TESTING THE WATER

Local restaurants apparently have been scanning the celebrity cookbook aisles at Barnes & Noble. They are suddenly all about the "meat renaissance," and "blood & guts" notion revamped single-handedly by Fergus Henderson via Dorothy Hartley via peasant cooking of the actual Renaissance, and given major lipservice via Tony Bourdain. I didn't realize chicken liver was gritty, blood & guts eating. I didn't realize it signified a new American attitude towards food in general. I need to pay more attention. Get more in tune.

No less than 10 local eateries are serving chicken liver. It's usually served as a "mousse" and it's always noted as, "offal," hence "blood & guts." If we're going to champion the chicken's liver, why not its feet, neck, heart, or gizzard, too? Why not cockscombs? Since when is chicken liver adventurous? The Jewish deli from here to there has slathered chicken liver on saltines since the beginning of its inception. No rebirth here. No new attitude.

If you're going to open a sparse dining hall, call it a "chophouse," and have an offal section on your menu, don't think you're a torchbearer for omnivores if you're serving chicken liver mousse. That actually deducts points from your final score. You fail completely if said liver is presented with "Southern" trappings. Scrap the offal section. Offal is meat. It needs to be presented with the mains. Can the cutsey bullshit. Let's see tongue and heart and tripes. Let's see tails and heads and gizzards. You can keep your farm-raised burger and foie-gras hotdogs. That's fine. But don't think you're part of a "movement" that never was one to begin with.