Food, Glorious Food

These days, at our age, it’s all about weddings and funerals. The weddings of our friends’ children and the funerals of our friends’ parents, our own parents or, heaven forbid, our friends. Recently John attended a funeral while I went to a wedding. And you end up hearing a lot of stories that you knew about, but a bunch of stories that you didn’t. John suggested this as a topic for a comic. For instance, I learned of the random arrest of a kid who was buddies with one of my kids (what did he get into and was my own kid involved????), acts of surprising kindness and charity, and in the case of a funeral, you can also be surprised in ways both good and bad. John said he learned some surprisingly good things at the funeral of a friend’s parent—that the parent had fought in a couple of big battles in WW II. Who knew? Not John. At any rate we decided to play this out in a funeral parlor, after debating doing it in the deli where Sal actually worked. It would have looked a lot like Katz’s because we’re both native New Yorkers and Katz’s is the last of the old-time delis still standing. Some of the old faithfuls remain, but in vastly different locations. For instance, the famed 2nd Ave Deli, spelled with English letters that resemble Hebrew letters (famously designed by my former art director partner, Mark Shap-may he rest in peace) is now no longer located on 2nd Avenue. Go figure. But back to the comic, it’s fun to hear about people you thought you knew well. The positive stuff, but also the negative stuff that makes you raise your eyebrows silently (even if we made it all up).

Now our next comic also has to do with food and this time it’s something John experienced and I read about. Molecular gastronomy. Food is all about experimentation. And as the world becomes flatter, we frequently mix different cuisines to produce new flavor combos. I once went to a sushi restaurant in Madrid where one of the courses was a mini cheeseburger, cut like a piece of sushi, atop a small bed of rice. Pretty damn good if I say so myself. But these wildly innovative chefs are constantly trying to experiment and the pressure must be enormous. For instance, John and his wife once visited WD-50, which sounds like a motor oil but stands for the chef, Wylie Dufresne. I’m sure we all remember past cooking techniques, like “tall food” where your plate was stacked high, one ingredient atop the other. Trouble with tall food is that once you cut into it, it all fell down on the plate and it wasn’t so tall anymore. Well, Wylie ushered in a technique called molecular gastronomy. I mean, who wouldn’t want liquid nitrogen sprayed on their chicken paillard? What is a dish without foam and fog? According to John, everything they ordered looked nothing like it was supposed to but tasted exactly like you thought it would. And because of its tiny size, it was packed full of flavor. The only thing that wasn’t miniaturized was the check, and there came our punchline. Sadly (or happily if you’re me) this fad faded as less accomplished chefs tried their hands at it. As Alex Stupak, Dufresne’s pastry chef put it, “It’s like pyrotechnics at a Kiss concert. Take that away (the smoke and fog), take your face paint away and you suck.”

That’s all she (or he) wrote this week. Next week the surgically repaired half of The New 60 (the Andy half) will try next week’s blog but who knows what kind of drugs I’ll be on? One thing’s for certain, like molecular gastronomy, it’ll be an adventure.

Andy and John