“Plain bagel with butter,” I said.
“Plain with butter?” she scoffed. “You are SO boring. How can you be a food critic?”
“Plain bagel,” I repeated. “With butter.”
The above is a short abstract of a conversation I had with a friend several days ago, as we were deciding what to order for breakfast at Moe’s Broadway Bagel on Grant Street.
She was right, of course. I am SO boring.
But I stuck by my bagel order. I didn’t want a sun-dried tomato bagel with scallion cream cheese. I didn’t want a cinnamon-raisin bagel with maple cream cheese. I didn’t want a mojito bagel with kangaroo hummus.
I wanted a plain bagel with butter.
See, when I’m off the clock and eating for myself instead of for my job, my tastes couldn’t be more simple. Plain bagel with butter. BLT on white. Pasta with olive oil and garlic. Roast chicken with mashed potatoes.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy and appreciate more complex flavors and preparations. In fact, they often blow me away (just see today’s cover story on the a week or so ago).
But my deepest cravings are always simple dishes. Dover sole with lemon. Short stack of buttermilk pancakes, bacon on the side. Corn on the cob with butter and salt. Oatmeal with butter and brown sugar. Grilled rib-eye on a bed of arugula. Gin martini up, cocktail onion on the side. Blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream.
Maybe it’s because I’m exposed (happily) to so much unusual, exotic food in my day-to-day life, or maybe it’s because the world we live in is so fast-paced and chaotic, but when I turn off the noise and sit quietly to nourish myself, my inclination is to find the simplest thing on the menu and order it, or conceive the simplest dish I can think of, and prepare it.
Maybe it’s because what I appreciate most about food is its ability to connect me to the basic flavors of nature. I like a potato that tastes like a potato, a carrot that tastes like a carrot, a tomato that tastes like a tomato, a fillet of trout that tastes like trout.
Friends don’t always believe me. They think that because I do what I do for a living, I must have exotic, rarified tastes, that I crave complex, so-called-sophisticated marinades and drizzles and rubs. But the truth is much simpler than that. What I want when I wind down is simple, straightforward, perfectly prepared boring food, dishes void of heavy- handed tinkering and bombastic saucing.
Plain cheese pizza. Pork dumplings. Boiled potatoes with thyme. Pork roast with white beans and sage. Fried egg sandwiches. Chocolate cake.
Simple, honest flavors are the flavors I love. Sure, I’m amazed, awed and inspired by the way some chefs can manipulate and build food into impossible constructions and previously unimaginable flavor combinations.
But when I’m served my last meal, I want it to be warm, freshly baked white bread and a soft slather of sweet cream butter.
Dining critic Tucker Shaw can be reached at 303-954-1958 or at dining@denverpost.com.
What’s your favorite boring food? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
