Boy, do I love going out to eat. "An expensive habit," people always tell me. Sure. But art appreciation is usually expensive in any form. There are festivals of food, museums of a sort, where streets are lined with cabinets offering a peek at their curios for a pittance, but such is not the ideal environment for taking in true culinary works of art.
The gastronomic art may differ from its brethren on this count, but then again it may not. Its works are literally to be taken in, and therefore cannot be had by many all at once as a fine statue might. But perhaps the spice added by the private possession of the work, which is eventually an ingredient in any gastro-creation, could enhance even a piece of visual art, if one had the chance to examine the piece at leisure, in private, from many angles and distances. Prying eyes, not to mention guard-rails and the ominous, omnipotent presence of security in a museum, create a sort of distance from anything placed in their midst, a political element that gathers around it like a mist. Is it really real, what I am seeing? I see all the others seeing it, but no doubt they too are wondering, and we can't all come up and touch it, setting our noses up close to the brush strokes, or caressing the contours of the marble. The greatest pieces of visual art themselves are layered thick with Importance, which even without all that other fluff would remain a formidable barrier.
Some foods are wrapped in their share of reputation--certainly wine has succumbed to this new bottling process--but taste is such a powerful and personal sense that it eventually cuts through this layer and finds the meat of the matter. Even in a restaurant where every customer is given the same dish at the same time, each tongue is in private session. This is not absent at an outdoor food festival, but leisure is often lacking there--too many other sensual experiences butt in on the lingual, from jostling to the odors of the street, cans filled with flies and paper plates left to fester in the sun.
The ideal forum for food appreciation is the room closest to the food's own kitchen. So certainly, someone might object, no restaurant is needed at all--the best food is enjoyed alone in one's kitchen, without nosy waiters or busy bills. Indeed, if I had been Michelangelo, perhaps I wouldn't have let David out of my sitting room. But not only was I not--I suppose that all artists enjoy much more the act of production than the product, and intend (or relinquish) the product for the eyes of those who did not create it. Likewise, the receiver of art is in a special position. It is I, the non-artist, who am allowed the unique experience of the thing itself, a mysterious whole to be grasped in wonder. I know nothing of the stone from which the man was drawn, and even less about the man who drew him forth. I know only the miracle, not the work, of art. A fickle artist is pestered by the thought, "More salt!" He is still creating, he is recreating. But a good restaurant does not even put salt on the table. There is no chisel left next to David.
Perhaps my metaphor is getting out of hand. (Less salt!) Surely any restaurant that I can afford is no house of Michelangelo. And surely many aren't worth their salt. But New Orleans is a food town. The number of restaurants worth the price on the bill is cumulatively more than I could afford in a year, given other costs of living. And I am not an artist of taste--I cannot come close even to middling chefs. A finely prepared cut of meat, or delicately balanced spices, academic to journeymen, is a treat for me. There is also the thrill of the gamble--a menu promising an unusual combination of personal favorites piques the interest, and could turn out to be wildly successful, or fall flat, but I hedge by picking something somewhat familiar, and hope for the big score, the meal that knocks me off my chair. And that kind of exhilaration is heightened by its transience. The most remarkable difference between the gastronomic and the other arts is temporal. A dish is made for now, right now, and as I experience it, the artwork disappears into me, and the moment into my memory.
Get it while it's hot.
