true that I would probably enjoy my food a lot more if I were to simply order entrees, plates and desserts that I know I will enjoy, but that seems to defeat the purpose of going to a restaurant in the first place. I don't need to know how perfectly a sous chef can execute a classic, I want to know how the executive chef thinks a meal should taste and look like. It is akin to the difference between reading contemporary fiction and science fiction. Contemporary fiction seems to me to be mostly about perspectives on life. Take events that we know occur about us all the time, and look at them differently. While that may be interesting, I find it much more so with science fiction. The science fiction writer creates a world. Perhaps not a world he thinks should be, but a world where there is a sort of internal logic, where given what he has decided as a parameter for the world, everything else is, to a certain extent, inevitable. A proper tasting menu has only one iteration for that moment. There is no other way in which the chef would have presented a culinary experience on that moment then in that way, those dishes in that order with those presentations. The inevitability of creativity. And it is in that inevitability that I can experience the work of the chef. My palate is his canvas, to slide into cliches. I become the creation, in that my experience is what is created.

No more, I am tired. I will explain the ambivalence some other time.