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Markets and marketism
Adam Platt recently issued a series of nags about the New York City restaurant industry (Trends We’ve Seen Enough Of, New York Magazine, December 2007), which included some facts — yes, we’ve surely had enough of overpriced, musky dry-aged steaks, taxidermy and ‘mixologists’ — as well as some ancy indictments. On the trend of ‘market restaurants’ he asks,
Do you really want to purchase a $20 jar of artisanal honey after paying $150 for your meal?
I ask, why hinge an argument on that? (It’s a callous price-point issue; also, artisanal honey is in fact really good.) Platt’s complaint is likely targeted at some new restaurants bent on riding the recent seasonality/locality wave — the overbearingly earnest Market Table (Mermaid Inn’s Mikey Price and Little Owl’s Joey Campanero) and Laurent Tourondel’s ridiculous overstatement of “market”, BLT Market. To my knowledge the New York City ‘market restaurant’ was a model established three years ago by Marlow & Sons in Williamsburg, which does offer at least a dozen varieties of artisanal honey. But these items among others that fill their front room grocery shelves are not conspicuously lit during dinner service, nor are they aggressively barked by waiters1. Marlow & Sons is grocery by day (and a café counter with coffee, sandwiches and pastries), and restaurant and bar by night. Their dining experience is bolstered with affectation — dark wood paneling and antique light fixtures, turn-of-the-century graphic design — but it’s an experience several steps behind full-blown, taxidermy-heavy gimmickery. The emphasis is primarily on simple but well-sourced food — cheeses, charcuterie, oysters — and cocktails, a service philosophy echoed in the grocery as well; a program tidily spartan and without pretense. Platt’s argument seems a bit off target. Marlow & Sons butcher and grocery curator Tom Mylan keeps a blog:
The A-train and I are pretty obsessed with the idea of the island of Sardegna, which is a little place just south of Corsica and west of mainland Italy. We fell in love with it at the Dean and Deluca cheese counter during the frigid winter of 2003 when some strange, plain looking wheels of hard goat cheese showed up with one of the days deliveries (from Forever Cheese, if I remember correctly). The name of the cheese was Pantaleo, which we started calling Joey Pants before we even broke the wheel. When we did finally get around to cutting it open it was a revelation: Sardinians bust off chunks of funky stuff like nobody’s business. I felt like I was eating rosemary shrubs off the side of some steep goat hill overlooking the Mediterranean. It blew our tastebuds and our minds, winning us over as instant fans of anything coming from that magical little isle.
I doubt that the people behind Market Table and BLT Market are deficient in passion over their grocery stock or menus. But there’s passion, and then there’s obsessiveness. ‘Passion’ is such a loaded term anyway; it’s a word that serves no better than any to fluff a chef’s reputation, or add a disembodied delectability to a restaurant’s concept. Marlow & Sons2 seems to work because they really do care, to the point of obsession, about food. On a recent visit, a serving of toast smeared with beef marrow, pungent continental butter and sea salt firmed my resolution. This is honest food that took a great deal of a small staff’s time and effort to be found, prepared and brought to my table.
Unfortunately, Mylan’s attitude is one that can be replicated, bulked up and smoothed over with cash, zipped up by designers and delivered to the West Village, or Midtown, under the banner of simplicity and ingredient-first honesty. Some goofy copy from BLT Market’s website:
Chef Laurent Tourondel offers a dining experience for all seasons at BLT Market located in The Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park. The country chic design redefines casual elegance and sophistication. The airy dining room is decorated in shades of coffee and cream, accented by large-scale paintings depicting vibrant fruits and vegetables, as well as antique farm tools, reclaimed wood furniture and textured velvet banquettes. The menu rotates monthly and focuses on fresh, seasonal ingredients available in farmers’ markets, paying particular attention to unusual, wild and locally grown items. The signature BLT blackboard menu is updated weekly with selections that highlight first-of-the-season produce.
I suppose antique farm tools and textured velvet are ugly enough decorative elements for Platt to admonish the whole scene altogether. Or perhaps his sentiments suggest that market restaurants are destroying the nostalgic, egalitarian market archetype, an endangered breed (engendered by stereotypical ethnic grocerymen) that has been swept almost entirely to outer boroughs, leaving painfully precious, overpriced reminders of its past — Marlow & Sons included — behind. If this trend was a true threat to the real butchers and bakers left in this city, I’d accept Platt’s viscera, but trends are as trends are. There’s a good possibility that someday I might want a $27 jar of Marco Bianco acacia honey after dinner.
1 I’m almost certain that the groceries aren’t even for sale during dinner service.
2 Some photographs by Michael Harlan Turkell, printed in Edible Brooklyn, Spring 2007.