Eater's World's Fare proves the general public cannot be trusted with a Michelin-pedigree empanada

The concept of a "world's fare" is, in theory, a beautiful thing. When Eater announced they were bringing together over 30 of New York City’s most in-demand chefs under one roof at Pier 36 to celebrate the intersection of global food and the world soccer finals, I naturally assumed the roof would be locked from the inside.

I expected an intimate, industry-facing summit. A place where the cultural elite could gather to nod approvingly at a braised pork belly without the exhausting interference of the outside world. I had even cleared my weekend schedule, sacrificing my Sunday reset, to properly prepare my palate for the occasion.

Instead, I arrived on Saturday to discover that the event organizers had committed a grave and unforgivable error: they had sold tickets to the general public.

Thousands of them.

The sheer volume of uncredentialed humanity was staggering. People who had never once written a sternly worded email to a maître d’ were freely walking around a cavernous pier, exchanging standard American currency for the very same dishes that usually require a media affiliation to secure.

I watched in profound horror as a man wearing synthetic athletic fibers casually consumed a Michelin-pedigree empanada while standing up. He did not photograph it. He did not close his eyes to isolate the texture of the masa. He simply chewed it, swallowed it, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as if he were eating a hot dog at a municipal park.

Determined to rise above the fray, I approached the stall for a highly acclaimed Oaxacan concept. The queue was twenty-five people deep. I have not stood in a line since 2014, but I gamely walked to the front and attempted to bypass the wait by mentioning a dinner party in Tribeca where I had once briefly spoken to the executive chef about his sourcing methods.

The cashier, a young woman wearing a branded lanyard, blinked at me blankly and told me the line started behind a man in a bucket hat.

The indignity of transactional dining cannot be overstated. When I finally reached the front and received my order, the culinary masterpiece was handed to me not on bespoke ceramic, but in a compostable paper boat.

Julianne is absolutely correct. How are we supposed to assign value to the New York dining scene when anyone with an entry fee and a free Saturday can just walk in and taste the zeitgeist?

Finding a place to consume my paper boat proved to be a secondary trauma. There was no assigned seating. There were no ushers to enforce a social hierarchy. There were only scattered high-top tables, entirely unregulated by the presence of a hostess stand.

I approached a table to carefully set down my yuzu-infused crudo, only to realize the opposite end was already occupied by a family of four from New Jersey. They did not leave when I arrived. They merely slid their plastic cups of mass-market lager to the side to make room for my elbow.

I was forced to eat an exquisite, delicate piece of line-caught fish mere inches from a teenager who was aggressively dipping a dry-aged wagyu skewer into a ramekin of generic ketchup.

The soccer element of the festival only compounded the physical danger of the environment. I had assumed the "sports" portion of the World's Fare would be an abstract, curatorial nod to global movement. Perhaps a muted screen playing archival footage of the 1970 finals in the corner of a dimly lit mezcal bar.

Instead, Eater had installed massive televisions broadcasting an actual, literal sports match in real time.

The attendees actually cared about the score. Every few minutes, a wave of unchoreographed human emotion would rip through the pier. People were cheering, groaning, and throwing their hands in the air, sloshing their globally-inspired beverages precariously close to my linen trousers.

Food is supposed to be a love language, an intimate, hushed dialogue between the creator and the consumer. It is not supposed to be shouted over a penalty kick.

The sudden roar of a stadium-sized crowd completely obliterated the subtle tasting notes of the crudo. To disregard a chef’s life work for a mere athletic achievement is a profound failure of civic priorities.

I thought of the chefs themselves. These are artists who usually operate in heavily controlled environments, protected by velvet ropes and six-week Resy waitlists.

To thrust them into a warehouse and force them to hand their creations to people who haven't even read their profiles in the weekend supplements borders on industrial cruelty.

Mateo’s pain is our pain. When we allow the masses to access the absolute peak of cultural output, we dilute the very meaning of taste. We teach the public that they are entitled to the fruits of culinary genius simply because they were willing to commute to the Lower East Side.

Seeking refuge, I finally retreated to the VIP lounge. But even this sanctuary was deeply flawed. The lounge was merely a slightly elevated platform in the center of the room. It did not have opaque walls. I could still see the public, and worse, they could see me.

I sat down with a glass of natural wine and looked out over the sea of replica jerseys and paper plates. I chatted with a fellow columnist who looked equally haunted by the sheer volume of ordinary palates we were being forced to accommodate.

We have allowed the concept of the "food festival" to trick us into believing that community is inherently a good thing. But true community isn't thousands of people chewing in unison. True community is six people nodding approvingly at a singular, impossible-to-get reservation.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe experiencing global culture should require at least a modest background check and a referral from a publicist.

As I left Pier 36, stepping over a discarded napkin that undoubtedly once held a transcendent, life-affirming arepa, I couldn't help but feel a profound sense of loss for the state of American dining.

The Eater World’s Fare had delivered exactly what it promised: the world. And it turns out, the world is entirely too crowded.