Eat now: an elegy

Today is the day after Johannes's birthday, the day I traditionally wish him "Happy Birthday" except, of course, that Johannes died this past September. I remember birthdays only because they appear in my online calendar, as Johannes's does on the ninth of October, so if I deleted that entry I would never again think about Johannes's birthday. It occurred to me to do so, but Talia corrected me, pointing out that it is a reminder and opportunity to think about him, dead or alive. Talia is a sensible person: I am keeping that entry and I am thinking about him. And what I am thinking about him, or one of the things anyway, is what a terrible loss this is for the Netherlands.

When, in late 2001, I found myself living in Amsterdam with disposable income, I quickly learned that money could buy you good food in the city but, almost without exception, it couldn't buy you a good meal. Dutch restaurant chefs had a real talent for taking the excellent produce, meats, and other ingredients available to me as a private shopper (and so certainly to them as professional ones) and turning them into garbage. So I cooked for myself, and once or twice for Johannes, and Talia came and cooked for us both, and the years went by and the restaurants very slowly started to get better. By the time we left in 2009 it was no very difficult thing to find a good meal in Amsterdam and the cause, in my biased but no less correct view, was Johannes.

Johannes was a food writer first and a restaurant critic second, as he himself would insist. Those food writings, and in particular the Dikke van Dam--illustrated randomly here--constitute an important and enduring legacy, but in his lifetime what really mattered were his restaurant reviews. Under his gimlet eye and slashing pen Dutch chefs and restaurant owners suffered but they learned. He drove their communal improvement, not the Hotelschool Den Haag, though I respect that institution, not the biologische movement in Nederland, though it's done much else praiseworthy, not my years-long near-boycott of the Amsterdam restaurant scene. Everybody read his reviews and everybody responded to them, going where the numbers were high, leaving the other restaurants to the miserable business of feeding tourists or, depending upon location, feeding no one.

Now that he's gone what do you suppose will happen? I'll tell you one thing for sure, we won't see his like anytime soon. He was blessed with abnormally acute taste buds, a talent for writing, and rare probity. He created for himself an encyclopedic (literally) knowledge of all things food-related. And he worked at his craft almost without stop for decades on end.

Johannes is gone, who knows where, and his memory won't long serve to goad the Dutch restaurant scene upwards. I've told you before and remind you here: eat now, for what today you have to dine upon, and who you have to share it with, will not be at table forever.