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The latest thing in food is one of the earliest: hunks of red meat. BY FRANCESCA FRENCH
AND JAMES McQUILLEN |
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The days of meat and potatoes once seemed far behind us. Dining in much of America--including Portland--has gained in creativity and found a global perspective; a person can even go vegetarian without being branded a communist. But once again, beef is king. Sure, it takes it on the chin from time to time, when mad cow disease or E. coli crops up in the news, but beef consumption continues to climb. So powerful is meat these days that it can even hire lawyers: witness the product-defamation suit against Oprah Winfrey, who was hauled into court in Texas for swearing off beef on the air because of its potential health hazards. Red meat recidivism has swept through the Portland restaurant scene at a head-spinning rate in the past two years. Ruth's Chris Steak House opened in February 1997, the Portland Steak and Chop House was established a year later and Morton's of Chicago opened its doors less than two months ago (see review, page 50). Outside of downtown, the Outback Steak House is competing for the suburban steak lover against such establishments as Stuart Anderson's Cattle Company and Sayler's Old Country Kitchen. The increased competition has not aced out institutions like the Ringside, which, according to owner Craig Peterson, had its best year ever in 1988. Despite projections anticipating a 4 percent decrease in volume due to new competition, Peterson says, "We ended up having the largest increase in volume we've ever had." Business has also been brisk at Morton's and Ruth's Chris. After only four days of business, Morton's was squeezing people between the lines of its reservation books. Allen Brothers and Stockyards, the Midwest's two largest beef wholesalers, are positively giddy about the rise in popularity of steakhouses, a trend that has increased their business by 40 to 50 percent. According to Stockyard's Matt Pollack, Portland used to be considered a tough market in the wholesale beef business. Not anymore. Academics could conduct endless symposia on the meaning of meat. Eating meat is part of a sexual code, some say, in which to consume the cattle's flesh is to partake of its virility. According to Roland Barthes, intellectuals themselves find in red meat a bloody moistness that counters "the sterile dryness of which they are constantly accused." And in The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, George Hersey demonstrates how the classical style--the ordered building form that originated in Ancient Greece and dominated Western monumental architecture until the early 20th century--is essentially an elaboration of the sacrificial altar, the original butcher block. The kitchen at the Ringside, in other words, has a deep kinship with the Parthenon, and the U.S. Capitol is a particularly appropriate structure for the practice of pork-barrel politics. Whatever its meaning, the rise of big steakhouse-style beef seems particularly incongruous in the context of contemporary American cooking, in which diversity, artistry and health have come to the fore. A dish at Higgins, for example, a restaurant that serves exemplary Northwest cuisine, is likely to be a carefully thought-out creation of many ingredients, some unusual, some wild, all as local and fresh as possible. Even a steak, which is unusual at Higgins, appears on the menu as a two-line entry--"broiled tri-tip sirloin with grilled vegetables, cumin roasted new potatoes & chipotle salsa." At a steakhouse, by contrast, even though the occasional cut is sauced or otherwise gussied up, most entrees can be described considerably more tersely: meat, cooked. Changes in American food have also entailed an ethical component. Alice Waters, whose groundbreaking Chez Panisse opened in 1971, has written that "restaurants are communities." For her and for many who have followed in her path, that means keeping in close touch with local producers--and, by foraging, with nature itself--and encouraging sustainable agriculture by buying organic. Those same principles are part of the philosophy of the slow (i.e., not fast) food movement, which began in Italy and now has many outposts, including one in Portland. Adherents believe in supporting local, small-scale operations, and they regularly gather to visit farms, wineries and the like. By their nature, food "movements" indicate a certain way of thinking about eating: The gastronomical is political. There's the raw-food movement, whose members are quasi-fanatical about the evils of cooking food. There's even a group called breatharians, whose extremely low-impact diet consists of nothing but air. (Their reputation took a beating recently when a breatharian guru was nabbed at an L.A. 7-Eleven with empty chicken pot-pie tins.) Some of these factions allow meat, but because their underlying philosophies tend to involve strict ecological considerations, many are vegetarian. Steak, on the other hand, evokes a devil-may-care world of cigars, big cars and high-denomination bills. (Perhaps not surprisingly, it was in the Eisenhower era that beef became America's No. 1 meat.) Some advertisements for New York City steakhouse Smith and Wollensky have used the tag line "Horrifying vegetarians since 1977." Grain-fed Midwestern beef isn't cheap, and it's not the most healthful thing you can eat, especially in 2-pound portions. Who's eating it all? That depends largely on who you ask. Angelique Leonard, Morton's catering sales manager, is quick to say that it's businessmen with expense accounts. "They bring in a yearly income of over six figures," she says. "They have a net worth of over a million dollars." That's not hard to believe: Look at the prices at Morton's and you'll wish you were a breatharian. To maintain that clientele, Morton's cultivates an old-boy's-club atmosphere. One entire wall is dedicated to autographed photos of the rich and famous, making it seem as though they have all flocked to the Portland Morton's in the last month and a half. Since all 42 of its establishments are windowless and look alike, Morton's is able to cultivate for its patrons a club-like atmosphere, the recycled-air sameness of a casino chain. But Morton's seems to be a special case in the homogeneity of its clientele. Walk into Ruth's Chris on a typical weeknight and you'll find the highly stylized restaurant packed with everyone from old ladies to couples to families of four. Ditto the Ringside, a favorite with locals. Granted, there's a prevalent maleness to the steakhouse concept, and the Ringside in particular appeals to sports fans. But it's not quite accurate to speak of the steak-eating class as a social unit unto itself. In the book The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig, anthropologist Marvin Harris writes, "Within most societies, developed as well as undeveloped, the higher the income bracket, the greater the proportion of animal products in the diet." There is certainly reason to believe that a rosy economic picture has a lot to do with the proliferation of beef joints. But food crazes come and go with regularity, particularly in this country, and the steak boom can't last forever. "I don't know when it's going to be over," says the Ringside's Peterson,
"but I can guarantee you one thing: It won't stay on its heels forever."
And then he adds, in words that might have come straight out of a cowboy's
mouth at the end of a cattle drive, "This has been an awful long ride."
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