The plot, of course, involves the Side Dish Formerly Known as French Fries. Last month, while the French were blocking American efforts to bomb Iraq, a restaurant in North Carolina demonstrated a command of international geopolitics by changing its menu to read “freedom fries.” Congress, too, changed its menu, and now even George Bush has launched a personal offensive in the culinary wars, breakfasting on “freedom toast topped with strawberries” aboard Air Force One recently while en route to bolster his troops in Florida.
Most residents of oh-so-cosmopolitan New York City view these linguistic broadsides as the rantings of a few Neanderthals who see the French as a symbol of everything that is wrong with that part of the world that doesn’t think everything is right with America. Though some Americans are boycotting French food, New Yorkers seem to understand that a French restaurateur doing business in Manhattan pays his taxes to the United States, employs American workers and buys his produce from American farmers. In fact, he probably isn’t even, well, of you-know-what unmentionable nationality.
To test this theory, I’ve started my own entirely scientific investigation. Whenever possible, I substitute the word “freedom” for “French” in all my culinary discourse. The results are shocking. Sometimes I’ve been rebuffed; other times I’ve been welcomed as a hero. At one trendy bakery in a left-leaning community, the counterman rolled his eyes at me when I asked for a loaf of country freedom batard. “We still call it French batard!” he said. The Gaul! I should be rolling my eyes at him! Who calls a bread a batard, anyway?
I expected similar treatment at a nearby restaurant, especially when I noticed that the menu still contained a french omelet. (Don’t blame the French; this melange of turkey, scallions, spinach and Velveeta definitely didn’t originate in Escoffier’s kitchen.) Undeterred, I ordered the freedom omelet.
“I’m so happy you said freedom omelet,” rejoined the waiter, Erik Escobar. “When customers ask for french fries, I always say, ‘You mean, freedom fries, right?’ " A Mexican immigrant, Escobar can’t understand why the world opposes a country that’s been so good to him. “We’re right on this issue,” he said about the so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom. But he said that I was the first person to actually order “freedom” anything.
That wasn’t the case at the nearby Glendale Diner, where I ordered the freedom onion soup and a spinach salad with the freedom dressing on the side. “Everyone has been ordering that way,” said waitress Carol Napolitiano. “I mean, look at what the French did to us.” Too bad we can’t also blame them for the dressing.
My oddest experience came at my favorite local cafe–er, coffee shop. At Tom’s, more American flags hang on the walls than there are items on the menu. So I logically presumed that here the French would certainly be in retreat, as usual. But when I asked for the freedom toast the waitress was confused. “You know, it’s just food,” explained owner Gus Vlahavas, who served in the Army during the Cuban missile crisis. “When this is all over, we’ll all go back to saying ‘French this’ and ‘French that’.”
Perhaps so. But some people will be saying it as an expletive.
