Dinner theater at EL Ideas

I was just in Chicago for a conference, and, having always meant to go to a highly touted experimental restaurant in the Chicago style, made a reservation — sorry, I mean “got tickets” — for EL Ideas.

To get this out of the way first — yes, the food was good.  Very, very good.  But I don’t actually want to talk about the food!  Lots of restaurants have good food.  What’s really interesting about EL Ideas is the way it merges the idea of “restaurant” with the idea of “theater.”

There’s no menu — each of the 24 diners eats the same thing at the same time, so that, as in a play, everyone in the room is having the same experience.  Before the meal begins, the chef/impresario/director/producer pops out from the kitchen to tell you that this isn’t going to be the usual stuffy expensive restaurant deal — he wants you to wander into the kitchen and ask what’s going on, he wants you to really get into it.  He warns that you should summon an Uber car rather than trying to walk home through the somewhat desolate neighborhood because if you did the latter “you might die.”  In other words:  we are the ones hip enough to be in this neighborhood, to feel a  little frisson of danger, though nothing you can’t dispel with an app!  (In fact, I cannot say the crowd looked notably hip — my dinner companions were younger than me, but most other people looked old and rich, one more thing EL Ideas has in common with the theater.)

Before each dish is presented, the chef gives a little introduction, during which you are supposed to be quiet — if you talk while the he’s talking, the chef warns, you might get thrown out.  Just like the theater.

You don’t exactly get a reservation here; you purchase the meal in advance, as with a ticket to a show.

And at the end everyone claps!

When I was younger, I used to go to plays a lot.  OK, not a lot.  But I probably saw three to five plays a year, and even then I think most people I knew weren’t going.  Now I never go to plays; for all I know, I may never see a play again.

But EL Ideas makes me think that there are things people want from plays, and these are things that people who never go to plays sense, consciously or not, that they still want, and so something wonderful happens — the theater, seemingly made extinct by other, nimbler forms of entertainment, spores out into the atmosphere and embeds itself in another cultural host.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you had a brother, would he like cheese?

My mom pointed out that Elliot Sober did not, in fact, write the “If you had a brother, would he like potato pancakes?” joke. She says she heard it as a child from my great-grandfather. And it’s older than that: one version of the joke appears in the 1858 comedy Our American Cousin (most famous nowadays as the last play Abraham Lincoln ever saw.) The comic engine of Our American Cousin is the upper-class twit Lord Dundreary, who brought the house down with business of this nature:

Dun What do they keep in pigeon houses? Oh! pigeons, to be sure;
they couldn’t keep donkeys up there, could they? That’s the dairy,
I suppothe?

Geo Yes, my lord.

Dun What do they keep in dairies?

Geo Eggs, milk, butter and cheese.

Dun What’s the name of that animal with a head on it? No,
I don’t mean that, all animals have heads. I mean those animals
with something growing out of their heads.

Geo A cow?

Dun A cow growing out of his head?

Geo No, no, horns.

Dun A cow! well, that accounts for the milk and butter;
but I don’t see the eggs; cows don’t give eggs; then there’s the cheese–
do you like cheese?

Geo No, my lord.

Dun Does your brother like cheese?

Geo I have no brother. I’m so delicate.

Dun She’s so delicate, she hasn’t got a brother. Well,
if you had a brother do you think he’d like cheese?