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Stirring the Pot
The History, Dynamics, and Ethics of Luxury Dining
September 19, 2005
By Julie Logue-Riordan, CCP

Clark Wolf and Betty Fussell
On September 19, Clark Wolf moderated a
fascinating discussion on The History, Dynamics and Ethics of Luxury
Dining. The influential panel was made up of Betty Fussell, author and
food historian, Michael Bauer, Executive Food and Wine Editor of the
Chronicle, Harvey Steiner, Editor for Wine Spectator, and Niloufer King,
Asian specialist and anthropologist.
According to Fussell, luxury food began with fire and is as old as
cooking itself. “Because what luxury food does is bring lust and excess
together. It is the big pleasure principle. The moment you have more
than you need for survival or reproduction, you have luxury. The
dictionary says luxury is something desirable in excess of what is
necessary to live.”

Harvey Steiman and Niloufer King
Bauer discussed his article The Magnificent
Seven, about seven Bay Area restaurants which are truly at their
pinnacle. “I thought it would be interesting to look at them
back-to-back within a 3 week period. And I thought to make it a more
even playing field I would just review the tasting menu, matched with
wines. This is the pinnacle of what a restaurant does”. For Bauer, the
common denominator for these 4-star restaurants is innovation, which he
equates with haute couture. These restaurants set the bar and influence
all the other restaurants. For example it is now easy to find pizza with
crème fraiche and smoked salmon on it.
Steiner spoke about luxury as it relates to wine. “When you get past the
necessity, you’re in it for the hedonism and that’s what expensive wines
are all about. Wine is from the ground, it is from the earth, but so is
great sashimi from the ocean; it is a basic food, lifted above the rest
by some sort of brilliance. Because it happens to be in the right place,
nurtured the right way and carefully handled, it is brought up to be
something special. The same thing you do with food you do with wine. The
result is something that gives you tremendous gratification.”

Our Panel at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel
Wolf asked Steiner to talk
about having a super premium wine next to the least expensive wine on
America’s tables. Steiner’s feeling is that it works the same way as
having supermarket chicken or a carefully raised free-range chicken.
“What makes wine expensive is not necessarily that it is very good,
because the cost of making something that is really very good does not
even approach what some of these wines actually cost. It is rarity. It
is PR, marketing, cachet, perceived rarity. If you can convince
everybody that the wine is worth it, then that’s the price it is. It is
rarity or perceived rarity which drives the price of wine up.”

Betty Fussell, Clark Wolf, Harvey Steiman, Niloufer King and Fred Martin
King’s experience with
luxury was an interesting perspective. She grew up in India. Having
spent her childhood in boarding school, food was a constant
preoccupation. “And we saw luxury as a can of baked beans after lights
out.” Luxury food for her parents was what was not customary for them.
“I can remember many party hostesses who had cooks, shopping and cooking
daily the fabulous fresh food we all want now, rushing for the can
opener to open the tin of peaches to honor a guest. Things like Spam
were considered really rather wonderful. So the whole idea of what
luxury and desirability means is determined by culture, history and/or
economics.”
Fussell had an interesting
observation about class in America and that is the democratization of
desire as a result of the influence of television and credit cards. “We
are no longer trying to compete with the Joneses, because thanks to
television we now know what it looks like on the other side and we’re
keeping up with the Gates’. The same thing happens with food. Now with
the credit card you can do it, you can have the $400 meal as a luxury
for yourself and yet it may be commonplace for someone like Bill Gates.”

Jennie Schacht, Shuna Lydon, Lili Rollins, and Weezie Mott
Steiner feels that in our food world, class is determined
by what you know. “It’s how much you learned about the food, whether you
can look at a wine list and talk about where the wine came from or what
score Robert Parker or Wine Spectator gave it. The idea of the food snob
is being the one who thinks he knows more than the next guy is beginning
to fade. I sense that and hope it is true.”
Moving to the ethical side of luxury, Wolf brought up the fact that many
of the high end restaurants are involved in charity work now, and how
ethics influence how we look at higher end dining. The panel felt that
part of the rationale for the charity work is American’s egalitarianism.
Bauer felt that the high-end restaurants were driving the sustainable
foods. Steiner added that this is another reason to be thankful for
Alice Waters. “She is the dynamic force behind the sustainability
movement. Whenever you have, it’s good to be able to share with those
who don’t have. It’s just basic human kindness, isn’t it?”

Betty Fussell and Jeannette Ferrary
Wolf asked Steiner about the resurgence of
table side cooking which until recently had been on the decline. Steiner
pointed out that tableside cooking is what luxury dining was all about
at one point. “When nouvelle cuisine arrived it wasn’t about very little
food on a very large plate, it was about taking the show back to the
kitchen and giving control back to the chef”. According to Steiner that
was a sea change when nouvelle cuisine became luxury as opposed to
having a guy in a tuxedo cook for you.
Here are the panelist opinions as to the future for luxury dining:
Harvey Steiner – “We’re training a lot of good cooks.”
Niloufer King – “Blurring the distinction of Western and Eastern
cuisines.”
Michael Bauer- “Restaurants are incorporating all cuisines; it is not
just a European based model any more”.
Betty Fussell – “There is the double face of globalization. You have
“slow” and local vs. beef transported in from Brazil”.

Julie Logue-Riordan and Clark Wolf

Chef Staffan Terje's hors d'ouevre

Laura Martin Bacon, Maurine Killough, and Patty Barish
Photos courtesy Larry at
A la Carte Digital
Studios
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