Let me put it this way. A little over a week ago I ate in a college dormitory cafeteria. Classic style: hot stuff in steamer trays, open salad bar with sneeze guard, drink dispensers, pick up your tray and dishes and silverware as you come in, that stuff. Everything was labeled. One station had pizza, and the sign said, "Our signature crust topped with...." Give me a break already!
I think the word "signature" makes sense in precisely one context: celebrity chefs and their restaurants. When people go, let's say, to Ming Tsai's Blue Ginger restaurant, a lot of them want to get Ming's "signature" dishes. But what in fact does this mean? Does it mean that the other dishes on the menu are not up to Chef Tsai's standards? In his case, at least, no --- for a celebrity chef, he is remarkably hands-on and deeply involved in his restaurant. (I've eaten there four times and every time he was working in the open kitchen with his people.) What "signature" means here is simply "you're looking for the celebrity chef experience, and here is a dish this celebrity developed for this restaurant and has kept on the menu a long time, so we recommend that dish for you."
The problem is that I don't like the whole celebrity chef thing. I mean, I don't mind a chef being famous and lauded, but the "celebrity chef" shtick irritates me. Call me old-fashioned, but I think the chef should be famous and lauded if his restaurant is consistently spectacular, not because he appears on TV. And I think a truly great chef is one who can train his people so well that there is no difference between a dish made entirely by the chef and one made by one of his cooks.
[Edited to add...]
An important negative dimension of "signature" for me is the way it pivots gastronomy on the question of novelty as opposed to tedium. Not so long ago, if you went to a top-notch French restaurant, what was on the menu was entirely as expected. Novelty was not really on offer. If you ordered tournedos Rossini, you got that dish, executed brilliantly, and you would have been shocked if there had been some novel alteration made. After all, if there had been such a change, the dish wouldn't be tournedos Rossini any longer. In a great deal of contemporary American restaurant culture, however, there is a notion that anything that is not new and different, to which the chef hasn't added his own personal alternative style and spin, is just boring. In part, what "signature dish" means is this: "unlike some other dishes on this menu, this is something in which the chef has expressed his personal style very strongly, to create a novel dish that speaks of who he is." I can only take this kind of thing remotely seriously when the chef in question is very, very good. Thus my reference before to Paul Bocuse's truffle soup: the man did invent this dish, and he deserves credit for it --- but very few chefs are Paul Bocuse. I think that there is now this drive to create, to be new and different, and that this drive is strongly instantiated in this term "signature dish." I would rather focus on brilliance of execution than on novel creation, and I think a good deal of the celebrity chef thing is based on telling diners that novelty is ipso facto a good thing --- and this often allows the restaurant to cover up weak execution.
Consider sushi restaurants. I don't know about the rest of the country, but I can tell you that in New England and at least to some degree New York a sushi menu will normally have a long list of "special" maki and usually at least a few "signature" maki. These things are, with few exceptions, complex concoctions of a wide range of ingredients. One of the things I learned in Japan is how fundamentally odd this is in terms of Japanese gastronomy: what makes good sushi or sashimi is its utter purity, the way you can't hide weaknesses. If the fish is fabulous and excellently cut, and the ponzu or shoyu and wasabi are of superlative quality, it's good. Many people can evaluate whether the sushi rice is good and the nigiri well-formed; I can't, but that's because I don't like it and normally order sashimi instead. If you pile up 18 ingredients together, you can get away with murder: how is anyone going to know if the fish is really all that good? That's fine if it's the intent --- if you're knocking together cheap maki rolls for on-the-dash dining, you want to use inexpensive scraps and do everything you can to obscure the quality so it's not unpalatable. But the idea of slamming together mounds of dramatically contrasting ingredients and using this as a selling point strongly suggests that your customers don't know the difference between okay fish and great fish. And yet, you'll constantly see in sushi restaurant reviews that the reviewer will harp on the exciting, novel combinations in the signature maki, and note only in passing that, yes, the ordinary standards are good too. Here the whole conception of novelty --- and celebrity, too, if you think about the way "creative" sushi gets located in the hot celebrity world --- undermines quality and taste, and "signature" becomes a constant sign of this effect.
[end edit]
So my problem with "signature" is twofold. On the one hand, it is grossly overused, to the point that all it means is "we don't think this sucks." On the other hand, it encourages people to select their food based on fame and publicity, and in many cases also to do so without regard for things like seasonality: if a dish is always on the menu, it's not seasonal, by definition --- not that all dishes must be seasonal, but I don't like anything that encourages people to think seasonality is irrelevant or a matter of pure hype (which all too often it is, of course).
I should note that I do not fault Chef Tsai for using the term. He's got a business to run, and he does a very good job of it. Part of his customer base -- a significant part -- is people attracted by his celebrity status, and they expect menus that cater to their celebrity-chef expectations. As it happens, I also like at least one of his "signature" dishes, a soup with foie gras shu mai. It's the term I object to, and I only single out Ming Tsai because I have absolutely no other objections to the man and his work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
KYHeirloomer 
Chris,
Could you expand on your objection to "signature?" I agree that it's overused, and nondescriptive. But I don't understand what your trying to say.
Edited by ChrisLehrer - 11/29/10 at 9:21am
Now, if you'll pardon me while I go put away these yummy veggies that I prepared as a side to some meltingly tender steak which I topped with asparagus...just for a little crunch. 
)
