Medium Raw

If there’s a new and lasting credo from the Big Shakeout, it’s this: People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit. The new financial imperatives—accompanied, perhaps, by some small sense that ostentatiously throwing a lot of money around unnecessarily might not be cool right now—dovetailed perfectly with the rising hipness of the more casual Momofuku and L’Atelier fine-dining models (which had been around for some time), as well as other, more mysterious forces, long simmering under the surface and just now bubbling to the top to be acknowledged and identified. Wiser heads saw this shift as presenting opportunities.

A lot of restaurants closed. And, as always, a lot of restaurants opened to take their places. Industry boosters will point to those aggregate numbers as a means of minimizing the severity of what happened. But who among them will survive? Who will still be standing a year from now? Two?

In the middle of the worst period of crisis, when everyone was predicting the End of Opulence, Chris Cannon and Michael White bravely opened up the very opulent Marea on Central Park South. True, the room is ultra-swank. The prices for the food—which unapologetically courts (and deserves) four stars—are expensive. But what’s interesting is the wine list. It’s cheap. Or, shall we say, unusually focused on moderately priced, lesser known boutique wines and cult wines of Italy. You pay a lot of money for dinner at Marea—but, significantly, you do not get gouged on wine. In fact, if anything, you are gently steered toward more sensible choices.

As the prices of raw ingredient continued to rise—and pressure on customers tightened—chefs were caught in the middle. Even traditional “must-have” dishes like salmon and sirloin steak were becoming so expensive to serve that many couldn’t make money on them. And customers still wanted organic and sustainable—yet affordable at the same time.

David Chang suggested a way forward in an article in Esquire, predicting an inevitable move toward an entirely new expectation of the ratio between protein and vegetables or starch on plates of the future—more along the lines of the Asian model. A concentration on not only “lesser” cuts of meat, like neck, shoulder, and shank—but a lot less meat altogether. A future scenario where meat and bone would be used more as flavoring agents than as the main event, Chang proposed, would not necessarily be a bad thing. That would be more affordable, and would force chefs to be more creative and less reliant on overkill, on bulk, to make their point—and it would be better for a population increasingly at risk of growing morbidly obese.

Hard times, he seemed to be saying, might actually help push us in a direction we were already coming to think we wanted to go—or that we should be going but hadn’t yet actually gotten around to.

Belt-tightening implies a bad thing. But it also means you’re getting thinner.

Serendipitously enough, many chefs have been wanting to go in that direction for decades. They’d never loved selling salmon or halibut or snapper anyway—because they were boring. They’d always liked smaller, bonier, oilier fishes, for instance, not because they were cheaper but because they believed them to be good. Now, perhaps, was the time to strike. For every chef struggling to convince their restaurant’s owner to put mackerel or (God forbid) bluefish on the menu, now they had a very compelling, even unassailable argument: we just can’t afford to sell salmon. So, indeed, there was light, maybe, in the darkness.

If ever a time called for braised beef shoulder or round or flank steak—this was it.

Something else was happening, too. As young investment bankers moved from the banquette to the unemployment line, they were being replaced by a whole new breed of diner. Jonathan Gold, who’s right about everything (except the virtues of Oki Dog), said in an LA Times roundup of 2009 that there were “more high profile LA area restaurant openings in the last year or so than we saw in the previous five,” but “something truly new was going on that may fundamentally change the way we look at restaurants” (italics mine).

“While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock ’n’ roll—individual, fierce and intensely political.” He points to the Kogi truck, which broadcasts its location on Twitter, and similar mobile operations, the advent of “pop-up” restaurants, and the general “hipness” now associated with street food, ethnic, “authentic,” or “extreme.” For a young man with indie aspirations and a modest disposable income, there is now a certain cachet involved in hunting down a shoebox-size Uiger noodle shop in the cellar of a Chinese mall in Flushing.