Cake and Commerce

How is it that Nina Planck has become the Raw Milk poster child?

I am not a fan of Nina Planck. I do not enjoy her writing, I do not enjoy the content of her articles. I am not impressed by her thinking or by her methodology for backing up her contentions about food. I am, in fact, so turned off by her and her schtick that I won't even link to her book on Amazon or any of her opinion pieces in the New York Times.

How is it that Nina Planck went from self-proclaimed savior of the family farm and fresh food in London (via the Farmers Market movement) to New York Greenmarket Director to darling of the New York Times and a poster girl for a rather elite form of 'civil disobedience'?

Three answers - at least as far as I know- and likely more that I don't know:

1. She's coupled up with Rob Kaufeldt, the very visible personality behind Murray's Cheese, which many in New York believe to be the best in the US. And he's raising her baby as his own.

2. Her book Real Food presented a fresh perspective (eat lots of food, as long as it is from the farm, and here's why....) in a casual voice. No one seemed to notice that the evidence for her contentions about the benefits of the foods she extolled was flimsy at best.

3. She's cute, in a horsey sort of way.

Why all this vitriol today? Because of the most annoying article I've seen in the NY Times food page in a long time - Joe Drape's "Should This Milk Be Legal" article (which I will not link to either).

Here's an excerpt:

"Nina Planck, the author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why,” defied the F.D.A.’s warning and drank raw milk while she was pregnant. She not only continues to drink it while nursing her 9-month-old son, Julian, but also allows him the occasional sip. She has an arrangement with a couple of farmers to deliver it to New York City.

“We drink raw milk because we trust the traditional food chain more than the industrial one,” said Ms. Planck, who knows a number of farmers from her days as director of the New York City Greenmarkets and through her boyfriend, Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray’s Cheese in Greenwich Village.

“We’re willing to spend more money the higher up the food chain we go,” she said. “We’re not alone, either. You cannot categorize the people who are drinking raw milk. They are people from the blue states and red states, farmers and yuppies and Birkenstock wearers.”

Don't get me wrong - I like drinking raw milk. I spent a summer on a goat dairy drinking raw goat's milk and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't miss it. It just tastes better.

But I find Nina Planck's very public role as spokesmodel of the food ultra-aware to be irritating at best and infuriating at worst. And Mr. Drape's hyperbolic writing, e.g., "Nina Planck...defied the F.D.A's warning and drank raw milk while she was pregnant," commits further idolatry at her feet as if she were the Rosa Parks of the raw milk movement.

She's not. But she just looks really good with a raw milk mustache. And she's got all the right friends to make sure she stays in the spotlight.

Heavenly Mexican...in the exurbs of Portland, OR

Usually I don't talk too much about restaurants I've visited. What's the point? But on a recent visit to Portland, my old friend John took me out to some town that was en route to some fantastic waterfalls for an amazing lunch.

The place? Salvador's

John waits impatiently

The food? Amazing, fresh, bright, glowing - like the decor!

These photos have me dreaming all over again of that incredible meal...

Suckered into shilling for da man

I generally align myself with products that I care about...but every once in a while a friend calls in a favor, and I make myself useful, despite my lack of genuine interest in the product.

Back in May I played host - surprisingly - to a Dove Chocolate-sponsored event at a hotel in downtown Chicago that I didn't even know existed. The hotel room was completely decked out in chocolate - Dove's new 'origins' chocolate (chocolate that indicates country of origin) and their filled caramel chocolate. There were samples everywhere, and they paired everything with wine and cocktails.

Here are some pix of the guests, enjoying wine with their chocolate:

The best part of the evening happened after the Dove folks gave us our goodie bags and the party ended. We stumbled, quite by accident, into a grand re-opening party of the hotel's terrace. Models strutted around in some kind of fashion while we grubbed as much free food and liquor as we could find.

There was an ice sculpture:

And, of course, a group photo:

Although I'm in the picture, you can't see me.

That's it, I'm done shilling for other people! Unless I've got corporate sponsorship, I'm not going to smile for a corporate behemouth who isn't paying my way. Bah!

Overpackaged at Whole Foods

I used to be a die-hard Whole Foods fan. I worked there for nearly a year in 1998-1999 as the cheesebuyer in one of their stores. With my 20% employee discount in hand, products were affordable and better quality than most markets near my house. They also had an unbeatable cheese case. Since there were just over 100 Whole Foods stores at the time, it flew under the radar. No stores had been opened in NYC, Canada or announced for the UK. Wild Oats was still a competitor.

In 9 short years times have indeed changed. There are now 194 stores and most of the new stores and the stores in the works are super experiential food centers of 55,000 - 80,000 square feet, offering restaurants and cafes, wine tasting, gelato stands, coffee roasted on-site, and the usual selection of produce, groceries, cheese, wine, meat, bakery products in conventional all-natural and organic. New Whole Foods stores are places where you could spend a day, attending a class, dining at a restaurant, and grocery shopping.

Whole Foods Market polarizes the food-obsessed like nothing else. There are the haters and there are the loyal-'til-death fans. Not too many fall into the "Whole Foods is okay" camp. In general, Whole Foods is a conscientious corporate citizen and does make an effort to recycle, use green products and alternative energy, and, increasingly, offer local produce. They are trying.

Recently a Dutch friend, Pim van den Berg, came to visit for a tour of Chicago's interesting new shopping sites. I brought him to the brand new Cicero/Peterson Store, which, until the new Lincoln Park store opens, is the largest Whole Foods in Chicagoland. We strolled through the store casually, checking out the new features (unfortunately this store doesn't have a cheese cave like the SoHo store) such as the Brauhaus featuring house-smoked sausages and meat (and, of course, beer on tap and in the bottle). Everything looked gorgeous. And then I noticed something that for some reason I had never noticed before. The packaging. Everywhere I looked there were shelves, tables, cases piled high with goods that were packaged in wrap packaged in glossy printed cardboard. And I was buying this stuff, recycling what I could, and throwing out the rest. For the first time I felt like a very bad consumer.

In my current job I've come to have a basic understanding of the amount of fossil fuel and resources needed to package food products. Food grade plastic film, used to keep products from cookies to pasta and everything in between fresh, is, surprise, a petroleum product. Cardboard, even partially recycled cardboard, is produced from trees and plant pulp and then processed. At least craft board, the unbleached version, is less processed. Inks, if not made from soy or linseed, are made from a heavy petroleum distillate.

I checked the Whole Foods website's Green Action section looking for their policy on packaging for suppliers. The closest policy I found was for their in-house publications:

Printing Standards

For our printed material, we work with printers who are as dedicated as we are to caring for the planet. Whenever possible, we insist on recycled paper, soy inks and solvent-free printing processes. Plus, we carefully evaluate the "right to exist" of every piece we print.

A good start, but it doesn't go far enough.

Whole Foods has a lot of buyer power amongst certain niche suppliers. United Natural Foods, the largest natural and organic distributor in the US, does a lot of business with Whole Foods, and a lot of manufacturers of all-natural and organic goods are distributed through United. If United and Whole Foods decided to change their packaging policies, and require suppliers to reduce the amount of packaging in their products, they could make a deeper impact on the reduction of fossil fuels. Additionally, if they provided incentive to their suppliers to seeks out alternative, eco-friendly substitutes for traditional packaging and printing materials, perhaps demand could motivate packaging companies to innovate in materials and design.

I realize that one barrier to changing packaging materials is shipping -- products need to survive shipment from manufacturer to distributor to store to shelf. Is there a reusable outer packaging that could be use, a la the plastic pallets at Wal-Mart? There's got to be a solution, but in the absence of pressure from Whole Foods or similar supermarket chains, change will be slow, at best. Recycling is great, but it isn't enough.

I'm no eco-activist, I'm just a consumer who cares about sustainability. Until Whole Foods starts reducing the amount of packaging in their stores, both their own (the cheese case is particularly ugly, with pre-sliced plastic wrapped cheese) and their suppliers, I'll avoid shopping there.

Taking 'food' out of foodservice and other heartbreaks

Conferences are universally reviled for poor food. Served banquet-style, or in a buffet, breakfast, lunch and dinner are usually times of mourning (for real food) and complaint (endless, expected, and unchanging). In the past I’ve tried to be optimistic, and have welcomed every course with anticipation and surprise. Although my corporate handlers would request ‘delight’ in addition to surprise, I have yet to actually enjoy a conference meal let alone find it delightful.

My capacity for palate fatigue and intestinal torture was yet again pushed to the limit this past week at a conference for women in the foodservice industry. These women are food professionals - people who have made their careers building a better chain restaurant or chain restaurant experience.

As I made my way through each salad, snack break, and unappealing banquet platter, I made notes for the sole purpose of sharing the experience. In the past two years I have learned not to have expectations for food quality, especially at conferences for food professionals. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Key to ratings:

* An experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong. I will not admit to actually eating this.

** Suspiciously deep-fried – even the salad.

*** Choked down with some guilt.

**** Went back for seconds, although I’ll be paying for it in the morning.

***** I’d consider paying for it out of pocket if it weren’t already covered.

Unless otherwise noted, all meals provided by the hotel in which the conference was held. All snacks provided by 'sponsors' who donated product

Sunday, April 15

Opening Night Reception ***

I arrived suspiciously early to size up the dinner that lay ahead. I had made a vow to refrain from flour, following the poorly heeded advice of my nutritionist, and decided this would be the night to start. After appraising the spread – a selection of fried entrees (“fried parmesan and artichoke globes”; “crawfish balls”; “crab –not krab, phew – cakes with mango goo”) “Asian-influenced” fare (“chicken skewers with some sweet goo”; “vegetarian potstickers”; “deep fried wontons”) and grilled vegetables, I opted for a glass of some generic corporate red wine. Subsequently, to get the flavor out of my mouth, I dashed to the buffet and started eating crab cakes and pot stickers, one by one with my hands, using my napkin as a plate. It was, admittedly, disgusting. But since I didn’t know anyone, I figured it didn’t matter. And then I remembered that I was wearing a name tag.

** Fried Stuff. Even the crawfish balls were crawfish-free.

****Grilled Vegetables. It seemed I was the only one who really cared about asparagus.

Monday, April 16th

Breakfast, Java Coast Café ***

I asked for an extra dry Cappuccino. I love my dry cappuccino. How difficult is a dry cappuccino? Not very. All it is is a couple shots of espresso topped with a lot of foam – deep, rich foam. This foam had big bubbles and the drink was too milky. And to think I actually paid $4.50 for it, plus tip. Oh well, it was still better than the generic breakfast they served in the banquet hall downstairs.

Snack Break, Morning ***

This sponsored snack break in hindsight proved to be the best one – if only I had stockpiled! Sponsored by Campbells and Kelloggs, the break featured those nasty soft nutrigrain bars, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish and Milano cookies. I took a pack of cookies and dunked them into the flavorless coffee that were sitting in sterno-powered urns (there is no worse way to serve coffee – the quality plummets dramatically when in contact with a hot sterno flame). I threw out the coffee after I finished dunking the cookie. Again I gave little mind to the disgusting factor of my actions. There was also plenty of Coke and Pepsi product – too bad Dasani and Aquafina are the only things I would drink, I am ashamed to say (I've got an internal prohibition against bottled water).

Lunch **

Big Old Banquet Hall for 3000 I was late for lunch. By the time I showed up, everyone had finished their salads and there were no free seats. I wandered around, going from table to table, trying to find a table to insinuate myself into. After a ten minute walk from one end to the next, I found a seat wedged between a portly “talent acquisition” (i.e. recruiting) VP and a woman who took no interest in me. After I ate my salad, I pulled out my food notes, which the portly VP noticed. “So,” he asked, looking at the ‘menu’ for the meal, “what was in the salad?” After rattling off the ingredients – nearly perfectly, I may add, except for the omission of ‘Boston’ when describing the Bibb lettuce – his colleague, a young woman of some girth – pointed out that I was very geeky for taking notes. Did I play Warcraft (super geeky online game – I’m bad but not that bad) she wanted to know. Of course I ended up offending her, because Warcraft was her game of choice. So much for making friends.

The entrée, a welter of reddish sauce, undercooked vegetables, and muy mysterioso pork, was as dissatisfying as it was unpalatable. After offering my pork to the rest of the table (no takers, surprise) I proceeded to gobble down my asparagus (with my fingers) and attempted to carve up the baby carrots, which could have been used as weapons. They were practically raw and a little pointy at the end – just the right size for taking out an eye. I ate my indifferent neighbor’s asparagus from her abandoned plate after boldy asking her permission. “Go right ahead,” she said. “And eat the carrots too.” Dessert was an anemic piece of lemon cake – lemon cake! A fakey-moist layer of ‘lemon’ flavored cake was filled with lemon-ish curd and iced with lemon-esque buttercream. Oh yeah, and there was some raspberry-like jam, too. I ate the icing. Can’t say no to icing. So much for my integrity.

Afternoon Snack *

Tell me, did I do something wrong in my previous life? Does God laugh as I push my way past the business-attired crowds, through the throngs of self-help book readers, to get to the table only to find the same out-of-the freezer brownies as were served the night before? Do my tears mean anything? How long did I have to search before I found a freezer of Blue Bunny ice cream novelties, limited to some peanut butter ice cream treat and a giant frozen ice cream hydrox/oreo cookie? And then how many bites did I actually take of the peanut butter novelty? One! I took one bite. And threw it in the trash.

Dinner ** Reception at some fish restaurant for a bunch of people from my company

I am grateful to my colleagues who made the time and effort to set up this event.

I am grateful for their foresight, their willingness to get involved, and their follow-through.

I am grateful that we had two hours of open bar, that the frozen thingy I drank had no alcohol (still recovering from a nights that were not so much debauch as they were irresponsible. There was this voice in my head saying, “dammit, drink the freakin’ water, what is wrong with you” which I of course ignored).

I am grateful that there was a stilt walker/balloon girl, made up to look very much like a trannie, who fulfilled my request to make a ‘balloon bra’, which I wore proudly, much to my colleague’s dismay (note: we were all women).

I am grateful to the servers, who were always there to offer me a drink when mine ran out. But dammit, couldn’t someone have gotten us better food? We had the same crab cakes as the night before, and the same chicken skewers. There was this interesting concoction called a ‘Shrimp Martini’ – mashed potatoes covered with warm scallops, shrimp, and crawfish, topped with some kind of creamy gravy and mango chutney and garnished with a giant cracker. It was, ahem, interesting. And then this cheese plate. There were odd shaped chunks of Port Cheddar, generic blue cheese, and something off-puttingly white. I was scared. I did gorge myself with chicken skewers, obviating the need for more food. The rest of my colleagues went to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Breakfast, Java Coast Café * How can you screw up a dry cappuccino and a bagel with cream cheese? I’ll tell you – you don’t make a dry cappuccino, and you find the oldest, nastiest, fakiest bagel you can find and age it for a few days, toast it and then don’t bother to mask it with butter or cream cheese. It was like eating sawdust, but without the fiber.

Snack Break ***

After my nasty bagel, I wasn’t going to eat anything during snack break. Which was too bad, because they were serving Yoplait yogurt and some quickbreads. Not that I love either, but they were better than anything I had eaten in a while. And that's saying a lot.

Lunch ***

I skipped the official lunch. Last year it was so awful that I knew a few hours in the sun and a lunch paid for by the company would beat out anything they were serving in a dark conference room to the accompanying sounds of self-congratulation. I was joined by five of my colleagues, who had the same idea. I ate French fries and a chicken sandwich and got a rosy sunburn. The thing that fired me up about resort hotel chicken is that it wasn't fresh tasting – it had a nasty warmed-over flavor which I masked with ample quantities of ketchup. I then ate a slice of a colleague’s flatbread, which had a remarkably awful tasting crust.

Afternoon Snack ***

I couldn’t find the promised Baskin-Robbins ice cream cups anywhere. Women were running to tables and grabbing boxes of peanut-caramel Crunch N Munch. I managed to pull one of the last boxes out from another young woman's reach. After speaking with our VP of R&D with my mouth full of popcorn, I put the box down and walked away. I noticed that many of my sisters-in-arms continued to snack throughout the rest of the afternoon. That’s one hour less on the treadmill for me.

Dinner ***

Another big banquet-thingy, with lots of red meat. There were stale rolls (what is up with the stale bread thing? It seemed every piece of bread I ate had been aging for several days before it was served). I wolfed down a gross of stale rolls, slathered in butter and red pepper hummus. I dug into my salad with gusto- two rounds of processed goat cheese, topped with too much pink peppercorn and black pepper. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. You see, I had asked –foolishly, of course- for a plate without red meat. By the time I was served, my compatriots had finished their entrées. So in typical fashion, I ate off their plates, until mine arrived. My fish was cooked to leather, and had a certain bounce to it. Dessert was inedible. We were served a trio of desserts provided by one of the companies attending the conference. A cheesecake slice, a brownie tart, and a wedge of tiramisu were topped with a rosette of non-dairy topping. I ate the tiramisu, because it was the only thing that didn’t taste artificial and had a pleasant-enough texture. Then I grabbed my commemorative mug and made a dash for it before the presentations began.

Conference Overall Food Score: **1/2

Crushing. If there’s anything that shakes my faith in the future of the foodservice industry, it is poor dining options at foodservice conferences. If you can’t make things taste good for your industry colleagues, then what the hell are you serving to the consumer? Thank you very much, but in the future I’ll be bringing my own food to conferences, even if that means a week of maple-brown sugar oatmeal.

Gambling at The Time Out Chicago Eat Out Awards Ceremony

No one from Tipsycake was interested in going with Naomi to the Time Out Chicago First Annual Eat Out Awards last Monday. So she recruited me to be her date.

I tore out of the company parking garage at 5:30, a half an hour later than I was supposed to leave. I called Naomi to let her know I was running late. "You're not backing out on me, are you? Cause I'm counting on you." No, I assured her, I was going to go with her, but I would be late, cutting short the free drinking we would presumably be doing before the awards ceremony began.

I arrived at Tipsycake 10 minutes before our taxi was scheduled to arrive. We opted for the taxi because of the challenges of parking around the Harold Washington Library, where the ceremony was taking place. The evening was unusually warm so I showed up in an Australian sun dress by Gorman that I had purchased in Melbourne back in December, in part to honor Naomi, who is from Sydney.

At Harold Washington Library, we were directed to the top floor, the Winter Garden Room. It is an airy, bright sun room at the top of the library. There are trees and flowers and it has the feel of a function hall in the suburbs.  Famous names and faces from every segment of the Chicago dining scene was there, from Hot Doug Sohn of Hot Doug's (the foie gras avenger) to pretty boy tv star Rick Bayless to the bartenders of Chicago's finest dive bars. It was a diverse and unusual crowd - and given the industry presence, it made sense that the ceremony was taking place on a Monday, the nearly universal day off for restaurants.

Naomi and I stood by the door to intercept the servers as they brought out platters of food. There were pieces of chicken piled on a cucumber (I dropped a few), pieces of mozzarella with a dollop of tomato, and grilled cheese sandwiches on a stick made to resemble lollipops. Naomi made a beeline to the booze table and threw tips to the bartenders to ensure her glass would always be full. I found myself standing in the wrong place every time another tray came out and had to follow the servers around the room, trying to nab another free morsel.

We were assigned to unlucky table 13. After we took our seats, Naomi turned to me for reassurance. "Do you think Tipsycake will win?" she asked. "No," I answered, "BomBon is going to win." I figured Laura Cid Perea's third restaurant/cafe/bakery was a shoe-in for the "Best New Bakery" honor. I can be a jerk.

Soon we were joined at our table by Chef GEB of Avenues, his front of the house manager, his sous chef, and the PR rep for the Peninsula Hotel and Avenues. They were nominated for best hotel restaurant.

I knew about Chef GEB from his posts on LTHForum.com . I had never met him, and I was surprised that he was as young as he was. The first and only question I asked him that night (he spent the rest of the night glad handling admirers and texting someone on his phone) was about his food. "So," I asked. "What do you call your cuisine? Some people have lumped you in to the molecular gastronomy camp. Others prefer to call it 'new cookery.' What do you call your cooking?"

Without missing a beat, he answered, "Contemporary Cuisine, or Chef GEB's cuisine."

I asked him what contemporary cuisine meant. It just seemed like a meaningless term for the food he was turning out of his kitchen. The explanation was cut short by the arrival of a few more associates who showed up to shake his hand.

The servers began bringing out platters of food as we waited for the award ceremony to begin. They brought out crudites, a plate of desserts, rice paper filled with rice, shrimp, and a sweet and hot sauce, and roast beef on choux pastry. Realizing that we had a long, boring ceremony ahead, I suggested to the table that we bet on the outcome of the Eat Out awards.

There were plenty of 'ballots' on the table, so each of us took one and filled out our picks for winners. Five dollars was the price of entry. By the time the awards began, we had eight people submitting ballots for a total of $40 - low stakes but enough to make the proceedings more tolerable.

I kept tally during the awards, giving points and taking off marks for each category. My score keeping was momentarily interrupted when Tipsycake unexpectedly won the Best New Bakery Award.

Yep, she won! And pulled me up on stage with her. I tried to stay to the side so that she would get all the attention and that I would - hopefully - stay out of photographs. That hope was short lived when we were pulled aside and told to pose for the camera. Luckily Time Out opted to not post our photo to their website. While she still stood on stage, Naomi grabbed the microphone and yelled out, "Aussie Aussie Aussie."

There was no response from the audience. I yelled out "Oy Oy Oy!" from my perch at the side of the stage, but since I wasn't near the microphone, I doubt anyone heard.

Back at our table, I caught up with the categories I had missed scoring. I added up the numbers after the last award - for best fine dining - had been given to Alinea. While I scored an impressive 12 points, Susan, the PR person from the Peninsula, cleaned up with 14 points. "I eat out a lot," she explained. I don't, but I try and remember what I hear about places in Chicago. Unsurprisingly, my Achilles heel was bars and pubs. I'm really pretty clueless when it comes to the 'in' dive bars in Chicago. I'm more of a stay-in-and-drink person. You know, cheap.

Susan gloated over her win:

But our night wasn't over then. One of Naomi's TOC Eat Out "Best New Bakery" competitors, Natalie Zarzour of Pasticceria Natalina, a four-week old bakery in the Andersenville neighborhood on the northside, approached her to congratulate her on the win. Of course, because I had been on stage first, she turned to me to tell me how much she wanted to meet me. Gently I directed her to Naomi, who would be delighted to be congratulated. Natalie, who brought her husband and business partner Nick along, was a sincere and earnest 24 year old who had opened up her bakery using old family recipes from Sicily. She and her husband were the main staff, and had been experiencing issues around labor similar to those at Tipsycake (hard to find bakers, high labor costs, etc). Naomi and Natalie immediately hit it off.

We ended up downstairs in Nick and Natalie's car, talking, smoking and drinking wine with the owner of the L&L, a well-known old man dive bar in the middle of Boystown. He was grumpy and fun, with a shock of white hair, a dangly earring, and a natty jacket, worn just for the occasion. We were a motley crew, hanging out in a late model Jetta parked just under the el tracks. No one took any notice of us.

It seemed an usual ending to an otherwise uppity evening with the creme de la creme of the Chicago food scene.

I hope Naomi invites me next year. I'm going to study up on my Chicago restaurants so that I can clean up in the betting.

Petals on a wet, black bough

This photograph brings to mind a poem by Ezra Pound.

In a sea of dull umber cubicles, Michelle's birthday gift of knitted desserts glow. She made these in a couple hours from a pattern. I'm especially fond of the cupcake and the cherry pie. Remarkably, no one has asked me to take them down since I put them up just after my birthday.

The white ball on top of the pink mini donut is a scoop of ice cream, for my a la mode cherry pie.

Dining at Manresa in Los Gatos, CA

Recently I dined at Manresa restaurant, a recent recipient of two stars from Guide Michelin. Was it worth it?

You'll have to read my entry, at http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=10880 and see.

One of the most influential young people in Ghana eats cake

Congratulations Elikem Kuenyehia! Elikem was just honored as one of the most influential young people in Ghana. For his 30th birthday in 2003, I made him an elaborate cake out of the tiny kitchen in my grad school dorm/apartment. It was a remarkably tasty cake, just what the birthday boy requested. The blue and yellow strips and the red flowers and green leaves are all made from marzipan. The rest is tinted buttercream.

Dinner with the Consultants

We've had a group of four consultants from a high profile firm in our office since early March. This was not something that many of us looked forward to; the consultants from that company had a reputation for arrogance and a sense of superiority and secrecy.  In the past, the presence of a consultant in the office usually meant that something was desperately wrong and probably about to be dismantled and pink slips weren't far behind.

But they weren't engaged (their word -- these kinds of jobs are referred to as 'engagements' -- it sounds so quaint!) to pull us apart, job description by job description (see Office Space), but to help us organize our massive ideation (see below) and fix a few processes while they were at it. So they were friendlies. Very friendlies. Which I found disappointing at first because I really wanted to hate them and their templates, process improvements, and jargon. (Years earlier I had even made up a a character on Friendster called Blaine whose description was taken -verbatim- from the websites of Bain, McKinsey, and BCG - no, I wasn't a fan). But they were too damn lovable, all four of them, even if they preferred diet coke to Junmai Daiginjo.

For the first time at the company, I was actually enjoying the people I was working with (OK, Ed, that's not entirely true, but it sounds so, um, epiphany-like) and I found myself spending quite a bit of time in their office (appropriately they had set up camp the same deluxe office once occupied by my now departed former boss), telling them about whatever crossed my mind. As time went on this devolved from work-related topics to completely inappropriate discussions of homicidal roommates, the past sex life of one of the consultants, the evil in-laws of another, drunk people, stupid people, and most usually, the unbelievable and ridiculous situations that one of the consultants got himself into on a regular basis. For hardcore and highly paid type-A personalities, they were flawed and nerdy and pleasant and social and I soon found myself joining them for the occasional dinner out on the town, each time at a venue of my suggestion. They accorded me final decision perhaps in part because of my food background but more likely because they just didn't want to think about it.

We have been out together now more than a handful of times -- usually just me and a couple of them. We've dined at some newly opened fine dining joints including May Street Market and Sola (where we were the last people to leave because invariably we are the last people to sit down owing to the consultants' workaholic ways and late departure from the office), some good chowist destinations like Mitsuwa Market and Tank Noodle, a sushi joint downtown, and some chain restaurants. On one night we bought chicken bowls from both Baja Fresh and Chipotle, just to be able to say, definitively, which was was better (Chipotle by a long shot). And the beauty of all this? They have expensed every last dollar. And the delicious (not literally) irony? Ultimately my company picks up the tab.

Yup. Apparently they get 20% on top of the agreed-upon price as a cost overrun. So let's just say (hypothetically speaking) that they are getting $100,000 for the job. They would also get an additional $20K  for incidentals, like dining out and travel and rental cars and any other expense that might come up. We do talk about work at dinner, so I don't feel terribly guilty. And some of our meals have been so cheap that they don't even need to send in the receipt. But fine dining is part of their lifestyle, a trade-off for the hours they work and their very firm-focused social world. As one consultant told me, "Everyone in the company has done something really interesting and was probably a really interesting person in the past. But now they don't have time for anything except work, and so they aren't interesting anymore."

One thing I will say for my present work situation is that I do have work-life balance. When I was chained to my desk at Cheese Hell in NYC just before moving to Chicago, I had no time for anything, including seeing friends. I was gone from my house 16 hours a day, which left not quite enough time to sleep, let alone have a life. I worked for a chef and he expected us (especially those of us on salary) to work soul crushing kitchen-style hours so that he could maintain his home in lovely Greenwich. Have I mentioned that I don't enjoy working for chefs?

Work at the Company is relaxed compared to what I used to do and a vacation compared to the work of our consultants. What they do (crunch numbers, make really pretty power point decks that aren't much fun to read) and don't do  (sleep, mostly) reminds me of life in grad school, and I'm way too old to want that anymore.

But I'm around if you want to take me out to dinner - but no chain restaurants.