What’s Good?
Photographs by Adrian Samson Food styling by Olivia Bennett Set design by Gemma Tickle
It’s Tuesday, loyalty card double-stamp night at my neighborhood sushi place in Oakland. It’s the kind of spot where the sweaty owner in a headband and his Latino kid assistant slur “irasshaimase!”—welcome!—in tandem when you push open the chime-tinkling door, no matter how harried they seem, and I do feel welcome here, within the mingled smells of gluey-sweet mirin and the floor-greased sneakers on the hustling, perpetually smiling staff. This is a business built on delivering customers what they want: an inside-out dragon roll heavy with raw salmon, tuna, yellowtail, and avocado (nothing the nice retirees at the two-top near the door, their white heads bowed over bowls of ramen in a broth that started as a hunk of yellow concentrate from a plastic bucket, would find “yucky”), a seven-dollar glass of DeLoach Chardonnay poured nearly to the rim, the NBA on a TV cantilevered high in the corner, and pale, shaggy-battered shrimp tempura as meaty as a kitten’s flexed hind legs.
At the next table, beneath a Mondrian wall grid of squares and rectangles randomly filled with primary colors (cool in the ‘90s, washed out now), two women are most of the way through a dinner that has sprawled across several plates. One is talking about her daughter’s skeevy boyfriend. She clutches her phone, which is scrolled to an Instagram pic that busts him, apparently, and turns it to show her companion, who makes an O-mouth gesture of shock.
Her friend has the last piece of salmon nigiri clenched between slivery, pale wood chopsticks and is dangling it above a sauce dish, which, though shallow, shows a hefty volume of soy sauce cloudy with wasabi. I watch as if the room has slipped into slow motion: The friend, focused on dispensing sympathetic outrage, lowers the rice end of her nigiri into the dark slurry, swabs the dish with it, rotates her wrist so the salmon tile faces down (its free ends, the parts ungripped by chopsticks, flop lazily sauceward), and gives it even more swipes through the soy mixture. The thing she raises to her mouth appears gunked, like a shore bird after an oil spill. The slo-mo stops. Once again in normal speed she chews and goes right on talking, looking unaware that she has just committed a heinous crime, violating the integrity of a small, rectangular piece of orange-pink flesh, striped with dental-tape strands of connective tissue. The former food critic in me winces. This is a crime of taste.
Crimes against taste aren’t prosecutable, but they are offenses. By drowning a nice, fresh hunk of raw tuna in soy-wasabi slurry, my table neighbor was guilty of murder. She’d killed whatever subtlety was in that pre-dunked fish (the faint tang of raw flesh and mineral richness of fat) even in such an ordinary sushi place as this. Did she even know what she obliterated in that toxic wash of salinity and heat? (And for sure there wasn’t a speck of wasabi rhizome in that pea-green paste she’d stirred with chopstick tips into a couple glugs of Kikkoman, only tinted mustard-seed powder: cheaper than real wasabi, hotter, and, for the thing being dipped, even more exterminating of nuance.)
That small tile of nigiri flesh was a piece of a once-beautiful creature with silver scales that grew and thrashed in a net cage anchored offshore somewhere, and resisted giving up its life—even as a creature of our industrial feedlot system of aquafarming, it was a bearer of magic. How does anyone sensitive to such beauty and magic of food make peace with trending grossness?
Some days my Instagram serves up a scroll of atrocities: cake-topped #freakshakes, Bloody Marys bristling with bacon swizzles and sliders on skewers, Luther Burgers with glazed donuts stunting for the bun, brownie-batter “hummus,” glitter-scurfed pink-and-blue unicorn Frappuccinos, and activated charcoal soft serve so black and glossy it resembles roof-patch polymer. Social media is a major enabler of crimes against taste (their visual representations anyway) but it is, after all, only food-hell porn. The real misdeeds are all around us, in real life. Sometimes they show up as news.
In February 2017 a reporter, acting on a tip that the freshly sworn-in President was headed there, camped out at a table at BLT Prime by David Burke, a steakhouse in Washington’s Trump International Hotel. Sure enough POTUS arrived, and dined at table 76, planked in by Secret Service guys and beyond them, regular folk gawking while picking at “clothesline” candied bacon and wet-aged filets. A waiter (who requested anonymity) described what Donald Trump ate that night. “The President ordered a well-done steak,” the unnamed server said. “An aged New York strip. He ate it with catsup as he always does.” This was a double crime against taste, to ask for beef beyond the point at which it holds its sapid juices (in the language of the ordering guide on BLT Prime’s menu, “no pink, hot center”), and then drag the taut, gray slices through ketchup (calling the condiment “catsup” did not seem to make it any less of an atrocity).
The nation’s food writers shook their heads. “For real, Mr. President?” asked Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema. In a piece titled “Actually, How Donald Trump Eats His Steak Matters,” Eater’s Helen Rosner identified a failure of character in the President’s always liking meat well done and dunked. “A person who refuses to try something better,” she explained, “is a person who will never make things good.” Months later, Burke told Eater that while the President does like well-cooked steak, the catsup on table 76 that night was probably a dunk for Trump’s fries, but by then it was too late to cry fake news and expect anyone to believe you: Members of the food crimes inquiry had long since voted to impeach. In a legit poll of registered voters, even some wearers of MAGA hats were among the 57 percent who disapproved of ketchup on a steak.
But who can say what’s objectively “better”? Do crimes against food need to be policed? Who plays cop? And should anyone, even a professional restaurant critic, dictate the terms of another’s pleasure? Yelp and Instagram have remade food into a place of boundless relativism, where extracting a thread of universal, objective truth about what’s delicious and what’s gross can seem almost as complicated as unraveling an algorithm’s code—unless “universal” and “objective” are themselves the problem.
Chris Ying, a San Francisco food writer and editor, most recently of the book You And I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us, pivots to music to explain this. “Growing up in white Orange County, ska and punk were everywhere,” he says. “I didn’t like hip-hop until I got to college, I still don’t like jazz; country music, I can’t do it—I don’t have the cultural context to see it.” Food is no different. Humans seem built to hate what we don’t know.
“I’m much harsher when it comes to other people’s taste,” Ying says. “Garlic fries are disgusting. I have trouble sitting next to people at a sushi bar, judging everything they’re doing. I’m angry about it. Upset! Drowning their fish in soy and wasabi!” Ying is one of the most honest and thoughtful food writers I know. His anger, as he calls it, over drowned sushi or ketchup on steak comes from professional pride. “It’s this sense that the knowledge of the quote-unquote right way to eat something is a hard-won thing,” he says. “I’ve had to pay for my sophistication, whether through experience or money, and the other person hasn’t and they’re still sitting next to me.” He says this in a tone of disappointment over his own limitations, as if knowledge dragged its own shadow. “I also feel like a privileged elitist shithead,” he says, “watching you at the sushi bar, shaming you about it.”
Is there a cultural context for dunked sushi or ketchup steak? Maybe there’s mostly a socioeconomic one, Ying says, “a little bit of this poor-shaming thing.”
“There’s this grade-school saying,” Brett Martin says: “‘Don’t yuck somebody’s yum.’” Martin is a GQ correspondent, and the magazine’s food critic. “It’s not my job to take away something that somebody else is enjoying,” he says. “Then again, it’s not my job to pretend I enjoy it.” In a world where someone will think of potentially anything as yum, what is the critic’s job?
Anthony Bourdain used to take a flame-thrower to the foods and people he hated. In time his callouts became reflexive, as shticky as a one-liner prompt for a nightclub comic. For instance in 2016, Bourdain aired a bullet-point rundown of crimes against taste on the now-defunct List App platform. It’s full of give-the-people-what-they-want Tonyisms, scurrilous and grounded in a sophisticated understanding of food, a combination only he could make seem witty. He blasts the soy-wasabi thing for sushi, and dipping nigiri rice-side down. (“Your sushi chef loses all respect for you… You may as well spit in his face. Seven years learning rice and you just shat in it.”) He questions the masculinity of any guy drawn to beef meatballs or burgers fraudulently labeled as kobe. (“All I can say is I’m truly sorry about your penis.”) You either hated Tony for his Jersey mouth or you adored him for it. Maybe, like me, you loved him in spite of it.
I was in awe of Bourdain for wielding his power to challenge cynicism in food, the brand marketing and spin, the lazy press-release journalism and easy click-bait (though obviously Tony wasn’t above pumping out a listicle now and then). For him the really unforgivable food crimes weren’t honest sins of inexperience, but vices of arrogance, by people too slavish to status or fashion to think critically or trust their senses enough to really taste. He used the force of his yuck not to crush yums, but to make his fans more open and sensitive to the world.
Rage against arrogance surges through the best-known pan in restaurant reviewing history, New York Times critic Pete Wells’ 2012 takedown of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen and Bar in Times Square. This is a searing piece of rhetoric, each sentence (except the last) posed as a question, as if Fieri were on trial for taste crimes, an indictment with a hundred separate counts. Wells is a prosecutor on fire. He grills Fieri with, “Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are?” And, “Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?”
When it published, Wells faced his own critics: Unless he had a personal beef with Fieri, why would an egghead critic jump the tracks to pan a tourist hole? Would anyone likely to eat at Guy’s even care how a critic more at home at the omakase counter really felt about the Cajun Chicken Alfredo? Wells looked cynical, making easy jokes at the expense of the popular TV chef with the flame highlights and a reverse raccoon-mask spray tan. “It had all the appearances of Pete shooting fish in a barrel,” Brett Martin says, “lording it over people. In reality Pete’s anger was that the cynical one was Fieri; that he was being the disrespectful one.”
Jonathan Gold, the Los Angeles Times food critic who died last year, knew better than anyone the power of calling out the horrendous, the criminally bad, or the merely meh. “People love reading really mean reviews,” he told students in a USC food media class in 2015. “And you know, there was a point in my career when I wrote those because they’re—it’s fun. You get to take your knives out, and you’re usually pretty funny when you’re doing it. People will wince when they see the little bullet hole in somebody’s head, but it’s not like they don’t watch.” He went on to describe his first taste of stinky tofu in a Taiwanese place, and how, instead of merely blasting it as gross, he went back 17 times to understand what was good about it.
“You’ve got to break on through,” Gold said. “You’ve got to understand, really understand what is something you dislike—if it’s something that you really truly dislike, or it’s something whose taste you don’t really understand and you have to get around to it.” Gold’s point was that even a paid critic’s opinion of what’s good or not is irrelevant, since it’s usually not possible to let go of prejudice, all our cultural preconceptions, about the President of the United States, even the women at the next table, out for cheap sushi and a laugh.
“My day to day experience, living and consuming food and culture is a constant lesson in humility,” Ying says. “I believe in the commonality of our human taste. The more cool shit there is to consume, the better life is.” In other words, Brett Martin says, “it’s too hard to enjoy yourself in this world without having somebody telling you that it sucks.”