Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Food by which to butcher people

June 3

This past weekend I rewatched American Psycho, starring Christian Bale as a Wall Street hotshot with bloodlust. It’s supposed to take place in the 1980s, but the movie was made in 2000, and I think that’s reflected in what the people eat.
Oh, food and drink have a big role to play in American Psycho, and I’ll detail it for you now.
The movie opens in a restaurant, and the servers announce the day’s specials, which to me seem very 1999-2000, except that nothing is garnished with chervil, and nearly everything in New York was garnished with chervil in 1999-2000:
The specials were:
Squid ravioli in a lemon grass broth with goat cheese profiteroles
Arugula Caesar salad
Swordfish meat loaf with onion marmalade
Rare roasted partridge breast in raspberry coulis with a sorrel timbale
Grilled free-range rabbit with herb french fries
Now, I don’t think goat cheese profiteroles would go particularly well with squid, but I’ve seen worse combinations. I’ve got no problem with the salad. Swordfish meat loaf is pretentious, but it would probably taste good.
The partridge dish, I must admit, just sounds completely disgusting, but I think sorrel is a particularly challenging herb to work with, and I’d like my partridge at least medium-rare.
If free-range rabbit existed, and I suppose it might somewhere, I think herb french fries would be a terrific accompaniment for it.
Later, in a club, the Bale character, Patrick Bateman, orders a Stoly on the rocks and the bartender charges him $25 for it. He says, although she can’t hear it because she’s at the other end of the bar: “You’re a f***ing ugly b**ch. I want to stab you to death, then play around with your blood,” which is a bit harsh, but $25 for Stoly on the rocks?
Later he takes his drugged-out date to what he claims is D'Orsia, a mythical restaurant that is the hottest ticket in town in American Psycho world, and she can’t tell the difference because of the drugs.
He orders for her: Peanut butter soup with smoked duck and mashed squash (“New York Matinee called it a ‘playful but mysterious little dish.’ You’ll love it,” he says) followed by red snapper with violets and pine nuts.
The soup actually sounds like a variation on Ghana’s national dish, Nkatenkwan, although that’s made with chicken. I personally don’t particularly want violets with my snapper, but I don't think they’d get in the way, and pine nuts would be good with snapper.
The next day, at some sort of meeting, a character by the name of Paul Allen (played by Jared Leto) says d’Orsia has “great sea urchin ceviche.”
To me, turning sea urchin into ceviche is a crime, and in fact Patrick Bateman later hacks Paul Allen to death with an axe, but I believe it’s because Paul has much nicer business cards than Patrick does. And because Patrick’s a howling-crazy psychopath.
Before murdering Paul, Patrick and he have dinner at a fake place called Texarkana.
Paul is an obnoxious diner, and is outraged that the restaurant is out of its cilantro crawfish gumbo, which Paul says is “the only excuse one could have for being in this restaurant, which is, by the way, almost completely empty.”
What a bastard. But cilantro crawfish gumbo could be good.
Patrick orders a J&B straight and a Corona, together.
Paul orders a double Absolut Martini.
To soothe Paul, Patrick says the mud soup and charcoal arugula are “outrageous here,” and he means it in a good way. Looking at the menu, he says, “I see they’ve omitted the pork loin with lime jell-o.”
Mud soup, well, no, there's nothing good to say about that, or charcoal arugula. But pork loin is often served with a sweet component, the added acid of lime jell-o could be tasty, if executed well.
The next day, or maybe two days later, while Patrick is doing his morning crunches and a snuff video is playing on his TV (a woman is screaming pretty much constantly), there’s a closeup of a plate of sliced kiwifruit and I’m pretty sure red currants and maybe a fig half, although it might be an orchid garnish, next to a glass of sparkling water.
He provides a “very fine Chardonnay” for his prostitutes to drink — and offers them what sounds like Garda truffles, which might be actual fungi, not chocolates, since Garda is a town in Italy’s Veneto region where truffles do, in fact, grow — before brutalizing them.
He offers his assistant pre-dinner sorbet in his apartment before deciding not to kill her. She eats it out of the carton and he has her put the spoon back in the carton, rather than on his glass coffee table.
He has lunch with a detective, played by Willem Dafoe, at Smith & Wollensky, which his assistant calls Smith & Wollensky’s.
They eat steak, over which Patrick dumps way too much salt, attempting to mimic the cop I think, and drink water, although Patrick also drinks clear liquid from a rocks glass. Probably vodka.
Next, after murdering a friend and a prostitute, we see Bateman having dessert with his fiancée in a large but nice restaurant, but with paper tablecloths on which he draws, with crayons provided by the restaurant, a picture of the murdered prostitute, a chainsaw in her back. On his plate is an untouched, overgarnished chocolate dessert (shards of fruit — pear maybe — a dab of whipped cream, topped with raspberry and a mint sprig), the plate is dusted with powdered sugar, except for an outline of a knife and fork.
I’m not sure what it all means, but whoever picked the food — either Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote the book, or Mary Harron, who wrote the screenplay — definitely put some thought into it.

dissed

June 3

I was dis-invited to dinner last night. A publicist had invited me to a tasting event at a private club with a couple of new chefs, and then took it back.
“Hello Bret,” she e-mailed me. “Thank you for your RSVP, unfortunately we are unable to provide you a seat for tonight's dinner. We would like to make it up to you by inviting to a dinner at the club this month. Please call me to find out more details.”
No, sorry. Even if she had managed to write a grammatically correct message, she had lost her chance for me to sample her client’s chefs’ food.
I’d eaten there before and was pretty sure it wasn’t my loss, food-wise, even with new chefs, although it probably would have been an amusing evening. I had work to do in the office anyway, and being snubbed gave me extra time to do that work. So in practice I didn’t mind, but in principle, it’s obnoxious to dis-invite people. The very height of rudeness.
But I suppose these are obnoxious times in the New York food world. Eater.com seems to have traded in the first E in its name for an H for the week and is singling out restaurants at which to vent some extra spleen. It all strikes me as unusually mean, so much so that since my dinner plans had been canceled anyway I decided to visit one of the targets of its hostility, Merkato 55.
It’s the latest venture of celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson and restaurateur Håken Swahn, who also own Aquavit and Riingo, and is part of Marcus’ journey to seek his African roots.
In case you have other things to do with your brain than fill it with the life histories of celebrity chefs, Marcus was born in Ethiopia and adopted by Swedish parents at age 3. He recently came out with a cookbook resulting from his experiences in recent visits to Africa.
Merkato 55 opened about four months ago and reviews have been mixed, but I mean, it’s just four months old.
So I popped in, sat at the bar and ordered some infused rums.
Aquavit the restaurant has a bunch of house-made aquavit, which is basically infused vodka. Håken explained to me once that Swedish law requires that aquavit be flavored with caraway seeds, but he’s not in Sweden so he infuses it with whatever he likes.
I forget which infused rums I ordered, because the bartender said I had ordered the worst ones and picked three different ones for me — hibiscus-blood orange, banana and date. Hey, I’m happy to take guidance.
Then I had the arugula tabbouleh and jerk pork belly with green mango salad — neither particularly African, but that’s all right.
I chatted a bit with the bartender, who said business had been really busy but was slowing down now that it was summer (in New York we pay no attention to the summer solstice or autumnal equinox — summer is between Memorial Day and Labor Day). But she said the restaurant would be offering sidewalk seating starting June 12. So that’s something.

Arroz con gulas y gambas!

Saio again....

ARROZ CON GULAS Y GAMBAS! (Rice mixed with Baby Elvers and Prawns)

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Thanks again!

Alubias rojas con chorizo!

Hi,

New meal from Basque Country by Saio...

ALUBIAS ROJAS CON CHORIZO (RED BEANS with PORK SAUSAGE)

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Thanks Saio!