Educated Palate

Although my love of food seems to have no end, there's something happening with me and restaurants.  Marlou and I dine out often, part of a national trend the newspapers say.  I tell myself that it's always enjoyable, even special, going out to eat.  But something in me is not convinced.  Simply put, I am becoming sated.  And, no, it's not the food but the wretched excess.  Only yesterday Marlou and I took a family friend out to celebrate his college graduation with a San Francisco meal and show.  I chose a place that a restaurant critic deemed a major turnaround.  That is to say, having wandered from culinary excellence, a new chef had put the place on the right course.  It all made perfect sense, and I proudly quoted the review at the conclusion of our meal.  But something in me was gagging.  Somewhere, out in the real world, there's a food crisis.  And frankly I'd rather think about the effects of American crop subsidies on the price of corn in Michoacán on this particular day while I sit in a fancy San Francisco restaurant.  I'm getting too used to waiters who describe the 'finish' on the evening's sea bass.  Just as I have grown too accustomed to fish that arrives on a bed of something--and we're not talking box springs. 

The fish that arrived last night on a swooping designer platter greeted us on its side.  It displayed its fillets and dorsal fins standing up on edge, doubtless braced by unseen toothpicks.  This bass was 90% bone free, the waiter had explained.  Presumably, it had lived its aquatic life with the normal complement of orthopedic superstructure.  But tonight, for our dining pleasure, someone in the kitchen had relieved this fish of all but its vertebrate essentials.  Voilà.  Enough already.

Which is why I prefer the Educated Palate.  It's a restaurant with what must be San Francisco's least trendy downtown location: the Fourth-and-Mission classroom building of City College.  Yes, just off the scuffed and worn foyer and next to the security guard, there's a restaurant.  In a sense, it's a classroom, the site of on-the-job training for culinary workers.  Tomorrow's waiters, busboys, and, for all I know, sous chefs and baking assistants, all are hard at work learning their trade at the Educated Palate.

My friend Phila and I met there the other day.  In her 70s, Phila negotiates the likes of BART, the region's subway, with utter aplomb.  As for the rigors of the Educated Palate, I wasn't sure but strongly suspected, she would get into the swing of the place.  Like me, the place swings slowly.  You don't go to the Educated Palate for service -- unless you're me.  For its staff of trainees, the patron becomes a teacher, and the meal becomes a lesson.  And as in all true learning, it is impossible to say who teaches whom.

First, the ambience.  The Educated Palate occupies a pleasantly sunny and remarkably quiet room.  The carpets are vacuumed, napkins folded.  The students have been hard at work creating a class act.  Yes, it is a class, and it is an act.  A restaurant is a sort of show.  Maybe all the world's a stage, but I'm equally convinced that all the world's a restaurant.  Hey, good looking, whatcha got cooking?  It's the sort of question you'd like to ask half the staff of the Educated Palate.  But you won't, and the servers are deeply grateful for this, because to understand your whatcha-got-cooking reference they would have to first recover from their mortal shock and embarrassment at your smiling incomprehensibility.  Then they would have to enroll in Advanced American Idiom IIA, and they've almost got enough credits, so give them a break.

The restaurant's City College trainees are all, without apparent exception, minorities.  Most are immigrants, and virtually all of these are from China.  They are formal, shy and often excruciatingly polite.  The joshing light-footed style of waiters with their finishes, reductions and glazes will be years away for most of them.  For now, this is a serious business requiring their every attention. 

A young man approaches our table with a basket of rolls.  Before we can discuss the options, crusty whole-wheat, focaccia and Parker House, someone motions him to the other side.  Rolls, it seems, are served from the left.  Beats me, I want to reassure him.  He is a skinny kid in a white waiter's jacket, currently cringing with cultural embarrassment.  I tell him the rolls look good.  I smile.  If I could, I would jokingly ask if he has baked them himself, but this would open a Pandora's box of linguistic complications.  My smile will have to do.  Better have a second, I say, as he attempts to depart.  We go through the roll selection process again.  Well, I say, suggesting that this is the most fascinating part of my day, and he should take full credit...one of those.  A piece of focaccia lands on my plate.  I want to compliment his use of stainless steel tongs.  Never mind.  I have loaded up with bread, correctly anticipating what comes next.

Time.  A lot of it passes while Phila and I sit, menus closed, and catch up on this and that.  I will have to count on some lunch hour abuse, Phila tells me, a reminder that we have known each other for three decades.  I consider her remarkable in every way.  Phila's civic involvements currently impress me.  Both of us recall the protest era and, particularly in view of the present one, do so fondly.  The University of California has slipped into a lamentably corporate mentality and boardroom consciousness.  The regents want to ensure that UC's pharmaceutical-multinational partners feel, well, comfortable in their new campus home...up the priceless and environmentally sensitive slopes of Strawberry Canyon. 

I glower and glance at my watch.  The sun has noticeably shifted since we arrived.  A young woman nervously takes our order.  The menu options are inexpensive and few, so choices are easy to make.  Portions are ample.  Half of the last sandwich I ordered here achieved a second life in my refrigerator.  The young guy comes by again with the rolls.  It's true that they are remarkably fresh, doubtless baked by students in the back.  It is also true that lunch will probably be a while.  Not to worry.  Phila seems into this as much as I am.

When lunch arrives, it is worth the wait.  There is a professional instructing the kitchen crew, I am certain.  A good bowl of soup, an excellent salad and, with 20 minutes to go, do I dare order an espresso?  I do.  A foolish move, I realize 15 minutes later.  The espresso has been cooling on the counter to my left for quite a while.  I could insist on another one, but no.  The espresso is cold, but the heart is warm.  And I'm out of here.

I pay the bill, thanking everyone profusely.  Training for a job, a real one, in an American restaurant seems such a small thing.  But not to me.  My disabled life has been all about small things.  I understand that wearing a uniform, knowing the indigenous ways of butter and bread plates, enduring small talk and ambiguous humor in a foreign language, these are not trifles for the young students working here.  They are immigrants.  We are immigrants.  We are Americans, all of us at various stages.  And in my stage of life the message could not be clearer.  Welcome.  There are no foreigners.  There are no mistakes.  There is no hurry, at least not now.

San Francisco City College in its downtown high-rise conveys the sense of a latter day Ellis Island.  The classrooms and hallways throng with Asian and Latin American students, most young and some not so young. 

As I exit the building, the specter of Strawberry Canyon giving up a few more acres of madrone and laurel to a biotech lab comes back to me.  I began my working life with Phila at a UC Berkeley research center.  I know the campus and I know its canyon.  A corporate lab is a sign of the times.  The national government research establishment has been weaned, starved and downsized in ways that are ludicrous and dangerous. 

It was almost 30 years ago that I sat in the campus office of Martin Cohen, interviewing the great solid-state physicist.  After the war, following the Manhattan Project, the federal government poured money into physics research.  There was money for anything in the field, Cohen told me.  And so it went at places like Stanford and Berkeley, government funds aimlessly poured into reactors and accelerators, into musings about quantum this and relativistic that...until the curious stumblings of science caught the interest of some more practical minded business persons...all leading, decades later, to my jobs in Silicon Valley.

Corporations aren't into stumbling and musing.  They want timelines and results.  That's the problem with corporate research.  It does indeed get results -- it rarely gets surprises.  Cohen drew lines across a sheet of typing paper on his desk.  He was explaining what captivated him in the early 1950s...the migration of electrons in solids.  Why, I asked?  He smiled sheepishly.  He didn't know.  It just seemed interesting.  He invented a name to make his projects more comprehensible to outsiders: electron mapping.  One solid after the next.  Metals like copper, good conductors, versus non-metals like sulfur, bad conductors.  Then this weird class of solids that seemed neither one thing or the other...semiconductors.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with a little applied, non-basic, research.  And nothing wrong with a little corporate money.  It's just that the spiritual fathers of the Strawberry Canyon research lab were dining across from me the other night in San Francisco.  They should have been eating here, in the Educated Palate.  Better, they should have enrolled in City College's current term so they could work here, busing tables for a semester or two.

Now, 30 years after our chat, what I recall about Marvin Cohen was that while everyone expected him to imminently win a Nobel prize, his expectations were much simpler.  He wanted to teach me what I could learn, however modest, about his work.  His pen moved around the paper, his phone rang unanswered.  There were no dumb questions, no mistakes and he had all the time in the world. 

In its heyday, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was a procession of war-era Quonset huts, trailers and temporary buildings, intermingled with blockish concrete structures...all of it linked to sheds and other labs in and around Richmond.  That's the kind of setting where Cohen did his work.  Perhaps that's the character of any real work place.  Which is why the prospect of a Strawberry Canyon lab with lovely views and lavish facilities seems sad.  The loss of nature and the loss of ideals.  A confusing mix of intellectual property and public property, all of it with a no trespassing sign.  It all sticks in my uneducated palate.