Best Food Writing 2015 (10 page)

When Shallal opened the first location of Busboys and Poets, near U Street in Washington, D.C., he told me that he wanted to create a restaurant that would knit together black and white. He was not the first D.C. restaurateur to make the attempt. Gillian Clark's Colorado Kitchen, now shuttered, was the kind of homey, self-effacing place you see much more of in the South than in the North. I once described it as the most integrated restaurant in the city, which was, in retrospect, a regrettable bit of sloppiness. Yes, blacks and whites came together to break bread, but allow me now to adjust the image that is no doubt taking root in your mind. From the time it opened until about seven o'clock, the room was predominantly black. From seven until closing, it was predominantly white. In the sweet spot of about 6:45, the dining room was, yes, the fulfillment of King's vision. Clark told me that it bothered her to see this division, and that she tried hard to integrate the room. To little avail.

Shallal decided to try harder. U Street was a kind of hallowed ground for black Washingtonians, the heart of their nightlife during the benighted period of Jim Crow, where Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, and others played nightly to packed houses. It was destroyed in the 1968 riots and was slowly groping its way back to life. His hope, Shallal told me, was to create a space that would show what the new U Street could look like. He felt uniquely qualified for the task, given that he was Iraqi and had for years brought together Jews and Arabs in the Peace Cafe dinner discussions he hosted after performances at the Washington, D.C., Jewish Community Center. Shallal was well aware of the 60–40 principle, and as much as he intended the restaurant to be a place of racial harmony, he was careful not to cross certain lines. Sitting down with me one day to talk about his vision a few weeks after opening, he told me that 60–40 guided many of his early decisions.

The restaurant was a kind of multiplex, which, in addition to serving
food, would serve as a coffeehouse, a bookstore, and a performance space. There were nightly events, sometimes two or three plays or performances or readings in a single night. He spoke to me at length, and also with great angst, about how important it was to not schedule too many events in any given night that would attract a predominantly black crowd. If the restaurant scheduled no events that attracted a black audience—if its programming was regarded as appealing much more to whites than blacks—then that was just as bad. Busboys and Poets could be a spectacular financial success, but he said he would consider it a failure if the mix tipped too far in one direction or the other. His menu, I understood that day, was written in code.

“I have field greens on the menu,” he said. “Only I don't call them field greens. I say—lettuce. I have chorizo on my pizza. Only I don't call it chorizo—I call it pepperoni.”

On the tables he would not put out just salt and pepper, he would also include tiny bottles of hot sauce. And that was not the end of it. He commissioned an artist to paint murals on the walls—murals that included images of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Gandhi, and others.

Shallal knew that what he was doing was, at some level, a form of pandering. And that some, like my more waggishly cynical black friends, would see his restaurant not as a symbol of hope, but as an emblem of condescension. At lunch one day not long after Busboys and Poets had opened, one of those friends of mine nodded toward the mural along one wall, with its images of King, Malcolm X, and Gandhi, and its inspirational quotations, and smirked and said, “I feel like I'm walking down the halls in junior high.”

Shallal and I spoke for five hours that day, and as the afternoon light receded and the house lights came up, I told him that he had gone to lengths that no other restaurateur in the city had gone to. He looked at me across the table and said, “I have to. If I don't go to these lengths, it just won't work.” In other words, if he didn't make a very conscious—even self-conscious—attempt at reaching a black audience.

It's impossible to know whether people came because of his concerted efforts, or whether they would have come anyway, because Busboys and Poets is such an interesting and irresistible mix of elements. But almost from the start the restaurant drew throngs of customers, black and white (and Asian and Latino), old and young, hipster and square, and emerged
as a new symbol of U Street—that magical third place we all seem to want so desperately in our neighborhoods and towns.

The first Busboys and Poets opened ten years ago. I was hopeful, then, that its success and the exciting vision it portended might inspire a new generation. There's a contagiously progressive spirit in the air right now, and some young D.C. restaurateurs speak earnestly and excitedly of blurring the old divisions. The city is witness to some fascinating experiments in high-low, in rusticity and refinement, as chefs draw inspiration from old truths to create new ideas, new techniques, new flavors.

But black and white are still largely separate. Shallal was interventionist in coding this restaurant, flagrantly and unapologetically so. He made explicit, sometimes straining overtures to a long-neglected audience, while being careful to limit their numbers in the building. He purposely framed his cuisine so as to not exclude anyone, underselling the quality of his ingredients for what he perceived to be the greater good. Yet Busboys and Poets has inspired no followers, other than Shallal himself, who promptly opened three more locations, with another on the way (there are now six locations along the East Coast).

Is it that everyone is too fearful to take a chance? Or is it that there is only one Andy Shallal? Or both?

Or is it that this kind of social engineering in the context of dining out feels, even to some progressive ears, not just intrusive, but somehow also contrary to the very spirit of breaking bread, of the table?

Food is intimate. We take it into our bodies. When we gather at the table with friends and family, we're gathering to affirm something. When we gather for business, we're gathering to cement something. The table, the notion of breaking bread—this is meant to establish an intimacy and gesture toward trust.

What Andy Shallal has proven—indisputably proven—is that it's possible. It's possible to bring black and white together under one roof. It's possible to do it both peaceably and profitably. But not without enormous work. And not without conscious and even self-conscious outreach. And not without a daily, even hourly, tending of the delicate mix.

Waste Not, Want Not (and Pass the Fish Skin)
Waste Not, Want Not (and Pass the Fish Skin)

B
Y
P
ETE
W
ELLS

From the
New York Times

          
As the
New York Times
's
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chief dining critic since 2011, Pete Wells is tasked with judging restaurants at their finest. But sometimes, it's not only about awarding stars. Here he enjoys a special event that goes beyond farm-to-table or even nose-to-tail dining—tapping into a growing concern about food waste.

On Monday, I chopped a week's worth of food scraps. It took most of an hour in my kitchen to reduce carrot leaves, cauliflower stems, onion butts and scallion greens to small bits that I hoped would make an appetizing lunch for the molds, mini-bugs and earthworms in the backyard compost bin.

The next night, I had a meal that made me wonder if my time would have been better spent tossing everything with a good vinaigrette and eating it myself.

The setting was Dan Barber's Greenwich Village restaurant, normally known as Blue Hill. For three weeks in March, he has converted it into a pop-up called wastED where he and his cooks sell fish bones, bruised and misshapen vegetables, stale bread and other items not commonly thought of as food for $15 a plate. The pop-up presents a creative challenge to the
kitchen crew (how can we make this stuff taste good?) and an intellectual challenge to the diner (why do we assume it won't?). It was a night of thoughtful, creative, entertaining and surprisingly tasty agitprop.

Chefs with an eye on the bottom line try to avoid kitchen waste. In a memorable scene in Bill Buford's book “Heat,” Mario Batali berates Babbo's cooks for throwing out vegetable scraps that could make perfectly good ravioli fillings while he roots around in a trash can like a bear cub at a campground. In their search for overlooked ingredients, Mr. Barber and his crew did more than that. They went out on a crosstown refuse hunt.

From Baldor Specialty Foods, a restaurant supplier in the Bronx, came bruised outer leaves from heads of bok choy and peelings from fennel, kohlrabi and apples for the “Dumpster dive vegetable salad” that persuaded me to reconsider my compost habits. To be painstakingly accurate, most of the persuasion was done by a buttery vinaigrette of ground pistachios, a swipe of tarragon sauce and a heap of white froth made by draining the liquid from chickpea cans and whisking it.

Smashed pulp from Liquiteria's juice presses was dyed to a reasonably convincing beef color by beet juice, shaped into burgers and slapped on buns made from “repurposed” bread. From Raffetto's, the shop on Houston Street, they picked up remnant noodles that ran from the pasta rollers between batches of dough. These were boiled together, so they ranged from floppy to taut, and were dressed with a mildly fishy sauce made from monkfish tripe and smoked fish heads.

The kitchen staff members took turns dropping off plates. One showed pictures of Baldor's bagged, peeled produce on an iPod and another pantomimed how he had scraped skate wings until his arms hurt. The night's guest chef, Philippe Bertineau from Alain Ducasse's bistro in Midtown, Benoit, appeared with head cheese, a pig foot croquette, stewed offal and tongue layered with foie gras, a reminder that French country cooking has a long tradition of turning scraps into treats.

Halfway through dinner, Mr. Barber came to the table with a sheet of wax paper holding a fish skeleton as long as a baguette. “I grew up on this stuff,” he said. He didn't mean the bones, which used to belong to a black cod, but the shiny white flesh sold in appetizing shops as sable. When sable is filleted, some meat sticks to the carcass. I unstuck it with a sauce spoon. Sable is always a treat, and this came with a bonus: the
gooey, soft bits hugging the spine. Between mouthfuls, I crunched on some crisp carrot tops with fried fish skin. The skin, the bones, and the heads in the salad dressing came from Acme, the Brooklyn facility that gives New York some of its finest smoked fish.

The restaurant was packed to the gills, one part of the fish that was left off the menu. A long row of high tables had been shoehorned into the center of the dining room. These were not just any tables, either.

“The tables were grown—yes, grown—during the second half of February with compostable materials and mycelium,” read a note on the back of the menu. The walls, meanwhile, were covered by a white fabric draped over crop rows to keep out frost and aphids. They were backlit, which gave the restaurant the feel of a wedding tent.

“A wedding tent, that's nice,” Mr. Barber's brother and partner in Blue Hill, David, said when he stopped by my table. “Most people say it looks like a meth lab.”

Breaking with protocol, I had asked Dan Barber for a reservation. This, of course, gave him the chance to set aside the choicest carrot tops and fish heads. Let the reader beware. I dropped the fake-name routine because seats have been scarce, my deadline was zooming in, and I am not trying to write a restaurant review.

Still, the forewarned reader may wonder what I thought of the meal. I had one of the best times I've enjoyed in a restaurant in the last year. The food was great, full of the surprises that happen when cooks run into inspiration at full creative tilt. Almost every bite was delicious, with a few exceptions.

“Repurposed” buns did not knock Martin's potato rolls from their place in my heart. I had trouble getting at the fried monkfish wings, which were shaped like a V, with most of the good stuff jammed down in the crevice. If I were going to enjoy them on a regular basis, I'd need to grow a snout. Also, the crackers served alongside an intense and rich bowl of broth made from desiccated dry-aged beef trimmings had almost no flavor. They were made from field corn, the commodity crop that goes into high-fructose corn syrup, cattle troughs and ethanol. It accounts for 99 percent of the nation's cornfields, and it is the only ingredient used at wastED that I'm convinced humans have no business eating.

This was Mr. Barber's point, of course. The meal was gently and consistently seasoned with a protest against the grotesque way Americans waste food while millions of us go hungry. Lack of money and other resources forced members of 6.8 million households in the United States to eat less than they normally would at times during 2013, the latest year for which government statistics are available. At the same time, 133 billion pounds of the food that is available to consumers goes into the garbage annually. The facts and numbers could go on, but I feel ashamed already.

Our food is produced and consumed in a bogglingly complex web. It can't easily be changed, certainly not by a three-week stunt in an expensive Manhattan restaurant.

Perceptions do change, though, and quickly. Sliced white bread was a prestigious item in 1960. Many find it worthless today. For years our restaurant culture has placed supreme value in pristine, high-priced ingredients. What if everybody who could afford restaurants like Blue Hill learned instead to prize bruised vegetables because they had been transformed by a chef's skill and ingenuity? What might we do with the ingredients that any hack could cook? It's a provocative, appealingly subversive idea.

For now, whenever one of my children complains about dinner, I'll silence him by saying that I once ate garbage, and liked it.