White Tablecloth Blindness

This town needs a food critic. Many Midwestern towns suffer from this same affliction of a lowered gastronomic bar. The first great step that all Midwesterners should take is to admit that we have a problem. Let’s face it, people from the East Coast, West Coast and even the South come to our towns and vocalize the limited quality of our food offerings. Sure we have plenty of restaurants but it’s the quality and freshness of the ingredients and the creativity on the menus that lacks in many Midwestern locals.

I would consider myself lucky. Athens offers a surprising diversity in cuisine for a Midwestern town of 20,000 inhabitants. We have the University to thank for that. Unfortunately many of our restaurants are lacking that extra something that turns a restaurant that just serves food, into an establishment that serves a superb experience.

Many of our eateries present a deceitful ambiance that leads eager customers in thinking they will be receiving a meal worthy of the inflated prices on the menu. They suffer from “white tablecloth blindness.” A sever hypnotic affliction that is spread by greedy and contemptible restaurant owners who revel in doing business where the bar is set low enough to allow a white tablecloth to define the market value of the meal. One of the most extreme examples of white tablecloth blindness or “ambiance blindness” is Spagio in Columbus, Ohio. They tried to get me. Alas, their “canned” red sauce broke any spell they had cast on me at the door. I suppose in the end they still got me. I had to pay for that crap.

One other such bad experience several months ago was a horrific dining event at a place called Toscanos in Athens. This is honestly the worst meal I have ever paid for. This place doesn’t even make an attempt at inducing “white tablecloth blindness.” They simply jack their prices up to make the public believe they are actually getting something worth the hefty price tag. My brie chicken pasta was first brought out cold by a pitiful waitress who didn’t know a knife from a fork. When if finally came out hot, it was essentially a horrific plate of overcooked pasta with melted white american cheese over the top. The real insult was its $18.00 price tag. That was $6.00 more than I paid for a dinner in New Orleans of a Crab Etoufé that I will never forget.

Culinary disasters like this are why every Midwestern town needs a food critic. Imagine if, on a monthly basis, someone publicly called these dog food vendors on their overpriced slop in the local newspaper. Better yet, a periodic food critique is a great way to push good restaurants into becoming great restaurants through constructive criticism. Design is an iterative process and that includes food design. An honest critique might persuade good chefs to try the next and far better iteration of their menu items.

Small and midsized Midwestern towns will never be food culture centers like New York and New Orleans. We won’t ever have professional waiters. We will never boast the boldness and richness in our local cuisine that has evolved into modern Southern fare. We can however up the bar by getting our communities talking about food and demanding experiences in our dining out as opposed to just fancy dish names on a white tablecloth. There are places out here in flyover country that have started to get it right. Madison Wisconsin boasts a bevy of good restaurants and my meal at L’etoile was world class. Best part of it, the ingredients were fresh and LOCAL. If all that we demanded was not-out-of-a-can ingredients and that “fresh” was a word that defined the ingredients and not how the chef talked to his waitresses, it would be a start.

Posted by chris keesey at December 29, 2005 08:57 AM