An Acquired Vocabulary

    I left the "Eating Out" section of this book with a strong disdain for any kind of fancy eating. Especially French restaurants in the late 1940's. I traveled through the vast majority of the pieces without any ground to understand what the dishes the critics were talking about consisted of, why they were so agitated by the tack French cuisine was taking. I felt almost no empathy for A. J. Liebling when he exclaims "You take me for a jackass!" after realizing a loved restaurant had gone down the drain.
    I should take into account that most of the pieces I found uninteresting and pretentious were written before 1975. The conspicuous consumption and elitism of those pieces must have been a result of the times. I've read some articles in the New Yorker and, at least in its modern incarnation, the writers seem to revel in presenting the complicated mess of their subject in a concise and interesting way. A good writer draws the reader in with the cunning explanation of the intricacies of their topic but those articles about France just seemed to be written for gourmands who already care about shifts in French haute-cuisine and wine vintages. Nearly all of the "Eating Out" section was dedicated to French cuisine, something I know next to nothing about. Instead of talking about specifically how the "amazing" French cuisine came about or how the everyday Frenchman/woman eats and how that related to the haute-cuisine, they seemed too caught up in their own decadence. They seemed to live in their own world of gastronomy and speak their own jargony language.

Ahh, a good old-fashioned beefsteak   

    I did love Anthony Bourdain's piece about the behind-the-scenes of restaurant. His description is so fresh and his exaggerated voice keeps me reading to see what crude or ridiculous statement he'll make next. Reading the perspective of someone very much a restaurant cook in the midst of so many food critics and "gastronomes" was incredibly refreshing. Even though he may be pretentious about vegetarians and buffets, he manages to make himself more understandable and identifiable to the reader than the rich men who fly over to France to eat their fills of the country's cuisine.
    I also loved the first piece in the collection about the "beefsteaks." Even though the article was written in 1939, I thought the author did an amazing job of showing us the excesses of the beefsteaks. The author seemed to have that same drive to create a vivid picture of a practice or aspect of life that I've come to associate with good writing and the modern New Yorker magazine. The author didn't seem to revel in his own excess. To me, he was just portraying the practice of beefsteaks in its cultural context.