Last Supper at Norman's

I ate at Norman's for the last time last night. I don't think I've ever eaten at a restaurant on its last night in business, though I suppose a few could have closed the next day without my knowing it. There’s something very uncomfortable about eating in a place that’s about to close. A good restaurant exists outside the normal boundaries of time, because restaurant experiences are inherently repeatable – on a future day, I have the option of enjoying this same dish in this same room with these same people. I remember Ernest Becker’s great book, “The Denial of Death” which makes the point that a human being’s greatest fear is his own death, and to “deny” one’s death, one looks for sources of permanence in one’s life that offer a glimpse of “eternity.” The restaurant experience is one such source of permanence.

All restaurants do ultimately die, however, and the good ones presumably take a little piece of their customers with them. Norman’s certainly left with a piece of me. I loved Norman’s, and I often said it was my favorite restaurant in Los Angeles, but I had to admit the place was commercially inept. The idea of a quiet, refined room on the Sunset Strip was a bit of an oxymoron. No one ever quite understood the “new world fusion cuisine” they served there. The execution was so labor intensive it seemed unlikely it could be profitable: the early menus there had a density reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s aptly named musical piece “The Black Page,” and I remember that they would painstakingly flambee the bananas table side for the New World Banana Split. Every time I went there it seemed that one little element of detail would be removed, an indication that the place was probably on a death spiral that could not be stopped.

Still, this was a place that exuded a lot of care, and I wondered what the last night there would be like. I felt it could go in one of two ways. Either the staff would pay respects to the final devoted customers coming through its doors and deliver the best night the restaurant had ever seen, or the place would die with a whimper. From a narrative perspective, I certainly prayed for the former. But the sad fact is, Norman’s felt like it did on just about any other night. The service was quite good but about 10% less impeccable than it normally was. The food was about 10% less perfect (my grits cake, a highlight of the roast pork Havana, was surprisingly dense and lacked the fresh corn whollop it has delivered in the past). There was no drama, there were no speeches, no mention that we were there during the final hours, no thanks for the support as we left. It was just like eating at any other place, with the slight difference that the next day it would all be dark.

One of my dining companions is friends with Nancy Silverton and she suggested we try to get a preview pizza from Mozza before that restaurant’s official opening on Monday. And so, after our dinner at Norman’s , we drove to Mozza to see day negative one of a restaurant's life. We got there at about 10:30. Sadly, they were just cleaning up so we didn’t get a chance to try the pizza. But Nancy was there, sitting at the bar, clearly pleased with her new creation. And I realized that with the death of a piece of permanence in one’s life comes the birth of the new. And so I watched with some emotion as the staff of Mozza cleaned up the restaurant for nearly the first time, just as those at Norman’s locked the doors for good.

Miracle Fruit Through The Looking Glass

My friend Nat has always been interested in fruit. Shortly after college, he devoted nearly a year to mapping out every publicly accessible fruit tree in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nat ultimately decided to get a PhD in ethnobotany. I’m still not precisely sure what ethnobotany is, but at a friend’s wedding, Nat noted that one of the flowers in the main arrangement was not only very rare, but was also hallucinogenic in sufficient quantities.

Nat is a member of the Rare Fruit Society, a national organization unsurprisingly dedicated to the preservation and cultivation of rare fruits. Through the Society, Nat located an exotic fruit farmer named Alex who runs a nursery out of his house called the Papaya Tree, about 20 miles north of Los Angeles. “I don’t really like papayas,” Alex confided in us.

Alex’s nursery turned out to be the fruit equivalent of Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory: strange flowers that were sweeter than honey, mutated blueberries that aren’t supposed to grow in our climate, intense bananas the size of my little finger. From Alex’s kitchen we tasted dried jujube chips and sipped homemade carob liqueur, a dark brown elixir with notes of mocha and vanilla oak.

While I was sipping on the carob liqueur I noticed that Nat and Alex were in an intense debate. They were talking about optimal soil acidity and water mineral content required to grow Miracle Fruit. Nat said to Alex in a somewhat hushed tone, “I heard you are one of the few people in the country who has succeeded in growing Miracle Fruit.” Alex just gave a wise nod.

I got up the nerve to ask: “What is Miracle Fruit?”

Alex’s dad disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a small red berry and a slice of lemon. Alex’s dad told me take a test of the lemon. It tasted like a lemon. Not so impressive so far.

“Now slowly suck the fruit off of this little red berry, make sure you mash it up against your tongue really well.” The berry had a slightly sweet and pleasant flavor. “Now take a test of the lemon.” The lemon now tasted like the sweetest orange! I eagerly devoured the entire lemon – it was like candy. This fruit really was a miracle! It made sour things gloriously sweet with no additional calories.

“How long does this miracle fruit effect one’s sense of taste,” I asked, assuming that it might work for 30 seconds on a good day.

“Somewhere between four and eight hours,” Alex said.

Nat explained to me that Miracle Fruit would turn red wine into the finest port. It would transform unsweetened lemon meringue pie. In fact it would make almost anything you eat taste a lot better.

Nat explained that many companies have attempted to commercialize Miracle Fruit but evil forces in the sugar industry have stopped it. There was even a popsicle with a coating of miracle fruit juice (to coat the tongue with the active ingredient, “miraculin”) and a soft drink can with a separate miracle fruit juice chamber. The fruit is apparently native to Cameroon, where the local soup is sour unless you coat your tongue with miracle fruit juice first.

The catch is that Miracle Fruit is extremely difficult to grow (unless you are Alex) and also very difficult to buy in this country. (There is apparently an African man in New Jersey who sells the stuff for research purposes, though.) But if you get the chance to try it, I highly recommend it. It will transform your views on the nature of taste and make you perhaps more conscious that you are a computer whose program can be rewritten by pressing the appropriate buttons. If a true miracle makes us question what is real and what is not real, Miracle Fruit is appropriately named.

The Hero Burger of Blogs

It is with great reluctance that I am writing a blog.

I was inspired by a hamburger--a very bad hamburger. There is a place in Toronto called Hero Burgers that I made the mistake of eating at yesterday. You can look at their web site at www.heroburgers.com. Their ad promises that "using nothing but 100% Angus Beef for our hamburgers and adding no additives or preservatives we make the freshest and juiciest hamburgers possible." Furthermore, "we strive to make every visit special so that every time you have one of our fresh sandwiches you will understand why we say that every Hero makes a difference."

A difference indeed. The Hero Burger's meat tastes like a they put a cow foot in a blender and added salt. The luke-warm "fresh cut french fries" cooked in "100% canloa oil" had a distinctly rancid flavor that, apparently, American (and presumably Canadian) consumers have grown to expect. There is not just one Hero Burger; Hero Burger has expanded to ten locations in places as far away as Aurora. The company has grand growth plans; can a public offering be far away?

I had to ask myself: Why does the Hero Burger need to exist? Does the world need yet another disgusting fast food chain when there is already a McDonald's on every other block? The world needs another fast food chain about as much as it needs another blog.

A blog, a blog. A good idea. Welcome to Milequetoast. The Hero Burger of Blogs.