Colin Marshall

Culinary reportage is cultural reportage

I don’t believe in opinion, but I do believe in food. Whatever that means. Hence my decision to join Yelp and incentivize my own writing of, effectively, two- to three-paragraph pieces of gastronomically themed writing. I’ve quite enjoyed getting a handle on this short form, despite never claiming brevity as a strength. Or maybe because of that. I’m with Tyler Cowen when he says, in his Ethnic Dining Guide, "Restaurants manifest the spirit of capitalist multiculturalism. Entrepreneurship, international trade, and cultural exchange all come together in these communal eateries."

Some principles I’ve thought up while crafting my first seven writeups of eateries in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara:

• If a writeup runs over three paragraphs, I’m not making it dense and/or concise enough.
• If a writeup runs under two paragraphs, I didn’t pay enough attention when I ate at the place.
• The food makes up half of what’s important about a restaurant — at most.
• Objective evaluations of food don’t exist — or if they do, who would want them?
• If a writeup has not reached beyond topics of taste, service, decor, and suchlike, that writeup has failed.
• My tastebud chemistry ain’t transferable.
• The words “good,” “bad,” and all synonyms thereof have the same place here as they do in any critical endeavor: none.
• At no point can I consider food separate from other varieties of world cultural product, including but not limited to music, film, literature, and visual art.
• “Authenticity” has neither any particular relevance, nor value, nor even meaning.

I aim to iterate toward making these restaurant writeups interesting enough reading that they can work as blog posts in and of themselves. Here’s my review of Blue Owl in S.B., which users have so far voted “Cool” once and “Funny” once:

This place cleverly hacks Santa Barbara nonsense laws — or at least the particular Santa Barbara nonsense laws that prevent food trucks from parking on streets. Where, y'know, food trucks park. The proprietor sets up her stand outside at 11:30 (more like 11:45 when I went) and uses Zen Yai's kitchen to whip up a few different dishes, including egg-topped fried rice, shrimp sandwiches, "peanut butter burgers," and trip-tip sandwiches with oyster mayo.

These dishes all but force you at gunpoint to eat them — and fast. Those with health concerns, know that they're as good for you as anything so compulsively wolfable isn't. Not to say Blue Owl tries to pull a Jamba Juice; I distinctly recall the promotion pretty naked playing the whole "food for after you've burnt the evening drinking" angle. They serve dishes in the Roy Choi tradition, meaning they taste apocalyptically buttery even when/if they don't actually contain butter. Not that they could fool anybody — I mean, even decadent ancient Rome couldn't dream of peanut butter burgers.

People told me Blue Owl operates firmly on the take-your-shite-and-leave business model, but the woman in charge offered us a seat at one of Zen Yai's tables without hesitation. Plates, utensils, and water, too. We had ourselves a mini-restaurant going. I still feel like I'm languishing in the provinces when I eat food-truck food in a brick-and-mortar because of the quaintness fetishists around here — remember when the Kogi truck came to town and we all waited in line for hours? -- but this stuff oughta hold me for the months before I move down to Babylon.

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The coffee conversion

I remember this commercial from years and years ago where a thirtysomething woman, on her way to a thirtysomething woman-type social function, rehearses her refusals of coffee. Even as she rides the elevator, you hear her thoughts in voiceover: “No coffee, thanks!” “Nope, tea drinker!” Every time I saw it, I felt an overwhelming wave of contempt for this character. Without knowing exactly why, I just couldn’t stand the idea of someone habitually refusing one thing after labeling themselves dedicated to another. But here’s the thing: I was a coffee-refusing tea drinker!

Still, a lot of youngsters don’t drink coffee. It heads the standard list of “acquired tastes,” though it does so in the company of my favorite things in life: cigars, natto, Steely Dan. I just happened not to acquire the taste for coffee until, uh, 26. But “taste” doesn’t quite capture my meaning, in that it implies I actively disliked coffee before. I didn’t; going down to the neighborhood coffee roasters, sitting on the bags of beans, and smelling the air remains one my favorite early-childhood memories. I mean “taste” as in “Now that bear has a taste for human blood; we’ve got to kill it.” I just hadn’t activated my desire for coffee yet.

I did this deliberately, because coffee people had always bothered me. Surely you know who I mean by “coffee people.” Under that large umbrella stand not just the obsessive types drilling down to one particular preferred bean, one particular preferred grinding method, one particular brewing method, and one particular serving method — it didn’t help that I grew up around Seattle — but the ones engaged in what I saw as a truly ugly pissing contest:

“Aw, yeah. I take it black. Always black.”

“Oh man, you drink this stuff? This stuff is so sweet!”

“This ain’t coffee, this is a candy bar, is what you’re drinking.”

I sensed a certain disdainful masochism in dedicated coffee drinkers. These people seemed to look down their noses not just at drinkers of supposedly inferior beans, but drinkers who would dare to supplement their coffee with absolutely anything other than coffee: milk, sugar, guava syrup, whatever. Are they running a race to the bottom of the taste scale, I wondered? Where does it end? Will they profess undivided enthusiasm for coffee that tastes like ditch water? Urine? Liquid-Plumr? Why?

So I faced the humiliating Scylla of becoming a sour-puss “tea drinker” and the equally unpleasant Charybdis of becoming a coffee fetishist. For a long time, I settled on the former in deed if not in word, neglecting to overturn my mug at the diner and resigning myself to defeated bags of Lipton — where available. Those of you elsewhere in the Anglosphere may not realize this, but as much as the American tea situation has come along in recent years, it still kind of sucks. Traveling to New Zealand and certain parts of Canada, I found that the environment around me seemed ever ready to provide me with reasonably decent tea; these places knew that, if I wanted a beverage, I probably wanted that. For whatever reason, this particular English colony never caught on to the whole tea thing. Here, expecting tea makes you look like a weenie (or a thirtysomething woman mouthing excuses to herself in an elevator in a ad for stirrable tea crystals).

My deep revulsion to identities based on aesthetic preferences (“But jazz isn’t my thing — punk rock is my thing”) kept me steady in this track until recently. Walking down the street one day, I suddenly knew — just knew — that I could not possibly go on without the biggest cup of iced coffee available. I bought one, chugged it, and now drink coffee, in some form, every single day. Irony of ironies, I only drink it black! I fear that putting milk in my coffee would “rock the boat” somehow, though I continue to put it in my black tea without fail. Because, hey, if I’m going to take up coffee, I’ve got to temper it with at least an equal amount of tea. So the plan now dictates tea in the morning and coffee in the afternoon. Ah, freed from yet another obligation to choose!

PB&J, every damn day

I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that I pop into the studio, interview James Wood or Alain de Botton or Clive James or whomever, and then eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Not just a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich, but perhaps my fifth peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich of the week. Of the many aspects of my life that don’t quite compute together, I tend to fixate on these two. Yet they stand in a sort of of non-causal alignment: I interview luminaries in order to build myself a career that somehow never materializes, and I eat PB&Js to build myself a savings that somehow never materializes.

Do know that I don’t practice absolute PB&J lunch asceticism. Whenever my checking account contains more than a few hundred dollars, my brain decides that I have “lots of money” and I spend freely, going so far as to treat myself to the occasional falafel. But overall, I’ve hewed closer to the PB&J rule than I ever would have expected me to; even the laxest guidelines I set for myself tend to dry up and blow away after a couple months. The mild financial pressures of (a) going to Mexico City soon and (b) moving to L.A. even sooner can probably take the credit for this. So I’m accomplishing the disciplinary mission, even if the actual goal — having some money to show for it — still floats vaguely on the horizon.

Sometimes, while I eat my PB&J — which I do now, as I type this — I remind myself to view my life in its probable entirety. No doubt I’ll eventually call these as “the lean years.” In fact, another luminary I’ve interviewed recently, one who provides me with a model of job-avoidance-as-life, assured me himself that I’ll look back on these days and laugh. Hence my tactic of pre-emptively laughing, aggressive self-deprecation being the apparent final solution (or as final a solution as I can find) to most of my problems. I mean, at least I eat peanut butter and jelly; I remember reading one blogger remember, with what I assume to have been a rueful chuckle, his grad-school stipend that provided just enough of a financial drip feed to keep him in not peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, but peanut butter sandwiches.

But anyway, my MacArthur Fellowship, whenever it comes in, should put an end to all this nonsense. From then on, I’ll eat all kinds of good stuff for lunch: stuff from the Kogi truck, stuff from the grilled cheese truck, stuff from the Ludo truck, stuff from the banh mi truck, stuff from the Bollywood Bites truck, stuff from the Komodo truck, stuff from the Shrimp Pimp truck. Even food not from trucks, I’ll bet. But the committee takes its sweet time, so until they get me my award, you’ll know where to find me: spreading things on bread.

The turkey sandwich lifestyle

For Thanksgiving, Tyler Cowen twote:

The plain truth: Turkey hardly ever tastes good.

That, I have long thought, is this holiday's elephant in the room. You think up recipe ideas for what could be months, prepare for perhaps weeks, spent at least a day actually cooking, and what's it all revolve around? Turkey, quite possibly the least appealing meat commonly eaten in the developed world. Its blandness is well-documented, but I haven't read much about what I consider to be its fundamental sadness.

I don't know about you, but I've never chosen to eat turkey unless all the other available options are truly repulsive. (Vegetables, for example.) Having come to regard the turkey sandwich as a symbol of wan resignation, I cannot fathom the mind that possesses enthusiasm for it. I find few images sadder than that of the sad-sack who, given all of the world's brilliant culinary variety, actively chooses to eat a turkey sandwich. Glumly he pulls the defeated meal from his rumpled brown lunch bag, biting softly in as the smothering clouds of pedestrianism engulf him.

Hence the expression "turkey sandwich lifestyle," which I mainly use in my internal monologue. A turkey sandwich lifestyle is, you might have guessed, the lifestyle equivalent of a turkey sandwich: limp, featureless, willfully bland. I have what might be called a lengthy list of goals, near the top of which sits "don't live a turkey sandwich lifestyle." If you find yourself resigned to turkey, Mistakes Have Been Made.

But turkey's problems, I suppose, constitute the relishable challenge of Thanksgiving. You have the fixed component of your meal: the turkey. Now make it good, if you dare.

A monstrous pairing

Madelaine asked me what I planned to cook this week. The flop sweat began as I desperately thought through the possibilities. As much as I enjoy cooking in the event, I suffer from severe cooker's block: rarely does the idea of what to make come easily. As for intuitively knowing which "side dishes" best combine with which "main dishes" to form "meals," forget about it; I throw myself on the tender mercy of combinatorial randomness and hope for the best.

"Salmon," I blurted. "Wasabi salmon."

"With what?"

Uh oh. "Um... potato cakes."

"What about sweet potato cakes?"

"Sold."

I thus found myself making wasabi salmon and sweet potato cakes last night, the recipes for which follow. The salmon I adapted from an Epicurious page:

3/4 cup wasabi peas
4 8-oz salmon fillets
Two or three limes

Preheat oven to 400°F. Blend wasabi peas in processor. Arrange salmon fillets skin side down on lightly oiled baking sheet. Sprinkle fish with sea salt. Press ground wasabi peas onto tops of salmon fillets to adhere, covering tops completely. Grate lime peel and sprinkle over salmon; drizzle with one tablespoon oil. Roast salmon just until opaque in center, about 10 minutes.

Transfer each salmon fillet to a plates. Serve with lime wedges for self-drizzling of fish.

The sweet potato cakes I made by following pretty much the first Google hit:

1 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1/4 cups mashed cooked sweet potatoes
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups milk
1/4 cup butter, melted

Sift dry ingredients into a mixing bowl. Combine remaining ingredients; add to flour mixture, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened. Drop by tablespoons onto hot greased griddle or skillet and fry, turning once, until browned on both sides. Makes one hell of a lot of pancakes, so watch out.

But how palatable, I sense you dying to ask, was the combination of wasabi salmon and sweet potato? That's not for me to say, though I will admit that I ate so much of the stuff that I rendered myself nearly immobile for the rest of the evening. Res ipsa loquitur. Then again, you're talking to a guy who ate peanut-butter-and-tuna sandwiches for lunch at least once a week throughout middle school.

But deliciousness aside, it seems to me that the product of cooking matters far, far less than does the act of cooking. Permit me to gesture toward the musty old trunk of clichés about journey over destination. While putting this monstrous pairing together, it occurred to me that it probably feels good to cook because cooking is something: it's a sequence of real actions that actually involve stuff in the world and produce tangible results. This recommendation may sound weak — don't a lot of pursuits... "involve stuff?" — but it signifies the physicality, immediacy and clarity lacked by much of what we might spend our time on. I suspect it's no accident that so many people who shuffle figures around Excel sheets all day long turn to the kitchen for their only solace.

Awe-inspiring black bean burgers

On Saturday I synthesized several black bean burger recipes to create what I have reason to believe is the ultimate black bean burger. Behold:

Awe-inspiring black bean burgers for 4n

14n oz black beans, drained
n/2 medium onions, chopped
n/2 cups rolled oats
n tbs chili powder
n eggs
n/4 cups miso
1.5n to 2n heads garlic, roasted
A thing of panko crumbs
4n toasted rolls, preferably onion, but at least not the kind that come in 16-packs

Combine the beans, miso, onion, oats, chili powder and egg in a blender. Pulse into a sorta-coarse (not puréed) mixture. Pour it in a bowl and stir in panko until the mixture reaches a shape-able thickness. Refrigerate.

In the meantime, roast the garlic with a bit of olive oil under 350d heat for 35m. When the garlic is about done, pull the mixture from the refrigerator. Let the garlic cool a bit (unless you have unusually heat-insensitive hands) and peel the individual cloves, then mash them into the mixture with a fork.

Shape the mixture into n burgerlike patties. Cook them in a nonstick skillet preheated to medium. Browning should take a little over 5m per side.

As a garlic fiend, I adhere hard to the 2n-heads side, but your mileage may vary. Some may wish to omit the garlic entirely, which is a sin against god.