Food Is Not Art, and a Chef, No Matter How Great, Is Not an Artist

The age of the diva chef who acts like an opera or a rock superstar has been with us for quite a while.
One of my first Philadelphia restaurant jobs turned into a busboy gig at the Barclay Hotel on Rittenhouse Square. The chef at that time became a quickly-to-be-famous local TV chef who later became a global celeb. His tirades inside the Barclay kitchen covered performing out with butcher knives and screaming f-phrase invectives that filtered out into the ocean of white linen-blanketed tables where there had been always agencies of hatted women.
I thanked my lucky stars then that I changed into just a lowly busboy and out of the chef’s firing variety and no longer one of the haggard-searching, psychologically beaten down waiters, wounded from Chef’s verbal bullets. In reality, Chef changed into like a mad king due to the fact you never knew what could dissatisfy him or while or how he might lash out.
“Chef is having a horrific day,” the maitre d’ would announce, as if describing an intellectual patient in a health facility isolation ward. In the one’s days, I ought to properly recognize why a real artist like Cezanne or Picasso would possibly throw his paintbrush in opposition to the wall or maybe spoil a canvass or, but I couldn’t wrap my thoughts around the equal sort of emotion spent on developing food objects. Food is some thing you consume at a speedy tempo; it was never supposed to be an art form.
Art, in spite of everything, is some thing that lasts, now not some thing that finishes up inside the human belly, in toilets, and in town sewers. Food is not artwork, and a chef, irrespective of how top notch, isn’t always an artist.
Working a the Barclay Hotel had its perks. In the dining room, I met many of Philadelphia’s movers and shakers. (Years later, even as a waiter at John Wanamaker’s Crystal Tea Room, I met Margaret Hamilton, the witch from The Wizard of Oz, whose covered face nonetheless conjured up photographs of munchkins and swirling broomsticks). One day, Philadelphia civil rights pioneer Cecil B. Moore, a politician recognized for desegregating Girard College, grew to become to me (in among lengthy puffs of his cigar) and stated, “Boy, get me some other glass of water.”
True, I become a boy, but Mr. Moore’s use of the phrase “boy” that afternoon seemed to have a special significance. In reality, I had the distinct influence than that Mr. Moore went around to all of the eating places in town and made it a point to name all the white boys “boy” because he was dead set on making emotional reparations. No doubt Mr. Moore became out to show a factor about civil rights, and I fell into his firing variety.
In Wanamaker’s Crystal Room, I slightly observed the chef there, which indicates that he becomes most genuinely no longer a diva but extra of a chef line prepare dinner, an insignificant first among equals. The Crystal Room’s largest draw become tea sandwiches and soup, an object with approximately as a lot elegant atmosphere as the usual giveaway in homeless soup kitchens. The Crystal Room chef nonetheless wore the conventional tall white hat, even though you’d by no means capture him on foot around the eating place shaking fingers with VIP diners because of the “creator” of impressive minimalist dishes.
Today whilst a well-known chef walks among diners, he shakes palms like a politician notwithstanding the truth that his creation has already disappeared into ratings of digestive tracts.
When I met superstar chef Wolfgang Puck many years in the past at a press occasion in Atlantic City, there has been so much fanfare you’d have thought that an ex-president becomes inside the room. As fellow reporters clamored to consume Mr. Puck’s cutting-edge creation—flat-iron steak with peppercorn sauce and blue cheese butter—I determined little difference between Puck’s creation and a “regular” beef kebob located in most Asian eateries. I didn’t dare provide my opinion to the starstruck journalists who ate with gusto and who didn’t seem to have any meals problems at all, unlike the percent of reporters I traveled with to Israel a while ago.
During that Israeli tour, one journalist claimed she could most effective devour gluten-free meals; another said she ought to consume the simplest kosher meals at the same time as a third became a strict vegan. The food issues surfaced from our first actual meal whilst the gluten-loose creator started out bombarding the waiter with questions. Would he list all of the menu objects that were gluten-unfastened?
At one restaurant the vegan author becomes a private investigator. “Is this surely vegan or is it pescetarian, pollotarian or is it lacto-ovo-vegetarian?”
“Let me see,” the server said, disappearing into the kitchen to test with the chef.
Sometimes strengthen calls had to be located to restaurants to ensure that vegan and gluten-loose dishes have been to be had. Our press coordinator was no longer prepared for those food issues. She very nearly had a meltdown whilst the ritual has become especially taxing at a tiny sandwich store outdoor of Tel Aviv. All expectations of grabbing a brief chew on the patio of this fascinating restaurant earlier than our bus headed to Masada ended while the server started taking orders. Once again, the excruciating menu analysis among the foodies became a tribulation akin to dental surgical treatment. The server, who did no longer apprehend what gluten-free become, had to take delivery of an on-the-spot lesson, or even then she struggled to apprehend the idea.