Rising to the Challenge
Michael Batterberry, Ariane Batterberry
Posted: February 20, 2009
You regularly encounter fresh clusters of "Contests for Food Artists" in Front Burner because their organizers have long recognized Food Arts readers to be uniquely responsive to challenge. Theirs is a competitive flame no economic slowdown can snuff out. Quite the contrary: challenge being the father of invention, under present circumstances expect creativity to burn even brighter.
Challenges, we all know, can now be had by the bucketload, thanks to such man-made tsunamis as the bursting of the greatest asset bubble in history, the unmasking of lofty Wall Street giants as greed-addled Wizards of Oz, $50 billion Ponzi scams, and more.
But back to competitive matters at hand. Our devout belief in putting a face on professional achievement, in spelling out credit where credit is due (i.e., our Silver Spoon Award for sterling performance, the apotheosis of which appears on this issue's cover) is what initially prompted us to compile a Food Arts annual roundup of who won what in the previous year. Since then, new categories of distinction have steadily expanded the award mix.
While convinced that industry pros would find a registry of victors as interesting as we do, we were nonetheless gratified to hear some years back from Raymond Bickson, a much-admired hotelier whose ability to build staff esprit de corps is legend, how he xeroxed the full report every year to pass out as a motivational tool.
"A global hotel wunderkind" is how Michael Whiteman and Rozanne Gold described Bickson in his November 2004 Silver Spoon Award tribute. "Bickson," they wrote, "humanizes the machinery of running hotels, and he passes this magic on wherever he works." We too were witness to his magic when he descended on New York City in the late '80s to open The Mark hotel, a compact hub of scintillating social and culinary action, in what had been a genteelly musty shelter for the bland, not far from our apartment. Fifteen years later, Ratan Tata, a regular guest and chairman of a conglomerate that owns the Taj Hotel Group, lured him away to become, at age 48, the youngest (and first non-Indian) managing director and CEO of the now global Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces chain.
You may suspect where we're going. On November 26, both the Taj Mahal Palace and Oberoi-Trident hotels, Mumbai's two most iconic properties, fell prey to a vicious posse of machine gun spraying terrorists. Bickson was eventually rescued from his office by police commandos. Tragically, this would not be the case for a stunning number of hotel chefs and kitchen staff, many of whom were killed, nor for the wife and sons of Karambir Kang, Taj Mahal Palace's gm. Quoted in Groundreport.com, Ratan Tata described how he'd gone up to Kang "and told him how sorry I was, and he said, 'Sir, we are going to beat this. We are going to build this Taj back into what it was.'"
Surprise attacks come in all shapes and sizes. As we've also always admired political analyst Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat, etc.), it was with dismay that we turned to his New York Times column in later November to find him, in the wake of Wall Street's precipitous depth probe, launching into a tirade against young people cramming restaurants: They should stay home! They should be eating tuna fish! They should understand they could no longer afford these indulgences! Well, he should understand that such misguided pulpit poundings could bring financial hardships to this country just as effectively as the closing down of the auto industry.
Incensed, the shorter of us shot off a letter to the editor to the Times, which was published on their Web site, pointing out that the restaurant industry is by far the country's largest employer of unskilled labor, and that it is crucial that the public, for the most part fully employed, should continue to spend as usual. Not spending on products of labor-intensive industries, she concluded, can only contribute to a downward spiral of self-perpetuating job loss. Hers was not the only letter to appear on the Web site. There were many, the vast majority siding with the restaurant industry, we're glad to report. In our December issue, we named Mr. Friedman's most recent best seller, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, one of three 2008 books meriting the honorific "Pages for the Ages." Might his rankling displeasure with youth-filled fashionable restaurants tempt him to extend the franchise and write a sequel, perhaps entitled Hot, Fat, and Crowded? There's a challenge for him to ponder.
