Medium Raw

There’s been no sign since, by the way, that Ducasse has gotten much smarter. Other than having the wisdom to close ADNY. After initial reviews of a new “brasserie” concept were negative, he suggested publicly that New Yorkers were unfamiliar with this kind of food and that it was up to critics to educate them to the complexities of exotica like blanquette de veau and choucroute. Which came as news, I’m sure, to the many, many distinguished French chefs who’d been doing exactly that—to great acclaim—for decades.

For being an arrogant fuckwit who nearly ruined it for all of us, Alain Ducasse is a villain.

Terrance Drennan is a hero because, back in the Stone Age, he was the only guy around who loved cheese enough to lose money on it. For years. Brennan, the chef/owner of Picholine and Artisanal in New York City, was the first American chef to get really serious about the French-style cheese course. It’s not like anybody was asking. It wasn’t like there’d been a popular outcry for soft, runny, prohibitively expensive cheeses with which few Americans were familiar—and even fewer inclined to ever like. Even today, mention “stinky cheese” and relatively few are they who will respond positively.

Sure, heroic cheesemongers like Robert Kaufelt at Murray’s Cheese Shop had been making a good living selling an impressive variety of the world’s great cheeses for ages. But making a go of cheese in a restaurant situation was a very different matter.

Back in the day, the cheese board was, at restaurants of a certain type, an obligatory exercise at best. At the kind of fine-dining Frog ponds where the waiters spoke with French or Italian accents, and the crystal and linens were of good quality, the flowers freshly cut, the menu French or “continental,” cheese was something you offered because that was the sort of thing your customers expected. They’d been to Europe—many times. They knew that after the main courses, cheese is offered. Nobody actually ordered the shit. And had they tried, they would often find a perfunctory display of usual suspects: unripe (or too ripe) Brie, maybe a Camembert (usually in even worse shape), a sad disk of undistinguished chèvre, something hard and vaguely Swiss—and a lonely and unloved wedge of something blue. Probably the same Roquefort used elsewhere on the menu. In fact, the key to offering a cheese course and getting away with it was to make sure that everything on the cheeseboard was used elsewhere on the menu.

Cheese is expensive. Very expensive. And perishable. And delicate. Properly aged, stored, served, and handled cheese is even more expensive. Every time you cut into an intact cheese, its time on this earth becomes limited. Every time you pull one out of the special refrigerated cave it lives in, you are killing it slowly. Every time you return it, partially served, back to the refrigerator, you are also killing it. Whichever employee is serving your cheese? Every uneven cut, every pilfered slice or smear can pretty much end any possibility of a return on your investment. In fact, to properly serve a reasonably excellent selection of cheeses—always at their peak ripenesses and at proper temperatures—one almost must accept the imperative of throwing a lot of it out sooner or later, or find a way to use it elsewhere. And the more varieties of cheese you offer, the less likely you will be able to merchandise all of the remnants as ingenious appetizers.

It is very rare, even in the best of circumstances, that a customer will order a separate cheese course—prior to and distinct from—dessert. The arrival of cheeses on a cart tableside presents a potentially awkward situation for a large party: should we wait for the asshole here—who insisted on ordering a few reeking blues and some port—or should we just go ahead and order desserts?

So, cheese is not exactly a “loss leader”—meaning, an expensive or cumbersome item that does not in itself make money but which somehow inspires others to order things that will make money. If people do decide to have cheese as a dessert course, there’s no way you’re making more money on a nicely aged Stilton than you would be had everybody simply ordered crème brûlée or ice cream, which cost much less to produce.

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese. And that’s a very dangerous thing to be in the restaurant business. One of the great suicidal expressions has always been “educate the customer.” You hear that kind of talk from your business partner, it’s usually way too late to roll your eyes at the ceiling and plead for sanity.