Cheap Eats

I have never had any interest in being a chef—the hours, the alcohol, the public and the pressure—but I have gallons of respect for anyone who does. The work is brutal physically and emotionally, and fame and fortune are fleeting—80 percent of restaurants fail within five years of opening. So if you can make a tolerable living cooking and serving, Godspeed, but I’ll take a pass.

Early in my food career, eating out was pure adventure. I was thrilled to eat at Larry Forgione’s An American Place or Wolfgang Puck’s Spago or Chez Panisse or Jams or Stars in San Francisco. And the first fresh crop of American chefs (including Jonathan Waxman, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, Jeremiah Tower, Rick Bayless, Alice Waters, Cindy Pawlcyn, Michael McCarty, John Sedlar, Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse) were on fire. California cuisine was born, authentic regional foods were reintroduced, and towns and cities with a handful of one-star French restaurants started to sizzle and pop with what America is so good at—a red-hot culinary revolution that continues to this day.

Now, however, we have the $250 problem. Once a week, I take out two of my older kids to dinner. It might be a small Middle Eastern restaurant in Cambridge, a generic “new American” spot in Somerville, a steakhouse or a fancy sky bar in the new Raffles hotel, but the check is almost always a whopping $250. This is not economically sustainable.

I don’t blame the chefs or the restaurateurs. Food costs have skyrocketed, and it is difficult to find servers and cooks post-COVID. Nobody is getting rich. There is no issue of greed; it’s pure survival. Nobody to blame.

My response is to turn to cheap eats. A bowl of beef noodle soup or ramen, Korean barbecue, dosa (with dipping sauces), the small Greek spot near Davis Square, Cuban, hole-in-the-wall Middle Eastern eateries, Uyghur specialties or Latin American spots from Brazil to Peru to Venezuela. I expect a future of empanadas, croquetas, gyoza, hummus, labneh, kofte kebab, spring rolls, yucca, ceviche, lomo saltado, pisco sours, picanha, fatteh, ezme, saganaki and the like.

It also offers a sense of adventure—now that chefs from around the world can cook and serve authentic dishes, not some bastardized version, to a hungry public, eating out can be a deep dive into a regional or highly local cuisine.

René Redzepi deserves his reputation (as does his wife, Nadine Levy Redzepi, who wrote “Downtime”), but now that his Noma restaurant is closing, it makes me think that a reckoning is due. In all human endeavors, it is our nature to push the limits, to look beyond, to usher in what happens next. History is tricky business, though. What happens next is sometimes what has happened before. Civilization does not march in a straight line, as the Dark Ages proved. It’s like driving on the interstate and missing the exit—sometimes you have to circle back.

So what if we come full circle? Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the only dining out done by my family was a run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant in a shopping center. But now those Chinese restaurants and many others are serving very good food, more authentic food. The door is open.

I desperately want to support the restaurant industry and the people in it, and I will. They are some of the hardest-working people on the planet, and many of them are true artists, but the $250 problem remains. For special occasions, I will shell out for an omakase tasting or a well-­deserved three-star experience, but most of the time it’s home cooking and cheap eats.

It is a sad moment in the life of the American restaurant. We thought that the celebrity chefs, the media attention, the new ingredients, and the signature dishes would last forever. But of course, we were wrong. Something new is brewing out there, something frugal, something everyday; perhaps it’s the second American restaurant revolution. Fast food but good food.

Until then, it’s home cooking, a bowl of ramen or a potato dosa.

Cheap eats can be great eats.