The age of the diva chef who acts like an opera or a rock superstar has been with us for quite some time. One of my first Philadelphia eating place jobs became a busboy gig at the Barclay Hotel on Rittenhouse Square. The chef, at that point, became a soon-to-be-well-known local TV chef who later became an international celebrity. His tirades inside the Barclay kitchen blanketed acting out with butcher knives and screaming f-phrase invectives that filtered out into the ocean of white linen-blanketed tables where there were always businesses of hatted women.
I thanked my lucky stars then that I became just a lowly busboy and out of the chef’s firing line. I was no longer one of the haggard-searching, psychologically overwhelmed down waiters, wounded from the Chef’s verbal bullets. But, in truth, Chef turned into like a mad king because you in no way knew what would dissatisfy him or when or how he might lash out.
“Chef is having an awful day,” the maitre d could announce, as though describing an intellectual affected person in a clinic isolation ward. In those days, I ought to recognize why a real artist like Cezanne or Picasso may throw his paintbrush towards the wall or maybe smash a canvas, or, however, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the same type of emotion spent on creating meals gadgets. Food is something you consume rapidly; it is never supposed to be an artwork in shape. Art, after all, is something that lasts, not something that winds up in the human stomach, in toilets, and in city sewers. Food isn’t art, and a chef, no matter how first-rate, isn’t an artist.
Working a the Barclay Hotel had its perks. In the eating room, I met lots of Philadelphia’s movers and shakers. (Years later, at the same time as a waiter at John Wanamaker’s Crystal Tea Room, I met Margaret Hamilton, the witch from The Wizard of Oz, whose coated face still conjured up pics of munchkins and swirling broomsticks). Then, one day, Philadelphia civil rights pioneer Cecil B. Moore, a flesh-presser recognized for desegregating Girard College, grew to become to me (in between long puffs of his cigar) and said, “Boy, get me every other glass of water.”
Right, I changed into a boy. However, Mr. Moore’s use of the word “boy” that afternoon was regarded as having special importance. In reality, I had a fantastic impression then that Mr. Moore went round to all of the eating places in town and made it a point to name all the white boys “boy” because he changed into dead set on making emotional reparations. No doubt Mr. Moore turned out to show a point approximately civil rights, and I fell into his firing range.
I barely observed the chef there in Wanamaker’s Crystal Room, which shows that he turned into a maximum honest now, not a diva but more of a chef line cook, a mere first amongst equals. The Crystal Room’s biggest draw becomes tea sandwiches and soup, an object with approximately as many elegant atmospheres as the standard giveaway in homeless soup kitchens. The Crystal Room chef still wore the classic tall white hat, although you’d in no way capture him walking across the dining room shaking hands with VIP diners as the “creator” of mind-blowing minimalist dishes.
Today, while a well-known chef walks among diners, he shakes fingers like a politician even though his creation has already disappeared into scores of digestive tracts. When I met movie star chef Wolfgang Puck a few years ago at a press event in Atlantic City, there was a lot of fanfare, you’d have the concept that an ex-president had changed into the room. As fellow newshounds clamored to consume Mr. Puck’s present-day advent—flat-iron steak with peppercorn sauce and blue cheese butter, I located little difference between Puck’s arrival and a “regular” beef kebab observed in most Asian eateries. I didn’t dare provide my opinion to the starstruck reporters who ate with gusto and who didn’t seem to have any food troubles at all, not like the % of reporters I traveled with to Israel a while ago.
During that Israeli tour, one journalist claimed she might want to consume gluten-free meals handiest; others said she should eat the best kosher meals, even as a third turned into a strict vegan. The food problems surfaced from our first actual meal while the gluten-loose creator began bombarding the waiter with questions. Would he list all of the gluten-free menu items? At one restaurant, the vegan author was a personal investigator. “Is this vegan, or is it pescetarian, proletarian, or is it lacto-ovo-vegetarian?”
“Let me see,” the server said, disappearing into the kitchen to check with the chef.
Sometimes, strengthening calls needed to be made to restaurants to ensure that vegan and gluten-free dishes had been to be had. Unfortunately, our press coordinator is now not prepared for those food issues. She nearly had a meltdown when the ritual became especially taxing at a tiny sandwich keep outdoor of Tel Aviv. All expectations of grabbing a quick chunk at the patio of this captivating eating place before our bus headed to Masada ended when the server commenced taking orders. Once more, the excruciating menu evaluation among the foodies became an ordeal akin to dental surgical treatment. The server, who did not recognize what gluten-free meant, had to accept an on-the-spot lesson, and even then, she struggled to comprehend the concept.
The server wound up checking with the kitchen numerous times in the course of the 25-minute ordering process, at the same time as the foodies kept changing their minds the moment they spotted something “purer” on the menu. Finally, when they canceled their orders because they determined they weren’t hungry after all, our excursion guide had had it. “We spent twenty-five minutes using that poor server loopy, and in the long run, we walked out,” she said, shaking her head. But because the excursion progressed, matters concerning meals were given worse in preference to higher.
