I just had one of the worst egg rolls I’ve ever had in my life. Given my love of egg rolls, that’s saying a lot. I have had many: some exquisite, many fine, a great many meh but satisfying. I’ve never had one so utterly awful. And it is a sign that things are very, very bad for a great many people, and for the economy in general.
Much has been made of the imminent closure of Noma (imminent as in, 2024, which seems like a long time given that most restaurants close almost immediately upon making such an announcement), rated as “the world’s best restaurant.” It serves dishes like bear dumplings, duck brains, and pumpkin in koji butter. While its food has been celebrated, accounts from former employees and interns indicate that its founder and chef René Redzepi is, well, let’s not be delicate about this, an asshole who treated his staff like shit. If the New York Times report is any indication, he hasn’t learned his lesson and is only closing because his behaviour is unsustainable.
The restaurant industry is one of the worst workplaces: long, sweaty hours doing repetitive and often dangerous work, abusive behaviour in an intensely high-pressure environment, sexual harassment from co-workers, and bosses who have absorbed the idea that being a “great chef” requires you to be a tyrant. Chefs, often male, are like writers. Like writing, cooking is a historically feminised occupation and if chefs are usually male it’s because the world doesn’t allow too many women to even open businesses or be in charge of workplaces (things are changing, but not fast enough). If you’ve ever been near a pack of male writers, you know that the air around them stinks of cheap cigarettes and bad alcohol and the desperate if often fake horniness of adolescent men who feel the need to prove to their fathers that, yes, They Are Men. Their awkward and careless misogyny is how they assert their masculinity. Similarly, chefs have to deal with the societal stigma attached to cooking, and each one ponders: “How do I prove I can make this fantastic dish that involves stirring pasta like my grandmother and also prove that I have a sturdy penis?” The macho bullshit that so many male chefs engage in—the shouting, the abusive behaviour, the tattooing, the loudly announced and detailed accounts of their sexual adventures—all of that is a way to mark themselves as men, men, MEN, damn it. “I’m no pussy,” says every stereotypical chef, “I may be holding a spoon but my leather jacket and burnt hands and very large dick tell you that I could take down a whole biker gang on my own” (in his head, usually, but sometimes out loud). Anthony Bourdain was probably the chief architect of this image of the chef and even he, towards the end of his life, regretted having been a part of the culture around it.
But that brings me back to that vile, disgusting egg roll, bought from a place that’s nothing like any of the places Bourdain ever worked at even in his youth, and certainly nothing like Noma.
I live in Hyde Park, the place where food goes to die. A bad egg roll is par for the course in a neighbourhood where the sweets are disgustingly sweet and the savoury dishes are loaded with salt, all to hide the fact that no one here can really cook and that there are no fresh vegetables under the torrents of sauce.1 But I thought I’d found an exception in these eggrolls, which I discovered a few years ago in a tiny hole in the wall place tucked into a mini mall. This was before the pandemic, and I’d strolled in one day to order the cheap Chinese food I often crave: unashamedly American, with its usual mix of Chop Suey and General Tso’s Whatever. Most of the food was worth maybe a shrug but the egg rolls, oh, those egg rolls were surprisingly good. They’re listed as “combination egg rolls,” promising a mixture of meat and shrimp, and you can get a two-pack cheaper than if you buy them as two egg rolls separately (I have never understood the maths or the economics behind this). They were almost perfect, with a generous bit of shrimp and identifiable pieces of pork and beef, perhaps some chicken, and I would occasionally walk over to pick up a couple.
The pandemic hit, and I think I may have gone there just once but it’s a bit out of my way and my knee has been getting worse which makes me less inclined to travel too far. But today, after completing a 19-month-long project and consuming a gallon of carbs to help my broken brain heal, I thought it would be great to walk over and get my egg roll fix. Because, really, everyone needs an egg roll fix.
To my surprise, I found the place vastly changed. They’d kept their tables even after the pandemic began but today there was just one chair in the space with someone sitting in it, clearly waiting for her order. It took a while before someone came to the window: a small, slight woman who hurriedly asked me what I wanted. I gave her my order and went outside to wait (I don’t eat in or hang around waiting even if there are only a few people inside). Meanwhile, a woman came in after me. A few minutes later, she slipped outside and joined me on the slim curb, telling me she’d originally hoped to get something from the Jerk place next door but that they didn’t have a cashier to take the orders and were severely understaffed. We chatted briefly, noting how many restaurants like this one seemed to be struggling, and she pointed out, “Well, most of these places are terrible places to work at, and I think people who could choose just didn’t return. And they’re doing other things.” Meanwhile, we realised our orders were taking an inordinately long time. Finally, the sole person working there came to the window and magically had three different orders ready, including my tiny one. She was, I realised, also the one taking phone orders and seemed to be involved in food prep of some sort as well.
Back home, I was eager to bite into my order and…it was sludge. The filling this time was a grey, indiscernible mess and I didn’t taste shrimp until the very bottom and even then, it was so evanescent I wondered if I had imagined it. I’m not sure what the rest of the “combination” was. Worst of all, the whole thing had clearly been cooked in oil reused so many times that it had turned rancid: a really bad sign that the restaurant was struggling to conserve even its most basic ingredients. I chomped for a bit on the second egg roll and while that had more shrimp, it tasted of the same foul, old oil.
I’m not sure how long the place will last. If it disappears, it will probably be replaced by something similar but it’s also likely that the spot will remain empty for years. Hyde Park is a tough place for any kind of business, and the University of Chicago controls who can open businesses here (long story, the short version of which is that this place is run like a company town and the university is the company). The trouble is: rents are going up in large part because of the Obama Presidential Center which has brought in developers swooping up land and lots and businesses don’t think of the area as likely to attract too many customers. The neighbourhood is not doing well but it has so far managed to create a false veneer of prosperity by dressing up 53rd Street as a “downtown” area—a ridiculous move given that there’s no town around it in the first place. There are fancier places to eat, like Virtue and Ascione, but these aren’t everyday restaurants. They cater to the wealthy parents of students (and wealthy students) and they’re also designed to be places to take visiting faculty for job searches, or for special occasions.
Food and grocery prices have been steadily going up, and restaurants can be exorbitantly expensive enterprises to keep up even when they’re tiny neighbourhood joints. I recently ordered some Indian food from a slightly pricier place downtown, once famed for its savoury cashew rolls that I’d tried many years ago: I’d just finished a 19-month project (I may have failed to mention this) and wanted to celebrate. I also ordered some Aloo Tikis alongside an order of Samosas. The Samosas were fine, but the Tikis were just red, with no flavouring and they were doughy from being worked too much. The cashew rolls had nary a hint of cashew. But everything is more expensive and even staples like potatoes are no longer exactly cheap, so it’s unlikely that any restaurant that’s not funded by a millionaire can actually afford to go all in with expensive nuts. The next day, still craving fried carbs, I taught myself to make Pakoras—I mean, good Pakoras, not the hastily thrown together sort I’ve been used to making. Aloo Tikis, easy to make and freeze, are next on my list as items to master, and then Samosas. The pandemic opened up delivery options and many restaurants will now deliver to the South Side (it’s hard to even get a cab here), but there’s been a precipitous decline in quality. Home cooks are having a hard enough time but we can at least cut corners and, for instance, reserve some ingredients for special meals. But a restaurant has to keep turning out the exact same dishes every day, on demand, without constantly raising prices—cutting corners can mean cutting back on the cashews that should be folded into the cashew rolls, for instance, and hoping that no one will notice.
There’s a place in the world for Noma, with its highly exclusive menu and ambience (but, please, with better labour practices), and a place for the average-priced Middle Eastern or Jamaican Curry place or American diner, the restaurants that dot most neighbourhoods. And there’s always a place for cheap Chinese or Thai, that spot where you get your favourite egg roll or Tom Kha Gai and nothing else, where there’s a constant rush of orders from neighbours ordering takeout or delivery as they come home from work.
The Nomas will always survive, as will their celebrity chefs. It’s the demise or devolution of the mid priced and cheap restaurants that we need to worry about, not because we should be sentimental about “mom and pop” enterprises (which can be horrible employers) but because, look, every neighbourhood needs its cheap and decent place, and that place is an indicator of how things are going elsewhere in the area. If a tiny, hole-in-the wall restaurant is feeling the pinch enough that it reuses its oil relentlessly to the point of no return, that’s a sign that there’s not enough foot and takeout traffic and that, in turn, is a sign that the larger economy around it is in a very, very bad way.
Sometimes a bad egg roll is more than just a bad egg roll.
See also:
“Hyde Park: Where Food Goes To Die.”
“Of Towers and Toilets: A Tale of Two Developments.”
“What Really Happened At Current Affairs?”
“Death by Celebrity: Anthony Bourdain, Kate Spade, and the Lives We Flee.“
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