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In Which the Safety Stasi Ruin Dinner.

by | 11:32 pm, December 28, 2008 | 2 Comments

We fade is as I, home for Christmas with the parents, am at a fondue restaurant that is something of a local legend.  We have been seated for nearly two hours and the salad course is a distant memory.  I am trying to order another drink, only some fiend has made off with the wine list.

Before us, a pot of oil is becoming hot enough for particle physicists to conduct experiments.  I wonder if the hold-up on the meat is because they’ve set out to hunt down a free range filet mignon in the suburban wilderness.  But, no, the waiter appears, scoops up the fondue pot, announces it has gotten “too hot” and that it must be replaced.

Another pot of oil is brought; as it warms, we are presented with 87 sauces and four ounces of meat.  I scrutinize the ‘pomegranate gorgonzola glaze’ while my mother eyes the oil.  It just isn’t hot.  And, for cooking raw meat, one does want a certain warmth.

I decide to start small…with a mushroom.  I spear the thing off the vegetable tray, miscalculating and instead launching it into the tempura dipping batter.  Brave girl that I am, I decide that a deep-fried tempura shittake may be delicious.

Everyone else’s meat is in the pot, which is still not hot, by now.  Now, ideally, fondue is a rather quick meal.  Super-heated oil sears a piece of meat in 30 seconds at most, sealing in the juices and getting the meat (or mushroom) out of the oil before it becomes saturated.  Of course, this involves hot oil, which is only a good idea with adults who understand such complex topics as not getting feisty around vats of boiling oil.

There is also the fact that one wants an oil with a specific gravity that holds more heat per cubic inch and thus cooks food quickly instead of producing rubbery cubes shellacked with enough viscous goo to apply for Superfund dollars.  That’s right, this restaurant offers canola oil for fondue, when every master of 1970s style entertaining knows that the only acceptable choice is peanut oil.    Sighing, I rearrange the four-inch lapels on my leisure suit.

I pull my battered mushroom cap out and decide it can’t be that bad.  Indeed, it tastes exactly like a raw mushroom coated in oily, lukewarm tempura muck.  Granted, I am an idiot for attempting to cook a batter dipped mushroom, but then again, it didn’t actually cook.  I begin to wonder if the oil that was “too hot” might still be around.  But I march on and test a chunk of meat.

It goes back in twice before the center is cooked.  The exterior has the color and texture of elephant skin, and barely goes down when drizzled with horseradish-cinnamon vinaigrette.  After two more pieces, my stomach is churning from all the oil and everyone else at the table has stopped eating as well.

We explain our predilection for hot, cooked food to a concerned waiter, who apologizes that they can only heat the oil to a certain point, but perhaps we would like to try a hot beef broth.  Momentarily, I am watching a pot of bullion cubes in water simmer, not boil, but simmer.  After five minutes submersion, a test piece of meat is visibly raw even under the mood lighting.

The entire staff and management is incredibly gracious, trying to offer free desert three times before we leave.  On the way out, a very upset manager asks us what was wrong.  I suggest to him that, just maybe perhaps, some peanut-allergic moron gulped down oil cooked meat without thinking and then sued.  Continuing to speculate, I postulate that some other fool felt the urge to table dance three inches away from a pot of searing hot oil.

This man is honest; indeed the ban on an oil that can actually sear meat and the rule capping oil heat well below a temperature sufficient to cook the damn food both come from lawsuits.  I resist the urge to point out that eating raw animal flesh and dealing with a vicious gall bladder flair-up from ingesting oil by the liter can also lead to litigious action and instead assure him I know neither he nor his staff had any control over this.

In truth they don’t.  This is a business that gets to choose between failing or bending over for every half-cooked bit of nanny-state jackassery to come down the pipeline.

By now, my mother is hungry enough to eat a tort lawyer, so we must find an alternate food source.  And so, here I am, typing away on the free wi-fi at the bar while we wait for take-out from a chain restaurant.  Nearby, pompous yuppies are decrying the death of mom and pop restaurants with flair and unique menus.  As soon as I sign off, I am going to throw a fondue fork at them.

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Comments

  1.   Colorado Jones
      December 29th, 2008 @ 12:22 am

    I do (well, at least used to prior to its nannification) love the Melting Pot! This must be a recent luke-warm oil policy? I was there a couple months ago and they still served boiling oil for tableside meat preparation.

  2.   travis
      December 29th, 2008 @ 12:11 pm

    You should find some Swiss immigrants, have them start an ethnic diversity celebration committee/grievance group, and then sue the peanut pansies and safety Stasi for unjustly oppressing their cultural practices.

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