On our way out to dinner last night we passed the location of a long gone old-time "fancy restaurant." A fancy restaurant was the kind of place you went to celebrate special occasions. A fancy restaurant might have a regular clientele that was wealthy, that had the money to allow them to live like kings and go out several days each month, or even maybe, each week. For the rest of us it was a couple times a year- a birthday, an anniversary, a graduation, a promotion. The restaurant was a destination. The meal, an event.
The hotel we've been staying at has a place called Trader Vic's Lounge. It's a fragment of the full scale restaurant that used to occupy the site, a Polynesian themed restaurant best known for its exotic drinks and South Seas derived menu. Earlier in the day I had the great good fortune to spend a part of the afternoon visiting with some old friends. They were recounting how Trader Vic's used to be a fun, fancy, special occasion restaurant-- although I think probably more than a couple of the dads in that era made it their regular watering hole. That would have been back in the day when there were such things as watering holes.
This all started to come to mind last night after I had a just okay Caesar Salad at a rather mediocre Italian restaurant where there seemed to be several tables with couples on dates, friends gathered for a dinner out, even a few older couples, and the bill came to over a hundred bucks for 3 meals and one glass of wine. It was in a "entertainment and shopping complex" (read: outdoor mall) swarming with locals, populated with nice retail outlets and all the usual restaurant suspects. After having had that conversation in the afternoon, and after passing the site of the old Chasen's on the way to our dinner, I realized this: Caesar salad used to be fancy, special, out of the ordinary. Caesar Salad, teriyaki chicken, coconut shrimp, great fettuccine prepared table side, and a dozen other dishes have been stripped of every last vestige of their once proud place on the exclusive menus of fancy restaurants, homogenized and packaged for the mass food market and presented in name only-- impostors for what was once not just a dish, but an event. Good grief! If a person today says they don't like Caesar Salad I can't be sure what they're talking about.
It's too bad in a way. There are so few restaurants where one can go and still get a spectacular meal with dishes prepared table side or brought out with panache. Instead, nowadays a great restaurant is one where a chef struggles to make "unconventional pairings" and you end up looking at a meal thinking the kitchen is just really trying way too hard. And when the kitchen does succeed, everyone else has it within 2 months; often served in a styrofoam bowl with a plastic fork.
I guess in the end there is nothing too terrible about being able to get great sushi on almost every block of every major city. I guess there are worse things then being able to get a Caesar salad at McDonalds, teriyaki chicken at the grocery store, or cedar planked salmon at the airport. But the down side is I'm just not sure that, 40 years from now, my kids are going to be able to sit around a poolside fire pit anywhere talking about the great restaurant landmarks of their past.
In all fairness, we weren't looking for a fancy restaurant last night but I'm just not convinced the "fancy restaurant" exists much anymore anywhere. And, based on what I see in places like where I ate last night, people probably don't know the difference. And that's too bad: They can generate a lifetime of great memories.
And too, safe to say, there are an awful lot of people who've never had a great Caesar Salad!
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