By Tom Frank
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Technically, Foodlife is a glorified version of the familiar shopping-mall food court, scaled up in price and pretense to match the affluent surroundings of Watertower Place. It offers all the usual food court fare, at predictably inflated prices that no doubt put it safely outside the budgets of the mall’s various employees: hamburgers, pizza, burritos, stirfry, pasta. I have personally consumed the mysterious rice ‘n’ meat “wraps,” the fake barbecue, and the chicken burrito; others of my acquaintance have grazed among the multi-grain, stir-fry, and puffy pizza options. To dispense with the subjective part quickly: however varied its appearance, the food at Foodlife is consistently lifeless and bland. The vegetarian offerings tasted, as one friend put it, like “a bagful of lawnmower clippings.” As for the ribs, I am always suspicious of establishments that offer barbecued ribs as a curious ethnic novelty when the real thing is available, without irony or pretense, only a few miles away, and sure enough these were predictably disappointing. Nonetheless, Foodlife’s barbecue seemed extremely popular on each of my visits, especially among the squads of European tourists who seem to gravitate to the place and for whom Foodlife’s authenticity act may be very convincing.
No doubt many imagine that patronizing Foodlife–and dining amidst the strident environmentalism, multiculturalism, and live-and-let-live spirit expressed in lower-case typography on every available surface–is a real progressive act of some kind; no doubt many conservatives shun the place as a den of political correctness. But what is most interesting about Foodlife is the total absence of conflict between its “credo” and the ideological requirements of global capitalism. What makes Foodlife such an effective upscale food court is the way it reinforces the thrilling fantasies of dissent so dear to the hearts of today’s international business elite.
Lettuce Entertain You has perfected the high-concept restaurant and made a fortune with the understanding that the dining experience is as much about fantasy as it is about food. At Ed Debevic’s (which the company opened but no longer operates), it’s 1955 and you’re a teenager again, scarfing burgers and milkshakes in the type of diner that sells condoms in the bathroom; at Maggiano’s you’ve stumbled off a New York street into a checkered-tablecloth clam bar where corpulent mafia guys eat spaghetti and meatballs with napkins tucked under their chins. But the Foodlife fantasy is of a different order of magnitude, approaching a full blown ideology. The Foodlife fantasy not only erases the reverses the economic reality upon which Water Tower Place is built. Here after a full day of immersion in the conmsumerist dream, Foodlife reassures shoppers that it’s all OK, that they are in fact helping the environment by eating off unbleached paper napkins, and that they’re celebrating human diversity by enjoying a Mex-Thai crepe. Here you can set down your bags of shoes and sweaters and cunning electronic toys without a twinge of guilt about the Third World sweatshops where they were made; you can enjoy a cappucino and a wholesome, tasty multigrain muffin and commune with the peasants who picked the coffee beans and the immigrants in the kitchen. Even the relationship between customer and restaurateur is obscured by Foodlife’s payment scheme, which banishes the exchange of money to a cashier’s booth safely distant from the dining room. When they enter the restaurant patrons are given a plastic card upon which the various food stations track their debt. Until they are ready to leave the fantasy and reenter the reality outside, everyone eats for free.
