The dinner from hell has finally reached its logical endpoint. After the women of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills were released from the bowels of Kathy Hilton’s dining room they were dispatched to yet another dinner. To my surprise, the meal that Garcelle hosted actually managed to upstage the drama that occurred at the prior one, which relitigated Erika’s divorce and the allegations against Tom Girardi.
But first thing’s first: Kathy’s dinner ended with a bang as Erika—who does not have two pennies to rub together because of the ongoing lawsuit against her estranged husband—asked Sutton if she would like to be sued over all the things she’s said. Erika made it clear that she would not be doing the suing herself but intimated that Tom would pull the trigger because of “what you’re saying about a person’s health,” which made little to no sense considering Erika is practically putting Tom’s medical history on display every other episode in order to garner sympathy.
Erika then retorted: “You ever call me a liar again I’m coming for you.” When Sutton asked if that was a threat Erika replied it was a promise. Now where I come from, if you say that to a person, one of the involved parties must immediately throw hands at that moment or at a more mutually beneficial later date—this is known as the situation being “on sight.” But after Erika’s comeback, Sutton left the dinner, because she is too rich to be spoken to in such a manner.
Surely Sutton and Erika will continue to rehash this beef despite their agreement not to speak to each other. So dispensing with that drama, I can now move on to the real head-scratcher of Wednesday night’s episode, which was the Haitian dinner Garcelle hosted at her home.
The Housewives franchise has clear issues with diversity, but this dinner in particular felt like a specific kind of disgusting attack on Garcelle’s culture. Her castmates are well-traveled women who have been to Hong Kong, France, Italy, and Dubai on the show alone, and yet Lisa Rinna and Kyle were turning their noses up at a Caribbean fish dish as if it were unfathomable to eat sea snail. The worst offender was Rinna, who grimaced with nearly every bite she took and said in her talking head that this wasn’t her type of food. (I can only assume she meant well-seasoned food, but she chalked it up to not liking fish.)
Disliking certain foods is one thing, but that the show’s editors went out of their way to emphasize just how much these women recoiled at the Haitian dinner crossed over into cultural insensitivity. These women shovel caviar into their mouths like the sea is drying up but they couldn’t disguise their contempt for Haitian food for a single meal? No wonder Garcelle keeps saying she feels left out of everything.
DISCUSSION
I don’t really understand the “unseasoned food” dig at white people (other than ‘haha white people’ I guess.) I’m first-gen Cuban-American, so at least 40-50% of my diet was Cuban or Puerto Rican food growing up; but that other half had a lot of variety... so who are the white people who aren’t spicing food? Who are these people with categorically not-yummy food? Is this like the joke of German or English being unpalatable or something? I don’t know anything about Scandinavian food, and I think the only Scandinavian dish I’ve ever had was gravlax, but that at least had a powerful enough flavor that I’m not sure what more you’d want to add to it.
I think sushi is the only cuisine I’ve ever had that was, for the most part, noticeably less seasoned relative to other cuisines. But I don’t necessarily think it’s worse off for it.