A new book follows one meal from seed to serving
A new book follows one meal from seed to serving
Consumers nowadays might have a general idea of where their food comes from. For instance, farmer’s markets and locally sourced produce have demystified a great deal of the distribution process. But that barely scratches the surface when it comes to even a single menu item at a restaurant.
Andrew Friedman is a food writer and author most recently of “The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food.” In the book, he gets to know one meal of dry-aged strip loin, tomato and sorrel at Wherewithall restaurant in Chicago.
Friedman joined Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal to talk about the unseen processes that every order in a restaurant goes through, and the countless unrecognized people who make it all happen. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Kai Ryssdal: You’ve been a food writer for a while now safe to say, right?
Andrew Friedman: Oh, yeah. Over two decades now amazingly,
Ryssdal: Okay, here’s what I want to know. Why now in your career have you in this book concentrated on one dish — what you call “this thing called a synchronous miracle”?
Friedman: Well, the synchronous miracle to me is one aspect of the book, which is that I tell it during a dinner service. So in addition to getting a breakdown of all the people profiled in the book, readers also learn how the mechanics of a service work, how something goes from being ordered from your server, to the kitchen, how it’s all timed just right (supposedly, ideally). And, for me, I’ve just, I’ve done a lot of collaborating. I’ve interviewed a lot of chefs for other projects. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in restaurants beyond the chef. And I just thought it was time that people came to know how much goes into a meal by how many different people.
Ryssdal: Yeah, that’s a fair point. How do you wind up at, specifically, Wherewithall in Chicago, and particularly their dry-aged strip loin, tomato and sorrel dish?
Friedman: The dish was just pure luck. I was very interested in having an entire restaurant team that would play ball, I mean, all the way to the dishwasher. And that restaurant changed its menu every week. So I did not know the dish until I was on the ground the day before I started trailing and observing at the restaurant.
Ryssdal: Wow, a little serendipity. It’s almost better that way. Now, obviously, the restaurant and the staff are the stars, as it were, of this book, other than the dish itself. But you work your way up the food chain, no pun really intended, to the wine. And you go see a butcher in the slaughterhouse. I mean, it’s way up the food chain.
Friedman: Yeah. So you meet the tomatoes in the dish when they’re in little pods in the greenhouse back in the winter. You know, I visit not just the slaughterhouse, but I go out to one of the fields where the cattle graze. And, for me, this was the most revelatory thing, because I had never really thought about it. But I went on a delivery run with one of the truck drivers from one of the farms, and what delivery people go through in a big city, there’s nowhere to park a truck. So even having covered this world for twenty-some years, I learned a lot myself.
Ryssdal: You know, it’s interesting. You mentioned the truck driver and his or her daily life, because you throw that in with your comments about the chef and nobody really ever thanking their chef. And this is service industry-wide, right? There’s a whole unseen part of the labor pool that we all just kind of take for granted.
Friedman: Oh, very much so. I mean, I talk about, at one point, I interview the dishwasher. And also in restaurants of a certain formality there is someone who, after the dishes have been washed and dried, kind of rubs out any little streaks and stains. And I interviewed both of them. They’re both immigrants to the United States. And I don’t think people give any thought to dishwashers. But a lot of these people will tell you, if the dish pit falls behind, the entire restaurant can crash. You know, we’ve all seen these old movies where people don’t have money to pay for dinner, and they have to wash dishes at the end of the night. But that’s not a reality. Dishes actually get washed throughout a dinner service and reused maybe three, four times. And it’s something I think most civilians don’t even realize.
Ryssdal: That slice of this kind of goes along with our separation from the sources of our food. And the reason I ask is that there’s a scene or a story in this book where you’re alongside a chef, and the chef asks the butcher what he wants to get rid of. And she then takes his discards, basically and turns this, you know, waste product, as it were, into actual food.
Friedman: Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. That’s a great story. It’s Slagel Family Farm, which is the meat purveyor in the book. And the chef now is very well known. Her name is Stephanie Izard. She was a Top Chef winner several years ago and she called up LouisJohn one day and said, “What do you need to get rid of?” And he said, “Well, you know, we have a lot of yield from pig heads.” I don’t say that —
Ryssdal: Say that again in case it went by people.
Friedman: We have a lot of yield from pig heads that doesn’t get used. And you know, I don’t know what most people think when they hear that but you know, there’s a lot of preparations in classic French cooking you wouldn’t know it was pig head. But she then created a dish called wood-roasted pig face, which is a signature dish. And yes, that all came about from a chef calling a farmer and saying, you know, “What do you need to get rid of?” Which, you know, that’s low-hanging fruit, right? That’s profit that was just sitting there to be pulled in.
Ryssdal: Let me get you back to where you started. The fact that you have been doing this for a good long while now. What did you learn in writing this book?
Friedman: Well, number one, I’ve never worked in a kitchen professionally. I was a busboy when I was 15, but I came to this as a writer. And I could not tell you what happens when a chit, which is the little piece of thermal paper, is kicked out of the point-of-sale machine that a server will hand to the kitchen. I couldn’t tell you how things got from that, through the courses of a meal, to the check being presented, or how exactly the timing worked. And I couldn’t have listed how many employees there are at a meatpacking facility, you know, and the same thing at the farm. When I got there at 2:30 in the morning, there were maybe 35 people. Some were packing up to take a truck to a farmers market, others were going out on their restaurant delivery runs. And you know, even I don’t think really knew how many people were talking about.
Ryssdal: How was the dish? I mean, you tasted it at the end, right?
Friedman: Oh, yeah. No, I tasted it on day one. The only night I wasn’t in the kitchen from start to finish was the one night I came in and had dinner as a guest and that’s when I had the dish. I had it in the context of the full meal. It was delicious.
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