And you get to make a lot of decisions-what restaurant to go to, what food you want to eat, when and how often you want to go out at all. At a restaurant, you’re getting something you wouldn’t normally get at home: a fully funkadelic dry-aged tomahawk ribeye, a soul-warming bowl of bún bò huế, or the undivided attention of a balletic thirteen-person service team. The civilian pleasures of dining out are largely connected to ideas of novelty and choice. Any leisure activity loses some appeal once it becomes mandatory, and eating dinner at New York’s cool new restaurants isn’t an exception to that. But when I began reviewing restaurants, I become one of them: eating became a job requirement. Researching and reporting on chefs and restaurants gives you access to an unending feast, but very few people in the food-writing world have jobs that demand the consumption and consideration of actual food. This isn’t as common among food writers as you might think. It’s everything and it’s nothing, and it’s glorious, and it usually comes with fries. Perfection is passive, it’s static, it verges on bland. By its very nature, perfection leaves no room for wildness or risk. It occupies a narrow peak, the very pinnacle of the mountain. But king of all perfect foods is the chicken tender.Ĭhicken tenders have no history, they have no metatext, they have no terroir. Their ubiquity on kids’ menus isn’t a mark against their perfection, but rather proof of it: the kids’ menu is where all perfect foods live. They’re salty and savory, crisp and juicy, easy to eat with the hands but absolutely okay to go at with a knife and fork. They’re perfect in flavor, perfect in aroma, perfect in shape, perfect in color. This is because chicken tenders are perfect. You might not ever eat them-you might be a vegetarian or a vegan, or not consume birds for whatever reason, or not want to deal with the carbs, or not think it’s okay for adult humans with serious opinions about fracking to dip a toe into the children’s menu-but that’s a choice about ingesting them. I know this about you: you love chicken tenders. Image from Flickr via Brenda Benoît Dudley
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