If you are from the South and I were a betting man, I'd bet that you claim that your mother's specialty dish, the dish she'd prepare for dignitaries, is the best of its kind. I claim that my mom makes the best fried chicken. I've eaten a lot of fried chicken, really good fried chicken, and I've yet to eat better. She doesn't do anything out of the ordinary, except remove the skin. It has never occurred to her to brine the chicken overnight, say.
As a newlywed, my mom didn't know a fork from a spoon, and the spork wasn't even on the drawing board. My paternal grandmother intervened after one too many of her son's grumblings of "meat loaf every night" during the first year of my parents' marriage. After my grandma's tutelage and close to fifty years of slaving over a hot stove in an effort to feed her husband and kids, my mom can claim mastery of the largely lost art of Southern cooking (Incidentally, my dad, whose efforts in the kitchen I'd characterize as "well-meaning," makes the best catfish.)
My mom set me loose in the kitchen one day when I was nine. I don't remember what she was making, but it smelled good and I wanted to learn how she did it. I remember that one of my first efforts was four exceptionally salty hamburger patties, hardly an auspicious start for a budding gourmand, but a good lesson: add salt carefully. Thirty-five years later, I've got these two pork roasts, larded and spritzed with an Oolong tea/root beer mixture, slow roasting on my smoker. Mom says I should open a restaurant.
To tell the truth, I have contemplated a culinary career. I entertained reveries of cooking for hundreds of hungry customers, all of whom I'd get to know on a first-name basis. I'd create signature dishes so inspired that they'd be the talk of a town that wallows in pride for ranking among the nation's fattest. Not least of all, I basked in the thrill of business ownership, no longer beholden to the big boss man whose chief delight in life seemed to be standing on my neck.
I am happy to say that better sense has largely prevailed. I truly enjoy the art and craft of cooking and entertaining family and friends, but that joy would cease within a week after cooking for too many people with nothing better to do than throw money around like expatriates in 1920's Paris and write haughty Yelp reviews on the spot because the waiter didn't respond to the request for another "marg" quickly enough. And even I, still foolish with money but learning, know that the failure rate for restaurants is abysmal. The likelihood that today's innovative weenie truck, which seemed like a sure bet in the beginning, the one that gets all the good press from the city's tastemakers, will wind up on the playground of an underfunded elementary school tomorrow is too high for me to seek out a small business loan and put my wife through the stress.
Speaking strictly as a consumer, eating out not only isn't as fun as it used to be, but also not very sensible, for too many reasons. You might agree with me that Whataburgers are exemplars of their type. If you do, you might also agree that eating at a Whataburger restaurant and then catching a late movie might rank among the dumbest ideas you've ever hatched. The odds aren't bad that a night of fine dining followed by a movie with lots of fire won't be much fun, either. Children cry at fires, especially loud movie fires, and there's little that's more irritating than a gaggle of smartly-accesorized early-30 somethings posing for pictures around the lamb shank, their drunken capering frozen for eternity. In short, I don't want to cook for these people, and I don't want them around me.
Some of the benighted among us take no small delight in, after an especially fine meal, uttering the phrase, "That'll make a turd!" On the one hand, their numbers are shrinking, thank God. On the other, the membership of the Shitty New Leisure Class, reared by Google, posing around platters of meat is swelling unabated. To be clear: as a food lover (to further clarify, I've got no truck with the too-precious neologism "foodie"), I'm thrilled with many of the developments that attend contemporary food and dining. At the same time, I'm bothered, even disturbed, by many others. I can't help but suspect that Food Network might be the chief culprit.
To be continued at exasperating length.
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