Observation #6 Tell Me What You Eat

New Yorkers seem to cry out the mantra “can’t cook, won’t cook” with pride.

Photo by Yusuf Evli on Unsplash

A recent review in the New York Review of Books of a novel by John Tottenham called Service describes service workers as “distinguished…by the emotional and relational quality” of their job; the chief product of the service economy being “not a consumer good but a satisfied customer”. This at all costs is what restaurant owners in America require. Not necessarily, as we might expect, because they actually want us to be happy with their product when we leave but more that they are relying on us to pay the wages of those workers. Restaurants in New York, good, bad and indifferent are expensive. Way more expensive than you could be prepared for. And because the hospitality industry works so differently from anywhere else in the world, it is hard to get accustomed to paying these prices. The system takes a principle of hierarchy originally developed in old school restaurant settings and applies it to every species of service from fast food to slow dining. All restaurants here are run with layers of service experience, from the affable Maitre’D to the silent servers (usually immigrant workers) who refill your water and clear your plates. I am constantly asked by visiting friends whether they are required to tip so exorbitantly as the industry demands here (in the UK a standard twelve and a half per cent applies and elsewhere in Europe you might tip ten per cent in exceptional circumstances but normally a euro or two would be sufficient nod to excellent service). The answer is of course yes, you must. Here is why.

Most restaurateurs - there are exceptions - generally try to pay their staff as low an hourly rate as they can get away with and then use what is called the ‘tip credit’ from the (mandatory) gratuities paid by customers to make that up to a basic wage. And while higher level staff may make any additional tips above that, except in the most expensive places with wealthy customers, it is always the bare minimum and only the most highly experienced waiting staff in the best restaurants earn anything approaching a good salary. It also means that the heavy lifting in most restaurants, from food prep to clearing tables, be it a local diner or a five star hotel, is done by poorly paid, unskilled, undocumented workers who barely make enough to meet the income tax threshold anyway.

I am not telling you this from a partisan standpoint - in fact both political parties have been effectively lobbied by the industry to keep minimum wages out of hospitality - but because it tells you something about what you can persuade people about fairness. Americans are persuaded to rely on their immigrant workforce and the willingness of those with nothing, to earn the most meagre remuneration for the most menial work in the service industry. And the food industry has persuaded them to pay for this. But when you first come to America from elsewhere, it is hard not to feel aggrieved at the twenty per cent or more you are expected to add to every bill, until you know this. Nobody here complains about paying almost a quarter again on top of their bill. In this, the restaurant owning business has pulled off an astonishing heist by making everyone else cover their staffing costs. And according to the article ‘Check Your Bill’ in the New Yorker 28 July 2025, they will stop at nothing to prevent the introduction of a minimum wage where everyone would be paid fairly. All of which leaves a bad aftertaste.

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” is the famous quote attributed to the original gastronome, 18th Century French lawyer and politician Brillat-Savarin. I might adapt that maxim to “tell me how you eat.” Nowhere have I found this more apt than New York City. Food is everywhere. There are endless offerings of fast and easy food, from burgers to tacos, bagels to pizzas, empanadas to shawarmas, not to mention the cookies and cakes, candies and ice cream. Within the supermarkets are the frozen foods and deli counters, selling pre-cooked meals. A cornucopia of independent speciality grocery stores fills in the rest. The choice of restaurants is bewildering too, from fine dining to hole-in-the-wall, brasseries to steak houses, omakase to salad bars, trattorias to taverns, grand hotels to greasy diners. This is before you even start counting the coffee outlets and sports bars, cocktail joints, pubs and speakeasies, roof gardens and street terraces. Here it’s all about having what you want, when you want it.

But the persuasiveness of convenience has caused a rift between people and what they eat. And the ‘how you eat’ has become a triumph of demand over authenticity. I recently queued up outside an Italian trattoria, supposedly renowned for its authentic home-cooking, selfied by influencers and apparently loved by celebrities. There was not a single Italian waiter among the crew and none I could see in the kitchen. The place has been designed to look like Nonna’s kitchen but it’s a simulacrum, an artificial environment created by her grandsons. When the people serving and cooking know nothing about the culture of the place where the food you are eating is from, there is a disconnect, there is no sensual link between ingredients and palate. The most basic relationship between emotion and flavour is entirely missing.

New Yorkers seem to cry out the mantra “can’t cook, won’t cook” with pride. Apartment kitchens are generally tiny in comparison to other places I have lived. Space is at a premium and so most people don’t want to waste that on using up unnecessary square footage for cooking. When there is so much out there why would you? Few entertain at home. This is not a city where you will encounter the kind of north London Nigel Slater impromptu week night suppers for a friend, thrown together from a few leftovers and a Kilner jar of something lipsmacking nestling at the back of the fridge just waiting for an evening like this. Dinner invitations at home are rarely issued, friends generally meet in restaurants and cooking is certainly not a matter of course. Even if it is not a burden, why would you cook when everything you could want to cook seems to be right there in front of you?

Food and the places you can access it, often reveals some of the most interesting aspects of a city and where you will find some of the most innovative, creative, entrepreneurial people. In London, from Eric’s informal lunches at Books for Cooks to the artisan producers huddling around Maltby St, breakfast of sage fried eggs at Leila’s Shop in Shoreditch, curries in Drummond Street and old school Soho lunches at Andrew Edmunds, there is always somewhere to satisfy a particular longing, where you will find a energy and enthusiasm for ingredients and excellence in cooking. In a new place, that is harder. Navigating restaurants to find the best food and service, where there is an eager passion for what is served isn’t obvious. When a distinctly average dinner costs almost $150 for two, I can’t stomach too many mistakes. It’s easy to see why the foulmouthed Ramsay has done so well here. The conditions people are prepared to accept concerning their most basic human right, that of bodily nourishment, can be woeful. The cooking is an easy target for reality TV outrage.

The thought of which sends me running for my stove. It has taken me some time to work out how to shop efficiently and effectively across my neighbourhoods. I am getting to know where to buy what I need and where there is affordable quality. I have been well advised by friends and locals. But it is still hard to see how most people can afford to have a healthy relationship with food. Which circles back to Brillat-Savarin who, while no champion of the poor, believed in the connection between well-being and culinary know-how. For most people the correlation between how and what you eat has been severed from its origins. Eating has become merely subsistence, necessary fuel, an uncomplicated arrangement of the appetite, hunger delegated to others and cooking relegated to a diminished position in the domestic agenda. So much so that in my apartment block, food is delivered day and night from outlets only minutes walk away. Fast fare is left at apartment doors, so the residents don’t even have to see the person who delivers them their convenience. And thus all that is good about food and eating - conviviality, shared pleasure, conversation, flavour - is reduced to function and practicality.

There is great food out there. You can find it. And I am barely more than a stranger here so there remain many avenues and alleyways for me to explore in the culinary heartlands of the city. There are great vendors at farmers’ markets, delicatessans, bakeries and speciality shops, where you experience the love those people have for what they sell. There are wonderful restaurants too, places where you can taste a chef’s alchemy bringing alive the simplest ingredients. Served with flair, the simplest menus - a few dishes, freshly created - always satisfy. Far more than the fussy, overcomplicated ambitions of the high end restaurants with their brigades of chefs, platoons of serving staff and $400 tasting menus.

It is time for me to write about the kitchen again, to remind people of the innate importance of self-nourishment, cooking for yourself, and the way it stimulates creativity and balance. How cooking can be restful and vivifying in a busy life where time is sparse. Searching out the best ingredients, listening to what your appetite tells you, learning how to shop, satisfying that desire for flavour, cooking dishes that meet your longing, looking after your body and mind by taking action in the kitchen, controlling what and how you eat, acquiring the habits of a cook. All these tell you who you are.