A famed restaurant critic returns to dine at Burton
I graduated from Carleton in 1992, or as my kids call it, in the 1900s.
You know, the 1900s, the era of the atom bomb, Marcel Proust, the Clash, and I suppose the good professors of the history department in Leighton could add a few other notable events, including but not limited to the debut of the Burton dining hall in 1927.
Named for Marion LeRoy Burton, of the Carleton class of 1900, Burton was built to feed the men on the west side of campus, while the women ate on the east of campus, in what was then a radically progressive stance of having co-ed classes and a co-ed student body. (Co-ed means coeducational, all genders educated together, you crazy kids of the 2000s, and please know that ye olde Harvard did not get around to fully co-educational education until the Clash released their first album, in 1977, trailing Carleton in equity and good times by 110 years, and that goes down on their permanent record—go Carleton!)
Speaking of the 1900s, which we will be doing at length, kids please do prop your eyes open with toothpicks and get your precious consciousnesses out of those Silicon Valley attention black-holes you pay to bring you despair, memes, and all your friends. Another notable event of the 1900s was that the Burton cafeteria was fully renovated in the record-albums-and-groovy era of the 1970s, which you can instantly tell when you glance around and behold the natural-brutalist style of nigh-indestructible terra-cotta and well-lacquered dark wood that defines the cafeteria line and southern dining rooms, the ones closer to Davis.
Other notable events of the 1900s include me graduating from Carleton in a cohort of Nirvana-loving, zine-making, irony-drenched classic Gen-X kids, who then found one another in the Burton cafeteria and mocked everything. The pasta was gummy! How did it make sense to have infinite sugar cereals for dinner? Was that even healthy, was it even dinner, was it even sense? (In the fullness of time I would see stand-alone restaurants recreate this cereal-bounty as independent restaurants, so actually, yes, it makes all kinds of sense, in terms of economics, nostalgia, and, actually, you can’t make a Fruit Loop or a knock-off Fruit Loop at home, so it makes a certain amount of practical sense as well.)
Anyway.
Wildly clever kids from around the globe need something to bond over, so we bonded over mocking the food from the then-provider, Marriott, and we mocked nothing as much as the night the good people of the cafeteria piled a table with plain donuts, provided tubs of frosting, and called it: Frost-Your-Own-Donut.
We talked about this for years. Punk rock bands shouted about it, in chorus. It continually recurred in our zines. I can text important creators of American culture that phrase to this day and get a knowing response, such as: “pfffff ” or “bah.” (There was also a song I recall titled “Basket of Fries,” after the phrase shouted from the snack bar in Sayles-Hill at the time, but that’s another story.)
Did I start my vaunted career as a critic of fine restaurants and fine wines making fun of Frost-Your-Own-Donut? Absolutely not. It started in Boliou, in the art history slide room, with professor Alison Kettering prodding me, and I paraphrase: I don’t want to know what you think, I want to know what you see. Where is the light source in the painting? What is pictured, and what isn’t? It seems so simple now, but it broke my brain, these questions. Me, a lifelong clever kid, rewarded for clever thinking. What do I see? I had never thought to ask. It changed my life.
I later expanded Alison’s question to: What do you see, taste, smell, hear? And then I won six James Beard Awards for one sort or other of best food and drink writing, out of 15 nominations, and wrote a wine book, and Dom Perignon, the Champagne brand, celebrated some anniversary or other of theirs by flying me to Barcelona for 36 hours and having me taste Dom Perignon in the dark with the chef Ferran Adrià as giant isolation cones descended on us in the dark. (This is all true, I swear. Take art history classes, kids. All this conservative insult about the value of art history looks to me like it’s designed to keep you from having a good time. Art history has been very good to me.)
I forgot to mention the most important thing. I had a kid! And then another. And the first one went to Carleton, and, God-willing, will graduate in the class of 2028. I went down to move him into second Burton and ate lunch with the other teary-eyed parents within the mystery and majesty that is Language and Dining Center (LDC). Local-farm beef with broccoli! A real pizza oven such as they have in Napoli! This ain’t no Frost-Your-Own-Donut.
That’s the nature of life. You are born into the bad and problematic past; your kids are born into the glorious future. But somehow they have the gall to call the glorious future you have provided their own bad and problematic past?
You are born into the bad and problematic past; your kids are born into the glorious future. But somehow they have the gall to call the glorious future you have provided their own bad and problematic past?
So it goes.
When I picked up my kid for winter break, and ran another kid to the airport, I listened to them chatter in the back seat about how terrible the food at Carleton is—a pizza once
emerged from the Napoli-style pizza oven underdone! The pasta was gummy!
You have no idea, I thought to myself, you ungrateful youth, living in the glorious future, when I myself had to live in the bad and problematic past! Where we frosted our own donuts! Like peasants, like madmen!
Then, the editor of this fine Carleton Voice, the estimable Paul Schmelzer, reached out: You know what would be funny, he mused, if you, with your six Beard medals awarded for various bits of food and wine criticism, wrote a piece about your return to a Carleton cafeteria.
Well. You mean, I can make my son, who is too busy to text a reply to his poor mother because he is very involved in Schiller contests and D&D and chaotic dynamics and jazz piano and projecting Mario Kart upon the hallowed walls of Burton, have dinner with me? I’m in.
Seventeen dollars later, which is what anyone can pay at the door to eat at a gargantuan buffet of near numberless hot and cold options, here’s what I can tell you. Nineteen hundreds people, here’s some math: The food at Burton is 42 gazillion times better than it was in our day.
Here’s some math: The food at Burton is 42 gazillion times better than it was in our day.
They have small-grower artisan Peace coffee! A curried pork and vegetable stew that I would pay real money for in a real restaurant, it was so fresh and vibrant, and I mean that! A huge salad bar with a very good chicken salad, hummus, maybe four dozen vegetables, different rotating composed salads, including a lovely cucumber and tomato salad—if any of us prominent and successful adults had access to only the soup, salad, and toast area of Burton today, we would consider our food lives solved and basically perfect.
I also went and tried a full blue-plate-special from the “Global” station, which the night I went had a truly lovely German-style vinegar-apple-and-onion–braised red cabbage, a local Hidden Stream farm pork schnitzel in a lemon butter sauce, sauteed green beans with onion, and a rich creamy parmesan mushroom polenta. It was a plate better than I have found at many, many restaurants. Filling! Thoughtful! I cannot imagine anyone creating anything better, at scale.
This is not a restaurant review. A restaurant review is a thing that provides critical context for possible patrons. If you are reading this as the Harvard-educated spouse of a Carleton grad sitting in your kitchen in Boston, do not book a ticket to Minnesota for the pork schnitzel and chocolate-orange cake (also excellent) at Burton. This is not one of those meals that is worth the airfare, as we say of the world’s Michelin-starred gastronomy temples.
If you live in Sevy, Davis, Burton, do you need me to tell you to put on your flip-flops and go downstairs and eat? Obviously no.
But for one particular patron, drop everything. If you have a Carleton kid, or if you yourself at any point regularly ate at Burton after the 1970s renovation: Go! Go, go, go. Most specifically, go and eat and put your dirty dishes on a tray to the dish room. Because that is where the most intense thing happened to me.
That dish room roller area, for the trays, it is the leastchanged of all Burton moments. Everything else at Burton is zero-waste, global, up-to-the-minute, small-farm, healthy, and so on. But that dish room roller area, the wet mist travels in the air, the faint smell of sanitizer, and—woosh.
Proust, such as one studies in Laird (in translation) or LDC (in original French), famously put his finger on it a few years after the Burton cafeteria opened. The way memory is triggered by food, by fragrance, by what you see, hear, smell, and taste. “No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body,” he began, on a journey of memory, sparked by a little cake, a madeleine, dipped in tea. This was the portal for him to all of his past. Virginia Woolf later, in a letter, was half-dismissive of the obviousness of Proust’s insight, but went on to use it in her own work, particularly in the world-changing Mrs. Dalloway, when it occurs to Clarissa Dalloway: “There is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back; or a cup with a blue ring.”
And so it is for leaves of mint and cups with blue rings and madeleines, and so it was for me and that Burton dish roller, followed by the all-but-unchanged passageway from the Burton cafeteria door towards Davis.
As I followed my son through that door, a thousand, million memories whisked me into my mind’s time-travel. A particular image rose before me, a ghost of a kid we will call Mark, to protect the innocent, as we all were. Mark used to live on the ground floor of Davis, also known to us as Davis Beach. It was the ultimate party floor at the time, where boys, I think they were all boys, had kegerators in their rooms. (For the later part of the 1900s, the drinking age was 18, and I happened to be at Carleton right in the post-Reagan transition years. People born at some magical date in 1967 could drink, the later-born, theoretically, could not, and upperclassmen would tell us young’uns that everything was better before we got there, when there were kegs on Mai Fete Island! Anyway, it is this critic’s opinion that there should be no drinking age, and also no drunk driving, and I’m sure there’s a way to achieve that, though I’m hazy on the details.)
In any event, I saw him, this ghost, summoned by Burton dish room scent and sturdy tile floors, this ghost not named Mark, smiling his affable smile, standing in a T-shirt, shorts, and slides, a red cup filled with foamy beer in each hand, one for him, one for any guest ambling that way to join him.
Upon joining him, we’d trail back to his room, return to the hall to fish for more folk leaving dinner, create a party. We’d open the Davis Beach windows, so people could save the 40 steps they’d need to use the doors as they tumbled out to play frisbee and tumbled back for more beer. We’d put Guns N’ Roses on the department-store hi-fi that someone’s parents bought them for Christmas, we’d complain about frosting our own donuts and how big Paul Wellstone’s poli-sci class was now that he was getting famous, and not one of us knew that in our group of beer-drinking frisbee tossers one of us would become a titan of mergers and acquisitions, another a world-renowned stroke neurologist, another a leader in linguistics, another a much-awarded critic of the finest foods and wines, all of us nurtured to be critical and comradely in a place we’d absolutely take for granted, until it vanished from our day-today, and became transformed through memory into the place we lived when the future was so glorious we didn’t need to consider it at all.
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a senior writer at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, the author of The Essential Dear Dara and Drink This: Wine Made Simple, and writes a weekly email from deardara.com.
Julie Alex is an artist based in Pskov, Russia.