Playground DTSA http://playgrounddtsa.com

Like most great projects, The Playground began as a manifestation of the dreams and vision of its builders. But we want to be the best restaurant we can be and, among other things, that means we must adapt to our customers’ desires while remaining true to our core values. We promised on our home page that we’d involve our customers in how we evolve and that we’d seek their feedback. We use this page to maintain an open dialog with our customers.

We like to think of The Playground dining experience more as a playful exploration of the world of food rather than as a meal whose job it is to fill your belly. Certainly you shouldn’t go away hungry, but hopefully you’ll enjoy a journey that offers several highlights that will prove memorable and perhaps inspirational.

A playground is a place where people come together and mostly play together. While you’re welcome to find a spot in the sandbox to fill and empty your bucket, most of the kids will run up and down the slide, share the teeter totter or take turns spinning the merry-go-round while others get dizzy spinning around. It’s sort of the same at The Playground.

You’re still welcome to come in alone and enjoy as little or as much of the food and beer as you’d like. But we’d like to suggest that the ultimate way to enjoy The Playground is to share it with others. (Six seems to be the perfect party size.) Even if you’ve got misanthropic tendencies, you’ll get to taste more of the dishes if you share. And tasting everything is what we have in mind when we design a menu filled with innovative (and sometimes challenging) renditions of classic dishes and new presentations that highlight extraordinary ingredients. But you can’t taste many dishes if you don’t share. Heck, an entire burger or pork chop and you’re probably done.

Sharing limits you to a few bites of each dish. Why is that a good thing? Because of taste fatigue, the principle that you get used to and therefore stop enjoying a dish very quickly. So why continue eating it if it is no longer enjoyable? Thomas Keller explained it well:

“All menus at the French Laundry revolve around the law of diminishing returns, such as the more you have of something the less you enjoy it. Most chefs try to satisfy a customer’s hunger in a shorter time with one or two main dishes. The initial bite is great. The second bite is fabulous. But on the third bite, the flavors lessen and begin to die. Many chefs try to counter this deadening effect by putting many different flavors on the plate in an attempt to keep interest alive. In doing this, the focal point is often lost and the flavors get muddled . . . In five or ten small courses we try to satisfy your appetite and spark your curiosity with each dish. We want our guests to say, ‘God, I wish I had one more bite of that.’” Thomas Keller, French Laundry Service Manual.

A party of four came in. From the beginning, they weren’t happy. They didn’t like our 3% kitchen gratuity and they wanted their Playground Burger cooked well done. While we invite anyone who feels the kitchen didn’t earn the 3% gratuity not to pay it, we won’t cook the Playground Burger well done. (More about that below.) We did everything we could to make this party happy. But it became more and more obvious that they were committed to having a miserable time so they could run away and complain about it. In retrospect, we should have comped their beers and sent them on their way without trying to win them over with great service and wonderful food. So they sat, ate, looked at each other with rolled eyes at each perceived insult to their palates and then sprinted off to write the only one star Yelp review I’ve ever seen. Ever.
If I thought they were trying to be objective or helpful, I might have taken their review seriously, but it is clear to me that they were being neither. Somehow we touched something in one or more of them that aggravated some historical wound (Freud would undoubtedly have some opinion on the matter) and they decided to lash out at us in the hopes that they could heal that deep-seated insult to their psyches. How do I know this wasn’t an objective restaurant review? Because they made it personal.

After rattling on about Jason’s food in a way no one who’d ever had it would believe, the reviewer said something about the chef’s parents (that’s me) running around with some naive notion of what it takes to run a restaurant. That didn’t trouble me. The reviewer had already proved to me that he or she was an ass and I am long past needing approval from people I don’t respect. But it set Jason off. He probably could have tolerated the insults to his food and his restaurant, but when the reviewer attacked his parents, he lost his ability to restrain himself. I think that’s sort of sweet and it touched me even if I wish he’d simply ignored them.

But are we naive? Yes, in the sense that every new parent is naive. We’ve all been kids, we’ve known kids, we’ve cared for kids, but parenthood is another story altogether; nothing prepares us fully for actually having a child and the 24/7 demands of parenthood. Even a second or third child presents challenges for which we are ill trained to handle. A restaurant is a lot like a child and we, notwithstanding our experience, opened our restaurant’s doors on the first day naive about how to help it grow into a healthy, self-sustaining entity that makes the world a better place by its presence. (Isn’t that what we all want for our children?) All we could do prior to opening day was try to define our values and our vision and then put everything in place we could imagine we’d need to execute on that vision. From there we will learn and grow and adapt every day. Are there things maybe we should have anticipated that we did not? Probably. It’s how we react to those things when they do arise that defines who we are and what we will become.

I can assure our reviewer that we are not as naive or inexperienced as he or she might imagine. I’m not interested in defending myself or in inflating my sense of self worth, but the fact is, we’re not babes in the woods. I worked for seven years in all front-of-house capacities at a family owned French restaurant in the seventies and early eighties. I trained front of house at Das Hotel Roemerbad in Badenweiler, Germany (a “Leading Hotel of the World”). And I worked at the original Houstons in Nashville, Tennessee during law school. Hospitality and food service are part of my DNA. So is business. I have been a business lawyer since 1985, for the last 22 years focused on start-up businesses. I have been a financial executive and member of top management of several of these companies and was even CFO of a multinational public company for a while.

Have I ever owned a restaurant? No.

Do I have enough experience to help my son run one? I think if you combine his knowledge and experience with mine, we’ll do a credible job. We can make up for a lot of inexperience with passion and commitment and we have plenty of that.

I suspect that our parents taught most of us how well done our beef steaks and burgers and lamb and pork and chicken should be cooked . And I suspect further that most of us have not challenged what they taught us and have only the slightest idea what it would be like to do it differently. And the reasons that our parents believed that all burgers (for example) were to be cooked well done (for example) may not be relevant in all cases. Maybe that was because their parents in the old country ate poor quality meat and had to cook it to death to prevent it from killing them. But here we are, all preferring things cooked to one degree of doneness or another and when we go to a steak restaurant, they’re all about ensuring that we get it our way. After all, in a steak joint where it’s all about the meat, as opposed to a composed dish, it’s really just a question of how red you want your meat.

We don’t necessarily expect the same latitude with burgers. When was the last time you ordered your Double-Double medium rare? Never. It’s going to be well done and that’s final. Our only choice at most burger places is to take it or leave it. That’s why I don’t eat at Charlie Palmer’s DG Burger. Charlie wants to cook my burger medium well. I don’t like that. I want it medium rare. And at a place like Charlie Palmer’s where they certainly understand quality, I find myself wondering if they’re very proud of the meat they’re using in their burger if they insist on cooking all the meat character out of it. So even though they use the second-best bun I’ve ever tasted, I don’t go back.

The fact is medium well is a safe and almost universally appreciated temperature for a burger and Charlie Palmer probably chose this temperature to satisfy the largest percentage of customers. So what do we do about the Playground Burger, which we intransigently prepare medium rare? The question takes on real importance when we encounter a guest who is equally intransigent about having it cooked well done. As best I can tell, what so badly wounded our one-star reviewer was our decision not to cook his (or her) Playground Burger well done.

The artistic license we allow the kitchen touches on a sensitive tension between the chefs in the kitchen and the customers in the seats. The chefs design their dishes in the way they believe will highlight the quality of the ingredients, the culinary art involved and the customer’s experience. Every component of every dish is carefully considered and tailored to complement the other elements of the dish. Regardless whether you and I agree that they have created a masterpiece, they do their best to design the perfect dish.

If a customer orders risotto, he would never dream of telling the chefs that they should use a different white wine in its preparation; if the customer could detect and disapprove of the white wine being used, he would either not order the dish or say that it did not suit his taste. In that case, we would take it off his check and offer to substitute something more to his liking. (Much as we did for the infamous one-star reviewer.)

In certain circumstances we are accustomed to selecting the temperature to which we want our meat cooked and we are taken aback when the kitchen won’t do it. If the kitchen refuses to cook the meat to the customer’s preference out of arrogance, believing that the chefs are the true arbiters of how food should be eaten, then I believe the kitchen is in the wrong. I can’t believe there is a universal rule of how food should be eaten or that someone can be wrong for preferring one thing over another, notwithstanding what you see on Top Chef. On the other hand, it is not so offensive if the kitchen says, “We have designed this dish to be prepared a particular way. We have balanced all of the components just so and we don’t believe that the dish represents us well if it is changed.” Would you challenge a chef’s right to use a particular white wine in preparing the risotto? Can you respect his desire to serve a dish in the way he believes best represents his skill and artistic vision?

The Playground Burger is such a dish. Jason and his team have essentially attempted to design and construct the perfect steak. They use three cuts of steak and blend them in just the right proportion and using the most painstaking technique to produce a steak-like patty of ground beef that is an improvement on each of the original steak components. They cook this to (what they believe is the perfect temperature for this blend of beef) medium rare, place it between the finest buns we’ve ever tasted under a slice of melted Tomme de Savoie cheese and a dressed arugula crown. (Note, Tomme de Savoie is a rare cheese and hard to find in the quantities we require; when it is unavailable we use Gruyere and Fontina in its place.) It’s not the same dish if it’s prepared well done. It’s not something the chefs believe you will enjoy or that represents them. It’s not that they look down on you for wanting it that way, they’d just rather you chose something else.

Frankly, I don’t know who’s right here. I am respectful of the chefs’ right of artistic expression, but it’s easy for me. I like the way they do it. I don’t have to give up anything to respect their position. I am also very sensitive to hospitality and would always want a customer (who, in this case, is like a guest in my home), to have what he or she wants. The issue pulls me uncomfortably in both directions. For now, I want to respect the chefs’ decision to insist on medium rare. However, I think we must try to have plenty of options on the menu that meet the needs of the better-done crowd, while honoring that some dishes, including all of our sous vide preparations, have only one form and that it’s not possible to customize every dish. Maybe we’ll also have to get over ourselves a little bit and realize that the Playground Burger is still pretty awesome if it’s cooked up to medium, or God forbid, medium well.

What do you think?