Replacing food culture’s snobbery with humour
Cheetos dust, a cherry wood-smoked ice cube, pop rocks, blueberry ketchup recreated from an early American heritage recipe, a whole shoulder of pork — a partial list of things that I’ve been served in a restaurant that probably should have caused me to laugh out loud.
In the pursuit of taste, when an open mind is crucial, we often excuse or overlook ridiculousness. Humour and self-awareness, it seems, have no home in savoirvivre. Thinking about our increasingly complicated relationships with food is the absurdity that cartoonist and BoJack Horseman production designer Lisa Hanawalt finds most delicious.
Hot Dog Taste Test is a collection of one-panel gags, comic strips and illustrated essays, many appearing in chef David Chang’s food and lifestyle journal Lucky Peach, that skewer foodie elitism, approaching the world of cuisine instead with a naive sense of wonder and set of watercolours ready to document the James Beard award-winning author and artist’s keen and hilarious observations.
Hanawalt is our gustatory Valentine Michael Smith — a stranger in a strange land. She records whimsical garnishes as if they were newly discovered flora. She’s unafraid to admit that she comes as an out- sider and for it, she makes the highly coded, impossibly sophisticated arena of fine dining appear accessible.
Instead of offering insufferable tasting notes such as “cognac, spice cake and leather,” she describes wines in terms of how they make her feel: Shiraz, for example, “makes your tits itchy.” Merlot, on the other hand, “makes you ask strangers for piggyback rides.”
Hanawalt’s reportage is most compelling. In “Lisaaaaa Las Vegas!” Lucky Peach sent her and her partner on assignment in Vegas to explore the all-you-can-eat buffet. “Gorge ourselves” is how she describes the editor’s instructions. Even 400 kilometres inland and surrounded by the Mojave, she finds the crabs legs so plentiful at every stop that she envisions fashioning an Edward Scissorhands- style claw from them in order to better scoop up petit fours.
The centrepiece — and the item that won her the James Beard Award — sees Hanawalt shadowing molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne around his legendary, now-shuttered Lower East Side resto, called wd˜50, for a day. In Dufresne, she finds a passionate and hard-working subject, as admirably dedicated to esthetic exploration as he is to American cheese. In his kitchen, she finds the alien laboratory of her dreams, carefully reproducing the wall full of mysterious powders with unpronounceable chemical names. When she finally gets to tasting the wd˜50 menu, she describes the contents of a delicate carrot and almond ravioli as “sex cheese,” which is about as powerful and enticing as any food writing I’ve read.
Hanawalt has a unique ability to let conflicting ideas lie next to each other unresolved. She is both a horse-lover and a meat-lover — a contradiction the book visits. Hot Dog Taste Test itself is a takedown of foodie culture as well as a celebration of that same colourful universe. For Hanawalt, food represents a world of possibility. Of course she wants to have her cake and eat it too.