Fab FloFab

On the New York Times ’Dining & Wine’ section, Florence Fabricant offers periodic advice regarding the banalities of table and restaurant etiquette, but most often what would have been originally intended as genuine guidance rules for proper public presentation morph into pretentiously humorous takes on relationship counseling for new couples, therapy for young parents, and otherwise platitudinous renditions of consolation for unwarrantedly embarrassing dilemmas. A large portion of these personal concerns, usually addressed in the ‘overreactive’ fashion, can vary from petty complaints of bad ambient music (and what to do, were one to experience such a scenario) to grievances on a boyfriend’s habit of loudly licking his fingers (for which the solution is to pack moist towlettes).

What makes the Thursday feature readable and—perhaps—commendable and tolerable, considering the absolutely obnoxious and conceited tone often subsumed by contributors’s trite façades of daily life (for after all, don’t we all experience the wrongs of being assigned a Le Bernardin table neighbored by twelve loud DNC executives?), are FloFab’s habitually furtively derisive replies, hints that this woman—who one could expectedly assume an archetype of the manufactured product of the pretenses of haute cuisine—understands the culinary world as one of play, and particularly one that is more often than not taken too seriously by foodie wannabes. Some examples:

Dear FloFab: My Boyfriend is a Human Dumpster!

Q. My boyfriend is like a human Dumpster. Every time we go to dinner, I try to enjoy the ambience and his company, while he shovels whatever is on his plate in his mouth and finishes a full course in three minutes. I’ve told him that he eats like a puppy and needs to slow down but–short of taking his fork — nothing has worked. How, oh how, do I get the boy to savor the flavor and wait a few seconds between bites?

A. Try asking questions, or being a wittier conversationalist.


Dear FloFab: My Brother’s Girlfriend Hijacked Thanksgiving

Q. My brother started dating a young lady whom he brought home to introduce to the family for the first time last Thanksgiving. In our family, the Thanksgiving meal is usually provided by the host or hostess, with extended family members contributing occasional specialties such as the pumpkin pie or a vegetable. I might also add that most members of my extended family are excellent cooks.

To our surprise, a few days before the big dinner the young lady called my mother, who was to be hostess that year, and insisted on cooking the turkey along with all of the fixings. Since none of us really knew this girl or her cooking skills very well–for all we knew she could have been a professional chef–and because my mother didn’t want a contentious start to the relationship, she reluctantly agreed. After further questioning it became clear that the girl had never really cooked a turkey before, or much else that she was planning to make, regardless of her belief in her capabilities.

The night of the dinner was disastrously comical, of course. Her turkey was bland and shoe-leather dry, the “gravy” was a greasy black oil slick with burnt pieces of…turkey?…floating in it, and the cranberry sauce looked like chunky red vomit with broken pieces of walnuts dotting the surface. The only thing that was remotely edible was the cornbread stuffing, which I believe came out of a box. Many people were politely picking at the offerings (but not eating much, as there was a lot left over) and my poor mother kept up the show of politeness by praising the girl’s efforts and offering everyone seconds. The girl herself sat there smiling and thinking she had done an excellent job.

Fast forward to this upcoming Thanksgiving: My brother, who apparently didn’t retain any of his family’s traditions in food appreciation or social graces, is still with this young lady, and she again wants to cook the meal. How on earth do we stop her, save our stomachs, and also let her know that it is not appropriate to keep insisting on taking over another host’s dinner?

A. Disastrously comical? Isn’t that the norm for Thanksgiving?

Perhaps the best way is to be effusively grateful but firm: “No, thank you, dear. This year it will be somebody else’s turn, because there are other people in the family who really love to participate in this dinner and it wouldn’t be fair to them.”

The host or hostess might suggest that this young lady bring one dish–perhaps the cornbread stuffing. Often with these communal participatory affairs there will be somebody who insists on bringing some dish that everybody hates: Aunt Maggie’s sweet potatoes, or Uncle John’s cardboard pie. That’s family life and you have to put up with it.

As for this young lady’s lack of self awareness about her cooking skills, there’s little that can or should be said. But perhaps your family could offer to pay for a really good dinner for the two of them. Or offer cooking classes?

In fact, it is not difficult to imagine Fabricant herself milling over such unbearable indignities of ‘daily life,’ but the ‘witty’ reader cannot bear but notice her technique in combatting supercilious play-acting with the same. No doubt FloFab is aware that her true readership lies not in the people who submit dramatic questions concerning trifling matters, but rather on the more mainstream demographic of Sandra Lee enthusiasts and Gordon Ramsay apologists—indeed precisely the so-deemed uncivilized and uncultured demographic her ‘contributors’ wage a constant war against—people who take Hell’s Kitchen unseasoned, proverbially unsalted. One comment reads, sic,

At a casual restaurant, eat the available hot food as it arrives. From watching Gordon Ramsey on Hell’s Kitchen, I now understand that above a certain price point, it is entirely correct to send the entire course back and have the kitchen do the entire service together (and give the brigade kitchen brigadier something to yell about).

But certainly these people, too, miss the point. After all, what kind of person who takes cuisine seriously would even dare invoke—or rather, assume—a lesson from any celebrity chef? True ‘foodies’ are iconoclasts, celebrity praise an ultimate blasphemy against the established canon spanned by the artistes of fine cuisine, surely.

What surfaces, then, from the depths of Fabricant’s sea of target demographics, is insurmountable evidence for a lack of popular appreciation for the people behind the scene, for the executive chefs and the sous chefs and the pâtissiers and the unsung sommeliers. Abandoned is the sense of play intrinsic to any art form, literary to culinary. So what, over the long haul, attributes value and credit to Florence’s weekly Q&A is her own silent criticism of the binaries of haute cuisine, the rift cast between the elite and those who wish they were. And such is the purpose of the fabulous FloFab.