Good Food
Frans Verbeek, Burlesque Feast (detail, ca. 1550) Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.
–Wendell Berry, “The Hidden Wound”
A few months ago—in an entirely different era, that is—I met my friend Eve Abrams, a fellow journalist, for coffee. As we chatted, she surprised me: she told me she didn’t think much of the food in our neighborhood. We both live in New Orleans, in the Upper Ninth Ward, where a French-style bistro, a nominee for a James Beard Award this year, was named one of GQ’s best new restaurants.
It’s the sort of place where the chefs deliver each course directly to the tables so they can explain which trendy technique has been employed. My partner and I ate there for our one-year anniversary. The food was flawless, from a crepe served alongside a tiny cup of hot broth to a thin, breaded Japanese-style pork cutlet. The bill came to $400. “Who is that for?” Eve, my friend, wondered, when I told her how much it cost. For me, I guess.
That night was steep for us, a splurge, but not orders of magnitude beyond a typical outing. Every weekend, it seems—or it seemed, until we had to lock ourselves inside and work our way through our perfectly bourgeois pantry—my partner and I headed out to sample the buzziest new New Orleans restaurant. Just a few plates each night, but over time that accumulated into a decadent smorgasbord. Homemade pasta flecked with fresh-caught crab. Sous vide
