THENASTYBITS (18 page)

WARNING SIGNS

for the last few
years, I've become increasingly fascinated by a particular chain of London steakhouses (two related chains, actually). Taking up vast chunks of prime real estate on what sometimes seems like every other corner, they appear to be advertisements for What You Don't Want In A Restaurant, a rude, even proud demonstration of How Awful Things Can Be. Steakhouse franchise number one (let's call it The Chuck Wagon) often sits directly across from its sister outfit, steak-house number two (let's call it The Feed Bag), and at eight-thirty on a Saturday night, both of them are defiantly, even extravagantly empty. They are everywhere in central London, inexplicably still open each time I visit, their large, red neon letters reading CH K W GON and EED AG, the view through their large picture windows revealing empty faux crushed velvet booths, ugly flock wallpaper, and a single, abject waiter staring hopelessly into space.

"How do these places stay open?" I always wondered out loud, and as my interest grew into an obsession, a friendly journalist took me to one of them for dinner, allowing me to probe their dark inner workings from close up.

What I found that night was a fascinating working example of nearly all those things you don't want to see when sitting down to dinner in a restaurant, a real-world, life-size museum diorama representing Restaurant Hell, a pavilion of shame where an entire restaurant chain decides to flush money down a hole, night after night, so that we, the casual dining public, can learn the many shades of hideousness, the warning signs of what will surely be bad food—and apply this newfound knowledge elsewhere. The Chuck Wagon exhibited the following classic restaurant crimes for our consideration; all of them can be taken as indicators of Nothing Good Will Come of This.

1)
  
A big, bright chain operation—loudly advertising VALUE.
How good can "cheap" steak be? Especially when the place is completely empty?

2)
  
A big, bright chain operation—directly across from an eerily similar operation.
The place seems to have, at one time, planned for regular arrival of entire herds of spectacularly stupid, undiscriminating diners. That the owners don't bother to replace the dead neon letters on their signs does not bode well for what's inside.

3)
  
Dead-eyed waiters, sitting in empty booths, looking bored, unhappy, and defeated.
This alone is reason to flee. The waiter knows, better than anybody, how bad things are. At my meal, as soon as my journalist pal and I sat down and a photographer took a picture of us from outside, our waiter inquired of our affiliations—and the purpose of the photographer—then immediately made a covert, whispered phone call. (A guilty conscience, and a procedure in place for dealing with too much interest, can never be a good thing.) Accompanying the waiter were a busboy (who apparently doubles as bartender), a dishwasher, and one cook. Now, how can
one
cook make all the food on an absurdly, even dangerously,
huge
menu, one might well ask oneself. And how long has that Duck a l'Orange been kicking around that quiet kitchen, waiting for me to come along?

4)
  
Signs
of
quiet scaling back and cost cutting.
A forlorn dessert cart, half-filled with hardy, not-too-perishable fruit variations (nothing that will oxidize or get too ugly too quickly— probably because it will be used again tomorrow and the next day) sits right by the front door, subtly blocking access to what might once have been an upstairs dining room. What don't they want us to see? Clearly a sign saying "Section Closed" is not enough. It has been deemed necessary to seal off the stairs, preventing even the casual drunken tourist, hunting for the restroom, from stumbling upon whatever hidden horror lurks above.

5)
  
The trick menu.
Wow! It sure
looks
big! But, wait! There may be ten or twelve appetizers—but half of them seem to contain prawns! This strategy allows the lone cook to quickly whip up a variety of no-doubt once-frozen delights from a single box of thawed prawns. And there sure seem to be a lot of deep-fried nuggety, breaded thingies
...
I regard the chicken "Cordon Bleu" with the same suspicion I cast on the prawn nuggets; they very likely originated in the same far-away blast freezer.

6)
  
The telltale "DING!"
of
the microwave.
Is it a coincidence that I heard its woeful tolling just before my limp, watery, gray, and completely uncaramelized duck arrived? I think not.

7)
  
The table tent display offering festive party drinks with umbrellas in them.
I don't know about you, but when I sit down in an empty steakhouse—whether in London or anywhere else in the world—a pifia colada, a grasshopper, or a Singapore sling are
not
the cocktails that leap immediately to mind. Their presence is evidence of a disturbed mind, as if some cargo cult of South Seas natives had found the menu of a fifties-era American diner and after hitting the lottery and moving to the UK, decided to re-create it from memory. "Oh yes! Americans
love
drinks that look like fabric softener—as long as they have cherries and umbrellas in them!"

8)
  
The mixed metaphor.
The shotgun marriage of New Orleans/Chicago/Virginia City Gay Nineties/Cathouse theme with framed prints of the Scottish Highlands seems strangely . . . inappropriate, as does the melange of "California Burger" (even Californians would not recognize this as food), Prawn Cocktail, Duck a L'Orange, Chicken Cordon Bleu, and Steak and Chips. I believe I saw a Hawaiian Burger offered—a warning sign all by itself. How good can they be at
all
of these? Answer? No damn good at all.

9)
The universal garnish.
When the same brown and limp
premixed salad and woefully unripe tomato slice pops up on nearly every plate, it's solid evidence that there is no budding Robuchon in residence.

10)
The "Why Is This Place Really Here?" factor.
Do the math. The place is empty. It's
always
empty. Even if they fill once a day for lunch (which they don't), the place was clearly designed to make money through high volume and turnover—and they
can't
be making enough money to pay the rent, much less electric, wages, gas, and so on. So
how do they stay open?
And
why}
What are they really doing upstairs, past the barrier of decaying desserts? Cockfighting? Craps games? Illegal importation of exotic snakes and birds? Human sacrifice? I can't help but think about this as I listlessly chew a bloodless, flavorless, too-tough steak, without even a sharp steak knife (the secret of every successful steakhouse) to mitigate the miasma of awful-ness.

I urge the reader to patronize, if only once, one of these shining examples of Restaurant Hell. Sit down in one of the oversized booths, breathe deep, suck up the ambiance, peer deep into the waiter's eyes. Take notice of the details. Carefully study the menu, a veritable field manual of the submediocre. Nearly everything you want to avoid in a restaurant is right there for you to see. Just don't order the duck.

MADNESS
IN
CRESCENT
CITY

three o'clock in the
morning and I'm sitting (or am I standing?) with the kitchen crew from Lee Circle Restaurant at Snake and Jake's Christmas Club Lounge, a favorite after-work haunt of the New Orleans chef/cook demi-monde. It's a dark, crumbling, and septic shack where the decor is always Christmas. Colored lights wink through cigarette smoke behind the bar as a very large bottle-blonde in a tight latex bustier pours what must be my sixth or seventh Jagermeister shot and pushes it toward me. This is not my chosen beverage, but Snake and Jake's owner, Tony "Mr. Hospitality" Tocco—who looks like a Fun House-era Stooge—is insistent, eyeballing me through lank, greasy hair, a scowl on his face. It's all about "hospitality" at Snake and Jake's, he assures me for the fifth time. Proof? Naked people drink for free. A few weeks earlier, more than forty of New Orleans' finest culinarians and their enables had shown up at the front door and stripped buck naked. I'm glad I missed that.

In my quest for "authentic local" food in New Orleans, I've managed to completely avoid the French Quarter. No boobs, no beads, no Bourbon Street for me. No cloud of fryer grease, hordes of slow-moving tourists, no eggs Benedict or oysters Bienville in the famous coliseums of Galatoire's, Brennan's, or Commander's Palace. Okay, I did nick into the quarter for a quick dozen oysters at the Acme; and I did call out from my hotel room to the legendary Verdi Mart, where locals can order a

MADNESS
IN
CRESCENT
CITY

quick, late-night delivery of bourbon and cigarettes and the bigger-than-your-head muffuletta sandwiches. But otherwise I've managed to pretty much stay away from the usual suspects. That said, every time locals ask where I've been eating and I tell them, there is disagreement. "Why didn't you try . . ." or "You should try . . ." is pretty much the standard reaction.

But I think I've been doing pretty well. I had a fabulously greasy breakfast at the grim flophouselike Hummingbird Hotel and Grill. I ate sublime sno-cones at the legendary Hansen's Sno-Bliz Sweet Shop, where the ice is shaved on a nearly century-old hand-cranked device, flavored in stages, and heaped in a cup topped with sweetened condensed milk. I had the crawfish pie, pralines, and jambalaya at Tee-Eva's; the "Feed Me" red-sauce-heavy assault at Tony Angello's; the tweaked classics and gumbo variations and best-in-world fried chicken at Jacques-Imo's; and the ham hock with collards and grits at the Harbor. Before arriving to face imminent destruction at Snake and Jake's, I drank local beer and ate red beans and rice and listened to jazz and blues at Vaughn's, an ancient bar in the Ninth Ward, and when the trumpet player took a break between sets to grill rabbit sausage and ribs on an outdoor pickup-truck barbecue, the other customers filling the streets, drinking from "go-cups," I met Tony, grinning evilly under a streetlight. Some of the cooks with me shook their heads. They knew what came next.

Oh, what a wonderful town. Bars are open twenty-four hours. Nearly everyone seems to drink heavily (I'm told that if you mention New Orleans as a residence, you go right to the head of the line at Betty Ford), and at a few bars, like Checkpoint Charlie's, you can wash the blood and hair from last night's misadventures off your clothes in the conveniently located on-premises launderette while you begin new ones out front. Fried batter is a menu item. And everybody, it seems, either cooks, eats seriously, or has opinions about both.