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Portland’s 2006 year in food, like most years, was dominated by the fundamental question that each person must answer at some point in life: what is your attitude toward drunken white people?Drunk white people loom over history as more world-changing, more horrifying, more terribly fascinating than any other group. The invention of gin in 17th-century Europe unleashed a bizarre array of instincts, passions, and cruelty that have left the globe incalculably less humane than what came before. Early Protestant ministers stared into their glasses as they refined ever more ghastly self-vivisecting theologies. Meanwhile, despondent alcoholic priests perfected the art of child molesting. Cheap liquor fueled the decisions of the countless young men who abandoned their feudal towns to chain their bodies to the dehumanizing machines of early industrialism. Soon the same liquor drove them to Napoleon’s recruiters. Intoxicated European bureaucrats and enlisted men tore the world apart in the age of imperialism, and German soldiers stumbled their drunken way through the death camps of World War II.
Here at home drunken white people are largely responsible for such quintessentially American practices as lynching, bum fights, the Native American genocide, Bill O’Reilly’s phone-sex habit, and date rape. Intoxicated whites are behind a disproportionate number of bad tattoos, ill-advised marriages, pretentious art, and unwanted children. Our president’s horrified reaction to his own drunken whiteness is responsible for the born-again moral rigidity that drove him to start the Iraq war.
It is the legacy of these centuries, the era of the drunken Caucasian, that decides which restaurants will succeed here in Maine, one of the whitest states in America. The problem is this: it is very hard to make a profit selling good food without also selling heavily marked-up liquor or wine. But if you sell liquor or wine to white people you could very well end up with a room full of drunken Caucasians. This is a bitter dilemma, but it is immeasurably tougher for members of minority groups. To ask an ethnic minority to stand by comfortably while white people become intoxicated is to ask history to erase itself.
Here in Maine, ethnic restaurants suffer of this dynamic from two directions. Understandably uncomfortable with the idea of intoxicating their customers, they often offer a tiny selection of beers and undrinkable wines. Viscerally aware of their frightening intoxico-genetic heritage, white customers stick to water or have one beer. So it is that so many good ethnic restaurants in Portland disappear so quickly. To get through the first debt-filled year without substantial profits from alcohol is a tough hurdle. The past year saw Honey’s shut its doors despite good buzz, Shahnaz Persian Grille close after being named Best Middle Eastern restaurant, and Portland Hunan change ownership, replacing David Wong’s terrific Chinese with something more common. Anyone who cares about good food in Portland worries for the future of other great new spots like Pom’s Thai and King of the Roll. Oolong, which has great food, seems to have gotten through 2006 mostly thanks to a bustling bar — a good indication that it must be white-owned.
