Loren Kantor’s recent restaurant review in Splice Today—“Haute Cuisine: Searching for the missing ingredient in restaurant food”—left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not sure about restaurants, but his missing ingredient was the truth. As a former kitchen worker who feels maligned, I’m compelled to write a letter of protest:
Dear Loren,
Please don't take the following as a personal attack. I think you're a good guy, but what you wrote hit a nerve. You expressed some strongly-worded derogatory feelings—as opposed to facts—towards the people who work in what you call “haute cuisine” restaurant kitchens. The problem, from a journalistic point of view, is that by your own admission you don't know anything about what goes on in those kitchens. I'll quote you: “I’ve never worked in a restaurant kitchen but I know people who have.” I hung in there out of curiosity. Plus, I'm generally a fan of your writing. I'm hoping you go back to telling some entertaining stories.
Here's my alternative point of view: I've worked in at least 10 kitchens, and not one thing you wrote about the gross behavior of professional cooks in the workplace rings true. I've written a number of pieces for Splice Today about my experiences in kitchens. You know that old adage regarding writers—”Write about what you know”—right?
For a couple of years, I worked at a “haute cuisine” place in the Four Seasons hotel on the island of Maui. The kitchen was pristine. There wasn't a trace of the “filth” you suggest is so common. You write: “Meat and fish often sit unrefrigerated for hours in such high-end places.” This never once happened in any place that I’ve ever worked in, even the ones at the low end. What you're saying, based solely on hearsay, is that the people cooking in fancy kitchens are lazy, ignorant troglodytes who don't care about basic, universal food service standards.
One haute cuisine meal at a stuck-up, hoity-toity place in downtown L.A. had you reeling. You almost retched, diners were eating atrocities resembling “dung” (it was truffles) and “chum.” It sounds like the culinary version of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but I suspect a good deal of it's in your imagination.
Another of your claims: “Sous-chefs prepare dishes with fingers bloodied from kitchen knife accidents.” Fact check: false and defamatory. You also write that, in “haute cuisine” places, “Kitchen personnel are drunk or drug-addled, their sweat mixing with food while they plate meals with dirty fingers.” The Truth-o-Meter’s verdict: “pants on fire.”
I don't get why you brought George Orwell into your diatribe/review. His book you cite—Down and Out in Paris and London—was published in 1933, after he'd experienced brutal work conditions as a dishwasher in Paris. But this is 2026. The past century has seen great advances in labor laws, as I'm sure you know.
You credit the great author with “ripping the lid off fine dining” and “depicting in unsparing terms the filth, language and subculture” of fancy restaurants. At least you got the part about the foul-mouthed language right.
You write that you wished that Anthony Bourdain could’ve been sitting with you to help you skewer the pomposity of that house of horrors that led to your meltdown. I suspect he would’ve let you down as a dining companion. Bourdain wasn't much of a complainer when someone cooked a meal for him. When an indigenous group in Namibia served him their specialty—uncleaned, flash-roasted warthog anus—he suppressed his disgust and just said, “Thank you.”
I'm sure Bourdain would've had a great meal at the place your aunt took you to as a treat and done his best to make it a pleasant experience for everyone at the table. Anyone could do that, even you if you'd only tried instead of wallowing in your misery and sharing it. On the restaurant’s website, the Margherita pizza cooked in a wood-burning oven looks irresistible. That and their Caesar salad would please even the most close-minded fussbudgets.
Bourdain would've written you off as a yokel had you told him that the bone marrow you tasted was like eating “charred bull snot” served on “a bed of schmutz”—the Yiddish word for “filth.” In fact, bone marrow was Bourdain's favorite food. He said that he'd like his last meal on Earth to include the bone marrow served at St. John in London. He also said, “If God made butter, it would taste exactly like bone marrow.”
Perhaps you've fallen for the self-mythologizing of an aging hipster trying to promote himself as “down with the people” as he traveled the world, dining in restaurants most people can't afford. For show, Bourdain claimed that In-N-Out was his favorite restaurant in L.A., but 400 miles up the road, in Napa Valley, The French Laundry was his restaurant of choice, not a lowly burger joint. In 2002, after his 20-course feast there—featuring foie gras, caviar, and fine wine pairings—he described it as “the best restaurant in the world.” I'm sure Bourdain didn't pay for it, but at today's prices it was somewhere around a $1400 meal.
Can I ask why you took a doggy bag out to feed the homeless—towards whom you make such a point of expressing empathy—when you describe the restaurant food as reminding you of “dumpster remnants.” That sounds demeaning. Don't you think they're tired of dumpster diving?
Maybe you intended this as a piece of satire, but the tone is so all over the place and downright mean that it doesn't read that way—more like a temper tantrum. Pretentious restaurants are a valid target for writers, but why did you think it was a good idea to go after the hard-working, low-paid kitchen staffers in such a brutal, cavalier, uninformed fashion? That's like going after corporate greed by smearing factory workers. You say that your waiter—another member of the working class—“smirked” at you? Maybe that's because of all the attitude you gave him.
