Hell’s Missive: Heat But No Light

Hell’s Kitchen chef/owner, Mitch Omer, unleashed a wild, ad hominem broadside against our own Andrew Zimmern this week on The Rake magazine’s website. I hesitate to feed it, in that it’s unreasonable and often incoherent, but I thought better of that because I do think it opens a window into the minds of independent chefs and restaurateurs.

Omer seems to be calling Zimmern out for failing to properly respect local chefs and restaurants, for poking fun at their press releases, for being impressed by powerful outsiders who bring their act to our towns, and having acknowledged some vicarious glee in watching other critics disembowel particularly horrible restaurants deserving of nothing better.

As editor of our restaurant coverage, I’ve never really thought of Zimmern as an enemy, gratuitous or otherwise, of the local chef/restaurateur. AZ tends to support and adore the same cadre of local innovators and stalwarts as Dara, Iggers, Nelson, and Lilienthal.

So why the hit piece? Is it jealousy? Is it xenophobia? Is it sheer irrationality? I think the attitude reflects something in the nature of chef-restaurateurs. Restaurants are extraordinarily challenging businesses to own, grow, and see thrive. There are many moving parts, and the human factor has more influence than most consumer products. They seem to engender paranoia and resentment.

I’ve eaten a lot of meals out over the last week: Cheesecake Factory, Tria, Morton’s bar, Chambers Kitchen, Yum! Three of the five meals were deeply flawed, two of those intolerably bad, and only one was not resolutely disappointing in some way. If your clock radio or car only worked right 20 percent of the time, 60 percent of the time only partially worked, and the final 20 percent not at all, people would be up in arms. But that’s the success ratio at many restaurants.

Yet I have not given up eating out. Nor have you. Which I think leads many chefs and managers to believe it’s enough for the restaurant to mean well, for the recipes to be interesting, for the ambition to be manifest. They not only don’t understand their customers, I think many are contemptuous of them.

We just won’t see their side of it. We won’t pay for top-quality ingredients, we want familiar wines, we expect consistency, and to get in and out on our schedule. WCCO-TV’s Jason DeRusha, in a comment to Omer’s rant, says, “I get bored with everyone who spends time talking down to the restaurant eaters. We pay to eat. We are customers. Why are we stupid and pedestrian if we don't want to eat certain foods?”

As I’ve covered the local restaurant scene here on and off for seventeen years, I’ve concluded that most chefs and independent restaurateurs are auteurs. They want to make an artistic and/or personal statement with food and/or hospitality. They don’t really want to be in business to serve people. Ask an independent chef or restaurateur what he thinks of Parasole (Figlio, Chino Latino, Pittsburgh Blue), which exists to give people what they want, not advance the dining culture. You’ll hear a lot of contempt and a bit of envy. It’s telling.

Now Mitch Omer deserves some kudos. His restaurant is successful and more importantly, has been so for years. That’s not easy. Success is to be respected in this business. He has found a way to express his art around a customer base that appreciates it enough to come back. His customers are the critics that matter, and they vote yes.

I admire all the restaurateurs who try to push the envelope and drag our food culture along with it. And I have nothing but respect for the food knowledge of Iggers, Grumdahl, Nelson, et al. But as critics, the question is whether our mission is to be an advocate for the diner or for the art they survey. The interests often don’t dovetail, and I think too many of us get so close to the restaurant community that we see the world through the prism of the valiant chefs, the martyred farmer, the struggling food artisan. It’s so prevalent an attitude nowadays that the Mitch Omers of the world demand it.

Zimmern doesn’t always play the game and has become wildly successful to boot, and that chaps some folks’ hides, but he is not the problem, Mitch. The problem is the restaurant business is groaning under the weight of chefs and restaurateurs (and genuinely sycophant critics) too busy serving themselves to realize they’re in a service business.

Crush Load on the Bandwagon

I like to think of myself as not easily suckered. I am repelled by hype and won’t easily board the bandwagon. Nonetheless, by mid-December, I was comfortably ensconced aboard the Vikings train. I shelled out $330 for four tickets to last Sunday’s portentous classic against the Redskins.

I blame the Star Tribune sports section for most of this. I mean, three weeks ago, my view of this team was that it had a third-rate quarterback with major skill-set deficiencies and had defeated only one good opponent all season. Adrian Peterson seemed promising, but he was so soundly routed by the 49ers and Bears (second game) that I wondered if it might be too soon to anoint him as the second coming of Walter Payton.

But I trusted the experts. My football-preoccupied colleague, Steve Marsh, told me this team was the real thing. I was impressed with the intensity of his belief after he became so agitated at images of Peterson that he loudly yelled, “Go! Yeah!” in the bar at Morton’s—while watching a three-day-old replay on a rerun of SportsCenter.

And the Strib? What a disappointment! I’ve long accepted the fact that La Velle Neal and Joe Christensen simply will not second-guess anything the Twins do. If I want a contrarian’s take, I know it’s got to come from Reusse or Jim Souhan. But the paper’s Vikes coverage has long seemed more balanced and emotionally detached—with a realistic view of the team, its players, and management.

But as the Vikings started their streak against the bad teams and A. P. amassed yardage, the paper changed its tune. The skeptics became acolytes. Even Reusse sold me a bill of goods. This town wants to love these guys so much that we need to be thrown just a crumb or two by the Vikes, and we swoon.

Back to Sunday . . . the Vikes dropped a big Christmas turd on the fans and decided the brass ring didn’t much matter to them. I trudged through blocks of snow and wind, pushed through the vast human sandwich that is the Metrodome concourse, and sat down to watch as my big-ticket purchase turned into the dumbest money I’ve spent all year. (The price of four upper-deck seats came to half a Twins Flex 40 season ticket, I’d note.)

Trust me when I say that there is nothing about the Metrodome that is comfortable or easy when it is packed with 60,000 anything, and when it’s 60,000 addled Vikings fans, well, you get the picture.

I know I won’t convince the guy in front of me—who spent the entire game standing and didn’t speak to his wife/girlfriend sitting next to him for three-plus hours—but these Vikes are mediocre. Tarvaris Jackson is not on his way to greatness. Adrian Peterson has yet to prove he has skills that can outfox a good defense—the mark of a great running back. And the Vikes have amassed its 2007 success on the backs of bad teams. They don’t deserve to go to the playoffs, and if they back in, they will be quickly excreted.

Which is what I have done with the Kool-Aid I drank in from the sports pages of my local paper.

No Virginia . . .

As December dawned, we were pondering whether my nearly ten-year-old son still believed in Santa Claus. Having made the mistake of once explaining that Santa doesn’t stop at his Jewish friends’ homes because those kids don’t believe in him, we suspected he felt any acknowledgment of non belief would result in a vast reduction of net giftage.

What nine-year-old in 2007 America believes in the man in the red suit? I mean, my kid rides the bus with eighth graders and claims to want his tenth birthday party at Hooters. His advancing age and savvy has made it increasingly hard to stage Christmas morning. Gifts from his Dear Santa letter need to not show up in a wrapped box from Grandma. After all, how would she know he wanted a West Virginia football jersey?

In 1971, I remember watching my then-hippie aunt tell my sister (then five years old) the honest truth about Christmas as I silently shrieked “noooooo” in the background. If I remember, her rationale was, “It’s not right to lie to children.” But to me, then and today, so much of the magic of a child’s Christmas is wrapped up in Santa Claus that you should support the belief as long as they need or want it. Questioning Santa's existence seems scant evidence that children are ready to let him go.

Fast forward to December 2. Our family was seated in the festive confines of Red Stag Supper Club. I don’t know how the topic came up, but my son, seated next to me, asked, “Dad, is Santa real?” This was the cry for help, I told myself. He knew what was what and wanted to let us know. After all, he’s nearly double-digits.

“Do you want an honest answer?” I asked him. “Yes,” he replied. And I told him everything.

There was silence at first. “Really?” he finally said. Uh oh.

“Really,” I told him. Then followed a litany of questions about gifts he’d received from Santa over the previous five years. “What about the Wii?” There were never any at Target. “What about, what about, what about . . . ?”

Then silence again. “Didn’t other kids tell you?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said, “but I didn’t believe them. Mom showed me a book about it once, and I decided it was possible, and so I didn’t believe them.”

I had misread things. He was not looking to be released from his childhood bondage but to stay put. He loved Santa just like I had and was content to one day ask him for a Hooters gift card, no paradox implied.

And as the meal dragged and the food didn’t arrive, as my wife and daughter became preoccupied by the lack of bread, my son started to cry. And cry. Visibly, audibly, tragically. Good move, Dad. And three weeks before Christmas Eve.

Three weeks later, Christmas in the boy’s world is a tad more mercenary. There are discussions about gift availability at Target, about first and second choices, about how “An iPod Touch will last a long time. How much money are you guys spending?”

Christmas will never be the same, and I suspect he knew as much that night at Red Stag. Life is pretty sweet at nine, but as I remember, four looked pretty good from that vantage point. No cares, no responsibilities, no homework. Some nights, I would get into bed, my mom would come to tuck me in, and I would just cry. I wanted to go back. I saw what was coming and wasn’t sure it was for me.

But then, I wasn’t on a fast track to Hooters. I’ve been tempted to tell him the truth—that I’d been to Hooters, and the reality is no match for the fantasy, especially the PG-13 aspirational version in his head. Santa beats it hands down. But I suspect it’d break his heart. And one of those is enough this December.

Merry Christmas.

Christmas Stories

I suppose as a Jew, I have no right to complain about the state of the Christmas season, but I’ve had more Christmas than a lot of Unitarians I know.

Back in the early 1940s, my mom’s family moved to a heavily Catholic suburb of Chicago—one of the first Jewish families to show up. Early in her school days, my mom brought home a toy Christmas tree that had been given out at school. My grandmother proceeded to make quite a show of disposing of it. According to my mom, she vowed that day that as long as she lived in a Christian culture, she would not deny her kids the month-long goodwill and pageantry that is Christmas.

(Hanukkah is not the “Jewish Christmas.” It’s a minor Jewish holiday that has been trumped-up in Western cultures to keep Jewish kids from feeling completely left out. But it lacks the festiveness and all-around monumentalism of Christmas. Due to the fact that it changes dates every year and falls during one of the busiest times of the year, few Jews can take the holiday off or travel to visit family.)

We had some pretty impressive secular Christmases as a child. It was the only time of year where my parents really went all out. My dad pulled off some amazing feats of gift procurement related to my arcane hobbies. We always had a nice tree, had family over, etc.

It never seemed abnormal to me until my stepmother once told me how ambivalent those Christmases made my late father. I knew my grandparents didn’t come to our house on Christmas, but only as an adult did I understand why. (They didn’t agree with my mom’s choice, but they respected her enough not to denounce it to us. Not sure the current generation is so circumspect.)

Gradually, intermarriage loosened things up in our family, and there were Christmas trees in the homes of cousins and in-laws. I married a non-practicing Episcopalian, and we are raising our children Jewish. My wife did not want to give up Christmas, and neither did I honestly. But as the years pass, I wonder if Americans, the most religious First-World people on earth, have lost sight of what a secular Christmas is even about.

I’ve observed a greater and greater unwillingness of our culture to respect the season’s imperatives on family and togetherness, beyond copious lip service. It used to be things slowed down at the office around the holidays. Now, they seem to speed up. I am busier this month at work than perhaps any month in memory. It’s little different for my wife, who has worked every Saturday this month. And I hear the same from others. We have two school conferences this week of all times. Even the schools don’t care.

As I was getting my hair cut on Saturday, an older customer stopped by to drop off gifts for the salon staff. My mom used to do stuff like that. But it’s only older folks, families where a spouse doesn’t work, or those affluent enough to hire someone that make that kind of display of gratitude anymore.

Now, I don’t have to sign out 175 holiday cards, but all the other things on my to-do list are meaningful: finding special presents for the kids, cooking and having friends over on Christmas Eve, the evening we drive around town looking at holiday lights, buying and decorating the tree. And I’d like to find time to engage in many of the other special aspects of the season that make it so enjoyable—from holiday music to getting together with friends.

Instead, we’ve turned down virtually every social engagement we were invited to—too busy.

In the UK, there is no public transportation on Christmas Day, and during the entire Christmas week, it operates on Saturday or Sunday schedules because there is little demand. That culture still respects the season. But more and more on these shores, Christmas is just another three-day weekend, albeit one that requires draining hours of preparation that most of us don’t have working fifty-hour weeks.

Think about that before you ask anything more of your employees and colleagues in what remains of this season. The best gift you can give someone this Christmas is a few extra hours of his or her life back.

Impotent, Indeed

“Dad, do you have E.D.?” my nine-year-old asked, earnestly.
“Uh, what’s E.D.?” (scrambling . . . )
“You know, that thing where your thing doesn’t work.”
“Oh, that thing. No, my thing works.”

If this conversation had happened with me as a nine-year-old in 1972, my dad could have been confident I not only didn’t understand what E.D. was but had no idea of the things my thing could one day do. But in Tila Tequila’s America, who knows? The boy does ride the bus with eighth graders.

“Could I maybe have E.D.?”
“No, I’m pretty sure you don’t have it.”

Believe it or not, this blog is not about erectile dysfunction. It’s about why my son knows so much about it. Or doesn’t, as the case may be. It’s about why we are bombarded with TV ads for Cialis, et al., during every TV sporting event.

Believe it or not, this blog is not about my son knowing all he wants to know about E.D., although I’d prefer he wait a couple years.

It’s about whether pharmaceutical companies need to charge so much for medicines. As you know, Americans pay more for prescription drugs than any First World nation and have some of the strictest patent laws protecting drug companies from generics.

Big pharma insists federal intervention in drug costs will kill their profits, thus putting an end to innovation, thus turning the world sick and impotent.

“Dad, have you ever had a heart attack?”
“No pal, I haven’t.”
“Do you take Lipitor?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Maybe you should, so you don’t have a heart attack.”

Maybe it’s just the TV shows we watch, but I can’t escape Lipitor ads either. And I don’t watch anywhere near the average amount of TV. Which leads me to believe big pharma is spending a veritable fortune advertising meds we can’t buy without convincing a doctor we need them—advertising that has only recently been legal and is not in most westernized nations.

Clearly this advertising is effective. And doctors apparently don’t like to say “no,” or there’d be no Lipitor commercials and many fewer antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Much of this advertising is to convince consumers to ask for new, patented medicines that have to compete with off-patent, cheaper generics.

I’d be a lot more sympathetic to the industry’s claim that it needs to charge us so much if it wasn’t spending sums each year on ads that would probably sustain its research for decades.

I wonder how much of a drug’s cost goes to fund marketing budgets? And I wonder what value there is, if any, in allowing prescription drug advertising to consumers? It basically assumes doctors can’t make the right decisions about what patients need without TV ads to spark patient inquiry.

Let’s save the drug companies some money and return drug advertising to where it belongs—medical journals. If the drug companies can’t get behind that, maybe it’s time to regulate prices and/or shrink the length of pharmaceutical patents.

I know I’d enjoy seeing those old Alka-Seltzer ads instead.

The City That Smirks

Maybe it’s because I’m from Chicago, which justifiably calls itself “The City That Works,” but I’ve never been particularly impressed by Minneapolis city government—with its ineffectual mayoralty and a City Council driven by left-wing ideological factionalism and tilting at windmills. Two topics in the news right now have me shaking my head again.

The first is the once-lauded effort to wire the entire city for wireless internet access. This endeavor has proved disastrous in other cities, where the wireless providers have backed out after the process proved too costly and non-remunerative. US Internet of Minnetonka won the bid hereabouts, and was supposed to have finished wiring the city by now. They are months behind, and every time I check the progress map on their website, ever more and more of Minneapolis is grayed-out, meaning it won’t be wired.

USI is finding the city harder to wire than it thought, due to all the trees and stucco exteriors, which are proving impenetrable to wireless signals. Residents are complaining about the hideous apparatus sprouting all over telephone poles, and on web discussion boards there are many complaints about the quality of the USI signal and constant outages.

Only in the tech industry would things like trees and stucco be an acceptable after-the-fact excuse. Wasn’t it USI’s obligation to do its due diligence before it made its bid? If there weren’t enough available places to hang apparatus, why didn’t it know that beforehand? Why wasn’t the company aware that wi-fi couldn’t penetrate stucco and trees? Isn’t that wireless 101?

My address in Kenwood, hardly the outer reaches of the city, is now considered “outside of the Minneapolis coverage area.” We won’t be getting wireless, according to the website. Neither will CIDNA, Lowry Hill, East Isles, and several other south side neighborhoods. Well then, why are my tax dollars paying for it?

Minneapolis has had nothing but good things to say about USI, perhaps seeing a disaster in the making and trying to cover its rear. Wi-fi is one of the few citywide endeavors of the ineffectual Rybak administration, and it’s not going well. There goes that Senate run.

Topic two is garbage. The city is again about to be sued by the consortium of private haulers (Minneapolis Refuse Inc.) that has operated in a no-bid, sweetheart-contract environment for decades. Several council members have been trying to get an open bid process to see if they can save the taxpayers some money. Some oppose this because trash collection is considered to be satisfactory and this consortium includes small mom ‘n' pop haulers which could probably not bid competitively against BFI or Waste Management.

The consortium successfully sued the city in 2006 because it failed to follow statutory procedures before it opened the bidding. Now the city has jumped through the hoops the law dictates, but the consortium is again planning to sue, saying the city has still not followed the letter of the law.

It’s unclear to me if this bunch of monopolists will stop at nothing short of endless litigation to maintain its monopoly or if the city has again stepped in it. But more and more the city seems capable of managing less and less without a great deal of mess. Who is our Mayor Daley?

A Union Hell-bent on Calamity

If you’re not familiar with the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, it is the union that represents public school teachers in Minneapolis. If you want a case study in how teachers unions are playing a vital role in the demise of public schools, MFT is textbook-worthy. It is also rapidly on the way to destroying itself. But it’s not clear which will happen first.

MFT and the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) have been engaged in contract negotiations since spring, and face a mid-January deadline to agree on a new one or city schools will start losing state aid in draconian fashion. MPS has not exactly covered itself in glory in recent years, and neither has the School Board, but current leadership has settled on a reasonably bold reform agenda aimed at stemming massive losses of students to charter schools and taking back control of its classrooms.

The district wants back the power to decide which teachers belong in which classrooms; to lay off according to need and skill instead of seniority; to let qualifications and potential guide how schools are staffed, not a hire date. These are reasonable goals for any organization, but essential ones for an entity as deeply troubled and threatened as MPS.

The union cares about nothing but its power base. And it has built a massive one. It controls teacher assignments, has gamed the system to dominate the teacher discipline and remedial assistance process, and refuses to allow rigorous qualifications for teachers that teach in specialty programs. Teachers in Minneapolis are not regularly evaluated for competency and effectiveness. That’s shameful.

MFT accepts none of the responsibility for the flight of students out of the district, one of the root causes of MPS’s never-ending financial crisis. It’s all unfunded mandates, victimized teachers, and bad administrators in its world. The union wants better pay and stable benefits as the district crumbles. Will the last MFT member in a Minneapolis school please turn out the lights?

How through-the-looking-glass things are: Just last Sunday the Star Tribune, long every Minnesota union’s best friend, took on MFT with both barrels in an editorial calling for reform of the teacher placement process. Current negotiations are at a veritable stalemate, and in state mediation. A teacher’s strike is a real possibility. It is time for Minneapolis’s elected officials and the school board to start making the case to the public and parents, because it needs their support. It will be interesting to see how many of the city’s DFL elite will stand up to one of its most powerful patrons.

What’s so sad about all this is that MFT represents hundreds of great teachers, a sizeable number of whom surely disagree with its factory model of public education. And I am sympathetic to many of MFT’s goals: smaller class sizes, stable benefits, rigorous results-oriented management of principals and administrators, and taking a hard and consistent line against students who act out violently in schools. If schools aren’t safe and controlled, they can’t function.

Your right to a public education ends when you become a destructive force in school. But so should your right to teach or represent teachers.

The Mouth That Roars—My Journalist of the Year

Later this month, when Brian Lambert joins this site, any of my future attempts at media commentary will inevitably provoke fits of outrage from his gaggle of smitten college-age hangers-on, his venomous mad-dog attorneys, and his peyote-addled new-age sycophants, so I thought I’d get one in while I still can.

A year ago I would have argued that the Star Tribune lacked a metro columnist whose work was impactful. Doug Grow is a very nice guy, but was a very quiet columnist. His role was in need of reinvention. The paper ended up forcing the issue.

Kathy Kersten, though she has improved her photo, has yet to write a word which gives me any reason to believe she is capable of philosophically independent thought (as opposed to parroting a canned ideology).

Nick Coleman seemed to be devolving into self-parody. From his high-handed railing against everyone from Carl Pohlad to Don Samuels, to his populist regular guy shtick, to an evaporation of his great biting wit, Nick seemed past his best days. (When newspapers, or any media outlet, cannot find prominent roles for new talent and fresh voices, it sows the seeds of its own irrelevance. The Twin Cities media is worse than most in this way.)

Then the bridge collapsed.

Since August 1, Nick Coleman has been the most important opinion journalist in the Twin Cities, and one of the most important journalists, period. He has almost single-handedly called to account not just the Governor, not just Lady Molnau, but the entire culture of fiscal starvation that passes for leadership in this state. And he isn’t letting up.

It’s polarizing, surely, drawn in too-broad strokes at times, but in doggedly pursuing the forces that shaped the state’s greatest public sector disaster, Coleman manifests journalism’s higher calling: not letting the big lie go uncontested.

I suspect he’s doing it at some peril to his own career. This is a newspaper that doesn’t like controversy, doesn’t like risking its access to the powerful, doesn’t like perceptions it is imbalanced. Only in its coverage of the Vikings and Timberwolves does the Strib seem to allow rank negativity to prosper.

I know some will argue that Nick has been engaged in a months-long witch-hunt when all the facts aren’t in. That he’s scapegoating figureheads who would never be expected to have a command of small details in any other walk of life. But Coleman gets the larger point: unless there was a tiny earthquake under the Mississippi last August 1, bridges don’t collapse unless something is neglected. Not willfully, but because of a philosophical approach to the public welfare.

And Coleman isn’t the only one. The paper’s primary reporters on the after-story, Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe, have been dogged as well. For all I know, there may well be a Pulitzer in it for them.

Ironic, isn’t it, that it took an unprecedented disaster to give an atrophying newspaper a reason to live?