Are Open Kitchens the New Male Revue?

Oui Chef

For the first time in months, I had Saturday night off and took Natashia to Smithereens.

Our good friend, Michael Silber, got us seats at the Chef’s Table and it was exquisite. I don’t usually dine at restaurants where the food is overly chef-driven i.e. all the attention is on the chef, the food, the technique, the ingredients, etc because I just don’t like the feeling of being all up in someone’s ass like that.

I’m a bit more interested when the chef is decentered, there’s narrative focus, a macro point of view regarding culture, and perhaps a middle finger toward late stage capitalism which could be the metal being played in the bathroom of Penny or a restaurant that still gives bread and rice away for free.

While it is impossible to not focus your attention on the chef, the technique, and the plate at Smithereens because it is simply that good, the story is what keeps bringing me back. As a Chinese kid from Florida who thought he was Omar Epps for large swaths of his adolescent life, I appreciate Chef Nick doing white boy kaiseki a la carte at Smithereens.

I’ve seen a lot of white boy omakase or white boy kaiseki over the years and it’s like watching BumFights.

Chef Nick is absolutely shredding and what anchors his restaurant is that he’s employing Japanese technique to cook New England cuisine. It’s not fusion, it’s not appropriated, it’s a story of a chef from New England that learned Japanese technique and applied it to the cuisine of his youth.

This is literally what Marco Polo did for Italian Cuisine, what the Moors did for Italian Cuisine, and what Shaw Brothers Kung Fu Films did for Wu-Tang which is basically Italian since they’re from Staten Island.

BUT, cuisine aside, what really got our attention was the set up of the Chef’s Table in the middle of Smithereens. It feels like you’re in a dark, dingy, illicit room reminiscent of a place I may or may not have set the fire alarm off in Tokyo and got chased through the street by Yakuza when filming an HBO Special on Japanese Sex Work that never aired…