Big Easy Wins Another Convert...
David Brooks wrote a recent op-ed piece for the New York Times that poked fun at the national obsession with a superficial health consciousness while delivering a backhanded compliment to New Orleans. We offer enough here to pique your interest, and hope you click here to read the entire article. Take it away, David:
Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine's. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty - fish, then crab, then steak.
Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called "devil's brew." A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.
The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:
"Is it decaf?"
I was sitting there in an orgy of excess. My head was fogged with wine, bourbon, conversation and a couple of hours at the craps tables at Harrah's, but strong is the power of the zeitgeist. So I did what all of us middle-aged Prufrocks do when coffee follows dinner. I asked, "Is it decaf?"
If 18,000 calories and four kinds of booze didn't kill me, there was no way a smidgen of caffeine was going to keep me awake. And yet we live in the age of the lily-livered, in which fretting over things like excessive caffeination is built into the cultural code.
I blame the people at the top for setting the tone…
Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine's. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty - fish, then crab, then steak.
Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called "devil's brew." A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.
The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:
"Is it decaf?"
I was sitting there in an orgy of excess. My head was fogged with wine, bourbon, conversation and a couple of hours at the craps tables at Harrah's, but strong is the power of the zeitgeist. So I did what all of us middle-aged Prufrocks do when coffee follows dinner. I asked, "Is it decaf?"
If 18,000 calories and four kinds of booze didn't kill me, there was no way a smidgen of caffeine was going to keep me awake. And yet we live in the age of the lily-livered, in which fretting over things like excessive caffeination is built into the cultural code.
I blame the people at the top for setting the tone…
posted by John V at 9:00 AM
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