by Cathy Erway
Restaurants existed before John Delmonico opened his first cafe and pastry shop on William Street in downtown Manhattan in 1827, but they had never truly solidified their place in the daily life of Americans the way they had begun to in Europe. The Swiss immigrant, born Giovanni Del-Monico, brought his brother Pietro to the States to bake at the cafe what were then the most impressive pastries in the city Moreover, they were served in a comparatively clean, pleasant setting. Empowered by the success of this little shop, the Delmonicos took a gamble on purchasing the storefront next door, hiring a French chef, and serving full, hot meals at lunchtime. Their mission was to attract businessmen and other working people who could afford to eat finer meals midday and actually appreciate the novelty of the French delicacies they served.
The Delmonicos would send for more relatives and open three more restaurants, each one more refined than the last, over the next decade. They would set the mold for fine dining in New York City and America as a whole. Before this time, restaurants were mostly taverns that offered limited food options and often served only shared meals to which customers would help themselves. There was also an oyster trend, and New York had four oyster bars by 1805. In fact, the oldest restaurant still in operation in America is the Union Oyster Bar in Boston. Oysters were a beloved snack food in nineteenth-century America, but they were also incredibly cheap, sold by street hawkers and in cellar bars, some of them for an all-you-can-eat price. (Again, why did they have to do away with these?)
Yet these taverns and inns that served food were often raucous places, bound to have uncouth fellows lurking about (America was in a particularly boozy place in time then), not suitable for women, and shocking to European travelers. And the food they served was, by all accounts, extremely crude. New York was very far indeed from the foodie destination it has become. For the most part, the middle class still had yet to see food as something more than plain sustenance. The Delmonicos’ restaurants paved the way for the sit-down restaurant culture that New York City would thrive on over the next century and beyond.
Taking this workday lunch concept further, William and Samuel Childs established their first restaurant in 1889, with just that middle-class lunch crowd in mind. In contrast to that of Delmonico’s, their fare was more modest, down-home American cooking—pancakes and omelets, sandwiches, and oysters on toast. Their most famous dish was butter cakes, and the Childses showcased them with panache by setting the griddle by a window facing the street. The restaurant had a self-service buffet line, where diners could select their food and take it to a table. It was a more casual, less expensive affair than upscale restaurants and soon became something of a midtown cafeteria for the working class.
Many more restaurants would mimic the success of the Childses’ “lunchrooms,” as they were popularly called, while others would try to top the opulence of Delmonico’s. Even today, the takeout or sit-in restaurants of New York’s busiest commercial areas don’t sound so far off from the buffet lines at Childs’. Taking this cue, many more cafes, soda shops, and bakeries would begin selling full meals instead of quick bites. Eating the foods from these places, instead of eating at home, became increasingly popular throughout the twentieth century.
This isn’t a book about all that, as you know. Still, the world might be a very different place if it weren’t for that loftily ambitious Parisian, the Swiss American dynasty, and all the other great restaurateurs through the ages who fanned the flames on the art of eating out.
In contrast, home cooking has seen better days than the last half century in the United States. The prevalence of eating out has risen quickly, gaining significant momentum with the development of the interstate highway in the 1960s. As Americans hit the road more, they relied on restaurant food more. As meticulously observed in Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, fast-food moguls were there to capitalize on the trend (and subsequently claim a large chunk of our diet). Just thirty years ago, in 1980, Americans were still spending twice as much on groceries as they did in restaurants. Heavy restaurant advertising, car culture, relative prosperity, and many other factors have all contributed to the reversal of this stance today. If national trends continue at the same rate, eating out will soon eclipse the home-cooked meal altogether. Eating out is also a habit that gets passed on to subsequent generations, something of a dominant gene. If a person hasn’t been raised in a household that cooks, how will she or he know how to cook for her- or himself? Many of my friends who claim they never eat in as adults say they rarely did while growing up.
The restaurant revolution has had graver effects on American society than our forgetting how to cook. Today, one in three Americans (one in two African Americans and Latinos) will be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. This is due to the overindustrialized, over-processed foods that have engulfed restaurants as well as supermarkets today. But leaving aside easy targets like fast food for the moment, most restaurants across the country do not typically serve very healthy food. Most households, on the other hand, typically cook food for their families that they believe is healthy. Waiters in restaurants don’t tell you to eat your greens before you can be excused from the table. Instead, restaurants aim to pamper your taste buds, tell you it’s okay to have that buttery pasta or bacon burger because it was created by a renowned chef or a trendy restaurant. This should come as no surprise—restaurants are profit-seeking businesses after all, founded on the idea of making something that tastes better than what you could cook at home. Therefore, chefs add much more fat, salt, and sugars to their dishes than one would likely reach for at home, hoping to gain repeat customers hungry for another taste. Several of the entrees at the nation’s largest restaurant chains, such as Applebee’s and Chili’s, have close to twice the government’s recommended daily sodium limit alone. Thanks to recent legislation in New York City, large chain restaurants must now be transparent about the number of calories in each food option with signs posted in their stores. But this law hasn’t swept across the nation yet, nor does it affect independent businesses or small chains.
Many point to the advancement of women in the workplace as the reason for fewer family meals cooked by Mom. Indeed, the rise of women at work from the 1960s on neatly parallels the national trend in eating out. Even as early as the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century, cooking was looked down upon by feminists as a stifling relic of female subservience. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman put it, “Why should half the world be acting as amateur cooks for the other half?”
The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its relative achievements may have succeeded in bringing more women into the workforce, but the issue of equality when it comes to traditional roles is still up for debate. Regardless of equally busy schedules, it seems that, if not the actual cooking, at least the responsibility of feeding a household has largely remained in female hands. Enter the days of family buckets from KFC. Turn on primetime TV today and you’re bound to see at least one commercial depicting a triumphant mom winking toward the camera as her family dives into a “just like homemade” takeout meal—or in other instances, calling for delivery pizza as she rushes out to make a meeting. Instead of acting as amateur cooks, today women and men alike turn to professionals to feed their families. Add to them the “food scientists,” responsible for canned, instant, just-add-milk, or just-microwave foods.
Another reason for the wane in home cooking is that the profit margin for prepared foods is generally much higher than that for groceries. It’s not because fewer people patronize grocery stores. Rather, grocery stores are just not a terribly profitable business. There is tremendous loss involved in keeping fresh products stocked on the shelves. Much is thrown out at the end of the day due to expiration dates or just to make room for new products. For stores without vertically integrated brand-name products or a prepared-foods section for which the extra labor can command higher prices, the lack of these items and the fierce competition among grocery stores for the lowest prices possible means paltry profit
s compared to those of restaurants. Throughout Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, the number of supermarkets has continued to dwindle over the last few years. A 2008 study by the Department of City Planning estimated that as many as seventy-five thousand people in what were considered high-need neighborhoods lived more than five blocks from a grocery store or supermarket. These are areas typically rife with fast-food establishments. Even more frustrating is the proliferation of restaurants in close proximity to schools, opened with the intention of luring youngsters away from the cafeteria.
For young women today, it might seem almost perversely backward to embrace an activity that our feminist forebears fought so hard to distance themselves from. But so what if the success of the women’s movements contributed to the demise of home cooking? Let’s not kid ourselves; men are not all helpless individuals searching, sad-eyed, for a woman to feed them, any more than a woman is looking for a man to look after her. Cooking is an especially gender-bridging activity in this day and age, if my young peers are any indication. I have many male friends who cook. I have just as many female friends and acquaintances who’ve admitted to never cooking, or to not knowing how. In 2007, The New York Times published a delightful article about couples in which one member was the “alpha cook” and the other the feckless “beta.” Most of the alpha cooks in the article were the husbands or boyfriends. In the media, there are just as many if not more male cookbook authors or celebrity chefs. There is a wealth of male-driven food writing today, and a somewhat macho infatuation with adventurous eating, meat eating, fatty cuts and offal eating, and regional food pride, seen in the many male-dominated barbecue brawls or chili cook-offs throughout the country. On the flip side, there is also a fervent vegan community that is very much mixed in gender. Whether it’s for passion, status, politics, or budget purposes, preparing a meal is no longer strictly the territory of just one half of the world.
Cooking has become a tool of many persuasions in this country, and it has seeped its way into our culture far beyond the basic need to feed oneself. But how good are we at doing just that—cooking, simply to feed ourselves, on a daily basis? For no other aim or purpose? Less and less, it seems. So long as busy workdays and constant commutes dominate our schedules, and restaurants populate our neighborhoods more than grocery stores, so will the eating-out regime dominate cooking.
I recently attended a panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y on “food finds and trends.” One of the notable food critics on the panel, Gael Greene, said at one point that she didn’t think people actually cooked at home. “I think they get frozen meals or takeout,” she said. I think she’s right, for the most part. Then I almost fell out of my chair when another panelist, Bon Appétit editor Victoria von Biel, countered that statement by mentioning a food blog written by a young woman called “Not Eating Out in New York.” (Thank fully, I had a friend sitting beside me to keep me from running up to the stage right then to shake her hand.) However, at another lecture given at the American Museum of Natural History a few months later, I listened to Michael Pollan observe that more Americans were getting back into the kitchen and rediscovering how to cook once again, and that this was “a healthy change.”
In America Eats Out, John Mariani attested that restaurants particularly in this country always hinged upon a gimmick: “Lunch wagons, milk bars, diners, drive-ins, speakeasies, restaurants shaped like hot dogs, restaurants designed to look like a pirate’s den, restaurants where the waiters sing opera, restaurants with wine lists as thick as family bibles—all are, in their own way, gimmicks to hook in the crowds.” The gimmicks go on. It could be foods that restore the health, or fine meals in the middle of the day. It could be purely outstanding food, food being served all night, how about waitresses who wear tight T-shirts over their well-endowed chests? It could be ribs. Fifties nostalgia. Or chefs who serve the patrons themselves, like at The New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni’s pick for best restaurant of 2008, Momofuku Ko.
Well, I decided to give home cooking a gimmick of my own. To eat for a prolonged period of time without the assistance of restaurants whatsoever. Was that something that a New York-born, New Jersey-bred, working, middle-class, twenty-six-year-old American such as myself could achieve?
It seemed only fitting to test this humble experiment in the eating-out capital of the world.
CHAPTER 1
The Start of My Restaurant Fast
It began as a lark.
“I think I’m going to swear off restaurant food for a while,” I told my friends at a beer garden in Brooklyn. It was the middle of August, the dog days of summer 2006.
“Yeah? How come?”
I looked down at the wooden table separating myself from my friend and roommate, Erin, and her friend Sergio. It was covered with four or five grease-blotted paper plates, two of which had half-eaten hamburgers on them, three plastic cups surrounding a plastic pitcher of light golden beer, and a white paper boat that had previously held a hot dog.
“Well, I’ve been wanting to start a food blog,” I began.
Erin perked up in her seat. I told them that my blog would be based on home cooking, a repository of sorts for all the recipes I had brimming in my head all the time. just the other day, I had some leftover pesto, and when I started to make a potato salad to bring to a party, I decided to use the pesto instead of mayonnaise and added some sliced radishes and bits of red pepper to the mix, along with a splash of balsamic vinegar. My blog would be about easy-to-prepare, healthy, and hopefully unique home-cooked dishes like that, I explained. And as an added, extremist measure, I would quit eating out in any of the five boroughs of the city where we lived.
“Not eating out in New York?” Sergio said after I told them what I wanted to call the blog. “That sounds ... perfect. I only eat out, but I would read it.” He shrugged and took another chomp of his burger.
A cloud of smoke wafted to our table just then, and I couldn’t make out Erin’s exact expression. It was a muggy, severely hot day, and the ceiling of patio umbrellas in the cramped backyard created a virtual hotbox of stale, smoky city air. Sergio’s normally olive-complected face had turned bright sunburn pink.
I suddenly wondered why the three of us couldn’t be sitting at home, in the comfort of a room with an air conditioner or a fan, or in the shade of someone’s backyard, drinking much better beer, and making ourselves better burgers. Why did we have to come here, forking over our hard-earned dollars in exchange for the basest of barbecue food and being squashed in this pebble-floored patio, waiting for service, and yelling over the din of our too-close neighbors? Pure habit, I guessed. I wondered whether this habit was something we could reverse.
“Yeah, do it!” Erin pressed.
I picked up my third or fourth burned slider from my plate. It had been baking in a slice of sunlight on the table for a while, and the cracked black patty looked and smelled like a charcoal briquette. I took a swig of flat, lukewarm beer to wash down the regrettable last bits of bun.
“Yeah, I think I will,” I said.
Despite that underwhelming meal at the beer garden, it was a good time to be a gourmand in New York. “You are what you eat” might be the universal food motto of all time, but in today’s metropolitan food meccas, the old adage might be better put, “What you don’t eat will come to define your limitations in character.” In the midst of a national foodie renaissance, especially in New York, not eating anything, by principle, was simply not cool. Even friends of mine who are vegetarians are routinely pooh-poohed by the cultured and elite. And vegans? They might as well wither and die. But not eating out in New York? That was like not seeing the sea lions at the Central Park Zoo, or not not drinking the tap water in Mexico.
Even as I described the plan to Erin and Sergio that day, I felt a creeping trepidation about how my blog would be received by those who were not my friends. I braced myself for severe backlash; the concept would seem sacrilege to many. For shame, people would shake their heads and say. In this town,
you could eat a bagel or bialy with lox for breakfast, a stuffed dosa from that amazing street cart for lunch, bistro steak frites for dinner, and for late-night eats, a steaming bowl of ramen or a mean slice of real New York pizza, all within the radius of a few blocks. The world is our oyster bar, so let’s start slurping it up.
So awesome and plentiful is restaurant, takeout, and street-stand food here that New Yorkers eat it for almost every meal. I certainly did, at first. For those first two years or so living in the city, my head was very much in the game; my budget, on the other hand, was not up to speed. Any financial expert will tell you that your twenties are the best years of your life ... to save. I wasn’t a fluid spender, at least compared to some people I knew, but I simply wasn’t saving up, either. I was living pretty much from paycheck to paycheck, what with paying rent, utilities, transportation, weekday lunches, a lot of takeout and casual restaurant dinners, afternoon brunches on the weekends, and the occasional splurge at a nice, new restaurant. I was fond of seeing music gigs and movies, and grabbing happy hours, too. Saving was not the first of my priorities when I began working and living in New York City, obviously. It’s no wonder that people of my generation have coined terms such as quarterlife crisis (dealing with insurmountable debt, among other things) or the boomerang effect (when college graduates move back in with their parents).
Something had to give, I resolved. But I was already living with two roommates at this time, in a cheap apartment in the outer borough of Brooklyn. How many other corners could I possibly cut? Set aside sustainable food and eating with a conscience for a moment: My eating-out lifestyle was not sustainable—with my income, that is. I was going to have to separate some of the needs from the wants. Buying food that’s already prepared is a want, even if buying food itself is definitely a need, I reasoned. Since I was beginning to get bored and disillusioned with many of the restaurant meals I was eating (for example, the beer garden burgers), and because I felt a creative urge drawing me into the kitchen more and more often, I decided that the prepared food-or eating out—was the one habit I’d try to kick. But what was going to motivate me to rush through a frenetic grocery store, drag back ingredients to my apartment, and cook up enough food to feed myself, twenty-four/ seven?