North America’s in the grip of a crisis of immense, yet incongruent proportions. A Greek’s no longer Greek and a burger doesn’t qualify as lunch anymore. The burbling and bubbling of humanity’s hearty verbal bedfellows, patois and vernacular, are yielding to the piercing and deflating twin tines of the forked tongue of pseudo-elitism and political correctness, and there’s currently a lot more than just liquified cheddar drenching your cheese fries. I used to dismiss the babblings of the late Carl Jung and his way-too-present proponents as a fatuous pile of conflated psycho-turds, but now, my resolution on such matters stands on shakier ideological soil. There’s a sinister, convoluted thread running through contemporary North American culture that connects disparate behavioral phenomena in such a way as to suggest the reality of one of Jung’s more nebulous and untenable theories: synchronicity, which claims that contemporaneous but clearly unrelated occurrences are related.
Until now, I’d dismissed this “principle” as a hyper-fictitious pseudo-tenet. But a recent visit to a tiny British Columbian brew pub, and a couple of uncanny and eerily point-proving conversations that took place there, alerted me to the possibility that there might actually be something to this Jungian spew. And, in light of this possibility, a number of observations that I’d passively noted suddenly drew together in a point of clarity that shattered my sense of oblivious complacency. My world was rocked by the interconnectedness of fallacious discourse and the obvious fragility, and ultimately, the malleability of human perception and pursuant thought, opinion, and language. All at once, an Italian wasn’t Italian, and a cheeseburger and fries combo no longer constituted a meal.
Now, it’s back to the little brew pub, which, for me, served as an improbable locus of ostensibly disparate points and their corresponding corkscrewing cultural and linguistic riptides. I was there with my wife, and we were both hungry. The maelstrom of phenomena that incited my current line of fevered thinking began innocuously with our reading of the place’s menu. Immediately, words and phrases like “artisanal,” “handcrafted,” “craft beer,” “comfort food,” “small batch,” “chef-crafted,” and “reduction-drizzled” leapt from the cutesy bill of fare to the old prefrontal cortex. For a Budweiser-leaning guy like me, who also has an appetite that rivals that of the late, great Andre the Giant, this document set off alarm bells.
What does “handcrafted” mean as it applies to food or beverage? Is a sandwich or beverage not described in this way footcrafted? Machinecrafted? Dronecrafted? Pawcrafted? Sounds to me like some lily-gilding-babble of the mobile vulgus. Further, and more to the point, hyphenated conflations like “reduction-drizzled,” sharing the laminated pages of this little joint’s menu with unfathomable term-oids like “comfort food” call to mind a temporal line of demarcation in my life as a restaurant-goer and consumer of foodstuffs in general in my hometown of Chicago, and signify a simultaneous North American culinary, linguistic, and cultural point of no return.
Chicago was the no-nonsense home to a once-burgeoning steel industry and the world-famous union stockyards, and it was the town where I gorged myself at landmark, long-standing family-owned restaurants like Gene & Georgetti, Arnold and Eddie (owned by Arnold and Eddie Morton and the precursor to the carnivore-centric Morton’s Steakhouse), the Italian Village, Roditys, and the Berghoff. These places served massive portions of family recipe-based creations, delivered to your table by sensible waiters—older gentlemen whose grace and civility defied the passing of time. The barmen at these joints, like the waiters, called you “sir” or “ma’am” until they got to know you well enough to remember your poison and name (which always seemed to happen by your second visit). And they made your martini with gin or vodka, dry vermouth, and as many olives as you wanted. No apples. No chocolate.
A number of these places still stand (and those that don’t marked their closings with the deaths of their original proprietors) and they defy trendiness and caprice. Likewise, casual places—sandwich shops like Al’s Beef and Division Street’s Five Faces—served you satisfying piles (measured, frequently, in pounds) of food with sides of fries, rings, cheese sticks, or fried ‘shrooms, and were mainstays of the native Chicago on-the-fly lunch and dinner crowd. But the presence of these depots coincided with the proliferation of a new kind of restaurant whose first mass-manifestations in the Second City can generally be traced to the second half of the 1980s. At that time, restaurants serving “haute cuisine” spread across the town (most conspicuously on the near North Side) like malaria.
Trendy, ridiculously popular, common sense-defying shacks like Charlie Trotter’s and Okno served microscopic portions of random, glop-covered, overpriced “creations” set in the middle of oversized plates, each with an expansive, desolate band of ceramic real estate flashing as a stark, white, inorganic margin, separating its outer rim from the periphery of its tiny, centrally-positioned payload of infused crap-driblet that, incidentally, you just dropped 49 bucks on. And all that dough you just coughed up also bought you the pleasure of having the joint’s shit slung at you by snotty, ersatz-sophist college kid “servers.” But evidently a sense of importance and/or dining savvy was conferred upon one who was seen feeding at one of these places, or at the very least, one who could tell his or her friends that they consumed the overpriced, expertly-marketed, fastidiously-presented sub-tripe while in the presence of others likewise mesmerized by the spot’s bourgeoise-targeted press and subsequently rendered blind to the fact that they forked over money for a few ounces (and a few cents’ worth) of fancy-colored bowel-gravy.
And what exactly is meant by “comfort food?” Has the nauseating proliferation of tiny mounds of overpriced, infused, chef-crafted bullshit relegated everything that I’ve always loved engulfing to the second-rate status implied by this snotty little bit of phraseology? I was certainly comfortable eating a cut-to-my-specification, perfectly seasoned five-pound hunk of bloody-rare prime rib of beef at Gene & Georgetti. Would such a meal, therefore, be considered “comfort food?” When my sister and I were kids, our mom cooked us delicious juicy burgers on the griddle and whipped up gratifyingly-salted piles of French fries. Were we comfortable sitting at the dinner table as a family? Definitely. So, should this particular iteration of my mom’s culinary repertoire be considered “comfort food?” To our family, burgers and fries and the like meant “supper.” Not “comfort food.”
Insipid catchphrases and overpriced, overrated minuscule portions on outsized platters represent the freakish stitching together of a frightening cultural narrative. The lines are converging here. A new connecting lexicon is in the bindery. Synchronicity in action. What comes next is further evidence of this improbable dynamic, and it all continued to go down at the little place in British Columbia.
My wife and I ordered. We had to go up to the front counter to do it. Included in my selection were a couple of servings of what I would’ve, in less cataclysmic times, considered cheese fries. Blame it on my lack of attention to detail—I focused, apparently, only on the menu’s words “cheese” and “fries” when ordered—but I was immediately corrected by the young bearded guy at the counter when I told him what I wanted, which was, in fact, cheese fries.
“You mean the gouda-cheddar-and-provolone-lime-cilantro-reduction-infused hand-cut potato wedges?”
“I guess.”
“It’s a really sophisticated dish. I mean, considering it’s just comfort food.”
As soon as I got back to our table, I realized I’d forgotten to order our drinks. My wife decided on a boutique-winery-crafted glass of red, and, since there was no trace of the word “Budweiser” on the menu, I opted for a bottle of root beer, which was handcrafted in small batches. I headed back to the counter to order the swill, but had to wait my turn because two couples from a Seattle suburb were now ahead of me settling their tab. These people, who looked to be in their late-30s, were discussing with the bearded counter guy a menu item they’d just polished off that evidently featured what sounded something like Tuscan-sun-ripened-tomato-infusioning paired with parmesan-olive oil-encrusting. One of the Seattle guys, after nodding sagely his approval of this dish, elaborated on the selection by discussing with the kid behind the counter the vegetable growing habits of his neighbor back in the Seattle ‘burbs.
“He grows tomatoes and olives in his garden. Since he’s Italian-American, I’m sure he’s got an amazing pasta sauce recipe or two up his sleeve. (Knowing chuckle.) I’m Irish-American, and my wife is half German-American and half Scottish-American, and since we don’t really cook or even eat at home very often, except when we order take-out from this amazing little Indian restaurant (the owners are these amazing first-generation Indian-Americans), we can only guess at the amazing Italian-American dishes he’s concocting in that kitchen of his.” (Broad grin and another knowing chuckle here from Irish-American Seattle guy.)
Seattle guy’s half-German-American/half-Scottish-American wife chimes in: “When we get back home, we’re going to tell him about the amazing Tuscan-Canadian food we ate right here at this amazing little place!”
Irish-American Seattle guy: “And we can’t forget the amazing craft beer, sweetie. That blueberry-apple-infused IPA was fire!”
My ancestors are from Greece. On both my mom’s and dad’s side. In the old neighborhood, I was known as “a Greek.” Or often “that Greek.” By virtue of my residency, it was a given that I was American. I can’t ever remember being referred to as a “Greek-American” by anyone I know. I had a lot of good buddies. Some were Polish (Dennis and Darren were Poles), some were Mexican (David and Mark were Mexicans), some were Irish (Jimmy and Mike were Irishmen), Some were Serbian (Danny and Vince were Serbs). The “American” part was never a necessary part of the taxonomy. We all knew we were Americans. Just like each of us knew that we were either a Greek or a Pole or a Mexican or a Serb or an Irishman. Even cooler was the fact that we could refer to our ethnicity in either noun or adjective form. I could be a Greek (or that Greek) or just Greek. My buddy David could be a Mexican or simply Mexican. Danny could be a Serb or Serbian. No harm, no foul. No hybridizing secondary descriptor necessary. But today, the rippling undercurrents of cultural and lexical synchronicity lump such nomenclative predilections in with handcrafted tiny portions of delicately-named, reduction-infused, chef-crafted comfort food.
The visit to the little brew pub in British Columbia coincided with one of the last days of a visit to my wife’s familial homestead in Bridge Lake. Within what seemed like a few short hours of our brew pub synchronicity-experiencing adventures, I was on my way back to Michiana Shores, Indiana (many miles away), via a six-day car ride. During that drive, I had time to reflect on the phenomenon of synchronicity at the societal, linguistic level as it manifested itself trans-continentally. I wondered about my attachment to verbal conventions and decorum that would no doubt seem archaic to generations subsequent to my own. I wondered if my behavior—my thinking—might be considered boorish or backward-grasping. Was I a Philistine-American? Or worse, an Archetypal-Philistine-American? Maybe a Neanderthal-American? I was considering these questions when my Canine-American companion Holly and I pulled into our driveway and were greeted by the sight of a pair of Squirrel-Americans in the front yard, tussling over what could only have been a half-eaten loaf of amazing sun-dried tomato and olive artisanal bread, lightly brushed with a ricotta-parmesan-asiago-curd-infused reduction, and handcrafted, undoubtedly, at the small-batch bakery a couple of blocks away. Tomatoes and olives? It had to come from there—the guy that owns the joint is an Italian-American.
Man, I could practically taste that synchronicity.
—John Stamos, along with his wife, Ann, publishes The Renaissance Garden Guy (renaissancegardenguy.com).