> >
Print
E-Mail
tool name
close
tool goes here
Wednesday, Sep. 16, 2009
Changing face of fine dining
Upscale dining is great, but in challenging times, we need a side of modesty with our decadence.
by Christopher Kelly
123RF
Is fine dining in Cowtown worth the price?
Settle into your seat at Ellerbe Fine Foods, a new upscale eatery in south Fort Worth, and be prepared for a culinary lesson — one so picayune and obscure that you may think you’ve stumbled into a Saturday Night Live parody of a fine-dining experience.
The "Sauteed Anna Maria Shrimp with Melted Scamorza?" Well, that comes served over eggplant grown on Scott Farms, and that scamorza is a cheese similar to mozzarella, produced locally by The Mozzarella Co. in Dallas, and, really, if you haven’t tasted shrimp caught off the coast of Anna Maria Island in Florida, then you, sir, have not tasted shrimp at all.
The cost for this rather dainty appetizer: $13.
The entrees get even more convoluted — and expensive. Among the recent items on the menu, which uses "fresh, seasonal ingredients" and changes daily: a "Johnnie Fair Glazed Petite Pork Shank" served with "Black Eyed & Creamer Peas, Crispy Carter Farms Okra, Stone Ground Mustard" ($26) and Curried Lamb Chops with "Latte De Feta, Warm Couscous Salad, Tzatziki" ($29). Be warned, though: If your experience is anything like ours, you’ll probably feel a little peckish after the meal has ended (the portions bring to mind the old Steve Martin joke from L.A. Story — "I’m already finished and I don’t remember starting"). If the service is as inconsistent as it was for us — the food took forever to come out, an entree arrived missing a main ingredient — you may even turn indignant.
Ellerbe Fine Foods joins a long list of upscale places that have enlivened the Cowtown dining scene in recent years, among them Grace, Bob’s Steak and Chop House, Lanny’s Alta Cocina Mexicana and Eddie V’s Prime Seafood.
Yet even if our meal at Ellerbe had been exemplary, we probably still would have emerged feeling as if the entire fine-dining experience has turned upside down.
We’ve created a foodie culture that lionizes the exotic and the obscure, at prices only the elite can afford. We’ve turned eating out into a form of entertainment — forget a night at the opera, we’ll build an evening around the meal — but one fraught with a bizarre kind of anxiety. (Why hasn’t my water glass been refilled? I’m paying $200 bucks and I have to flag down someone for water!).
We’ve convinced ourselves that unless there are four adjectives in front of a pepper — slow-roasted, balsamic-glazed, organically grown, hand-picked — that pepper isn’t worth eating.
And while maybe none of this would seem strange if the economy were flush — after all, people have been spending too much money on fine dining at least since the reign of Marie Antoinette — in the middle of a crippling recession, it feels bizarrely out of step with the culture at large.
Drop $160 for two people, and you may find yourself asking the same question: Has the time come for us to approach eating out in a new way entirely?
Bye, bye, corporate tab
A photographer who traveled often for work, Leo Wesson relished seeking out great restaurants all around the world. He once ponied up $110 for a Kobe steak at Craft in New York City. His biggest tab came to $1,200, for a party of four at Thomas Keller’s legendary French Laundry in Napa Valley. That all had to change two and a half years ago, when he was laid off from his job at Pier One Imports in Fort Worth.
Does he miss the luxury dining? Absolutely.
"Our hobby was going somewhere and having great dinners," he explains. "Sometimes, it was about going to a celebrity chef’s restaurant. Sometimes, it was just picking up the local alt-weekly and seeing what they reviewed — that’s how I found my favorite restaurant in Seattle."
Wesson’s lament is one you can hear from many corners: Just because there’s a recession doesn’t mean we still don’t yearn to be treated luxuriously. It’s also a lament that cuts across many different forms of "entertainment," whether it’s theater tickets that sell for a hundred bucks a pop, or a trip to the new Cowboys stadium in Arlington, which will cost a family of four a mortgage payment, if not more.
To some degree, we only have ourselves to blame: For most of the last 25 years, restaurants had no trouble selling $100 plates of food and $1,000 bottles of wine.
In which case, maybe the recession is a good thing, at least as far as our stomachs are concerned: It’s forcing us to realize that decadence is sometimes best when it comes served with a side of modesty.
Wesson reports that his family has taken to cooking at home more often. And while he still eats out regularly, he’s also learning to be creative about it.
"Since I’ve been freelancing, you don’t really know when your next gig is coming," he says. "If you’re going to have a nice meal, you try to do it at lunch. Or you go and share some appetizers and have a glass of wine instead of a bottle of wine."
That strategy is one that seems to be catching on. A number of high-end restaurants saw substantially increased business during the recent Dallas-Fort Worth Restaurant Week promotion. (The promotion was so successful, in fact, that it was extended to three weeks.) Enticing dining deals continue to crop up — at Ferré in Fort Worth, the owners decided to give food away for free on Monday nights in August — as restaurateurs find new ways to get bodies into the seats.
If the ’90s and early 2000s saw the rise of Foodie Nation, this next decade might bring us a new creature entirely: The Foodie Bargain Hunter.
"Folks still want to dine at these restaurants," says Terry Clower, the director of the University of North Texas’ Center for Economic Research and Development. "They just want to do so in a way that results in a lower ticket price overall."
He adds: "I was actually speaking to someone in the fashion industry about this same topic: Are we all going to become value shoppers?"
Talk to your waiter
The food is undercooked. The water glass remain unfilled. The waiter or waitress is nowhere to be found. We’ve all experienced poor service while eating out. At high-end restaurants, though, these problems become even more magnified: If we’re paying $30 or more for a plate of food and anything goes wrong, it’s apt to seem like a bigger deal than it might otherwise.
And now that we’re all more conscious about how our money is being spent, the experience of fine dining has become much more fraught.
Which begs the question: Are we placing unfair pressure and expectations on restaurateurs, many of whom are struggling with the same financial challenges as the rest of us, trying to do more with less?
To get a bit of industry perspective, I visited Adam Jones, who had been developing the downtown Fort Worth restaurant Grace for years before finally opening last fall — smack in the middle of the worldwide economic meltdown. He’s been particularly challenged by the fact that corporate dining, which he expected would be as much as 50 percent of his business, now accounts for less than 10 percent.
"We have employees, we have customers, and we have a food product," Jones explains. "All three are volatile.... Not all of those things can be perfect at the same time."
Jones points to another problem that affects the Fort Worth dining scene in particular: Whereas many cities, including Dallas, have a long tradition of fine dining — and an experienced group of servers who tend to move from one restaurant to the next — Cowtown is still relatively new to this game. More servers need to be trained. But training can be very expensive, further cutting into the restaurant owner’s bottom line.
Does that mean diners need to just accept that their money isn’t necessarily going to buy a flawless experience? Quite the opposite, Jones says that now, more than ever, diners need to be clear about their needs and to speak up if something has gone awry. At his restaurants, he operates according to a "fix it, plus" rule — fix the error and then give the customer a little something extra to know you care about them. As much as diners have to be careful about their money, he says, restaurateurs need to make certain that they don’t lose a potential repeat customer.
Those open lines of communication need to extend to every part of the meal. Sure, you can allow yourself to be sweet-talked into a bottle of wine that you can’t really afford — and then feel all the more annoyed when the wine disappoints. But your dining experience will likely be much better if you are upfront about how much money you’re willing to spend.
"Tell the waiter what you want," advises Jones.
Indeed, the Grace owner predicts that the high-end spots that will survive the recession are the ones that offer diners a range of economic options, both a $9 glass of chardonnay and a $40 glass; the $20 strip steak and the $50 filet mignon.
A taste of austerity
A few weeks after dining at Ellerbe, a friend and I tucked into another new upscale restaurant on the scene, Eddie V’s, the Fort Worth outpost of the Austin original. Just about everyone we knew had raved about the place — and it turned out they were right. We were treated like visiting royalty. The service was attentive and kind. The food was superb. The price tag was again steep (about $110 before tip), but we agreed that if you were looking for a place to celebrate an anniversary or graduation this would be ideal.
Which points to perhaps the most important part of fine dining in tough times: Pick carefully. Just because the prices are high, doesn’t mean the experience is going to be a good one. The best you can do, then, is quiz your friends, scour the blogs and try to know what you’re getting into.
"The more expensive it is," says Wesson, "the less spontaneous you can be."
But a lack of spontaneity need not translate into a starched and boring evening. It just means that, after a few decades of recklessness and too much risk-taking, in the restaurant world and the real world, we could all use a little more restraint.
Indeed, more than being good for your pocketbook and for your waistline, a new approach to fine dining might ultimately be good for humanity, too.
"We just got back from San Francisco, and we had one expensive dinner, at Gary Danko," Wesson says. "Then the rest of time we ate at a smaller local place, or we just bought food at the farmers markets. It was really nice."
Be the first to comment on this story click the 'Add Comment' Tab!
DFW.com is pleased to be able to offer its users the opportunity to make comments and hold conversations online. However, the interactive nature of the internet makes it impractical for our staff to monitor each and every posting.
Since DFW.com does not control user submitted statements, we cannot promise that readers will not occasionally find offensive or inaccurate comments posted on our website. In addition, we remind anyone interested in making an online comment that responsibility for statements posted lies with the person submitting the comment, not DFW.com.
If you find a comment offensive, clicking the exclamation icon will flag the comment for review by the administrators; we are counting on the good judgment of all our readers to help us.
