No Coulis for Me!

Fancy chefs have mostly gotten over this by now, but the managers of banquet halls and "casual dining" restaurants haven't gotten the memo: Enough with the coulis already!

I understand the principle here: A drizzle of raspberry covers a multitude of sins. Dry chocolate cake? Coulis! Colorless panna cotta? Coulis! Huge slab of bland cheesecake? Coulis!

For those of us who are not big fans of the raspberry to begin with, this is sheer torture. In fact, the coulis has become so standard that many menus neglect to mention its presence at all, thus denying a polite, if fanatically coulis-averse diner from requesting that it be omitted. And it is the height of churlishness to send back a dessert due to unannounced drizzle. (Not that I haven't been tempted.) But nothing is sadder than the pure joy of a slice of chocolate cake tainted by overly sweet, radioactive red raspberry drizzle.

So...enough! We unhappy few shan't be trod upon any longer. Stand up for your right to a coulis-free dessert! Join my Anti-Coulis Crusade, small and quixotic thought it may be. Adorn your blog with one of my logos (below) and boldly speak up in restaurants: "No Coulis for me."

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Just think what the world could have been like if great men had devoted themselves to a topic that truly mattered, like coulis:

Martin Luther King, Jr.:
I have a dream that my four little desserts will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their drizzle but by the content of their character.

Karl Marx:
A spectre is haunting American restaurants—the spectre of coulis.

The Anti-Coulis Crusaders disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing patisserie conventions. Let the ruling classes tremble at an dessert revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their coulis. They have a world to win.

Students for a Democratic Society at Port Huron:
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably at the desserts before us.

The American Founders:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all eaters are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the freedom from raspberry drizzle. That to secure these rights, restaurants are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the eaters, — That whenever any dessert service becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Eaters to alter or to abolish it.

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If you care to join my tiny, pointlessly furious anti-coulis campaign, feel free to steal my big logo, the shrunken version at bottom, or use this little guy: