No One Cares Which Fork You Use This Week

Culinary connoisseurs take cover, the untutored masses are flocking to your places of worship. Stay in, order out, but for the love of all that you hold tastily sacred, do not go to your favorite fancy restaurant, because I will be there and will be using my salad fork to eat my soup.

This is the end of Restaurant Week here in Baltimore, an event that has become a tradition for many foodie cities around the country and even the world (I just found one for Bangalore). The culture of food in our city is a microcosm for the psychological and sociological issues that we wrestle with, as is all food, in all settings. It also brings us together, or at least it can. Imagine if all the countries that excel at making hummus fought about who makes it best instead of all the things they have fought about for hundreds or thousands of years.

The first Restaurant Week took place in New York City as a gimmick during the Democratic National Convention, but it has steadily grown and spread. The premise, for you fellow heathen fork users out there, is that while we may occasionally glance through the massive panes of glass at the sophisticates inside the hottest and most happening eatery, we will not enter and savor a fine meal because of cost and fear of embarrassment. Restaurants participate in RW in an effort to bring us in, to tease us with scintillating samples, and like any good dealer, hook us on the finer things. Not everyone loves it of course, including those who would typically frequent the nicer restaurants since they are crowded and full of people like me. I personally am of two minds about it, and while I partake, I suspect that I am participating in a bourgeois charade and/or missing out on the genuine experience these places have to offer.

It is entirely possible that RW plays into stereotypes about rich and poor by allowing us to act the part of the rich and encourages us to value certain types of cultural experiences as more valid or valuable than others. My sense however, is that this is an event for young, white hipsters, and is not an especially democratizing event. This is not to say that I think Baltimore is not capable of food events that have these qualities, however. One of my favorite things about the farmers market downtown is that the customers there look like the city as a whole. A broad spectrum of ages, races, and religions (I love seeing folks in their Sunday clothes after church at the market) all coming together to buy kale and apples. The Gathering – the monthly food truck events held throughout the summer – also bring together a diverse mix of Baltimorean eaters, at a price point that is affordable by most, and providing street food that is often very good.

Restaurant Week purportedly excels at bringing us in to taste what we are missing, except that they are not necessarily serving the food that we would eat if we came in for a normal meal at $29-$45 for an entree. There is a reason that the prix fixe menus are affordable, and that the servings are small. This is a sample, good enough to bring us back, but not so good as to cause a major hit to their bottom line. For that reason, and despite the fact that I take advantage of the event at least once each year, I wonder if it is really effective at opening up fine dining to all.

Then again, it’s important to note that Restaurant Week’s economic impact is highly skewed toward the local marketplace. Most RW participants in Baltimore and around the country are locally owned and operated, single sites or small restaurant groups, and the money that is spent there by local people is much more likely to stay in community, where it will do the most good. Eating is in many ways a political act, the most demonstrative version of voting with your dollars, as you are also putting your money where your mouth is (and chewing and swallowing). Committing more of those dollars than an average week to local businesses, their employees, and the vendors that serve them is a tasty political action.

Now stand back, I’m going to use my soup spoon as a knife.