- Gordon and Vergé went to have dinner at the hotel restaurant; Roy Yamaguchi was cooking. When they arrived, the maître d' said, "I'm very sorry, Mr. Gordon, we have a rule that the owners won't let the help eat in the restaurant. But I'll give you a free meal at the bar with Mr. Vergé" — to which Gordon replied, "Wait. You didn't pay him, you gave him the shittiest room in the place, you charged people hundreds of dollars to eat his meal, and he's the help? I thought the help gets paid."
That's when Gordon told Vergé that if he spoke to any of these people ever again without calling him first, he would personally choke Vergé to death. "I cannot see you treated like this," he told the chef. "I'd rather see you dead."
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So I happen to be at Ground Zero of empty celebrity chef-hood. I lit into a buddy on Sunday for taking me to a place where I'd have to wait in line to spend $14 on a breakfast with black beans, quinoa and sorrel in it. We had a blow-up fight about Chef's Table, which I consider to be a cause, not a consequence of bullshit like $7 donuts. According to Google the closest grocery store to me is that horrific new millenial-pitched Whole Foods concept which I actually sort of went to by accident without knowing it was the ItThingOfTheMoment. So the LA-ness of LA is driving me up the freakin' wall right now.
But.
I'm not sure I'd go back to the dark ages of Julia Child and the Endless Horizon.
But maybe I would.
Still grappling.
NO ONE in LA cooks.
No one.
In part, it's related to millennials moving into food deserts. In part, it's related to being on-call for our employers. In part it's related to all the bullshit you need in order to cook and the fact that if you have roommates the kitchen dishes will be the thing you fight about the most.
But yes. This is not new. Or, it's new, but it's not "new new."
It's illustrative to watch any cooking show of your choice and then cue up an old episode of The French Chef. Julia Child cooked for instruction. These days it's all about spectation.
As soon as I realized that every restaurant in LA is cooking for Instagram it all made sense.
You probably saw Michael Pollan talking about it in his recent series, "Cooked"
This is one of the statistics that he has been trotting out for a while (maybe made it's first appearance in The Omnivore's Dilemma?), and it is properly sourced info, too. (IIRC.)