ArticleIP_2566.txt

   
   
      
         
            The Second-Best Sauce

            "There's no sauce in the
world like hunger." You may think that your grandmother made that up, but
actually it was Cervantes in Don Quixote , about 400 years ago. Neither I
nor any of my friends are ever hungry except for a few hours on Yom Kippur, so
I am unable to test Cervantes' proposition. I will concede it to him,
however.

            I want to
talk about the second-best sauce, which is "belonging." Food tastes enormously
better when it is eaten in a place where you are accepted as a special person,
special for something other than the color of your credit card.

            Iwas struck by this proposition about a month ago when I
spent some time with my son in Los Angeles. In the space of two days, we ate
four meals--lunch and dinner and then lunch and dinner again--in the same
restaurant. My son thought the food was great; I thought it was only pretty
good. He seemed disappointed that I did not share his appreciation of the food.
A little later I realized what the problem was. The restaurant was a gathering
place for people in "the business," meaning the Hollywood movie-and-TV
business. My son was one of them. When he came into the restaurant, people
slapped him on the back and said, "Great show, Ben!" And he slapped someone else on the back
and said, "Great show, Tom!" (or whoever). This was his club, and that made the
food taste great. But it was not my club.

            I can see
many other examples of this in my eating history. The most obvious is the White
House Mess. To eat there one had to be either a fairly high-ranking official of
the administration or the guest of such a person. That is, eating there gave
one a strong sense of special privilege. (When I was there we hadn't yet
learned that access to the privileges of the White House could be sold for
cash.) And this sense of belonging made the food taste great. But the cooks
there were not graduates of the Cordon Bleu. The pièces de résistance
were the cheeseburger, the hot fudge sundae, and the Tex-Mex food on Thursdays.
Objectively speaking, one could get better food at any of six restaurants
within two blocks of the White House. But the judgment of the food in the White
House Mess was not an objective judgment.

            
One doesn't have to eat in "high-class"
surroundings to get this delicious feeling of belonging. For some time after we
were married I used to tell my wife about the great meals prepared by Freddie
the Cook. That referred to my college days. I had been the dishwasher at a
fraternity house. The waiters were all members of the fraternity and ate the
same meals in the same dining room as the other members. But I was not a
member, so I ate in the kitchen with the other kitchen help who were not
students and who were all "colored," as we used to say. We in the kitchen felt
that we were getting the best of everything, better and fresher food than was
served to the members upstairs. What it all was, I no longer remember, with one
exception: For dessert I often had a quart brick of vanilla ice cream bathed in
the wonderful syrup extracted from the sugar maples around Williamstown, Mass.
But Freddie was really a mediocre cook.

            There was a time, probably
now past, when medium-price restaurants would advertise themselves as serving
"home cooking." They were trying to play upon the memory of home cooking as
having been very good cooking. But the odds were against your mother having
been a very good cook. It was mainly the feeling of having been part of the
family that made the food there seem so good in retrospect.

            Good
restaurants exploit this feeling. They know that you will enjoy the food more
if the headwaiter greets you as "Mr. Jones" without having to look in his book
when you come in. That is, if your name is Jones. Otherwise, to be called
"Jones" spoils the meal.

            Ihave eaten in some three-star restaurants in my
time--almost always on someone else's expense account. Only one of those meals
was memorable. That was in a restaurant off the Champs Élysées where I ordered
in the belief that it was veal with rice. Quelle horreur!
            

            Surely there are exceptions
to my general rule. There must be people with palates so fine that even
blindfolded they could tell the difference between food from La Tour d'Argent
and food from McDonald's. And there probably is some food so good that even I,
eating it in a strange place, would recognize its merit. But, in general, my
rule holds. If you are not hungry, eat where you belong!