When did dinner out start to feel like a TED Talk?<\/p>\n
\n The best restaurant meals often come with a story. One year after my first dinner at Sunn\u2019s, a minuscule Korean spot in Lower Manhattan, I still recall the moment chef-owner Sunny Lee placed cold, sweet scallops in front of
\n 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.\n <\/p>\n
Lately, though, I have been sitting through fewer stories and more spiels. \u201cHave you dined with us before?\u201d The question has practically become a meme, and I\u2019m often tempted to say \u201cyes\u201d 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, \u201cThe chef recommends squeezing the lime over the chicken wings.\u201d<\/p>\n
During a dinner at Moon Rabbit, a modern Vietnamese restaurant in DC, I was captivated by chef Kevin Tien\u2019s take on a dish titled \u201cmuffuletta.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
A sentiment seems to have calcified among chefs that anything left unexplained will fly right over our heads. Maybe they\u2019re 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\u2019t this \u2013 the wonder, the mystery, the chance to discover \u2013 the whole point of leaving your own kitchen?<\/p>\n
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 Lut\u00e8ce, a bistro in DC\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe get a lot of people who will take a couple bites and be like, \u2018Well, I just thought it was way too much cheese,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI will have sat there and watched you just scoop right off the top, which is quite literally all cheese.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 Ell\u0113, 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. \u201cAll the information that I\u2019m giving is something that I am excited about,\u201d she says, \u201chopefully to make [diners] excited about it.\u201d Likewise, the server who spoke anonymously says he looks forward to discussing dishes he has formed a connection to. \u201cOnce you taste something that you are just blown away by,\u201d he says, \u201cyou want to highlight that dish more often.\u201d<\/p>\n
Storytelling is a particularly important tool for restaurants serving cuisines that are less understood or widespread in the United States. \u201cI train my staff as much as I can to tell the story,\u201d says Seng Luangrath, the chef and owner of DC\u2019s Baan Mae, a creative Southeast Asian restaurant, and Thip Khao, which serves more traditional Lao dishes.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cWe want our guests to be a little bit surprised,\u201d she says. The chance to marvel makes dinner at Baan Mae feel all the more special.<\/p>\n
Restaurant workers are tasked with the impossible. Dozens of times a day, they stand across from a stranger and try to anticipate their needs. \u201cYou don\u2019t know where everybody\u2019s at when they come into a dining room,\u201d says Paul Carmichael, who leads the Caribbean chef\u2019s counter Kabawa in New York\u2019s East Village and is one of the most astute temperature-takers I\u2019ve met in the restaurant industry. As he looks out from his open kitchen, he pays close attention to how diners are experiencing his restaurant.<\/p>\n
You can have a downright chill night at Kabawa, watching undisturbed as Carmichael\u2019s 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 \u2013 not a set of anecdotes and instructions to be memorised and regurgitated, but a shifting push-and-pull between those cooking and those eating.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of my favourite memories, while some are [in] restaurants, most of them are people\u2019s homes,\u201d Carmichael says. \u201cHow do you translate that type of hospitality to a restaurant without it being too loose?\u201d The chef\u2019s answer is in his restaurant\u2019s DNA. \u201cSome of the most delicious things you have in life aren\u2019t necessarily from places that, you know, tell you the whole f***ing kit and caboodle.\u201d<\/p>\n
More on hospitality <\/p>\n
Meet local innovators and top chefs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When did dinner out start to feel like a TED Talk? The best restaurant meals often come with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2946,156,4522,302,13840,51243,111,139,69,2539,46440,4497,11227,223,2044,61,1316],"class_list":["post-303787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-dinner","tag-entertainment","tag-feel","tag-its","tag-like","tag-monologue","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-restaurant","tag-retire","tag-start","tag-talk","tag-the","tag-time","tag-to","tag-when"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}