Your Taste Really Is In Your Mouth

I am late to this review, but it's a masterpiece. https://t.co/BfabbpCdHd

— Alan Blinder (@alanblinder) August 22, 2019

No, it isn't.  Really.

Taste, especially in food, is so painfully subjective it's not even funny.  Foods I devoured as a child I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole now.  Foods I love and crave I wouldn't recommend to anyone else, not even my wife or my daughter.  I love candy corn and "autumn mix" especially (candy corn, "indian" corn (they used to call it; now it's "Fall festival corn" or something), and thick, two-bite pumpkins. If I ever follow part of the family tree and develop diabetes, these will be why.  On the other hand, I barely dine in restaurants anymore.  I can hardly finish a fast-food meal (and not because it tastes like cardboard the colder it gets).  Restaurant plates tend to be huge, enough to feed a family of four, and often contain only one entree or include a side of vegetables more suited to serve the whole table.  I just can't choke it down like I used to.  It's not that I'm a much skinnier and healthier version of myself before I learned to dine out at every opportunity; it's that I just can't eat that much.

And what I do like,  as I say, I can't recommend to you.  There's a chain of Tex-Mex restaurants now spreading across the country like a weed (Wikipedia tells me they have 100+ locations, so not quite as ubiquitous as Cheesecake Factory).  It is still my favorite Tex-Mex food.  Once upon a time I liked really hole-in-the-wall Tex Mex, extremely local stuff, the way I still like my barbecue (that's another story entirely).  But now may favorite is distinctly white and inclusive of Tex-Mex specialties like cheese enchiladas with chili (meat) sauce, as well as excessive use of Hatch green peppers in other dishes.  But I love it because I've been dining there (one place or another) for over 30 years, and because for 5 years I wasn't in Texas and couldn't get good Tex-Mex to save my soul.  That's also when I realized I was an addict for the stuff, so even my subjective responses are subject to suspicion.  I just can't help myself.

I like French food, too.  Not the classic cuisines of the '50's, when "French" meant heavy cream sauces on everything.  No, the bistro fare; the stuff Jacques Pepin can knock out in 15 minutes (not me!).  I like Italian (again, not just Bolognese on pasta, or cheese and pepperoni on a round crust).  I've learned to look beyond bland "Chinese" food to Asian food, and even Indian (Asian, again) cuisines.  But I like them because I like them.  Constructing a standard by which to measure and assess them is a rigor too far for me.

For most reviewers, too, I suspect.  The review of Cheesecake Factory (which I would never have heard of but for my mis-spent days watching re-runs of "The Big Bang Theory") is a case in point.  First, like most reviews, it isn't about the quality of the restaurants food offerings, but the content.  Movie reviews uniformly (away from those, I assume in the NYT or The New Yorker) detail the plot of the story.  They seldom have anything to say about whether the story fulfills the audience expectations for a drama, a comedy, a tragedy, etc.  No, it's all about whether or not the story is interesting.  So this restaurant review is all about whether or not the food is interesting.

It isn't.

"Tex-Mex eggrolls," we are told, are "essentially a chicken fajita stuffed into a crunchy fried shell,", and by the way, "are a stroke of genius."  Thanks, we thought so, too.  We call them flautas.  I get them on the regular at my favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, mostly because they are lighter and just as tasty as my usual choice (cheese enchiladas or, if I'm really hungry, blue-corn tortillas stacked with chicken, cheese, green chili sauce, and topped with a fried egg).  I mean, honestly, can you write about food items on a menu and be this clueless about them?  And what do these "egg rolls" taste like?  Dunno, but later on we learn from overhearing a waiter at another table that they don't have any egg in them, so that helps!  (I would be glad to rhapsodize on the difference between blue corn tortillas and yellow corn ones, and the virtues to Tex-Mex chili sauce as well as green chili sauces, and what a properly fried egg does for a Tex-Mex dish, if you like.)

The review talks glowingly of the dishes CF has "reinvented," but they've done no such thing.  Is it "American" to do so?  Well, like mac and cheese is, I guess.  There are very good variants on mac 'n' cheese (Houston had a small restaurant that sold nothing but.  I don't know if it's still around, it's not near enough to me to bother with.  I make my variations at home, where nobody ever says one of them is a "stroke of genius."  Poor me.), but so what?  There are good variants on hamburgers, but at the end of the day it's just a hamburger.  Tex-Mex is pretty much a regional (v. Cal-Mex, or other regions) variant of Mexican cuisine.  There's a fine "real" Mexican restaurant in Austin with the best mole sauce I've ever had.  I wish I could eat there every time I'm in Austin.  But Tex-Mex is my first love, and always will be.  Is that "American"?  Yeah, but not because they changed the wrapper on the flautas from tortillas to egg roll wrappers (themselves an American Chinese variant on spring rolls, which are far superior, especially at a good Vietnamese noodle shop).

I used to read a local reviewer of Texas foods and restaurants who knew his stuff, especially about steaks.  He was learned in the ways of preparing steak, including aging the beef, and presenting it, and so could tell you what you should expect if you put down your good dollars at a steak house for a fine meal.  To me it was a bit like reading about fine wine:  no doubt the connoisseur can distinguish good from bad, and the Lovely Wife tells me from experience that the right wine with the courses of a meal is a revelation (she had a the opportunity to learn this that I didn't).  I don't doubt it for a moment, and would love the chance to learn it first-hand.  But if I don't know how food should be prepared (from steak to quiche to guacamole; there are good ways to do it, and many, many bad ways), how am I to judge it?  Because I like it?  Hell, I used to like Space Food Sticks and Fresca!  Now I like particular types of coffees from a very particular roaster, but that's again, like my Tex-Mex weakness, the product of drinking that roaster's coffees for decades now.  I like it because I'm used to it because I like it.  If I were to tell you what is good about it, I should be able to do so based on some objective criteria, like how beans are and should be roasted, how they should be ground and then brewed (I like what I do; what is that to you?).   I can't do any of that; so who am I to "review" coffee roasters?  (I did find one in a small town near here that blew my socks off.  I'm desperate to get back up there and buy a pound or two of what they roast, right there in the store/coffee shop.)

I hear "foodies" on the local NPR program occasionally talk about local restaurants, but it's all about places that make them sound "kewl", and nothing whatsoever about the food and how it is, or should be, prepared.  I actually went to one of the "hottest" restaurants in Houston (before it closed), and found it to be an experience akin to attending an exhibit at an art school:  there was far more discussion, on the walls of the restaurant and in the menu, about the concept of food and dining, than there was food on the plate or even on the palate.  The menu offered that dining was mean to be "family style," with a party ordering several plates and sharing them, something my family never did.  Sure, we had a groaning table for the Thanksgiving meal when all 21 of us sat to the meal, and the dessert table was a garden of earthly temptations (mostly pie), but nobody "shared."  We piled our own plate and chowed down.  The restaurant's aim was pure marketing:  plates were expensive, portions were tiny, and you needed three or four to make up a full meal.  Even then, you were meant to eat more the idea of the food than the food (just as art schools tend to teach the idea of art, rather than making art).  I wasn't surprised to find it had closed.  I wasn't disturbed, either.

I stick to my Tex-Mex and the restaurants around me (Vietnamese, Chinese, barbecue, hamburgers, salads, Mexican so authentic the staff doesn't speak English, etc.  Quiche I make myself; no restaurant makes a quiche worth eating, in my experience.  YMMV, of course.).  And while I'm close also to a Cheesecake Factory, I'm pretty sure I'm never going any nearer to it than I've been in the past.

So maybe that review wasn't a total waste of time, after all.