The Port Dick Cheney Likes
Who knew we had such similar tastes?
So we arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport three and a half hours in advance of our flight to Portugal, which meant we would be eating dinner in the airport. In retaliation for being so early, I insisted that I would not eat at a food court. I would not eat Taco Bell. I would not eat Sbarro. I would not eat Burger King.
"Dude," Tyler said, "Nobody is paying you to write about your airport meal. Just eat a chalupa!"
"How can I say I'm an advocate of Slow Food and eat crap like that?"
"Dude, you're a jackass. You're not a food critic anymore!" On this point, he was correct. I was not a food critic anymore. But I was still a recovering food critic, which may have been worse.
Only a few months before that trip, I'd quit a gig writing a restaurant column for a Glossy Regional Magazine in Philadelphia. Quit is probably an understatement. I was kind of like those Buddhist monks in the '60s who lit themselves on fire in protest — except my protest wasn't over anything important like an unjust war. My protest was over very subtle, but very clear, pressure to be nicer and more complimentary to several mediocre-to-lame restaurants that advertised in the magazine and that, coincidentally, I was being, um, encouraged to review.
This may sound like a reasonable reason to quit, until I mention that besides the fee the Glossy Regional Magazine paid me, my expense account was a staggering $1,500 a month. That's $1,500 a month. To eat dinner. With that kind of budget, you don't worry about ordering seven appetizers for a table of four. Or asking how much the special costs. Or glancing at the prices on the wine list. Or agonizing over dessert. Or supersizing the fries. Let's just say $1,500 worth of dinners buys an awful lot of goodwill among family and friends. At least until you quit. Then many of them think you are insane.
I should probably mention that I am not insane. My brother is more accurate: I am often simply a jackass.
"Look," I said. "I think there's this steakhouse. I think it's near gate 101."
"But we're leaving from gate 7," Tyler said.
"I'm going to that steakhouse," I said.
So we went to the steakhouse, which was nothing special, a knockoff of Ruth's Chris or McCormick & Schmick — so, basically a knockoff of a knockoff. We sat at the bar. The bartender was a good-looking young black guy, with a shaved head and an earring. We ordered two Stella Artois.
"Ah yeah," he said. "You guys like that Stella, right? That is some good shit. Man, I was drinking that shit the other night. Damn! That shit was burning my throat!"
Tyler and I looked at each other, slightly puzzled. "Burning his throat?" I said. "Is that a good thing?"
"I think so," Tyler said. "I think he means that he likes it."
"Well, I’ve never heard that one before."
As I drank my Stella Artois I realized that though I taste and write about drinks for a living, I'd never really thought of Stella Artois in any critical way before. It was imported from Belgium, sure, but it had basically just become a more expensive beer on tap to drink instead of Heineken or Rolling Rock. I had never experienced anything in it that I might describe as "throat burning."
Compare our bartender's unexpected tasting notes to this critique of Stella Artois from the well-respected experts at Beer Advocate: "Upfront this brew has a light malt mouthfeel with dextrin sweetness that turns almost tea-like. Then a vague hop bitterness and mild sharpness that builds towards the end of the flavour, with some dry grain notes…an extremely drinkable lager…"
It certainly sounds authoritative, but does this assessment mean anything to most drinkers? Is "good [stuff] burning one's throat" any more esoteric than a "vague hop bitterness" or "light malt mouthfeel"?
When our bartender reappeared for a second round, his attention wandered past us and out toward the airport terminal. "Damn," he said, lasciviously. "I got to get me some of that tonight."
We expected to see an attractive young woman, but when we turned around, the only women we saw standing anywhere in sight were three over-60 ladies dressed in L.L. Bean parkas and fannypacks. "A little old for you, don’t you think?" I said.
"I like them old," said our bartender. "Especially when it's cold out at night. Old ladies always got liniment. They rub that shit in and it's nice and warm."
This was clearly a person who possessed idiosyncratic tastes. But then, don't we all? Taste is not an easy thing to measure, nor even a worthy measurement to some. What people are looking for to fill their bellies, entertain their senses, decorate their homes, or satisfy their souls varies widely, and taste is almost impossibly hard to gauge. Almost.
In our bartender's provocative language, he challenged us to reconsider our way of thinking about our own tastes. Though it may have been inadvertent, I admired this all the same.
Of course, this is exactly the type of critical approach that my editors at the Glossy Regional Magazine did not like. They wanted a simple, rote, polite thumbs up/thumbs down on the food. But there is so much more to a restaurant, a dish, or a drink than that. Good criticism is an issue of taste — on many levels — and the rigorous, continual questioning of that taste. And when we talk about matters of taste, things get very personal, very complicated, and often very dicey.
One arrogant chef — a transplant from Manhattan — told me in a post-visit interview to his lousy restaurant that he served unadventurous dishes because he didn’t think the clientele in Philadelphia was "100 percent ready" for more adventurous fare. My reaction in print to this comment:
What an adventure it must be for the high-profile chef who leaves the bright lights of New York for the murky, provincial backwaters of Philadelphia and its suburbs. I often imagine that this chef must feel like the Old World conquistador who's stumbled upon a strange, backward native tribe, wowed us with shiny baubles, and threatened to take the sun away. What rubes we must seem! How could barbarians like us ever hope to grasp the finer points of restaurant dining as it is practiced in New York?I went on to trash this offensively overpriced and subpar restaurant. I noted the "repulsive" onion tart that "was soggy and retained the texture of a bad pumpkin pie" that left me feeling "like my breath was going to stink for a week." I observed that the Stewed Lamb Gnocchi "consisted of one huge gnoccho, the size of a small child's head." And I called the owners "sleazy" for the quasi-criminal price inflation on their wine list.
I still stand by the content of my review. But one might reasonably ask: Why so much venom? Well, after serving me bad food, this chef had gone a step further and insulted my city's taste. And therefore mine. All of which, by the way, is the same thing I did when I'd scoffed at my brother for turning up at the airport early or at his desire to eat at the food court. See, commenting on taste is a slippery slope.
Famed gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in his seminal book The Physiology of Taste, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."
To which some might reply to Monsieur Brillat-Savarin: Well, who the f---- are you?
•
 |
| Who likes port? Castro, Cheney, and the former governor of Zimbabwe. |
Although I was not a food critic anymore, as it happens, I was flying to Portugal with my brother that evening, on assignment, to taste port wine in Porto and then write about the experience. We visited the famed port lodges of Sandeman, Dow, Fonseca, and others.
At W&J Graham’s port lodge, on a hill high above the Douro River, we tasted the highly regarded 2000 vintage, which we loved. On our tour, we checked out a special cellar devoted to famous guests-of-honor who've visited throughout the years. Each special guest was invited to throw the contents of a glass of 20-year-old tawny at one of the "appropriate" wooden vats — individually labeled "The Minister," "The Ambassador," "The Emperor," "The Sportsman," and so on. Some of the luminaries so honored include cricket star Graham Gooch, big-game hunter Simon Fletcher, the Duke of Argyll, and Major General Sir John Noble Kennedy, colonial governor, in 1954, of British Southern Rhodesia, known now as Zimbabwe.
Later, sitting in the clubby tasting parlor of Taylor, Fladgate & Yeatman port lodge, we worked our way through glasses of white port, several late-bottle vintages, and a 20-year-old tawny, as a peacock, with feathers unfurled, roamed lovely English gardens outside.
Sipping on my glass of tawny, I wandered into the library to see their modest display of famous people who drink Taylor's port. What I learned was rather shocking. Though we likely agree on nothing else, apparently Dick Cheney and I share the same taste in port.
Next to a photo of Cheney was a yellowing article from the October 6, 1990 edition of London's Daily Express bearing the headline "Cheney’s port in a storm." The reporter commented that, while our troops in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War had been deprived of booze, "I can disclose that America's Secretary of Defense has not been so abstemious in his alcohol consumption." Cheney had humped his own bottles of Taylor's port into the desert.
Lest we draw too many conclusions from all this, let me point out another documented devotee of Taylor's port: Fidel Castro. Some day, maybe we can achieve such common political ground outside the civilized parlor of a port lodge? One can only hope.
I could go on with my tasting notes on the Taylor's tawny or the Graham's vintage, tell you about mellow ripe fruit, aromas of raisins and meatiness, hints of plum and blackberry. But now that I've inserted elements of class, and colonialism, and geopolitics into my port tasting, do you care? Can I ask you to put that out of your mind? If we can, what does that say about our taste? About our critical faculties? What does it say if we can't?
When I returned to the tasting room, my brother was just finishing the last of his tawny.
"By the way," I said. "Hate to break it to you, but we like the same port that Dick Cheney likes."
"Damn," he said. "This shit's so good it's burning my throat." • 29 October 2008
Jason Wilson is editor of The Smart Set. He also edits The Best American Travel Writing series (Houghton Mifflin).
Stella Artois photograph by Goldring via Flickr (Creative Commons); cask photograph by Trine Skjøldberg.
