Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook by Anthony Bourdain Page A

menu.
    Half-price specials, half portions, à la carte options appeared where they’d once been unthinkable. Soon, you could order off the menu—individual dishes—in the cocktail waiting area at Per Se, where, previously, the only option had been the full ride through a tasting menu—and only in the dining room. Prices dropped, specials changed to less pricey, less intimidating creations. The words “two for one,” “free bottle of wine,” “half-price,” and even “early bird dinner” began appearing on menus, signs, and Web sites. Comfort-food classics like fried chicken started appearing at weekly special-event dinners held late at night—at places where such quotidian fare would not, under ordinary circumstances, be expected.
    But these were not ordinary times—and everyone knew it.
    Many customers, particularly of fine-dining restaurants—the kind of people who invested in stocks and bonds—had lost as much as half their net worth in a matter of days. They could hardly be counted on to have the same priorities—to behave as before. Sure, it was not unreasonable to hope that there was still room for restaurants and menus and a level of dining directed at the luxury market—people willing to pay top dollar for the very best. They’d always be there. But there would also be, restaurateurs quickly surmised, plenty they would no longer be willing to pay for.
    “I may have money to pay for this white truffle fettuccine,” one imagined them to say, “but fuck me if I’m paying for the restaurant to buy that flower arrangement over there!”
    That gap would need to be filled. By ordinary customers. We’d better start being nice to them, went the feeling. Pronto.
    If there’s a new and lasting credo from the Big Shakeout, it’s this: People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit. The new financial imperatives—accompanied, perhaps, by some small sense that ostentatiously throwing a lot of money around unnecessarily might not be cool right now—dovetailed perfectly with the rising hipness of the more casual Momofuku and L’Atelier fine-dining models (which had been around for some time), as well as other, more mysterious forces, long simmering under the surface and just now bubbling to the top to be acknowledged and identified. Wiser heads saw this shift as presenting opportunities.
    A lot of restaurants closed. And, as always, a lot of restaurants opened to take their places. Industry boosters will point to those aggregate numbers as a means of minimizing the severity of what happened. But who among them will survive? Who will still be standing a year from now? Two?
    In the middle of the worst period of crisis, when everyone was predicting the End of Opulence, Chris Cannon and Michael White bravely opened up the very opulent Marea on Central Park South. True, the room is ultra-swank. The prices for the food—which unapologetically courts (and deserves) four stars—are expensive. But what’s interesting is the wine list. It’s cheap. Or, shall we say, unusually focused on moderately priced, lesser known boutique wines and cult wines of Italy. You pay a lot of money for dinner at Marea—but, significantly, you do not get gouged on wine. In fact, if anything, you are gently steered toward more sensible choices.
    As the prices of raw ingredient continued to rise—and pressure on customers tightened—chefs were caught in the middle. Even traditional “must-have” dishes like salmon and sirloin steak were becoming so expensive to serve that many couldn’t make money on them. And customers still wanted organic and sustainable—yet affordable at the same time.
    David Chang suggested a way forward in an article in Esquire , predicting an inevitable move toward an entirely new expectation of the ratio between protein and vegetables or starch on plates of the future—more along the lines of the Asian model. A concentration on not only