We’re all about edu-tainment over here at the Dirt Candy blog and last week I had a Teachable Moment! Two different tables ordered the Eggplant Fettuccini which comes in a basil broth. One guy turned to me and said it was the blandest broth he’d ever tasted in his life, watery and terrible. Another customer turned to me later that same night and said that it was the most amazing broth he’d ever had: intense and delicious. So the question is: which customer was wrong?

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Eggplant Fettuccini. The noodles are

black because they’re made with black olives.

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Answer: neither. Not everyone is going to like every dish (see previous post). And both customers get bonus points for talking to me about it (again: see previous post). I can get why the first customer didn’t like the broth. In most restaurants we’re used to having pasta served with a ragu (a thicker sauce, usually tomato based) or a butter sauce (an emulsion of butter and pasta water, sometimes with cream added). These are thick sauces that cling to the pasta. But the fettuccini we make at Dirt Candy is made of black olives, so they’re very wet and dense. We can’t serve them with a ragu or a butter sauce because both sauces will cause them to clump together – they need a thinner sauce, a broth actually, to keep the pasta from clumping.

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Basil broth with a dot of sun-dried tomato oil.

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At the same time, to balance the thinness of the broth, we load it up with basil. Drinking this broth is like getting punched in the face by an aggressive and possibly drunk basil leaf. So neither customer is wrong. Both of them have a different set of expectations and a different reaction to what’s on the plate. Some people think the food at Per Se is boring and bland. Some people think the food at McDonald’s is delicious.  Again I say, not every dish is for every palate. Here endeth the lesson for today.

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