"You're not going to pass out on me, are you?" Andrew Friedman on what it takes to make "The Dish"

Think about the last time you ate out. Think about how much it took to get that meal to your table. It took farmers and ranchers and drivers and chefs and wait staff; it took creativity and time management. It’s a story, one with a diverse cast of characters and interwoven dreams, ambitions and disappointments. 

Andrew Friedman wanted to tell one such story. In his meticulous, engrossing new book “The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food” the author of “Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll” and “Knives at Dawn” traces the provenance of a single meal in a single night in a Chicago restaurant. “I just woke up one day with this idea,” Friedman told me during a recent “Salon Talks” conversation, adding “The very last line in the book was exactly the last line that I knew it was going to be when I woke up that morning five years ago."

While you’ll have to read the book to learn what that final thought was, you can watch my full interview with Friedman here, or read the transcript of our conversation below, to find out what the self-described “chef-centric writer and interviewer” learned from witnessing a slaughtering, how he thinks the food service industry is evolving — and what “The Bear” gets right about life inside a Chicago kitchen.

What is "The Dish"?

The dish at the heart of the book is a dry-aged strip loin of beef with tomato and sorrel, and it is almost that simple a dish. There's some things that aren't named in the title, like a red wine reduction and some herbs, but that is the dish.

This book came to you in a dream. Tell me how you got the dream to follow this plate of food back and forth between this Chicago restaurant and the farms that it originated from. 

It goes back to a writer who did a lot of work for The New Yorker over the years, John McPhee. He was very famous for taking a subject and just blowing it out into incredible detail. He did a famous piece about a chef that figured prominently in “Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll,” my last book. He also did a book I'd loved called “Levels of the Game” where he takes a tennis match [and] does a point by point recounting of the match and uses the player's style and mindset and whatnot to tell their life story throughout. I've always loved that book, and I think when I was writing “Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll,” I honestly had John McPhee on the brain. I'm not comparing myself to John McPhee. I think he's a genius, but this is very much something he might have done.

I've spent my life around restaurants and chefs. I was reading a lot of John McPhee stuff, and I just woke up one day with this idea, I'm going to write a book told during a dinner service and during the service, you're going to meet in great detail all the key people who help cook it, serve it, clean the plates, and then the farmers, the delivery people. I don't want to say what it is, but the very last line in the book was exactly the last line that I knew it was going to be when I woke up that morning five years ago.

The book takes place in Chicago, at this restaurant called Wherewithal. What about this book surprised you? When we're watching these shows like "The Bear," what does that show get right, and what is different that we don't know about?

That show is probably the best anyone's ever done at putting the life of a restaurant and the personalities of a restaurant on film or on video. It's pretty much in line with that. The restaurant in this book has a real commitment to sourcing locally, getting their stuff from farms that raise or grow what they're raising and growing very ethically. “The Bear” is not that kind of restaurant per se, although I imagine the place where the main character worked before, the three star Michelin restaurant they talk about, probably would've been that kind of a restaurant. I think “The Bear” got a lot right. I don't think people call each other "chef" quite as much as they do on that show,

One of the things I saw a parallel to is about trying to unlearn these toxic practices and change this culture of the sadism that we associate with these great restaurants. You have these characters who have experienced intense sexism, racism, discrimination, abuse.

Harassment, abuse.

This is a story about people who are trying to do it differently. Do you think that that is indicative of where the restaurant community in general is going, or was it unique to this group of people?

I think certainly in this country, that's a very widespread thing. I wouldn't say it's universal. The motives can be very different. It was very deliberate that I chose a couple at the center of the book, the chef owner couple that run this restaurant that I knew from mutual acquaintances and friends. They're really ethical people and they very much are trying to enact change in the industry. 

In this social media age and this digital age, there are certainly people out there who are just kind of following along out of self-preservation. Those tend to be some of the older chefs who think the industry's gotten a little soft, but you can't be that way anymore. Everyone's got a movie camera in their pocket. There are blogs that are hungry for these stories. We've seen a lot of them come out over the last few years. So I won't say it's universal, but it's very widespread. But I do think the motivations can be very different. I think the younger generation very much wants to see a change.

This book is about people and their interconnectedness with food. One of the most fascinating parts is when you talk about the inconvenient truths of our food and our relationship with it. There is a scene where you witness an animal being slaughtered.

I saw it go from live to carcass.

How does it change you as someone who still consumes meat?

Not as much as I thought it would because I've seen people speak about the process. There are a lot of people who believe if it skeeves you or makes you uncomfortable to learn about the process or to witness it, you probably should not eat meat because that's how it got to you. I had never seen it. I'd never seen a video of it. That was actually the one place in the book where I went where no photographs were allowed, for good reason. 

In the book it's beef that's being served. The day I was able to go to this farm, it was a lamb they were slaughtering. They bring in this lamb and they have a two-prong electric stun gun, and they zap it and it just drops. Like a knockout punch, just drops. Then they flay it—not filet, flay—meaning remove the skin. They insert an air hose where the hoof basically meets the leg and they pump it. It inflates almost like a parade float, which facilitates cutting and removing the skin. Then they disembowel it and it all just comes spilling out. It starts going through the process of being cleaned, being chilled. Temperature is very much something that's controlled all through the process. 

It gets loaded on a truck almost like most people would probably think of a garment rack. There are these big racks with these carcasses on them. They haven't been broken down yet, and it goes on a truck and it's driven two blocks to their processing facility and it's butchered. If need be, it's aged or sometimes the meat might be ground, whatever they need to do to it. It's a huge production. I was sort of prepared by Louis John Slagel, who's the head honcho at Slagel Family Farms. Right before we walk into the slaughterhouse, he looks over his shoulder and he says, "You're not going to pass out on me, are you?" And my response was, "I've seen animals butchered." Which I have, but as I say, butchery is a Disney movie next to this.

I have friends in Chicago, and every night during my research trip, I would have dinner with friends or meet them for a drink or something. When I was telling them about that visit, a lot of people said to me, "Are you a vegetarian now?" No. I mean, I'd never seen it, but I knew it. It wasn't as shocking to me. But it is interesting. Everybody who's read the book, that is one of the first three things that comes up. Was it traumatizing to you?

No.

Did it make you not want to eat meat?

I still eat meat. I still love meat.

Did it make you not want a burger?

No, but it made me think about, how do we eat it in a way that is responsible? I don't have time to respectfully thank every animal every day, but how do we have that kind of consciousness in our shopping, in our eating and in our restaurant going?

There's always going to be outliers that are just flat out gouging their customers, but most restaurants are actually pricing their menus lower than they should be. The rate of price increase for restaurants has gone up much more slowly than the rate of inflation because there is a fear that customers will have sticker shock and stop coming to your restaurant. This is why when the lockdown happened in 2020 everyone learned about, “Oh, restaurants operate on a 2% margin or a 3% margin and they've been closed for four days and they can't make their payroll this week.” That was shocking to a lot of people. A lot of that problem starts with the fact that they have kept kicking the can down the road for good reason. 

But now there's a monster that needs to be slayed. At some point, the band-aid of restaurant pricing, it's going to have to be ripped off. Customers who care about the things we're talking about need to be open to that. The few people I know who did make a major adjustment after COVID, it's about 30% increase from their old menu from 2019. That's significant. But that is what it takes to maybe offer health insurance, for the chef owner to not have to rely on all the parties they do in December for their take home draw and to know what their personal income is going to look like. It's a myth that you see chefs on magazine covers and websites and television. Most of them don't really make a lucrative living, even the ones who work in great restaurants. Of course there are people who are on television and product lines and all that kind of thing, but most of them don't. A lot of them don't know until the holiday season what they made for the year. So it starts with pricing. 

Then I think going to farmer's markets is a good thing. You talked about time. I understand that and I certainly relate to it, but I think there are just certain habits that could be shifted that wouldn't necessarily take more time. In my case, the farmer's market that comes to my neighborhood is actually closer to my apartment than the local grocery store. So if I can just make a point of remembering when it's there, it's actually more convenient for me to shop there. It's probably a little less expensive because buying directly from the people who grew it, but that kind of thing goes a long way, and you can take it as far as you want buying things that are organic.

Everyone in this book in their own way was very respectful of the environment. Louis John, the meat purveyor, was very honest with me. They became certified organic as a business decision because it wasn't that hard to do, and they could charge significantly more for the product. A couple of the farmers are basically conservationists. They make room on their property for where birds can hang out. They leave things growing that they have no use for, just for the habitat. But all of that takes land, takes time, takes employees, and it's money. A big piece of the answer is being open to the cost.

You say in the book that everybody has a different definition of sustainable. It's a word that we love to throw around, but I want to know, what does it mean to you? What are good sustainable practices for us?

There is a definition of "organic." A lot of these terms, buzzwords, in the food world have definitions. But there is no definition of sustainable. You may be the first person who's ever asked my humble opinion. Maybe because I'm a writer, I take a literal meaning, is this something that can be sustained? 

I learned a lot about soil science in this book and what certain pesticides and other things that people use to make the growing process easier do to the soil, and then what that does to the land overall. It's making the land infertile basically.

That's when we talk about regenerative farming. I think its practices, if taken to their logical conclusion, will result in not being able to do something anymore. That could be growing, that could be how we treat our water and where the fish come from. It can also be how we treat our employees, because you could say the old model of the restaurant industry was unsustainable. It lasted over 100 years the way it was, but it's probably changed more in the last 10 than it did over the 100 years before that. To me, you could call that sustainable, but I take a literal view of it.