By Ashley Branam

     On Sunday, Joe and I celebrated our half-anniversary, six months of post-wedding adjustments. To treat ourselves, we went to Cleveland’s first French restaurant, LaPlace, and it quickly became a favorite. The prices are equivocal to Outback or Chili’s, so it isn’t a place I can often afford to go, but everything I ate was, in the spirit of things, magnifique, including the best rib eye I’ve ever placed in my mouth. But the woman sitting across the room didn’t agree with me. While I was enjoying my little slice of French heaven, she sent her rib eye back twice and on a third examination, she found it still pink, but edible.

     I don’t think she was intentionally difficult. The south sears its meat on the grill, and well done often means crunchy and black. It certainly doesn’t bake its steak until the meat is a tender, juicy light brown like Parisians apparently do. So when the woman cut into her steak and found it was not seared and instead dripping savory juices, she found it inedible. I could be wrong, of course. Her rib eye may have been undercooked, or she may make a hobby out of sending otherwise perfectly tasty food back to the kitchen so she can get a free dessert. But I have a feeling that a clash of the cultures has a lot to do with her rudeness.

     I waited tables at a Japanese restaurant for a short while—something I hope to never do again, by the way—and we got numerous complaints from customers who said their fried rice was cold about five minutes into their meal. I tried to explain that rice doesn’t hold heat like meat or vegetables, and that it’s supposed to cool rapidly because that’s what rice does. But you can’t reason with uncultured or ethnocentric people any more than you can convince a street lamp to sing in the rain, so I gave up and nuked their rice and accepted the lousy tips.

     Back to the French restaurant, Europeans typically don’t eat well-done meats, at least not by the southern standard. There is a certain temperature at which the meat is perfectly juicy and yet non-lethal. That is how chefs like to serve it, and it is not, even with steak, the point at which the outside is crispy and the inside tough and black. So a southerner who eats nothing but burnt steak would naturally find a European’s definition of done inadequate. Again, however, I could be wrong. The chef at the French restaurant could be some other nationality. At the Japanese restaurant, the chefs were Mexican, the owner Korean, and there was a Chinese server, so the nationality of the restaurant isn’t a good indicator of who works in it. But in this case, I know the owner is French, so chances are, if the chef isn’t French, the owner told/showed him how to cook the food.

     Thus, if LaPlace has any trouble in Cleveland—and it shouldn’t because, again, the food is superb—it will arise from the ethnocentric expectations of its customers.

     Ashely