Diners, Like Liquids, Take Shape of their Container

dansyoung — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:48:26 +0000

According to the ground rules of the restaurant repertoire you’re not supposed to find a dish like this…

…in a place like this…

Yet when Hugue Dufour, the French-Canadian chef-proprietor of the M. Wells Diner in Queens, New York, asked me if I’d ordered his silky-smooth parsnip soup with the sautéed foie gras topper I was surprised anyone would regard this accessory as optional.

“On ne vit qu’un foie“, I replied, a play on the French expression on ne vit qu’une fois – “you only live once.” What I essentially said to Dufour was that “you only live one liver” (wasn’t that the original title of a James Bond film?) and so I would pay the $10 supplement so as not to squander the opportunity. I don’t know what he thought of my pun, but he did reward me with this…

I immediately embraced Dufour as a comrade driven by the young&foodish manifesto:

Eat like a kid, dine like a prince.

The idea behind my London pop-ups, both BurgerMonday and SpagWednesday, has been to relocate accomplished chefs, along with their high standards, to a classic 1950s British caff (greasy spoon) where all comers could slurp spaghetti and spill burger juices with complete abandon. My notion of “kid-friendly” was “stain-resistant”, an eating environment paved in Formica.

Initially I viewed the wondrous M. Wells Diner as part of a trend that takes the informalization of fine dining down another big step. Pioneering restaurants like New York’s Union Square Cafe, San Francisco’s Zuni Café and London’s St John got us comfortable with smart-casual gastronomics. Gastro pubs and gastro bistros took seasonal, market-driven cooking further down to earth. Now concepts like LudoBites in LA and M. Wells were luring us to downright dives. The thrill seemed to be in the slumming, in experiencing something rarefied in the place you least expected to find it, much less yourself.

A single lunch at M. Wells convinced me there was something more to this slumming trend than the excitement of the unexpected. Diners, like liquids, take the shape of their container: If a restaurant is formal, stiff and unsmiling its clientele is prone to behave that way, too. More than a few multi-Michelin-starred restaurants are not so much fun as funereal in their ambience. If, however, you transported those starched-collared diners to a breezy, unpretentious and stain-proof setting they would likely assume those coveted attributes. Okay, maybe not the polyester part.

Formica | YOUNG & FOODISH

Diners, Like Liquids, Take Shape of their Container