The Grand Lux Cafe: "Grand-Casual" Excess

Meredith Ashton

Restaurant Review

22 October 2016

The Grand Lux Café: “Grand-Casual” Excess

In 1949 Evelyn Overton made a cheesecake for her husband’s boss. It must have been one hell of a cheesecake, as this single dessert spawned The Cheesecake Factory, an international empire of chain restaurants fueled by customers’ love of ridiculously large portions. Evelyn’s son, David, designed the Grand Lux Café as a sibling chain to its famed counterpart, offering a slightly pricier menu of seafood and steaks than its more appetizer-and-burger focused antecedent.

The first Grand Lux Café opened in Las Vegas in 1999 at the famed Venetian Resort, Hotel, & Casino, where it fit the Vegas vibe of excess and splendor. Inspired by extensive European touring, the menu features “seductive flavor profiles” from around the globe, blending the grandeur of Europe with the more casual American dining experience. Chicago’s Grand Lux was the third location to open in the US.

Grand Lux Cafe Las Vegas

The Grand Lux embodies the spirit of its birthplace and founders, presenting an incredible feast for the senses as well as the stomach. The restaurant offers a fun dining experience for special occasions, but most definitely borders on the excessive for the everyday dinner.

The self-prescribed term “casual” is used very loosely to refer to Grand Lux dining.

The large venue and extensive menu provide “something for everyone,” however, the only cohesion between the dishes and the décor seems to be the elements of excessive decadence and portion sizes.

Indeed, it was a sensory experience to just make it to my dinner table. I started in the restaurant’s large, street-level foyer with marble walls detailed in shimmering gold accents, the noisy din of the restaurant floating down from the floor above. Next, I ascended to the restaurant’s mail floor via escalator (much to the delight of the little girl behind me—escalators are very exciting.) I was greeted with an onslaught of rapidly moving waiters, the clatter of cutlery and customer chatter, and the tantalizing aromas wafting from the open kitchen. While the business does not accept reservations, it was only a twenty minute wait for a table, which is excellent for a Friday night in Chicago.

The Grand Lux boasts more than 500 seats, spread strategically throughout a handful of cavernous dining rooms. I suggest you take a minute and drink it all in. If you’re like me, you’ll probably shamelessly spin in a full 360—admiring the large hand-blown glass light fixtures and chandeliers draped from the ceiling, illuminating the intricate murals of geometric patterns and classical cultural scenes. The decadent décor was dizzying. It was with a sigh of relief that I retreated into the haven of my little booth in an adjacent space set apart from the central dining room. This smaller room was more intimate, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Chicago’s evening skyline; the lightly pulsing electric signs and headlights from the street traffic below charmingly lit up our cozy-leather-lined booth.

The Grand Lux’s menu is both daunting and oxymoronic.

Self-described as globe-trotting “grand-casual” food, for the unprepared diner the  diverse selection can be overwhelming. Many items on the menu blur the line of traditional “American” cuisine by combining foreign ingredients and techniques with familiar dishes.  While, in general, the Grand Lux excels with its main courses, the accompanying side dishes do not receive the same level of attention and detail in the kitchen.

The emphasis is clearly on constructing what is familiar, and in no way could the Lux’s “international” cuisine stand up to a restaurant focused on a single ethnic cuisine.

The Creamy Spinach & Cheese Dip arrived in what could best be described as a large ceramic vat. In addition to its wide girth, the dish delivered in the cheesiness department, offering a rich and creamy mixture of spinach and various cheeses. The spicy bite of the accompanying salsa added a surprising accent to the otherwise savory dish. There were, unfortunately, hardly enough chips to finish half the dish, and neither were said tortillas salted, which seemed an odd area in which to skimp.

It was after the appetizer that our server, who had been polite but disengaged, was suddenly substituted for a younger, far more enthusiastic (and close-talking) waiter who filled our glasses after every few sips. The food came very quickly, with little thought to the pacing of the meal for the guests. We were still wading through the spinach dip when our entrees arrived.

Miso Glazed Salmon

The Grand Lux is known for their meat and seafood, so I gamely trudged through several pages of the menu until I found their specialty dishes. The Miso Glazed Salmon with rice and stir-fried vegetables presented an interesting take on a classic “American” dish with Japanese-inspired culinary elements. Miso is a paste made from fermented soybeans and barely malt, and while I had enjoyed miso soup before, I was a tad skeptical about smothering it on a fish. It turned out to be freaking delicious. The salmon absorbed the sweet-and-sour miso flavor and was so perfectly cooked that it fell off my fork upon carving into the fish. The sauce tied the salmon together with the accompanying stir-fried veggies, which offered a light crunch to the fish, and the rice, while nothing noteworthy, created a lovely, although bland, base for the rest of the flavorful dish.

I’ll preface my description of the Parmesan Crusted Pork Chop with a confession: I am a lifelong vegetarian of nearly twenty years. As such, take it as you will when I say that the garlic-buttered breadcrumb crust added a delicious crunch to the tender pork beneath. It was one of the few meat dishes that I would like to try again. The accompanying cooked carrots, however, were reduced to a tasteless mush, a true tragedy compared to the rest of the dish.

New Orleans Beignets

For guests with second stomachs, the Grand Lux has an in-house bakery from which customers can order directly. I was intrigued by the New Orleans Beignets on the menu, and a quick internet search identified them as “fried squares of dough sprinkled with confectioners sugar.” In a serendipitous turn of events, I discovered that beignets are, in fact, just fancy donuts! I might even venture to say that they’re slightly superior to their rich cousins, as their light and fluffy consistency allows the guest to consume the entire basket of the round, powdered sugar dough-balls (or at least, that was my experience) after the enormous entrée course. While the chocolate sauce was solidified and the strawberry sauce a sickly sweet concoction, the yellow cream was the perfect compliment for beignet-dipping.

After the final dessert course, if you’re not absolutely stuffed to the brim with food, then you haven’t done the Grand Lux correctly. For me, it was a pleasant sensory overload soaked in creamy cheese dip and savory miso sauce, sprinkled with confectioners sugar. If you’re looking for a stimulating, full-body dining experience, then The Grand Lux Cafe is the place for you. As for the fainter of heart, or those simply desiring a reasonably-portioned, lighter meal, I would suggest looking elsewhere. The Lux has definitely super-sized since the days of Evelyn’s single cheesecake.

The Grand Lux Cafe: An "Upscale-Casual" Eatery?

Meredith Ashton

Restaurant Review Expectations

21 October 2016

The Grand Lux Café: An “Upscale-Casual” Eatery?

            The phrase “Grand Lux” inspires images of soaring white columns, well-dressed waiters bearing bow ties (and perhaps English accents), and a menu so extravagant it couldn’t possibly be written in a language as common as English. Conversely, the term “café” bespeaks sipping coffee and nibbling on fresh pastries at a quaint wooden table overlooking the French countryside. These two contrasting images are my first impressions of The Grand Lux Café, the restaurant I have chosen for my first (and hopefully not last) culinary review.

            With a little internet investigation, I learned that The Grand Lux Café was created by the founders of The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant that I have visited with my family several times. My experience with The Cheesecake Factory can be summed up nicely by the phrase “luxurious excess.” It is soaring white pillars and chandeliers dripping with fake crystals and salads that towered so high I moaned thinking about eating the ensuing entrée course, let alone the famed dessert itself. I did, however, always find room for that Chocolate Raspberry Truffle Cheesecake at the end of my Cheesecake Factory escapades. Drawing upon this past experience, I expect The Grand Lux to embody a similar excess of décor and portion size.

            Upon further research, I learned that the Café boasts an incredible diversity of international cuisine, calling itself “a world of food.” As such, I expect a menu overflowing with unique ethnic flavors, speaking to my desire for the exotic and unknown (all in the comfortable familiarity of an American chain restaurant, of course). I am hopeful that the plethora of international cuisines will serve as a gateway into new culinary dishes and experiences for myself and my readers. Because The Grand Lux is a national chain, I anticipate that the food, while foreign, will be created and marketed so as to be edible and familiar to Americans across the country. This bounty of other-but-familiar food has the potential to be overwhelming, especially as the sheer variety of cuisines will make it difficult to pick specific dishes from the menu for my review. In addition, the pictures online speak to the Café’s decadent architecture and layout. I’m thankful to have done a bit of initial research, as this will help me steel myself against the seduction of the Café’s impressive grandeur.

            It seems as though my initial contrasting images of the business were even more complex than I originally postulated. Any restaurant describing itself with the phrase “upscale-casual” is bound to blur the lines of traditional eatery expectations. Furthermore, I am both skeptical and curious to observe if the restaurant can pull off its theme of, well, representing the entire world. How can I, as either an avid eater or an aspiring restaurant critic, put a distinctive flavor to an establishment that claims to offer every desired taste and cuisine in the world? If I am truly preparing to review “a world of food, then I will strive to enter The Grand Lux Café with an open mind and an empty stomach.

Is This Title Authentic?

Meredith Ashton

Culinary Tourism

Reading Response

20 October 2016

Is This Title Authentic?

            Dean MacCannell analyzes the tourist experience, stating “touristic consciousness is motivated by its desire for authentic experiences.” The work Culinary Tourism by Lucy Long expands upon this statement, analyzing culinary tourism as an exercise motivated by the human curiosity to experience “the other” as an escape from the mundane. This experience can be set on Lucy’s continuum of the exotic to the familiar, as the degree of  desired “authenticity” is individual-specific. The issue is additionally muddled by the fact that the very idea of the “authentic” is socially constructed, holding differing meanings in varied cultural contexts. Due to the individual-specific nature of the culinary tourism critique, I decided to turn inwards to reflect on my experience with authentic (or perhaps, more accurately, inauthentic) tourism.

            One of my first experiences with “other” cultural cuisine was in Disney World: the quintessential icon of “Americanness.” I remember walking around the World Showcase in Disney’s EPCOT theme park, icy cold gelato sticking to my throat in Italy and a Mexican candy skull so sugary my eight-year-old self spit it back out. Who knew that something could have too much sugar? It was fabulous and exotic and exhilaratingly different. My young “tourist’s gaze” was adept at discovering all of the exciting differences between “here and there.” In the matter of a an hour or two I had walked through eleven countries, heard men in plaid kilts blare their bagpipes, watched a belly dancer shake her hips in the din of a Moroccan restaurant, and found no fewer than three gruesome trolls on the Maelstrom ride in Norway.

I was practically a world traveler. It was only the occasional Mickey Mouse-shaped ice cream bar and the surprise spotting of Beauty and the Beast on the cobbled streets of France that reminded me I was still very much in good ol’ America. Disney created a user-friendly type of culinary tourism for its guests, where young American families could experience “the other” as a type of elaborate theatrical imitation, and still have the option of an “American Hot Dog and French Fries” in the conveniently located American Pavilion in the center of the Showcase.

Don’t get me wrong. I freaking love Disney World—some of my fondest childhood memories include consuming fistfuls of colorful Goofy Sour gummy worms with my sister under the backdrop of Cinderella’s Castle. I’ve simply become more aware over the years that Disney’s theme-park-packaged experience falls very far towards the familiar end of the culinary tourism spectrum. While I still enjoy walking the streets of the World Showcase with my family, I now do so with the understanding that it is more of a “show of the world” than an authentic showcase, which is tailored to a very tourist-specific lens. EPCOT presents an experience authentic to Disney World, but not necessarily of the different cultural others that it performs for its guests.

Artisanal Delicacies

Meredith Ashton

Secret Ingredients

Reading Response 2

13 October 2016

Artisanal Delicacies

            The final chapters of the Local Delicacies section of Secret Ingredients spoke to the beauty and culinary superiority of artisanal food products. As the descriptions of these foods were so lovely and tantalizing, I began to wonder: what is it that makes these artisanal products so delicious? After analyzing these sections, which describe “those particularly gnarly little dark pumpernickel bagels,” unpasteurized cheeses created by a nun, and the artisanal tofu handmade by Japanese monks, I discovered a few common themes that tie these artisanal dishes together.

            The first aspect that surprised me was the incredible amount of hard work and specialized knowledge that these dishes necessitate. When making tofu, for example, many artisans show up at two in the morning to begin the arduous task of ensuring the product is “soaked, ground, boiled, strained, reboiled, curdled, pressed, drained, cooled, sliced, and packaged” (Thurman 328). Such a time-intensive task also requires individuals to have very specific knowledge of the process. In the case of Mother Noella in the chapter “Raw Faith,” she has completed a Ph.D. in microbiology, studying cheese caves in France for her doctoral thesis. The nun has an incredible amount of specialized knowledge about the bacteria and fungi that are an essential aspect of the artisanal cheese-making process. Bagels, too, turned out to be far more complex than I had previously imagined. There are specific flours and an intermediate boiling period that create a huge difference between a bagel and a bread.

            The process of creating these artisanal goods relies not only on the knowledge and perseverance of these cooks, but also upon natural forces. Both cheese and tofu require an intricate understanding of natural forces and native ingredients. Mother Noella explains that “Every dairy, every cheese cave, has its own specific ecology. Every handful of soil, no matter how ordinary, contains more biodiversity than a rainforest,” (Bilger 321). With her keen knowledge of fungi, Mother Noella is able to harness this natural process to aid with her cheese-making. Tofu also requires a nuanced knowledge of the natural, as a key part of creating artisanal tofu is finding the correct ingredients. The author of the section explains the difficult task of locating the right coral reef off the coast of a certain island where there resides the perfect kind of seaweed to mix in with the half-formed tofu.

            The final component of these artisanal delicacies is that their complicated processes result in unique, individualized food products that one cannot find elsewhere. In “The Magic Bagel,” Calvin Trillin spends multiple days searching for the particular artisanal bagel he once enjoyed with his daughter. He refuses to settle for any other kind of pumpernickel bagel because it simply won’t be the same experience. As we’ve discussed in class, eating the same food twice, especially one tied up in nostalgia, will not be an exact simulation of the first time that you tried a dish. Trillin, however, does not seem to be looking for a recreation of his pumpernickel bagel.  Rather he acknowledges and respects the beauty and “magic” of that food from his past, and wishes to possibly taste that connection to food and his family once more. It is this ethereal, magical component that contributes to the success, and arguable superiority, of artisan foods.

How much is too much?

Meredith Ashton

Dining Out Reading Response

10 October 2016

How much is too much?

            How much should we eat? This is a question that, when posed to a passionate French chef, a clean plate club mother, and a stringent doctor, would merit very different responses. It’s a query that comes with enormous privilege, as only those with disposable time and income have the opportunity to determine to what degree of excess they will eat on a daily basis.

            As a child, I was raised to be exactly the kind of customer that has the French chefs and food critics in the Dining Out section of Secret Ingredients shuddering in horror. My household was self-labeled “health-conscious,” and as such I entered restaurants as a salad-loving vegetarian accustomed to the reasonable portions I received at home. I suppose this was the inevitable outcome of having a mother who owns a gym, an aunt who’s a registered dietician, and another aunt who competes in Iron Man competitions. Basically, there was zero chance that my family would be invited to an all-you-can-stuff-in-your-face beefsteak.

            Coming from such a strictly portion controlled background, the idea of eating an enormous amount of food was foreign to me as a reader. In the chapter title All You Can Hold for Five Bucks, Joseph Mitchell presented the beefsteak as a festive atmosphere in which individuals came together over the consumption of huge quantities of meat and beer in a rich, time-honored celebration of social and political success. And honestly, as strange as the initial thought of eating six steaks was, the beefsteak sounded pretty darn entertaining.

            The tradition reminded me of my family’s one instance of eating excess: holidays, of which Easter was the pinnacle. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, we celebrate Pascha, or Easter, at a midnight service that goes into the wee hours of Sunday morning, and then enjoy the Agape (God’s love) Meal directly afterwards. Similar to the beefsteak, the Agape Meal is a celebration of a special event (the birth of Christ), in which the entire parish shares an outlandishly excessive meal with the communal goal of eating as much as humanly possible at two o’clock in the morning. Parishioners bring wicker baskets overflowing with sausage links, ham, red-dyed eggs, rich breads adorned with dough crosses, sculpted butter lambs, large chocolate Easter bunnies for the kids, wheels of cheese, and bottles of wine and ouzo and vodka, depending on one’s ethnic background. Hands pass around goods from personal baskets, so everyone gets a nibble of whatever they wish. It’s a relatively quiet endeavor at first, with all mouths engaged in the all-consuming task of eating. That is, until the deacon starts going around with the shots and a rousing chorus of Russian drinking songs fills the hall with rowdy laughter.

            In the chapter titled Really Big Lunch, Harrison wrote that “life is a near death experience, and our devious minds will do anything to make it interesting.” When I first read this passage and reflected on his 37 course lunch, along with the beefsteak celebration, I found it hard to understand. For most of my childhood, I’d been taught that we eat to live. Now, Harrison was proposing that we live to eat, or at least we zest up our lives by enjoying the occasional six hour lunch. This contrast reminded me of one of my mom’s few sayings that I actually enjoyed: “everything in moderation, even moderation.” Perhaps that is the answer to the age-old question of proper portions. If you’re lucky enough to have the privilege, eat until you’re full. But a beefsteak every once in awhile can help to keep life fresh.