Food: A Love Story (28 page)

NON-ROYAL TREATMENT

Of course, most of my eating-outside-the-home experiences are not at fancy restaurants. I’m normally in a hurry to eat or else on the road somewhere, so usually I end up in a place where it’s less of an elegant adventure and more of a transaction. I’m just buying my food and sitting down and eating it. Sometimes I’m even standing up and eating it.

Homestyle

Sometimes after a show there’s nothing open except the place across from my hotel that offers homestyle cooking. I never really understood the appeal. When I go out to dinner, I want restaurant-style cooking. When I hear
homestyle
, I always think of some guy in his underwear standing next to a microwave. “You want me to nuke a hot dog for ya? I got some old Chinese in the fridge, but I think it’s my roommate’s.”

Dining Al Fresco

When people find out I live near Little Italy in New York City, they will often say, “Little Italy? You must eat well.” I never understood that logic. It’s not like they are giving the food away. Sadly, most of the food in Little Italy is not even the best Italian food, and most of the restaurants are tourist traps not even run by Italians. To maintain the illusion of authenticity, many of these not-really-Italian restaurants have quaint little outdoor seating sections on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant’s entrance. When the Italian-looking Albanian waiter asks you if you would rather be seated indoors or dine “al fresco”—literally, “in the fresh” (air)—like it’s some alluring vacation destination, you gladly choose the latter. After all, when pretending to be in Rome, do as the pretending-to-be-Romans do. Once you are seated, you quickly realize that “al fresco” in New York actually means, “Eating outside while you watch two drunk guys from Long Island yell at each other as a homeless man rummages through a garbage can.”

Diners

There are different types of diners, but generally they all embrace the simple approach to mediocre food. There seems to be an almost deliberate lack of creativity. Don’t get me wrong. I love diners. I love the booths, the subpar coffee, and the laminated menus that feel more like a catalog of every dish ever conceived of by humans. I usually want to ask, “To save time, can you just tell me the food you
don’t
serve here?” The diner menu’s description of food items is so hyperbolic that it borders on sarcasm: “World’s ‘Greatest’ Tuna Melt.” I especially love the diners that decorate their walls with actor headshots.
“Wow, look at all these people I’ve never heard of who have eaten this mediocre food.”

Truck Stops

(See “Diners,” but add in mud flaps and showers.)

Food Trucks

The chuck wagon of today, the food truck always looks to me as if it wandered away and got lost from the rest of the caravan. “I’ve been separated from my group. I’m selling coffee to raise money to help me find them.” I don’t really understand the appeal of a food truck. It is a truck, right? Are we supposed to be eating stuff served out of trucks? If they give you food poisoning, they have the ability to flee the scene quickly. I call them poison-and-run trucks.

On
Portlandia
, my character worked in a food truck.

Street Fairs

In order to increase traffic and block the entrance to perfectly good restaurants during the summer, most large American cities have street fairs. Suddenly food that is normally eaten only by drunk people is being sold in broad daylight, and sober folk are lining up to pay too much for it. I like to think of street fairs as stationary parades that are pretty insensitive to the homeless. “Sorry you have to live on the street, but we’re having a PARTY!!! Can you move your box/house/bed thing? Thanks.”

The Barbecue

There are other times when you leave your home to eat and you are not actually paying for your food. I’m not talking about a fancy dinner party or a casual meal at a friend’s house. I’m talking about being invited to a barbecue. This gathering is a popular tradition in the summer months. You do not even have to know the host that well to be invited. As soon as it gets warm out, everyone suddenly has an uncontrollable desire to break out the grill and invite all their friends and friend’s friends over for an obnoxious amount of food in their backyard. People are usually expected to bring something to the barbecue. As a result of this disorganized assignment, there are never enough buns, and an inordinate amount of disgusting, mayonnaise-based salads complete with their own clouds of flies. I know people love an outdoor barbecue, but to me it just means “Let’s make the food more accessible to insects.” I mean, I enjoy the wind blowing a plate of potato salad onto my shirt as much as the next guy, but whenever I am at an outdoor
barbecue, I always think,
This would be so much better if it were indoors.
I realize I’m a man and I should love outdoor grilling, but eating, cooking, or even being outdoors just feels counterintuitive to me. There’s just too much standing.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The term “ethnic food” is relative, of course. Germans don’t think of German food as ethnic. I guess
ethnic
is code for exotic or unfamiliar food. I grew up in a small town in Indiana where my father’s favorite ethnic restaurant was a place called Giovanni’s that sold exotic dishes like spaghetti and chicken parmesan. I was raised on Wonder Bread, which is probably the whitest of the white breads. Frankly, I’m not even sure if Wonder Bread is bread. I don’t think bread is supposed to catch on fire or be used to remove makeup. Anyway, my point is, I grew up thinking most food was ethnic food.

Asian Food

Asian food, or as 60 percent of the Earth’s population refers to it, “homestyle cooking,” is exotic, diverse, and amazing to me. Understandably, there are innumerable varieties and styles covering the enormous and culturally varied continent that is Asia. Having only a couple of paragraphs dedicated to Asian
food is a little obnoxious, but then again, this book is titled
Food: A Love Story.
Not
Food: An Anthology.
Here’s what I love about Asian food.

Thai

The best Asian food is undeniably Thai food. Congratulations, Thailand. I’m sure as a country you were waiting to learn what an out-of-shape pale guy from the other side of the planet thought of your food. I think Buddha was so peaceful and fat because of the Thai food. There are almost too many good dishes coming from Thailand. Pad Thai, Massaman Curry, and tons of other stuff I only know as numbers on a menu all come from Thailand. The Thai even figured out a way to make string beans delicious. The Thai combination of sweet, sour, hot, and spicy is incredible, really. I would be so fat if I lived in Thailand or near a Thai restaurant. Oh wait, I do. Well, at least now I know why I’m so fat.

Indian

I entirely agree with the Hindus in their belief that cows are sacred, yet for some reason beef is rarely an ingredient in Indian food. Thank God I’m not Hindu. Beyond a doubt, Indian food is the best non-beef food on the planet, which I feel is almost an impossible task. Indian food is either on the edge of too spicy or lethally hot. It’s no wonder that Indian food also boasts the most delicious variety of breads offered at a single meal. We all know eating tons of different types of bread is the best way to effectively eat super-hot food. I’m a fan of any culture that is brilliant enough to justify this kind of bread eating.

Korean

I’m normally not a fan of restaurants where they ask me to do the cooking. I view fajitas as the IKEA of Mexican food. “Oh you want me to put my taco together myself? Um, okay.” That being said, I’m a huge fan of Korean barbecue. It’s like a self-serve Benihana where for some reason they don’t allow me to toss knives.

Chinese

Given that the Chinese restaurant near my hometown growing up had a Chicago Bears poster hanging in it and no employees of Chinese descent, I like to think of myself as a Chinese food expert. Supposedly, eating Chinese food means you’ll be hungry in an hour. This is a ridiculous statement, because after eating any food I’m hungry in an hour.

My family and I live near Chinatown in New York City. Like most Chinatowns throughout North America, there are live seafood tanks in the windows of many of the restaurants. Often I look at the windows filled with crabs and lobsters swimming in murky water and think,
Do you want us to come in there, or are these sea monsters protecting your establishment? Cause I ascared.
I eat a lot of Chinese food. One of the many things I admire about the Chinese is that not only will they eat anything, but they have an uncanny ability to make seemingly disgusting things taste good. The best example of this would have to be oxtail soup. This doesn’t sound that appetizing. “Hey, you know how you’d never eat an ox? Well, how about the tail? Yeah, the thing it swats flies away from its butt with. Well, what if we put that in a murky soup, where you wouldn’t be able to tell what was in it but you’d know there was a tail in there? Sounds good, huh?”

I know what I’m getting.

Chinese food is the most deliverable of all ethnic foods. Sometimes when I order Chinese delivery, it comes
too
quickly. I’ve been on the phone ordering from our local Chinese restaurant and the food has arrived while I was ordering, “Yeah, I’d like to order the General T … 
DING-DONG
 … oh, it’s here already. How’d you know I even wanted … ?” Chinese food seems to be the fastest to prepare but the slowest to eat. I prefer the Chinese restaurants that have the silverware on the table when you arrive, because there’s nothing more humiliating than starting with chopsticks and having to turn to the waiter and being like, “Uh, yeah, hi, uh, I’m too white. Do you have a shovel back there?” Chopsticks are fun, but I’d rather eat than play Operation. I always found it interesting that in China they use chopsticks, but in Russia they use forks. Does it change at the border? Or are there some border towns where it’s mixed? I imagine the different groups don’t get along. “I won’t eat with those fork users!” I could see a real Romeo and Juliet story coming out of one of those fork-chopstick border towns.