Diasporic Dining XXXX: Should You Put Your Napkin in Your Lap?

Should you put your napkin in your lap? You might also ask, did the mountain come to Muhammad? There are those who believe in manners which may go back to famous theoreticians of cooking like Escoffier or derive from the kind of social mores for which Emily Post was a spokeswoman. And there are others who regard the table as a jungle, just another platform in which Darwin’s fittest survives or not. For instance, if you leave your napkin on the table with its detritus of ketchup and gravy stains you make yourself less attractive to those with whom you might like to procreate. Hence your particular line will not be naturally selective.  W.D. Hamilton’s rule in epigenetics basically shows that altruism itself can be naturally selective. Thus an awareness for others at the table demonstrated by a gesture of concern for their sensibilities is another reason why you might decide to put your napkin in your lap. It’s not that you're adhering to social pressure or abiding by standards of behavior that will result in acceptance in one social milieu or another. It’s that putting your napkin in your lap will result in the preservation of your gene pool. Civilized man regards eating as a form of culture and every once in a while it’s useful to be reminded that appetite actually reveals his true nature as that of a pig or cow eating cud out of its trough. This is why ill-mannered people are such a red light to those who're resistant to being reminded of their animal natures. Despite the advent of consciousness, there's little to differentiate man from lower orders and man's fall from grace, emblemized by the failure to put his or her napkins in their laps is a rude reminder of an often unpalatable truth.

A Matter of Taste?

“A good risotto is a fine thing, but it isn’t going to give you insight into other people, allow you to see the world in a new way, or force you to take an inventory of your soul,” says the venerable essayist William Deresiewicz in the Sunday Review section of the Times (“A Matter of Taste," NYT, 10/26/12). Escoffier may have propounded a philosophy of eating, but he was no Epicurus for whom the understanding of the senses led to philosophical notions like “the golden mean.”  Earlier in his essay Deresiewicz remarks about America’s growing obsession with food as a form of high culture, “what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known—in the days of the rising postwar middle class…as culture. It’s costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseuership…It is a badge of membership into the higher classes …Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.” The fact is that “foodism” is just  the latest manifestation of the middle brow and ersatz in American culture that Dwight MacDonald identified when he coined the term “mid cult." If you were seeking  entree into the realms of the cultivated you could subscribe to a tony magazine like The New Yorker, which provided not only a baedeker of what was good or bad, but excerpts and abridgements which afforded short cuts. Why read all of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King when you could read the excerpt? But of the ways to arrive, food is the most reprehensible. Yes, it’s work to become educated, but having to pay exorbitant prices for meager portions of heartless food (that is also not hearty) is likely to make you feel empty in more ways then one. Get a horse.

Diasporic Dining: Episode IV

Back in the days when America was a prosperous country, eating conformed to Thorstein Veblen’s doctrine of conspicuous consumption.  Oenophiles and varying kind of agrophiles and phobeds flocked to restaurants that specialized in presentation. There was a particular fascination with all things French, duplicating a fixation that began in Russia with Peter the Great, and that ran right up until the revolution. (The elegant Manhattan gallery, A La Vieille Russie, specializes in Faberge eggs and the kinds of Russian Imperial treasures that canonize French culture.) The appearance of French food was once seen as a form of ostentation similar to the luxury goods—cars, summer homes, jewelry—so often used as expressions of class superiority. Escoffier and Emily Post are personifications of class consciousness, in that the manners, mores and appreciation they exude require a certain level of leisure time, while simple dishes like meat loaf and potatoes are associated with the working man or woman, for whom eating is a matter of refilling the empty tank, an act generally accomplished with a silent, often sullen counterpart in front of the TV.

Writers like Julia Childs and M.F.K. Fisher taught us about haute cuisine, but what about moyenne cuisine or basse cusine, like the Croque Monsieur sold in most French cafes? Today, with tempers short and pocketbooks thin, the age of haute cuisine has happily passed. Those Goldman Sachs executives who can afford to eat in the grand old French restaurants don’t dare to be photographed using their stimulus bonuses to purchase overpriced meals. La Grenouille is one of the last on a list that included La Côte Basque, which figures in the title of Truman Capote’s famed expose of café society that served to exile him from the very world into which he’d longed to gain entrée.

This is the age of comfort food, with 24-hour diners in their original Greek form (the Athens, the Dionysius, the Parthenon, the Ethos, the Lyric) or in ersatz incarnations such as the Brooklyn Diner or Big Daddy’s, which raise prices by treating a viable part of American cuisine as a period piece. “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” Mark Twain said. Similarly, murmurings about the demise of the local diner are premature. After all, what can be gotten at La Grenouille that can’t be gotten at the Lyric?  Here is a comparision: at La Grenouille, the service is formal, the food excellent (if you like quenelles), and the atmosphere elegant.  At the Lyric, the service is surly, the food is good (if you like Chicken à la King), and the atmosphere is comforting—if you are at the point where you have lost everything (or know someone who has), and have nowhere else to go.  The lighting can be harsh, but so is life.