HALF A DECADE AGO, I wrote an essay for The Weekly Standard on “Five Ways America Keeps Getting Better.” It concerned, for the most part, various revolutions in retail the 1990s had wrought: Borders, where you could sit eating cheesecake at 10 o’clock at night, listening to Joni Mitchell and reading Camus; the Cheesecake Factory, which brought California snob food within wallet range of the masses, offering Midwestern-sized portions to boot; and–above all–Starbucks, in all its metastatic nationwide proliferation. In 1992, there were only three or four cities in the country where you could reliably get even a bad cup of espresso. This is one of the reasons returning from a trip to Europe used to feel like a banishment. But by 1994 or so, you could get a latte even in Flagstaff, Arizona. The same thing happened with single malt scotches. In 1992, you’d be lucky to find one in a big-city hotel; by the peak of the Clinton boom in 1999, off-duty cops were dumping Macallan 18-year-old into their boilermakers. Ditto for grappa. In 1992, you could get it in one or two stratospherically expensive restaurants in New York and Boston; by 1998, Luigi’s Corner Trattoria in the St. Louis suburbs–home of the plastic tablecloth and the $5.99 all-you-can-eat pasta special–was offering a range of grappas. And on and on it went, with stuff that had never been seen on these shores. Rognons de veau. Guanabana juice. Grilled whitebait. Calvados. Kaiserschmarrn. Flan. Mate. One of the greatest things about America over the past decade is that American dining became so much less American. So what has happened to me since September 11? Driving in to work the other day, I heard a commercial for a restaurant called Romano’s Macaroni Grill. Some guy was recommending the joint’s “Tuscan” fare in a pathetically inauthentic shaddappa-you-face Italian accent. “Whassa alla dissa widda you Americans?” he asked (or words to that effect). “You say ‘Lessa do lunch’ orra ‘Lessa grabba bite’.” Yuh? I thought. Your point being . . . The point was, as you can imagine, that Americans, with all their “grabbing” and “doing,” don’t appreciate the finer things–whereas, for Italians, every meal is a work of art. It’s lucky I was alone in the car. I was in the frame of mind in which feminists always like to imagine men, and terrorists, presumably, like to imagine Americans–“apoplectic with impotent rage,” or something of that sort. I started to mutter to myself, “Oh, up yours! So you don’t like the way we Americans eat, eh, Guido? Then why don’t you go the hell home to Tuscany!” When he got to his “finer things” spiel, I added, “Yeah, my apologies, Luigi! I guess we’ve been too busy saving your sorry European asses from totalitarianism to nibble cheese with you and your collaborationist friends.” For some reason (well, you know the reason), nothing ticks me off more of late than to hear foreigners presume upon our probably hyper-developed habit of self-deprecation. I arrived at the office ready to organize a boycott against this epicene Eurotrash. But when I got there, I learned from colleagues better informed about the restaurant business that the Macaroni Grill is as American as American can be. It’s a chain. It’s based in malls. It was started in Texas, for goodness’ sake, by a bunch of local entrepreneurs. So I suppose they can stay. But I warn them that the oh-you-pathetic-American-philistines pitch is unlikely to lure diners the way it would have on September 10. If “grabbing” lunch is the American way, then it’s a good time to have plain old ham sandwiches on the menu. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
