Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (17 page)

Lastly, we serve up a
little alt-indie-postmodern rock with Cake. Between 1996 and 2011, they’ve had
five albums debut in the top fifty, so looking and sounding bored must sell. If
you really want to end the meal with a hipster’s sensibility, serve something
that isn’t cake, but still call it “cake.”

Since
not as many people make (or listen to) ‘ambrosia’ any more, here’s another
recipe from the 1927 Piggly Wiggly Cookbook.

Sadly, Miss Belisle (of
‘Swedish meatloaf’ fame) graduated fifteen years before the first Piggly Wiggly
Store opened, or I’m sure they would have served this at some sorority bash.

Just be sure to use
Baker’s Southern Style Coconut (none of that Arctic-style coconut), and
remember—just like in life, bananas are optional.

B
EVERAGES

Hot Chocolate
with Sugarcubes

Mmm . . . Hot
Chocolate. Although mostly known here for the disco earworm “You Sexy Thing,”
in the U.K. they had a Top 100 chart hit every year between 1970 and 1984. Even
they’re
not sure why.

Toss in some Sugarcubes
for an Icelandic group with three top-twenty albums, featuring a quirky, young,
swan-obsessed girl named Björk Guðmundsdóttir.

I wouldn’t recommend playing
all of these artists for  your background music during this dinner. That would
be far too obvious, and you’d have to actually listen to Bread. Here’s an
alternative:

Isaac
Hayes

Hot
Buttered Soul (1969)

None of the four tracks
on this album have anything to do with food, but Hayes’ twelve-minute version of
the Bacharach-David classic
Walk on By
should pair nicely with the
appetizers, and by the time everyone starts to feel the groove of
Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic
,
nobody will care if your meatloaf isn’t quite perfect.

If I told you I knew a
chef who has created the most decadent and exquisite porridge from locally
sourced ingredients, full of sublime flavors and textures, would you think that
this chef:

A)
               
Trained
for years at Le Cordon Bleu in France, is probably named ‘Jean-Michel,’ and
might be a little snooty

B)
Trained at a flapjack house in Ada, Oklahoma, dropped acid “a lot,” was stabbed
at a Van Halen concert, likes to “blow fire just for kicks,” owns a herd of
buffalo, and has a tattoo that was hand-drawn by Hunter S. Thompson’s
illustrator.

If you answered ‘B,’
then you must know Mitch Omer, co-owner and executive chef at
Hell’s Kitchen
,
a man who has been following his mischievous and sometimes destructive muse for
thirty-five years.

Chef Mitch Omer instructing his staff in the fine
points of proper fire safety techniques

We sat down to chat in
a booth toward the back of his restaurant, and when our server came by, I
couldn’t help but thinking, “It must suck to have your boss seated in your
section.”

A few things on the
menu jumped out at me, and most of those involved bison. There’s bison sausage,
and there’s even a bison ‘sausage b
read
,’ which I guess is
for people who don’t have the time to eat their sausage and bread
separately
.

I ordered the Bison
Benedict and a Bloody Mary, and I hate to say this, Wheaties people, but
that’s
your ‘breakfast of champions.’ There’s nothing like biting into a hunk of
majestic buffalo to give you that ‘top-of -the-food-chain’ feeling.

Meat is a big part of
the menu here, and a fairly generic question about foie gras (which he keeps at
home but doesn’t serve in the restaurant) led to this . . . passionate
response:

“I’m
sorry—I don’t give a fuck—its great! They been doin this for what—centuries?
Look, if we can get free range, great, but . . . they’re bred to be killed.”

My vegan readers will probably be quite upset
by all of this, but thankfully, due to their meat-free diet, they won’t have
the strength to write me an angry letter.

The first thing you
notice when you enter the basement restaurant / bar / music venue known as
Hell’s Kitchen
is the decor.
Unlike a lot of basement restaurant / bar / music venues, the decor at
Hell’s
Kitchen
isn’t just a tease–the food is as good (and as interesting) as the
art.

Specifically, the art
of Ralph Steadman, who has drawn iconic caricatures since the days when
Rolling Stone
was actually counter-culture. He may be best known for illustrating the drug-and-booze-fueled
narratives of
Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas.

The walls at
Hell
‘
s
are covered in Steadman’s dark, bold lines, including an original called
Big
Head #5
. And Mitch Omer has
two
Steadmans inked on his right arm,
one of them autographed.

Honestly, I don’t think
I’ve
ever
liked an artist enough to have
their work
burned into my flesh.
That’s probably just as well, since
my tastes in music weren’t very adventurous when I was younger, and I wouldn’t
want to have to explain a tattoo of John Denver.

Talking about Steadman
naturally led us to Hunter S. Thompson
(“his stuff was a Bible for me in the
seventies”)
, so I asked Mitch to improvise a sandwich in Hunter’s name that
would be suitably ‘gonzo’—

“You
gotta start with a decent bread, gotta look at a focaccia, or something like
that, and then I’d put some mayonnaise and Vicodin in and wash it down with
some scotch, make it like a French dip, and . . . you dip the fucker
in
Scotch
.
So there you go, you got the Thompson Dip.”

Mitch spent some time
working concert security (hence the aforementioned stabbing), but instead of
making him jaded, he seems wistfully nostalgic about his ass-kicking past.

That same past, and a
concerned roommate, led him, oddly enough, to try LSD . . .

“I
was working as a bouncer during this time,
and
I started working third shift as a baker. I’d
kick the shit out of bikers through the night, and roll in dough until the
morning.

I
was fighting every night and absolutely loving it. My roommate told me one
night that he was afraid I was going to kill one of these bastards, and well,
‘this might mellow you out a little bit.’

I
was still tripping on acid one day before work. It was wild; the dough was
convulsing, the colors on the walls were running, and I had to take very slow,
deep breaths to keep it under control.

Of course, as any aspiring pastry chef knows,
you have to work with the dough until it completely stops ‘convulsing.’

It
was cool, but I would never let that happen again. I wasn’t giving my employer
my best work, and I’m all about quality. I’ll just stick to pot.”

I knew that Mitch
wasn’t exactly a fan of celebrity-chef culture,
and
since
he
brought up fighting, I asked who would win if he fought celebrity chef Anthony
Bourdain.

Bourdain, of course,
has fashioned himself as something of a bad-ass (of course, how much of a
bad-ass can you be when you’re featured on the Travel Channel?). So, who wins
if it comes to foodie fisticuffs?

“That’s
actually a good question. I’ve met Bourdain. He’s 6’5″, and I’m
6’4″ , and he’s younger than me by a ways, so he’s got that going for him
. . .

What
I’ve got going for
me
is a history of fighting.”

In addition to fighting
random goons at rock shows, Mitch Omer has had to battle himself. He talks
(almost proudly) about ‘finally’ being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and
seems at peace with who he is now.

And if
obsessive-compulsive disorder ever had a telethon, Mitch could be its
spokesman. He actually sent his book
, ‘Damn Good Food–157 Recipes From
Hell’s Kitchen’
back
to the
publisher on first printing.