TASTE, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the salty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.
These passages are so indebted to the masterful food writers who cast a long shadow over Sweetbitter: Brillat Savarin, MFK Fisher, Patience Gray, writers who understood food as so central to how we cope, show love, and inhabit our days. It’s never solely about food being “delicious.” When I was doing press for Sweetbitter (the book and show) I was often asked about the “best” meal I’ve ever had. An impossible question to answer. Food (and wine for that matter) is so much about context. Where the meal was shared, the time of day, how you felt in your body, how the food met your needs or expectations. It’s not the sixteen-course tasting menu that was so decadent I had to throw up in the middle of it just to keep eating (a true story) that I recall, but a red snapper. I ordered it for myself the day I finished Sweetbitter on a small island in Greece. I had seen the fishermen bring it in off the boat that morning. A whole fish was very much outside my food budget, but I wanted to celebrate. The woman who owned the taverna kept topping off my glass of white wine, and I got fairly drunk and ate the entire fish. That was one of my best meals, but that story isn’t about food. It’s about my sense of accomplishment, about my definitions of luxury, and even my loneliness. Without all sides of that story, the “taste” is incomplete. That’s why bitter remains so important, just as suffering in our lives underscores our contentment or outright joy. I imagine if you recall your “best” meals, you’ll come up with a memory that is about so much more than food.
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