How Hard Can It Be?

Dear Cory:

As you are a paragon of culture and good taste, it will probably surprise you to learn how much "fine dining" has degraded in recent years. Please comment on the appearance of some type of asparagus that is not white, as well as the lack of fingerbowls, at fine dining establishments.

Disillusioned Minnesotan Muncher


Dear Disillusioned:

How kind are your opening words. Cory’s breathtaking orality is the stuff of gossip, if not legend, and he is hard put to think of a food he doesn’t like. He is childishly happy whenever anyone prepares food for him. He will not therefore be drawn into the trap of commenting haughtily on albino vegetables and table implements that were popular before the Great Depression, no matter how carefully arranged is your bait. Those issues should be referred to Dr. Laura Schlesinger, who is the right age and has been accurately described by Rabbi Cohon (Phoenix New Times, March 17, 2005) as having “a quality of overwhelming judgment with no comprehension”. It is to this column you come when comprehension is required.

The phrase “fine dining” catches Cory’s interest. He suspects that you, dear interlocutor, have put it in quotation marks because it makes you suspicious too. A frequent contributor of wisdom to Ask Cory is Sandy Osborne of the HHCIB board. Sandy succinctly summed up the matter while dispatching some scrumptious spaghetti in a very humble eatery. Pointing out the fatuity of the description, he likened a restaurant describing its offerings as “fine dining” to Vancouver calling itself a “world class city”. If you have to tell people what they’re going to experience in such inflated terms, you probably don’t have the real thing. Vancouver is no Venice.

Honest restaurants have no need to attract snobs with the trappings of the upper classes in previous centuries filtered through years of compromise, misunderstanding and degradation. They struggle to create pleasing food in portions needed by human beings with functioning metabolisms, not the tiny, dispiriting pyramids of la nouvelle cuisine. They employ somewhere upon their menus the native language of their guests. They inhabit rooms or buildings, not establishments.