I realize that taken literally, a name like “David Chadd Eats the World” could seem quite maniacal. It might convey a bloodthirsty hell-bent destruction prone alien race who would stop at nothing to actually destroy the world. It could also be interpreted as a mad dictator who wants to rule the earth, and devours countries one by one as they bow to his indomitable will. But, as fun as that might be, I am just a simple food enthusiast, who has traveled the world with an eye (taste buds?) toward the best food that is out there.
I am a philosopher by training and profession, and by nature as well, and so I can’t help but place the scrutinizing eye of a detail-oriented person to the food I seek to eat. Just as my mind seems to enjoy consuming new ideas, my taste buds are always looking for new flavors, or creative reinterpretations of old ones. And there is something else I notice I can’t help when I’m thinking about food. I tend to try to draw out deeper meanings and life lessons when inspiration strikes. Oddly, I found some kind of allegory between good and evil and a really tart cherry and ice cream dessert in Chantilly, France. I don’t know how these things come to me. <shrug>
I didn’t start out as a food enthusiast. As I was growing up I was raised on fast food and ‘tv dinners’ like so many young people growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, and like so many young people growing up now. I had the occasional home cooked meal, because both of my parents worked full time, and found it difficult to devote the time necessary to cooking. Although for a time when I was little, my parents kept a rather decent sized garden, where they grew okra, tomatoes, and corn, among other things, but I didn’t appreciate the value of it at the time. This underscores a very sad truth about eating well: the US socio-economic system is not arranged to appreciate and promote fresh and flavorful eating. In many ways, we are a very practical country where you can get a lot of calories for very little money, but they won’t taste particularly good, and they will come with a number of unhealthy things. Food in the US has to be consumed while you’re on your way to work while sitting in your car. It is rare if you can have the time to prepare a satisfying meal for yourself and your family, and you should consider yourself lucky if you are able to experience this. It is also rare, at least in the US, to find restaurants that are as concerned with flavor and freshness as they are with profit. A publicly traded food corporation is loyal to their shareholders, and their shareholders want profit. And the most flavorful may not be the most profitable.
After experiencing food in almost every continent, it is painfully obvious to me that a thriving flavorful food culture is far more mainstream in Europe, South America, Japan, and Hong Kong (among others) than it is in the United States. There is a lot to this conclusion, but one of the hard truths about eating well in the US is that it can be very expensive.
It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I started to pay attention to food a little more closely. I had some ‘disposable’ income and I wanted to explore what some of the nicer restaurants were offering. I worked my way up to Michelin starred restaurants, and I couldn’t believe some of the flavors I was experiencing. I never knew foam could be such an important part of a dining experience. In my late 30s, I met my future wife and we bonded over a long conversation about fine foods. She was a food enthusiast as well, and she was able to teach me a great deal about what makes a flavorful meal. I have come to learn that she is a ‘super-taster’, meaning that her taste buds can sense things that mine cannot, so I generally trust her conclusions when it comes to food matters. We plan our vacations and other trips around food destinations.
The purpose of this website is share my thoughts about meaningful dining experiences I have had, in the hopes that those who read about them might be able to have a meaningful dining experience as well. I hope to hear thoughts and suggestions on other restaurants to try, and thoughts about the restaurants I have reviewed. This can be nothing other than a work in progress.
The CDC estimated that there are about 25,000 restaurants in Los Angeles County alone (where I reside), and about 25% of them are chain restaurants. This leaves about 19,000 independent restaurants in LA county alone. According to various sources compiled by the World Cities Culture Forum, there are 45,000 restaurants in Paris, and almost 150,000 restaurants in Tokyo. China accounts for almost 2/3 of all restaurants at a total of 9.3 million, with the worldwide total estimated at about 15 million. Let’s suppose someone starts eating at restaurants at the age of 20, and lives until they are 80, eating at restaurants for a total of 60 years. Let’s further assume this person eats at 3 different restaurants a day for those 60 years. That is a total of 21,900 days, and at 3 restaurants a day for 60 years, this person will eat at 65,700 different restaurants in their lifetime. Even if you did some shenanigans and just ordered a few things from the menu to sample them, and then go to another restaurant quickly, you still wouldn’t get very far. If you ate at 6 restaurants a day, that is still 131,400 restaurants. This is impressive, but its a long way away from 15 million. Of course one can imagine that not all 15 million restaurants are worth it, and so we have to narrow it down.
Yelp can help, and it is almost essential anymore when one is trying to make a good decision on a restaurant. You have to hope that the crowd gets it right, and the numbers somehow reflect that. But if you’re wanting to make a really discerning decision, sometimes Yelp is not enough. It helps to have some perspective and insight to add to all the noise you can find in a Yelp review. Sometimes people complain about stupid stuff, like getting a really great meal, but then the to-go box didn’t have handles on it. 1 star! And that person’s view goes into an algorithm and counts toward some mathematical conclusion that people pay attention to. For me, dining out and the food I eat is a multi-layered experience, that involves thinking, tasting, and reflection. Food connects us to our past, our future, and to the people we share it with, and the people who make it. Behind every restaurant there is a risk-taker with a vision, who believed they had something special enough to offer that people would buy it. Embedded in the food we eat is the result of hundreds of decisions that are economic, culinary, symbolic and perhaps even political in nature. There is a lot more that comes with your meal than calories, and that is the space that fascinates me so much, and occupies these pages.
I only write about places I think are worth going to. If an eating place is discussed here, it is because I had a good experience there. I am not paid by any of the restaurants I have reviewed, which lets me be honest about what I experience. I tend to be fairly charitable to an independently owned restaurant, because I know there is a lot of hard work involved in just keeping a restaurant from going out of business. So I follow the principle that if I can’t say mostly nice things, then I’m just not going to say anything at all. Although I do wholeheartedly agree with Anthony Bourdain’s reported views that fast food is the enemy, with the exception of California’s In-n-Out and I would add Northern California’s Gott’s Roadside because of each of their commitments to fresh and locally sourced ingredients. There are a lot of reasons why fast food should qualify as a kind of pornography and evil on its own, but I’ll save that discussion for another time.