On culinary televangelism and the Parkerization of cuisine

In the introduction to his book La Cocina al Desnudo (roughly “The Kitchen Laid Bare”), the chef Santi Santamaría writes: “one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s chefs is to avoid becoming the court jesters of the snobs and the posh.”

One of the highlights of FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, was a spirited hour-long debate on the status of Spanish cuisine between Mr. Santamaría (Santceloni, Racò de Can Fabes, EVO, Tierra; on the right end in the photo), one of Spain’s great culinary traditionalists, and José Carlos Capel (on the left end), a well-regarded food critic for El País who, generally speaking, embraces the avant-garde.

It was a debate to which Ferran Adrià, one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy (the culinary movement to which Santamaría alternately refers as “cocina de la vanguardia,” “tecnoemocional,” and “cocina del laboratorio”), was surely invited—and didn’t come.

Perhaps Mr. Adrià felt no need to defend himself. In late April 2009, his restaurant, elBulli, was named the best in the world for the fourth year in a row in the annual survey of the World’s Top 50 restaurants, by the British Restaurant Magazine, while Santamaría is absent from the list entirely. Fellow molecular gastronomy houses The Fat Duck (UK), Noma (Denmark), Mugaritz (Spain), and El Celler de Can Roca (Spain) round out the rest of the top five. (The chefs of Noma and Mugaritz studied with Adrià.)

Santamaría, without being so immodest as to suggest that he, too, deserved at least some ranking in the top 50, hinted at the absurdity—and it really is an absurdity—that food critics and publications from the US and UK, regions mostly devoid of complex food traditions of their own, should be the judges of whether fideua, bollito misto, and blanquette de veau are now hopelessly passé, and whether a kitchen need be outfitted with a centrifuge, liquid nitrogen tanks, and stockpiles of sodium alginate and calcium chloride in order to be considered one of the world’s best.

That question is at the crux of a crisis in modern cuisine—a culture war. Although these men that have learned to make human beings breathe like dragons have been anointed as philosopher-kings by America’s culinary televangelists and food bloggers, what exactly is the composition of this jury? Does it represent any depth of food education? Any geographical breadth?

Restaurant’s top 50 list, which is determined by more than 800 food critics from around the world and sponsored by S. Pellegrino, is clearly influential—influential enough, at least, to come up in the discussion between Messrs. Santamaría and Capel.

But what are we to make of the fact that, the entire continent of Asia, home to the world’s greatest culinary bounty, has only two restaurants in the top 50—Les Creations de Narisawa in Tokyo (#20) and Iggy’s in Singapore (#45)—and they’re both French? Even more preposterously, the list tells us that the three best actual Asian restaurants in the world are in Sydney (Tetsuya’s, #17), New York (Masa, #27), and London (Nobu, #34).

As the wine guru Jancis Robinson has indirectly asked, what does it say about the composition and wisdom of the food media elite if this is their jury verdict?

Is this the Parkerization of the food world?

Yes, chemical pyrotechnics and scattered plating make for good food porn in magazines. And yes, it is interesting, at least intellectually, to watch the arcs of cuisine and modern art intersect in molecular gastronomy. Yet the notion that one must be a molecular gastronomist to be truly great restaurant—and that is, increasingly, the consensus view—is poisonous. It devalues both subtlety and directness. It devalues terroirs of all different sorts. It devalues the commitment to any one culinary tradition. It devalues the multi-generational emotional and even theoretical structures that define many great restaurants. And above all, it devalues pure deliciousness.

Are the world’s greatest chefs and restaurants—as many of its greatest winemakers and wineries have irreversibly done—being forced to reinvent themselves as pretentious pleasure pumps for the adolescent palates of an army of camera-wielding tourists who write for food blogs and lifestyle magazines?

Court jesters, indeed.

Should we stage a Boston Wine Party, and throw our wine into the Atlantic?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the bewilderingly diverse wines on display at this week’s FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, is the price range: 2€–5€ is most common, trailed slightly by <2€ (a significant category, with strong representation from La Mancha, the wine fair’s home region) and 5€–10€.

In the 2€–3€ range are a vast assortment of sometimes steely, often aromatic, almost always appropriately acidic whites from Castilla-La Mancha and other lesser-known regions. If you want a 1994 or 1995 Gran Reserva from La Mancha—an eminently mature Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Tempranillo-Cabernet blend—it might cost you up to 6€.

All of this is a prescient reminder of the three-tined gouging of the American wallet—and, by extension, of the American palate—that defines our wine industry.

The first tine is regulatory: the unconscionable customs duties imposed at our borders, and, worse still, the preposterous bureaucratic labeling and testing rules that are imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (Is there anything that more clearly reveals our government’s still-Puritanical view of wine drinking as a vice than this agency’s name?)

The irony of these idiotic rules, at least as concerns the importation of Spanish wine, is that the EU’s own regulation of so-called “quality wine” (i.e. non-table wine) is actually far more restrictive than our own domestic wine laws, which allow all sorts of preservatives and additives that would be illegal in Europe.

Yet we force Spanish wine producers to spend thousands of dollars in farcical chemical analysis (a boondoggle for sham chem-lab outfits that have been legislated into existence) and an onerous label-approval process. These arbitrary, extortionist barriers to entry function like a medieval wax seal, blocking much of Europe’s best-value wine from ever showing up in America.

This protectionist regime reminds me of the brief rule of Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador. Before President Bucaram was removed from office after six months for “mental incapacity,” he famously (okay, famously in Ecuador, anyway) imposed a 1000% “luxury tax” on imported wines and liquors. The toxic effects of the luxury tax on consumers were a principal reason for his ouster. (The silver lining was that Ecuador got its first woman president, Rosalía Arteaga, who had been Bucaram’s vice-president—before the legislature got rid of her, too, two days later.)

US wine policy doesn’t just rob consumers blind—it also takes away pressure on our own producers to compete globally on price, which ultimately works against them. Ever wonder why the US exports so little wine?

The second tine is legislative: the extraordinary markups that importers and distributors still take are protected by a state-by-state three-tier system (importer–distributor–retailer/restaurant) that was set up at the repeal of Prohibition for the sole purpose of limiting how much Americans drink.

In the civilized modern world, wine stores are allowed to buy wine from wine producers, and sell it at a reasonable markup. In our bizzarro world, a middleman is legislatively mandated.

These archaic blue laws and the industry that they have engendered—artifacts of an era in which the religious fervor that brought about Prohibition was still a very real cultural norm—continue to rob consumers of billions of dollars, year after year.

The third tine is what happens in restaurants: wine multiples of 2.5x, 3x, or even 4x. When US consumers are being asked to pay $40 at retail for a wine that sells in Spain for 3€, we’re exactly matching Bucaram’s 1000% markup.

In short, if we were to do a Spanish version of The Wine Trials—Fearless Critic’s guide to inexpensive wines—its price cut-off wouldn’t be anywhere near the $15 per bottle that it is in the US.  would probably be limited to wines under 5€, or US$6.65—or perhaps even under 3€, or US$2.25.

The Spanish wine industry, of course, deserves a lot of credit for pricing so reasonably. Congress should be deeply ashamed of its consistent record of preventing our own country’s industry from doing so.

1. Are most wine critics impartial judges of quality, or are they really serving as public-relations advocates on behalf of producers? With evidence from my own empirical work, expository journalism, and a survey of the industry, I argue that most wine critics are really in the business of advertising wine, not judging it impartially. Critics are for sale.

2. My exposé of Wine Spectator’s “Award of Excellence” program.

3. My research indicating that wine experts don’t prefer expensive wine to cheap wine by a significant margin in blind tastings: In a year-long series of blind tastings that I conducted with wine experts and non-experts from the US, France, and other countries, my colleagues and I poured more than 6,000 glasses of wine from brown-bagged bottles that cost from $1.50 to $150. On the whole, our tasters actually preferred the cheaper wines to the more expensive wines—by a statistically significant margin. Even among the wine experts alone, there was only a weakly positive correlation between price and preference—one that didn’t rise to the level of statistical significance.

4. Blind tasting and what I call the “wine placebo effect”: No scientific blind-tasting study of wine experts has ever shown expensive wines to do consistently well, or cheap wines to do consistently poorly.

5. “The taste of money”: I believe that the sensory experience itself that changes when you know the wine is expensive. 

6. “The honest wine movement”: the way forward. I advocate for a new approach to quantitative wine evaluation that’s based only on double-blind tasting. So-called “single-blind tasting,” in which tasters know the vintage and/or region (and thus general price range) but not the exact producer, is not enough.