When did dinner out start to feel like a TED Talk?
The best restaurant meals often come with a story. One year after my first dinner at Sunn’s, a minuscule Korean spot in Lower Manhattan, I still recall the moment chef-owner Sunny Lee placed cold, sweet scallops in front of
me and explained that they were harvested by her retired father, who dove for them off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Her excitement and pride were tangible. I felt lucky to be there in the days following a plentiful dive, to reap the rewards of two generations.
Lately, though, I have been sitting through fewer stories and more spiels. “Have you dined with us before?” The question has practically become a meme, and I’m often tempted to say “yes” to bypass the pain we must both feel as a server dutifully runs through rehearsed anecdotes for every dish, robotic explanations of why this restaurant differs from all the others, a breakdown of even the simplest menu. At a relatively casual new DC restaurant recently, the server pointed to the lime garnish on a plate of chicken wings and told me, “The chef recommends squeezing the lime over the chicken wings.”
During a dinner at Moon Rabbit, a modern Vietnamese restaurant in DC, I was captivated by chef Kevin Tien’s take on a dish titled “muffuletta.” He had layered ribbons of springy rice noodles with petals of Vietnamese pork roll, sprinkles of sesame crumble and a trail of olive tapenade to create a dish that looked like a fresh salad but evoked the iconic New Orleans sandwich. It was a revelation that needed no explanation, a dish encapsulating the story of a Vietnamese American chef raised in Louisiana. When a knowledgeable server described in painstaking detail how each ingredient stood in for one in the sandwich, it made the profound feel suddenly more mundane.
A sentiment seems to have calcified among chefs that anything left unexplained will fly right over our heads. Maybe they’re right. But I wish diners were given the chance to make small mistakes, to explore, to come to our own conclusions. In a culture of so little friction between us and everything around us, restaurants remain a vital way to experience the confusion, sensory overload and deep meaning of a complicated, imperfect world. The urge to direct diners through every bite of a meal runs counter to what I love about dining out, one of just a few cornerstones of life that have not yet been optimised into oblivion. Isn’t this – the wonder, the mystery, the chance to discover – the whole point of leaving your own kitchen?
Restaurants, of course, are not home kitchens, and my plea for fewer tableside monologues is as much an indictment of the state of diners as of chefs. In the years following our pandemic solitude, we seem to have lost some crucial muscle memory. Working at Lutèce, a bistro in DC’s Georgetown neighbourhood, one server, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in the industry, has watched diners grapple with a layered dessert consisting of honeycomb semifreddo covered in a tundra of shaved Comte cheese.
“We get a lot of people who will take a couple bites and be like, ‘Well, I just thought it was way too much cheese,’” he says. “I will have sat there and watched you just scoop right off the top, which is quite literally all cheese.” Now, he provides a bit of gentle parenting, making sure diners reach their spoons to the bottom of the dish and get semifreddo in each bite. In a world of Yelp Elites and TikTokers and Beli-trackers and, yes, restaurant critics like myself, it makes sense to leave nothing open to interpretation. Only, interpretation is half the fun.
The stories that succeed at adding meaning to a meal are rarely rundowns of ingredients or scripted anecdotes, passed as in a game of telephone from chef to server to diner. Kristen Ulmer, a server at the breezy DC cafe and restaurant Ellē, keeps her descriptions minimal unless she has a personal connection to a dish, like recently, when grits were being sourced from her hometown in South Carolina. “All the information that I’m giving is something that I am excited about,” she says, “hopefully to make [diners] excited about it.” Likewise, the server who spoke anonymously says he looks forward to discussing dishes he has formed a connection to. “Once you taste something that you are just blown away by,” he says, “you want to highlight that dish more often.”
Storytelling is a particularly important tool for restaurants serving cuisines that are less understood or widespread in the United States. “I train my staff as much as I can to tell the story,” says Seng Luangrath, the chef and owner of DC’s Baan Mae, a creative Southeast Asian restaurant, and Thip Khao, which serves more traditional Lao dishes.
She takes any opportunity to tell curious diners how Lao stews, thickened with smashed sticky rice, differ from Thai curries. And when someone orders sai oua for the first time, she makes sure they know to temper the salty Lao sausage with bites of sticky rice. Still, Luangrath directs her staff to keep explanations to just a few words. “We want our guests to be a little bit surprised,” she says. The chance to marvel makes dinner at Baan Mae feel all the more special.
Restaurant workers are tasked with the impossible. Dozens of times a day, they stand across from a stranger and try to anticipate their needs. “You don’t know where everybody’s at when they come into a dining room,” says Paul Carmichael, who leads the Caribbean chef’s counter Kabawa in New York’s East Village and is one of the most astute temperature-takers I’ve met in the restaurant industry. As he looks out from his open kitchen, he pays close attention to how diners are experiencing his restaurant.
You can have a downright chill night at Kabawa, watching undisturbed as Carmichael’s team turns out a dazzling array of dishes. But express even an iota of interest in how the sausage gets made, and the nearest chef or server will click into gear, explaining the history of an ingredient. If the chef has a down moment, he might even demonstrate how your favourite bite of the night was cooked. His approach is deeply human – not a set of anecdotes and instructions to be memorised and regurgitated, but a shifting push-and-pull between those cooking and those eating.
“A lot of my favourite memories, while some are [in] restaurants, most of them are people’s homes,” Carmichael says. “How do you translate that type of hospitality to a restaurant without it being too loose?” The chef’s answer is in his restaurant’s DNA. “Some of the most delicious things you have in life aren’t necessarily from places that, you know, tell you the whole f***ing kit and caboodle.”
More on hospitality
Meet local innovators and top chefs.