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" As part of its much-needed and beautifully curated Greasy Spoons Week, Eater.com recently invited some of New York&amp;#039;s top tocques (as they say on Page Six) to &amp;quot;re-imagine&amp;quot; diner classics. The results are predictably terrible, or at least they look terrible. But even if they were good, I would hate them on principle. Here&amp;#039;s why. Chefs, as a rule, tend not to invent things. New dishes are rare; most of the ones you&amp;#039;ve come across are either variations on older dishes, or outright knock-offs. If you pared away the modernist dishes American chefs stole from Spain, there would hardly be enough left to fill an airplane menu. That&amp;#039;s fine. I don&amp;#039;t like new things anyway. I still think of Brian Johnson as &amp;quot;the new guy&amp;quot; in AC/DC. But I wish these chefs would stop expecting to get credit for &amp;quot;re-imagining&amp;quot; the vernacular dishes of their youth, when they haven&amp;#039;t even tried. That, in my professional opinion, is some weak shit.  Chefs aren&amp;#039;t dumb. They are generally very smart, at least the ones people like me hear about. But they are dumb in the way that smart people generally are: They overthink things, overvalue novelty, and enjoy the easy applause that comes from a designer label. Tweezer tributes like Betony&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;grilled cheese and tomato soup,&amp;quot; or classed-up renditions like Gwynett Street&amp;#039;s BLT (&amp;quot;crispy guanciale, red oak lettuce, heirloom tomatoes, and smoked mayonnaise on black bread&amp;quot;) may indeed be nom-nom-nom-errific, taken as dishes, but they are completely unworthy of their originals. They substitute grand stage flourishes, of the David Copperfield/Liberace type, for the actual work of pushing American food forward. Weak. I realize that this seems kind of pissy and predictable, professional curmudgeonism. But really, it&amp;#039;s a point worth making. And, insofar as my anti-&amp;quot;riff&amp;quot; stance takes the work of chefs seriously, it pays them much more respect than reflexive reblogging or mindless applause. It&amp;#039;s a real issue: It matters. And I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s really been addressed intelligently. There are three ways to refer back to food. One is the modernist model, which is to make something new and weird and to then claim to be paying tribute to the flavors of one&amp;#039;s childhood. The Italian and Spanish guys are the worst for this, by the way. Another is to try, honestly and with rigor, to keep the essence of an old dish while improving it or bringing up to speed with the way we cook and eat now. A third would be to make the same dishes, but with better ingredients. Torrisi is an example of the first approach; Carbone the second. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter which one you like better; what matters is that both take their inspirations seriously, which is a moral issue more than an intellectual or even a culinary one. Whatever you think of, say, a grilled cheese sandwich/tomato soup combo, there can be no question that the dish is a classic. All diners or coffee shops, essentially, have made the dish more or less the same way, from coast to coast, for no less than sixty or seventy years. The ingredients are primitive, vulgar, and vile, but the thing they make isn&amp;#039;t. A grilled cheese sandwich is light and crisp; tomato soup is sweet. If you make a grilled cheese sandwich that is crunchy and a tomato soup that is tart, or worse, you may have made a good dish but you cheated on the test. Don&amp;#039;t claim to have covered &amp;quot;Mr. Bojangles&amp;quot; if all you did was remix it with &amp;quot;Mr. Wendal.&amp;quot; The greasy spoons of your youth deserve better. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/food/a23995/upscale-comfort-food/>