FOOD IS NOT FUNNY FOOD SHOULD NOT BE FUNNY FOOD IS NOT FUNNY!

It’s important, every May, to take stock of the year that has gone by. Seasons of life come and go with the wind. This time last year, the bane of my existence was a sandwich.

^Wayne Thiebaud, Sandwich, 1963

This was a sandwich that I could not get off the menu at the restaurant I was working at. Actually, it was a bar I guess—I was discouraged from using the word restaurant, which was confusing because I was the chef of the kitchen there and therefore in charge of the food program. But I was mostly used to the contradictions of food work in general, the strange checks and balances. To be a chef at all, you sort of have to choose your battles and accept that you can be creative at home if you can’t always be at work. The job is also a lot of math, which is whatever, time management, and computer time. In work meetings, I always like to say “At the end of the day, it’s about the bottom line!!!”

Anyway, I really was not into this sandwich. It was a baloney sandwich reminiscent of the kind that the bar’s owner grew up eating. It wasn’t that it didn’t taste good, because it did. Satisfying next to a beer, with a toothpick and olive holding it together. It’s concept was described to me as a ‘cartoon sandwich’. Stacked gem lettuce face up, a silly little tower. I tried to price this sandwich at below $10, but it’s now priced at $13. It was yummy, but something about what its presence implied irked me. When guests asked about it, servers were told to respond as if the sandwich was sort of a joke, and that despite its silliness, it was good.

I tried and tried to get the sandwich off the menu, but it simply didn’t budge. It became clear that the sandwich’s reign would outlast my own.

Why? Well. I did not want to make food that was trying to be funny.

Why not?

A lot of work actually went into making that sandwich. You might be like, ‘really- a sandwich??’ But yes, really, a sandwich. Not only did animals give their bodies for it (cheese and mortadella, after all!), but it took time to assemble well and make. I sourced beautiful milkbread, made a cheddar grain mayo and a cornichon butter to soften it all up. I cleaned lettuces every day, catching the baby ladybugs inside the gem cups and putting them to rest in the garbage.

It is really easy to make a bad sandwich. It takes care to make a good one. I made the sandwich not so that it would taste funny, but so that it would taste good. I didn’t make it to taste like a conversation-starter or a goofy childhood memory, I made it to taste good. I did not make it to be a prop. To set it up as one, and price it at $13, felt cheeky at best, wasteful at worst.

I don’t mean to take this all too seriously, haha!

But, it seems, I do take it seriously. It has to be said: it’s a gift to eat a meal. Not everyone always gets to eat something. This isn’t saying the same thing as “finish your entire plate because people out there are starving!”. It is saying, this came from somewhere and someone. Because of that, it means something.

^more Thiebaud, because these paintings calm me down :)

In those times, when the sandwich was ruining my LIFE(!!!!), I tried to reason with myself by having a conversation about nostalgia. As in: was this sandwich just some nostalgia that I couldn’t understand the value of because it was not my own? Maybe I was mad because it was a missed reference, the implications that would validate its existence soaring over my head.

Like this Stitch sandwich stacker game that I played as a kid.

^aaahHhhhhh!!

But I sort of lost the energy to try to locate a 70’s vibe sandwich in cultural context, especially after that owner’s values and my own seemed to grow in profoundly different directions. But last week, when GrubStreet covered this new restaurant Patti Ann’s, I could not help but cycle down the drain of this familiar conversation. And off we go :)

 I haven’t been to Patti Ann’s,

And unlike me, Adam Platt has. Yay!

^Patti Ann’s, photo by Noah Fecks.

Anyway, Patti Ann’s is a new restaurant in Prospect Heights by Greg Baxtrom, who also did Olmsted and Maison Yaki – all Vanderbilt petit staples or, as Time Out calls them, the “prudently slow-burning dynasty”. Lol! Anyway, it’s described as midwestern comfort food and is named after Baxtrom’s mom. Also there’s a bakery attached. Haven’t been there either but tbh would love to go. I am a bread girl.

I haven’t eaten the food so there’s nothing interesting I feel like I can say about the substance of what the Patti Ann’s offerings are. Maybe next time! But I actually think it works that I haven’t been there because we’re talking about style and language here, not necessarily the food itself.

School Vibes!

Is, I guess, the theme of Patti Ann’s. When I look at the menu, what stands out to me are these dishes.

Here with food, we have a classic “upleveling” of midwestern comfort food with fine dining technique. Bread isn’t just itself, but in a basket. We are probably asked to imagine one of these bad boys.

Chips and goop is vague and silly enough for someone to ask ‘what is goop?’ and not be disappointed kind of no matter what. Call me crazy, but I do think the goop thing is interesting when we consider that Brooklyn moms going to Patti Ann’s probably have heard of Goop and maybe even Poog.

The salmon-encrusted saltine cedar plank moment is a long enough dish title to show that there is something to prove. Cooking salmon on cedar is a centuries-old Pacific Northwestern tradition. It is BEAUTIFUL! Photo below from the National Museum of the American Indian.v

To ‘encrust’ (what a word!) salmon with Saltines might taste good! To actively reference Saltines also really changes the vibe of the dish. Which reference, between the cedar planks and the Saltines, provides the humor in the juxtaposition? Which player “uplevels”?

As for bevvies

It’s all about… school. Still. A couple faves here:

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What does it mean that someone would want to create a drinking experience that plays with the idea of school? Perhaps there’s that classic transgression that comes from associating vice with virtue, adult behavior with nostalgic spaces. But wouldn’t then you want these drinks to be called something like ‘Detention’ or reference the shadows under the bleachers or something? Like WTF is the Vice Principal doing with Zirbenz?? That’s my question.

These menus come from the same worlds as the sandwich, aka My Nemesis.

They seem to harken back to a very specific memory for people, somewhere in 70’s suburbia. But with some reassurance that you don’t have to worry – the item is elevated, not the one you actually remember. The baloney is mortadella, but we’ll call it baloney. The goop is aioli. The silhouette of the object itself is built for some vague recognition, but there’s a clear refusal to fill it in with the original substance. The evidence at the avoidance comes down price, which *as a chef* I can tell you typically starts out as 30% of what it takes to buy the dish’s ingredients themselves. Then it becomes what you think people might be down to pay. The basket becomes $12, the baloney sandwich $13, and you’re sipping on an Umeboshi Parent Teacher Conference wondering how it all happened.

I always cringe at the word ‘elevated’ when we use it to talk about food.

Elevated literally means ‘situated or placed higher than the surrounding area’. Here we have these objects seemingly lifted from the midwestern past and placed somewhere new, here in Brooklyn, as both souvenirs and – it seems – punchlines. It’s hard to imagine a mortadella baloney sandwich or cheeky artisinal goop really hitting the same, with the same descriptions, in the rural Midwest. The jokes would perhaps… not land.

The reason that I don’t think restaurants should be funny is because the context they’re operating in is exactly the same business structure as anything else. The restaurant may be school-themed, and that may feel silly and absurd, but it still operates on margins and human labor. If the restaurant is a schoolhouse and an adult is now a kid, what is a server? What’s a chef? The more you realize that the labor is being replaced by the hilarity of fantasy, the less funny it all feels.

Dirt and Worms, after all

Before you get sad, if you were going to, I’ll tell you what I think IS possible and wonderful with food and conceptualizing these spaces. It IS possible for food to engage with childhood, I think, in mess and play. Though I don’t think it should be funny, it can be fun and messy and unselfconscious. It actually should be engaged with that way, because if you think about it, childhood is sort of the last time that a person is allowed to be deeply earnest and well-fed. Being a kid allows for play, but not irony. Silly joy, but not tongue-in-cheek humor about the treat itself.

To put a better taste in my mouth, I think about one of my all-time favorite desserts: Dirt and Worms. Literally… delish! Not elevated, not even close. In fact, as grounded as you can get. Straight from the earth.