Confessions of a restaurant bigot
Baltimore, Maryland, 1998 – I am about as non-racist as an American can be, but when it comes to restaurants I am as bigoted as any member of the Nation of Islam or the Ku Klux Klan.
Remember the Spike Lee movie, Do the Right Thing?
The plot hinged on a protest by blacks against a pizza restaurant owner whose primary decor consisted of pictures of Italian athletes. He refused to add pictures of black athletes even though almost everyone else in the neighborhood — and most of his customers — were black.
If I walked into a pizza place and saw pictures of Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan on the walls, I’d probably turn around and walk out… Especially if the girl behind the counter was Hispanic and the guy making the pizzas looked Asian.
When I go to an Italian restaurant, I want my pizza made by someone named Guido or Tony or Mario, and I want to see a motherly woman named Maria behind the counter. On the walls, I want to see pictures of Italians, maybe a few badly-painted scenes of Naples or Palermo, and a couple of hanging Chianti bottles. Not California Chianti, either.
Now let’s turn this around and go to Braznell’s Caribbean Kitchen. When I go there I don’t want a blonde waitress named Muffie, and I don’t want to see a bunch of Irish guys in the kitchen. The staff in this place had better be (and is) 100% black, and the decor should not (and does not) include pictures of famous New York investment bankers.
My favorite Mexican restaurant, El Tacquito, is owned by a middle-aged Mexican widow. The waitresses might deign to take your order in English, but they write it down and relay to the kitchen in Spanish. The tables have little Aztec designs on them. Posters — in Spanish — for Mexican beers and soft drinks are on all the walls, mixed with pictures of Mexican rural scenes, and the background music is contemporary Mexican pop. Even though El Tacquito is located in a heavily Polish neighborhood, the only way you would know this while eating there is if you looked out the front window and saw the Kosciusko Savings and Loan building across the street.
My favorite deli is Attman’s, on East Lombard Street. I’ve seen people of many ethnic origins eating there, but I have never heard anyone complain about the fact that Attman’s is, always has been, and probably always will be staffed almost entirely by Jews, even though Attman’s is in the middle of a primarily black neighborhood.
The best oyster shuckers in Maryland are black and work from little stands along the highways. They aren’t going to hire Jewish oyster shuckers, but plenty of Jews buy from them. Texans make the best chile and shouldn’t hire anyone but fellow Texans to do it. People from Arizona shouldn’t try to make New England boiled dinners. Italians should stick to pasta and veal and leave curry to Indians and Pakistanis who grew up eating it.
These may be stereotypes, but they’re so often true that we should take them seriously and be suspicious of anyone who tells us they’re not.
Mixing restaurant ethnicities can be dangerous
When I was a child — in the 1960s in Orange, California — there was a local restaurant called “Walter’s Minnesota-Style Chow Mein.” One night, out of sheer curiosity, my father took us there.
It was the worst Chinese food we ever ate, so bad that my father later took some of his coworkers there so that they, too, could taste just how bad it was.
Indeed, the joint’s only source of repeat business seemed to be people who brought friends in to show them how horrible Minnesota-style Chinese food could be, since no mere verbal description could do justice to its complete lack of flavor.
Over the years I’ve tried vegetarian “San Francisco-style” barbecue (horrible), Kosher pizza (you could gag on it) and many other sad mixtures of food styles, but Walter’s still remains my all-time culinary low.
Going broke by upsetting the natural order of things
For several years, my primary source of Southern-style barbecue was the Bitman’s carry-out in the Westside Shopping Center on Frederick Road. It was staffed entirely by blacks and patronized by barbecue lovers of all races.
Then one day I went to the place and found nothing but Koreans behind the counter. They claimed they were using the “original” Bitman’s recipes, but what they turned out was greasy, inebible stuff that was nothing like the tender perfection staunch Bitman’s fans had come to expect. They had kept the original Bittman’s decor — blank white walls with nothing on them — but the ambience was no longer there. Perhaps the Koreans were too courteous for their clientele (Bitman’s staff had always been rather rude, sort of, “What’cha want? Spit it out. I’m busy!” in their dealings with customers), but I believe most of us could have dealt with this change if the food quality had stayed high.
A year later the place was closed… and no one missed it.
We can pass all the anti-discrimination laws we want, and talk all day and into the night about multi-culturalism, but Chinese will still make better Chinese food than Jews, African-Americans will still make better southern-style barbecue than Koreans, and I’ll still want my Mexican food made by Mexicans, my French food made by chefs named Henri or Pierre, not Irving or Mohammed, and when I want German food I’d rather go to a place called Haussner’s than one called Abi Obanju’s.
Call me a restuaraunt bigot. Go ahead.
But when you look into your heart, you’ll find that you are one too, unless you think McDonald’s is the height of American culinary expression, in which case your opinion isn’t worth hearing anyway.
April 29th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Yes, and I want my coffee made by Italians thank you very much. Which is why I was suprised to read in a newspaper that a coffee roast house run by 3 Chinese sisters rated the best in Sydney. Turns out they were smart enough to hire an Italian barista to make the coffee while they were purely there as management.