Like so many people with nothing to do on a Wednesday night, I found myself watching Top Chef’s fifth season finale last week before Top Chef Masters. And it was then that I realized that I was partaking in something that somehow felt… wrong. The words spun through my head as I heard Padma Lakshmi describing a dish – “It’s so eighties…”
This stirred deep and profound feelings within me, and not the usual deep and profound feelings I get when looking at Padma Lakshmi, or even Kelly Choi. No, this was different. It was the sort of caveman rage that only erupts when the food-driven, club-wielding, Cro-Magnon part of my brain runs across some phenomenon it doesn’t understand… the Budweiser Chelada, The Jonas Brothers, KFC Famous Bowls, or, more pertinently, how food is fashion.
It’s not a new thing. Even in the times of Auguste Escoffier, cuisine was a marker of who had money and who didn’t, and by proxy, who was fashionable and who wasn’t. Interestingly enough, one of the hallmarks of being rich at the time of Escoffier was not just floating frozen in the North Atlantic after your gigantic ship hits an iceberg, but was also eating food that by modern standards would be considered under-seasoned, in order to show off the quality of the meat (yet another example of the dangers of food fashion).
Admittedly, there is some commonality between the two worlds. Haute Cuisine and Haute Couture represent the supposed elites of their arts, and I respect the shared drive between the two to challenge their disciplines in order to create something even better.
But these are separate worlds, in many ways antithetical to each other. Too much fashion is the bane of food, a la Kate Moss, or the Olsen Twins. Likewise, too much food is the bane of Fashion, a la Manuel Uribe, or anyone who wears more than a size 4. And the chasm deepens even further when you consider that with hard economic times, the trends between the two split, with people craving traditional “comfort foods”, and yet fashionistas taking their world to profoundly more expensive and bizarre levels. And perhaps of all the differences, this one is the most profound – What was delicious in 1985 probably still tastes good if prepared today (In the world of Hostess products, the axiom reads differently: What tasted mediocre when you started it in 1985, tastes the same when you finish it in 2009, only a bit drier). Sure, food presentation styles change over the years. But what tasted good then still tastes good now.
So what do with Haute Cuisine? How do we look at it? If you can’t appreciate it simply for what it is – a bunch of guys who are brilliantly good at cooking deciding to push themselves to see just how good food can get – then compare it to Art. Like painting or sculpture or photography, cuisine has had its movements, each informed by culture and technology and obsessive minds. And in both worlds, the greats of each generation are still absolutely stunning. A well done peach melba or baked Alaska will still elicit an almost lustful eye from eaters in the same way that people can still look at Gaugin, or Chagall, and see something incredible.
Realistically, Haute Cuisine probably falls somewhere in between the worlds of art and fashion. But there’s comfort in believing that you’re eating the Venus De Milo, and not MC Hammer’s parachute pants.
Chef Jordan Cherry
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