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Dough à la Mode
The morality of dinner for two, $200. A defense.

By William Grimes
 

I recently grabbed a quick bite at Bar Masa, in the new Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. The bar has a short menu, so ordering was simple. The waiter proposed a plate of assorted sashimi at $85. I accepted. Sea-eel tempura sounded like a nice way to start off, and corn croquettes, in a Japanese restaurant, seemed weird but interesting. My eye wandered to an Asian-style risotto of lobster and black truffles. Irresistible, so why resist?—although $34 was pushing the upper limit on what was, when you got down to it, a glorified bar menu. The bill for two, with no dessert and no drinks, was about $200.
Spending that kind of money on an abbreviated dinner should have elicited at least a twinge of guilt. Two hundred dollars, for the average American struggling to make do in tough times, is no small thing. I did some soul-searching but found that my only regret was not getting a table next door at Masa, where the owner and chef, Masa Takayama, creates menuless meals of five appetizers and a 15-fish main course. The price is $300 per diner.

In nearly five years of reviewing restaurants for this newspaper, I spent that much, and sometimes more, on dinner. Invariably, the ensuing review, with its heartfelt evocations of foie gras, caviar, Kobe beef, truffles and Champagne, would provoke outrage in a certain class of reader. The letters, and occasionally the voice-mail messages, all expressed the same sentiment: How could you? In a world where millions of children go hungry, where famine haunts broad swaths of Africa and Asia, where the $200 spent on a bottle of Bordeaux could go far to alleviating a destitute family’s misery—how could you?

I wanted to feel guilt. Honestly, I did. But among the many emotions I experienced as a reviewer—happiness, annoyance, amusement, boredom, bliss, rage—guilt never figured. I was more likely to get worked up over the price of parking in a garage than I was at the $150 for a splash of 19th century Madeira or the $50 extra for a sprinkling of white truffles. Parking garages perform a function, but truffles delight the palate, a much higher calling. Unfortunately, in the United States, where even serial killers are considered innocent until proved otherwise, all sorts of harmless pleasures are routinely described as guilty.

May I mount a defense? Most arguments against fine dining as frivolous, excessive and somehow morally wrong rest on one of two propositions, both of them false. The first is utilitarian. The food that goes into my mouth comes out of someone else’s. In this Malthusian, view, the total food supply is seen as a large pie. Rich people push forward to the table and cut big slices for themselves, leaving their poorer fellow citizens to slice the pie thinner and thinner until, in the end, the truly desperate fight over a single cherry. On an international scale, it is greedy Westerners who load up at the expense of everyone else.

No one, rationally, believes in the pie-chart model. Food surpluses pose as much a problem as food shortages, and famines, it turns out, usually have political causes that require political solutions. There is food available, but the wrong people, like warlords or autocrats, have wrested control of it. But the pie chart lingers in the collective unconscious, or at least in the minds of readers who write letters to restaurant reviewers. The thought of one man feasting at Alain Ducasse while another eats a bowl of rice is intolerable, an economic crime.

There is something amiss in this reasoning. Disparity of incomes and national wealth might or might not be unjust. I’ll leave that to others to sort out. But the $500 Manolo Blahnik shoe, the $50,000 car or the $3,000 television set is not, in and of itself, a wrong. And I’m willing to bet that a thorough audit of my impassioned letter writers would turn up one or more of the aforementioned items. For the record, I drove a Honda Civic to many of my dinners, rather than an S.U.V., which means that my potential food guilt should have been prorated by a formula calculating miles per gallon saved. I might also point out that restaurants employ people.

The second objection to fine dining is moral. It boils down to this: It is all right to enjoy food, but not too much. It is all right to eat out, but not to spend too much money doing it. There are two moral impulses intertwined here, the ancient prohibition against gluttony and the more modern Puritan objection to indulging pleasure for its own sake. Add to this ethical cocktail a twist of American pragmatism, the belief that money not spent usefully is money wasted. And what can be more useless than several hundred dollars applied to a six-course French meal that lasts four hours?

Feelings on this issue run high. In 1975, Craig Claiborne, The Times’s food editor and restaurant critic, bid $300 at a charity auction for the right to eat anywhere in the world, no expense spared, with American Express picking up the bill. His account of the meal appeared on the front page of the newspaper under the headline, “Just a Quiet Dinner for Two in Paris: 31 Dishes, Nine Wines, a $4,000 Check.” Angry letters poured in by the thousands. Even the Vatican spoke out, denouncing the meal as “scandalous.”

This sort of objection never seems to come up when box seats for the World Series or front-row tickets to a David Bowie concert are involved. Spending vast sums to see the Ring Cycle at the Met is seen as noble, like tithing. Art is uplifting. Spending the same amount on food, an object of animal appetite, is somehow degrading. I admit to my own prejudices in this regard. When I hear about fabulously expensive pampering sessions at Manhattan’s top spas and salons, something in me recoils. My thoughts turn to Sodom and Gomorrah. I yearn for the cleansing fire of a just but wrathful God. The moment usually passes quickly. Some people see a sheet of seaweed and want to be wrapped in it. I want to see it around a piece of fish.

The moral argument falls apart for a couple of reasons. First, most people do not eat at four-star restaurants routinely. A fine meal, for the vast majority of diners, is a special occasion, a splurge. There comes a time, say once every two months, when the usual rules go out the window, all bets are off, price is no object and the gods of mirth and mayhem rule. This impulse is universal. It is the small, irrational motor that drives human beings and separates them from the animals. It’s the reason for Las Vegas. In the 1930’s, when nearly a fifth of England’s working class was on the dole, a helpful newspaper ran an article explaining how a family could eat a healthy diet on the approximately 30 shillings a week that the government paid in unemployment benefits. George Orwell analyzed the shopping list and the menus that had been calculated to the last halfpenny and admitted that the writer had done his homework. A family could survive, just barely, on the dole. But only a theoretical family. What the writer failed to take into account, Orwell said, was the need to break routine, to reward oneself with a treat, something “a little bit ‘tasty,’” and hang the cost.

That’s what most people are doing when they eat out, and this is the big fact that my letter writers never considered. On purely rational grounds, human beings would eat only what’s necessary to sustain life. Shelter and clothing would limit themselves to keeping out extreme cold or heat. Strictly speaking, anything more would be frivolous. But fallible humans, with their fallen nature, will demand cakes and ale. If given a choice, they’ll opt for a cherry on top of the cake too.

That urge for the little extra, the luxurious touch that separates apple pie from pie à la mode, leads me to the other part of the moral argument against high living. It is not just the rich who indulge themselves when it comes to food. Everyone does. Millionaires may be the exception, but almost anyone can make a millionaire’s pie, an old-fashioned dessert I ran across in a small-town café in Louisiana several years ago. The pie comes in many variations, but the ruling idea is to throw chopped nuts and fruit into a cloud of whipped cream which becomes the pie filling. Sometimes the crust is made with crushed cookies and nuts; sometimes with graham crackers. You can use cream cheese to make the pie even richer, a suggestive word in this context. Food is a convenient way for ordinary people to experience extraordinary pleasure, to live it up for a bit.

The Donald Trumps of the world can light their Cohibas with hundred-dollar bills. For the rest of us, it’s a slice of pie or the molten chocolate cake that is inevitably described on the menu as “sinful” or “decadent.” Or, in a rare mood, the house cocktail at the World Bar in the Trump World Tower. It is a preposterous drink whose magic ingredient is liquid gold. Like the millionaire’s pie, it is a big, fat showoff. It has no redeeming social or nutritional value and therefore enjoys great popularity. Long may it live.


Millionaire’s Pie

1 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened
½ cup sugar, plus 3 tablespoons
Grated zest of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 cup chopped pecans, lightly toasted
1 cup sweetened flaked coconut
1 cup diced fresh strawberries, plus whole ones for garnish
1 cup diced fresh pineapple or canned pineapple chunks, well drained and diced (do not use crushed pineapple)
1 cup heavy cream
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 9-inch prepared graham-cracker crust

1. Beat the cream cheese, ½ cup sugar, zest and lemon juice in a large bowl with the mixer at high speed until smooth. Fold in the pecans, coconut, strawberries and pineapple.
2. Beat the heavy cream, 3 tablespoons sugar and vanilla in a chilled bowl until stiff; fold half the mixture into the cream-cheese mixture. Pour into crust; spread rest of whipped cream on top. Garnish with whole berries. Refrigerate at least 4 hours or over night.

Yield: 6 servings.


World Cocktail

¼ ounce plain vodka
Edible 23-karat gold-leaf sheet (available at baker’s supply stores)
1 ounce Rémy Marin XO Cognac
1 ounce Pineau des Charentes aperitif wine
1 ounce white grape juice
1 ounce simple syrup (3 parts water to part sugar)
½ ounce fresh lemon juice, strained
Dash of Angostura bitters
Veuve Clicquot Champagne, chilled

1. Pour vodka in a shallow bowl. Tear off small pieces of the gold leaf with tweezers, avoiding squeezing or folding it (thick pieces will sink). Float the pieces on the vodka.
2. Combine the rest of the ingredients (except the gold leaf, vodka and Champagne) in an iced metal shaker. Shake vigorously and pour into a trumpet flute, filling ¾ of the way. Top with Champagne.
3. Pour in the vodka, letting the gold slide onto the surface.

Yield: 1 drink with extra
 

**This was originally published in The New York Times Magazine
June 6, 2004

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