No "C" restaurant review just yet though the poll is closed (check back on Wednesday) but I thought I'd share something nonetheless.
Met the sous chef from Chez Colette (ironically, one of the current "C" choices) at a party the other night and we got to talking about food and Philadelphia. He was bemoaning the fact that the trend toward doing weird things with food in weird ways (basically, using the kitchen as a science lab) wasn't succeeding in Philly the way that it was in other culinary hubs (NYC, Chicago San Fran). Frankly, I didn't even know that there were restaurants in Philly trying this -- apparently, the chef at Snackbar tried and failed -- but my argument was that he was talking about international cities with international clientele who were willing to spend spend spend on the latest trend, no matter what it was.
So anyway, he asked me if I thought that Philadelphia would ever be ready to embrace that sort of concept and, in his paraphrased words, become a groundbreaking restaurant city on the front lines of innovation. I thought about it for a second and told him, "I doubt it." Here is why:
Philadelphia has undoubtedly become a much better city for eating out, but our restaurants are good, for the most part, because of the food. It's not so much because of the dining "experience" or the joy of telling our friends, "I just spent $30 for an asparagus spear that was seared at 1500 degrees with a modified blow torch in a pizza oven!" Eating out in the city isn't cheap, but I rarely feel like I've been ripped off because of anything outside of, "The food sucked," which happens. I don't want the chef preparing my food to have a Master's degree in psychics just so he knows that a piece of goose fat with congeal and turn purple when it's exposed to liquid nitrogen for 3 minutes. I want him to know how to cook, and I think most Philadelphians do too.
I see it as no great failure on our part that what works in the big-name restaurant cities does not work here. Good cooking is an art, not a science. And I sucked at science in school (for that matter, I sucked at art too, so why do I like to cook? Hmmm).
That's all I got, in a nutshell.
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1 comment:
Philly is blue collar and we want our food that way, too. We want the hard-working, maybe rough around the edges, chefs who know food in and out because they have been around it all their lives.
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