Hors D'Oeuvre Weirdness at the Four Seasons
On one of the news programs on tv a reporter said that New Yorkers attended an average of two parties over the holiday season, but I don't see how that's possible unless she meant two parties a night. Since well before Thanksgiving the mail had been stuffed with invites, mostly for things we would never attend, maybe a party to celebrate the publication of a photographer's book of pictures of fashion models that commences at 10 at night, or the one-year anniversary of a restaurant in midtown Manhattan, from 6 until 8 p.m., which I not only could not reach in time but, if I could, I wouldn't know anyone there and would stand in a corner wondering why I had come to a restaurant's one-year anniversary.
Nevertheless, even excluding 99 percent of the events during the past holiday season, that left many, many parties that I wanted to go to, and that in addition kept me in touch with the world of hors d'oeuvres. On the television show, the reporter explained that for those attending the festive events, hors d'oeuvres contain many calories. The statistic that continues to haunt me is the pig-in-a-blanket, 475 calories.
Fortunately this obviously once-popular treat is served but rarely, or perhaps never, at the Four Seasons, where I attended a cocktail event determined to make an authentic study of the hors d'oeuvres. What is it with these nasty little things? You are holding a drink, talking to someone, and suddenly there is a waiter standing before you bearing a tray of some repugnant artifact. Out of nervousness, or politeness, one reaches involuntarily for the bit of, say, raw fish on toast that the waiter introduces to you as tuna tartare. Now you have a drink in one hand, a napkin in the other and a mouthful of rank raw fish, and are still trying to communicate, feebly, cocktail-party style?when a third party comes over to introduce him or herself. Transferring drink to the greasy fish hand, you reach out to shake hands and speak, all the while trying to swallow and breathing a fish-whiff cloud of the raw tuna. Or worse, the cold dollop of caviar, with the boggy ball of old boiled potato on which the deposit of caviar was initially laid to rest, plummets down your gullet.
The next time the waiter comes around you do your best to avoid him but no, accidentally, it happens again, your hand of its own accord has shot out and reached for, I don't know, something that's been announced as "coconut shrimp" or "chicken sate," and this time you're left with a mouthful of soupy peanut butter and a pointed wooden skewer you have to do your best to shove back into some old lemon half or pineapple before the waiter runs off, leaving you with a dangerous and dripping weapon.
And worst of all is that, after hundreds of these mean entities, you have consumed thousands of calories and are still hungry and hoping for dinner. The endless mouthfuls (which even if initially warm are always, by the time they get to your part of the room, ice-cold) have done nothing to quell or diminish the hunger pangs and have now gone to war, deranged, in your stomach, the crab egg roll and the spinach-and-feta spanikopita battling the foie-gras-and-creme-fraiche in some kind of global cuisine nuclear stomach war.
Apart from an airport, one would be hardpressed nowadays to think of a current construction project that permits as much space as the Four Seasons. The layout of the place is oddly reversed. One checks one's coat on entering, then goes up the free-floating staircase straight into the restaurant. Though the upstairs space is grand, one cannot make a grand entrance; one pops up into the room like a goby, those fish that pop out of holes in a public aquarium. The massive room, several stories high, with the dangerously daggerlike glass chandelier above the bar, is somehow familiar and comforting, as if one is a global citizen attending the World's Fair of 1964.
The design is more than 40 years old by now, but it's so worthy that there is none of that feeling of nostalgia associated with it in the way that, say, an art deco restaurant or even an inferior "modern" piece of architecture might have.
In my mind the Four Seasons has always remained firmly a place to have lunch. On occasion when I've had dinner, the room is oddly without energy and for some reason the food hasn't tasted quite as good?there's more of the idea, for me, of first-class tourists traveling on the SS France when the beautiful people have long since taken to jet-flight. At dinner the wheeler-dealers have fled, the air sags slightly with fatigue. Yet on this night the air, the atmosphere, the restaurant, has pulled itself out of its nightly torpor, it's got the same fervor as at lunch, only more glittery. The chandelier, that stalactite nest of icicle crystal spikes, the bubbling fountain, the great sheets of glass windows?upstairs a little jazz combo belts raucous sacky strains?if only the crowd were not quite so dismal in black, it seems a little sad, as always, the men are sharp in charcoal suits, but why do women have to be wearing sackcloth, these pale faces above a sea of darkness?
In any event I'm already uneasy as I approach a table where two men stand behind trays of littleneck clams and oysters on the half shell, pink and white curls of huge shrimp and a giant bowl of lobster meat. I just can't muster the interest in collecting a plate of seafood?even though it's possible to take the plate and sit at one of the empty banquettes. To indulge in an occasional raw oyster, for me, would be something best performed as a solitary act in the privacy of my own home.
Yet there's something rather jolly about seeing them?oh oysters, come and walk with us!?lined up on their half shells, something English, and American?they would have been found a hundred years ago, at Sherry's or Delmonico's. And yet, really, it makes me wonder at what point Japanese and American cuisines took such different paths?like the moment of separation on some evolutionary tree of two separate species, with raw oysters in common. At last I point to the heap of lobster meat. Really, I adore lobster, it's just that I don't want to be sitting here nervously chewing away on the white and pink chunks. It's not that I'm not hungry, either. It's that it's not possible to enjoy or participate in two activities at the same time. Am I alone in feeling eating is basically a solitary pleasure? Like an animal who's got a bone, I want to be able to gnaw alone in the private safety of a cave.
Meanwhile the waiters and waitresses are circulating. Wild mushrooms on toast (a quick mouthful and the overwhelming taste of soft, moldy forest floor). Tuna tartare (canned cat food, maybe?). Bruschetta (oily bread without taste, tiny cubes of tasteless vinegary tomatoes). Tempura vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, red peppers, zucchini?soft, bland vegetables in soggy batter). Smoked salmon on pumpernickel toast points. And, of course, sauteed chicken on skewers with peanut sauce. Maybe somewhere, somehow, someone's got this perfected. But I don't know when it turned into an American thing, like peanut butter and jelly, a kind of Elvis Presley dish, peanut-butter-and-chicken-sticks. Surely what it's become isn't right.
The regatta of hors d'oeuvres sails past, modern, proud, fashionable. Gone are their companions of yore, the stuffed celery, the deviled egg-halves of the 1960s, the chicken-liver-bacon-water-chestnut rumaki of the 1970s, the cheese straws of the 1980s. All long exiled to some distant shore. It's not the food. I don't want to be mean, I adore the Four Seasons. It's me. It's the lack of thinking time between mouthfuls, one cannot savor because one's too busy shaking hands, or worrying why one's not. I know it's my problem. If I could eat it at home, in bed, on a tray, the mouthfuls of sponge or spores from the ocean floor would be worth mulling over, I wouldn't feel I was getting hit in the face with some wet fish. I would be happy. Here? It's sensory overload, too much to deal with. If I'm going to have a plump raw oyster, please don't make me do it in public. I don't want to be the walrus or the carpenter. I want to eat hors d'oeuvres alone.