The Tastemakers

by David Sax

  The modern food media is a relatively recent phenomenon. Craig Claiborne was the first editor of the New York Times dining section to move away from articles aimed at mostly female home cooks and to devoted journalistic coverage of restaurants, chefs, and the new flavors they were introducing. The starred restaurant review, which Claiborne introduced in 1962, added an element of competition to dining out. Suddenly, chefs were vying to outdo their competition for accolades, and the dining public responded, pouring favor on the highest-ranking restaurants. This often had the side effect of creating trends in their wake, as others emulated the favored menus, techniques, and flavor profiles. A few specialty publications, such as the now-extinct magazine Gourmet, wrote profiles of the men behind the stoves, but for the most part chefs were anonymous workers, emerging from the kitchen once in a while to pose for photos in giant white toques beside comically large buffet spreads. If they had tattoos, they hid them. No one called them celebrities.

  In this climate chef-driven food trends took a long time to move beyond their restaurants and have a broader impact with the public. Someone would have to dine there, notice something extraordinary in a particular dish or technique, and spread the word organically, person by person, until a newspaper critic took the time to eat it. If the critic wrote for a large, well-read paper, such as the Times or the Washington Post, the restaurant review might have an impact beyond its particular market, spreading the trend to other cities. “It took two years for Paul Prudhomme’s blackened red fish to make it upstream from New Orleans to Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s,” recalled restaurant consultant Michael Whiteman over lunch at Rosemary’s, a farm-to-table restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village. “Today it’d take about ten minutes.”

  Whiteman, who runs the restaurant consulting firm Baum + Whiteman, has created, nurtured, and tracked restaurant trends for over forty years. His partner, Joe Baum, was the mind behind legendary New York restaurants the Four Seasons, La Fonda del Sol, and Forum of the Twelve Ceasars and is regarded as the father of the theme restaurant, which broke the stranglehold that ostentatious French dining rooms and clubby steakhouses had on American dining. Baum and Whiteman were innovating with globally inspired tapas and classic cocktails twenty years before these trends caught on elsewhere, but since the late 1990s, as the media coverage of chefs and restaurants has exploded in both traditional outlets and online, Whiteman has seen the cycle of dining trends speed up exponentially. “The life cycle of a trend is interesting,” said Whiteman as he picked at a kale and beet salad, which, he acknowledged, had become a mandatory appetizer on every farm-to-table restaurant menu in the country. “If Cajun blackening were invented today, you could easily call it a fad because it’d be gone in three years.”

  Chefs and restaurants today receive relentless media attention. There is 24/7 chef and food programming on two dedicated television networks (Food and its sister, Cooking), dozens of food shows on other networks (Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen, Master Chef, The Chew, Cake Boss, Bizarre Foods, No Reservations, Diners, Drive Ins and Dives, etc.), profiles and articles in the food sections of local and national newspapers, as well as a plethora of national and international food magazines (Saveur, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach), national food blogs churning out dozens of stories a day (Eater, Grub Street, Chow, Serious Eats, Gayot), hundreds of thousands of independent and specialized food blogs (on cupcakes, vegan chefs, recipes, dining out in Tucson, etc.), and a number of massive social networks, including Chowhound, Yelp, Citysearch, Urbanspoon, and countless other upstarts that are derived from recommendations and reviews that skew heavily to restaurants. Between all of these, every single minutia of our dining world is being chronicled, photographed, critiqued, and commented on in a relentless cycle that has no off switch.

  Celebrity chefs have been compared, without a trace of irony, to geniuses and great artists. They are photographed by the paparazzi, dispense autographs like Hollywood hunks, and pen piles of memoirs and cookbooks each year. Celebrity chefs will talk about their “personal brand” regularly, with their faces appearing on cookware, clothing, and packaged foods that have been licensed by third parties. The top-tier chefs no longer cook nightly in restaurants—they build empires, with outposts in Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Las Vegas that they visit a couple of times a year as they fly between their homes, TV shoots, and various charity events. Even the tier or two below the heights of A-list chefs like Mario Batali, David Chang, and Gordon Ramsay—the local young Turks, with their heavily followed Twitter accounts, and in-your-face menu items—are treated as sex symbols in their respective markets, doted on by the local media and the dining public. Once upon a time, if you were a chef, your greatest ambition was to own a restaurant. Now that’s just a stepping stone to the true goal of global fame.

  “There are large numbers of chefs who have set out already to be famous,” said Whiteman, who blames the Food Network and the media for changing the way chefs approach their work. The attention has driven more and more chefs to focus on creating the next trend that the media will embrace rather than simply cooking good food for their customers. Young chefs are no longer content to work their way up through kitchens over the course of a decade; instead, they want to create wild masterpieces the first day out of cooking school. “It’s upped the ante,” said Whiteman. “Because the media is voracious in scavenging things to write about, a chef says, ‘You want something to write about? I’ll give you a pastrami egg roll. You want something to write about? I’ll smoke my meat over balsa wood with mussel shells ground into my smoking mixture!’ I mean, why should the Kardashians have a monopoly on the bizarre? There’s constant pressure on chefs’ creativity to capture the media’s attention.”

  The result, according to Whiteman, is food screaming out for media attention. The dishes these chefs create rattle around in the mouth and excite dopamine in your loins. The food clashes rather than harmonizes and disrupts rather than soothes. It’s an oyster paste and blood sausage–stuffed, Sriracha-basted chicken, cooked sous-vide and then flash fried rather than a perfectly roasted chicken with fresh herbs and lemon. It is food that shoots for a trend and not often for the better. A city like Los Angeles, where Zarate has established himself, is highly susceptible to this. “In LA most of our restaurants are trend driven,” said Leslie Shuter, the dining editor of Los Angeles Magazine and a chronicler of the city’s extensive food scene. Shuter believes that when we’re talking about restaurants and food trends, it is really driven by a small elite of foodies and bloggers who exert an outsized influence on the direction of popular restaurants; and those trends eventually filter down to the places where 90 percent of the public regularly eats. “The blogosphere changed everything,” she said. Blogging is instantaneous, like an ongoing news ticker, and because of that, bloggers are only interested in what is currently trending. “If roasting whole goats on a patio is hot now, bloggers won’t be interested in it in a year. They’re not interested in consistency or longevity.”

  What results is a self-contained and highly predictable churn of trends. One outlet will write about a dish and then everyone will pile on in a sort of food media scrum, offering their own spin on the same story, whether it is gourmet hamburgers or food trucks or Peruvian cooking. Other chefs take notice and offer up their own interpretation of the growing trend because it will sell to the dining public and inevitably generate for that chef some coveted publicity. More stories are written about the trend around the city and, eventually, the country, culminating in top-ten lists of the best Korean tacos or the fifty hamburgers to eat before you die. Eventually the story can only be told so many ways, and the media moves on, openly declaring that trend dead even if the food in question is still delicious and many people still enjoy eating it. This is how we’ve arrived at a time when a restaurant can be absolutely packed to the gills seven nights a week, and six months later it sits empty, even while the food tastes exactly the same. The media trend cycle has chewed it up, digested it, and unceremo
niously flushed it away.

  Two nights after my meal at Picca I returned there to attend a dinner the restaurant was hosting to preview its new menu for a group of journalists and bloggers. Ricardo Zarate and his partners were keenly aware of the media’s power in shaping trends, and they frequently reached out to tastemakers in Los Angeles. An hour before they arrived Zarate sat at the counter by the kitchen with his business partner, Stephane Bombet, a French music producer who introduced himself to Zarate after tasting his ceviche at the original Mo Chica and left five hours later with a handshake deal to become the chef’s business partner. “There are two types of chefs,” said Bombet. “Those who are simply very talented,” including many French masters like Paul Bocuse and Joël Robuchon, and those like Zarate, “who are leaders and create trends.” Zarate had been working on the new menu for two weeks, and these new dishes would replace a third of the current menu’s seasonal offerings. Most of these items began as an idea that Zarate jotted down on his phone, inspired by something he had eaten elsewhere, or an ingredient a supplier brought in. He scrolled through a list of random ideas, which read as recipe haikus, such as grilled sous vide goose fat fennel and stuff yucca with octopus and parmesan aioli. Head chef Ricardo Lopez kept sending dishes out of the kitchen for Zarate and Bombet to sample, as Zarate consulted photos on his phone of how he’d prepared them previously. “This one,” Zarate told Lopez in Spanish, pointing to a plate of quinoa that looked too plain. “It should look like a quinoa salad but without the salad. Comprende?” He suggested they add to the dish a drizzle of chimichurri, a salty Argentinean steak sauce made from olive oil, lemon juice, and fresh oregano.

  “When I build a menu I think about who my customer is, but I also throw three to five dishes in there for the tastemakers,” said Zarate, looking over a plate of braised tongue in Peruvian romesco sauce that had been finished on the Japanese robata charcoal grill with a crisp char. “It should be something challenging. A big writer won’t write about a chicken salad, but if you make every single bite a wow, there’ll be no balance for regular diners. It’s like a football team—you have to build around the stars.” Zarate saw bloggers, Yelp reviewers, and other members of the digital food media as the advanced scouts for the city’s foodie scene. They set in motion the buzz machine with their exclamation mark–laden reviews, and their #nomnom hashtagged Instagram photos, all of which eventually lure in more established publications and critics who could still cement a trend with the mainstream diner with far more authority than the more cavalier bloggers and online reviewers. It had happened once before at Mo-Chica with his ceviches, which brought them to the attention of Jonathan Gold, and tonight Zarate was looking to rekindle some of that magic. “I just hope that one of the dishes is a killer,” he said. Clearly, he wanted to recapture some of his early momentum.

  Within the hour a dozen people gathered upstairs in a private annex, along a rustic wooden table decorated with votive candles and giant, scattered, black and white Peruvian corn kernels. Some of the guests had their own blogs, whereas others wrote for larger food news websites or magazines, and a few were involved in public relations. Once everyone sat down, Zarate and Bombet thanked them for coming and began serving dishes, each of which Zarate explained in a very straightforward way. Every time something new hit the table, such as the lobster causa, everyone picked up their phones or giant cameras and bathed the food in flash photography, like starlets emerging onto the red carpet. “Are you familiar with causas?” asked Zarate, explaining that they were cold mashed potatoes seasoned with lime juice and aji amarillo. “Would you like a bit more light?” Bombet inquired, adjusting the overhead lighting as the bloggers clicked away.

  I sat next to Matthew Kang, a writer for the LA branch of the national food website Eater who also owned Scoops, a local gourmet ice cream shop. Kang had been following Zarate’s career since the original Mo-Chica, and he credited him with putting a spotlight onto Peruvian food, which had been dismissed as a cheap ethnic cuisine before he stepped onto the American scene. “That trend started with Ricardo,” Kang said, diving into a fantastic, grilled branzino anticucho skewer, dressed in spicy huacatay butter and a tangy coleslaw. “He made it bourgeois, with small plates and people willing to pay $50 a person.” Picca was the next step, a destination for diners that Kang not only put on par with the best and most unique restaurants in the city; he considered it a place where you could get food that no one else was serving in the entire country. “From a blogger standpoint, Ricardo Zarate is a chef that we can talk about on a national level. The entire blogging community is supportive of his places.” Zarate’s next venture, Paiche, a seafood-focused Peruvian Izakaya in the Marina Del Rey area, was already generating tremendous buzz even though it wouldn’t open for another six months.

  Despite all of this support and the accolades he received from the media and diners, Zarate had yet to see any of his dishes truly blossom into a trend. It was true that Peruvian cuisine was gaining greater international prominence, especially in Europe and Latin America, but most of that was credited to Gastón Acurio, and in America it hadn’t really spread beyond Zarate’s own restaurants. Tiraditos, causas, aji amarillo, and paiche were still far from household names, only appearing on scattered menus around the country. Although Zarate was undoubtedly a success—he owned several bustling restaurants that were packed every night of the week—his prediction, among others, that Americans would turn to alpaca as the new red meat had yet to materialize. Zarate himself didn’t seem too concerned about this and wasn’t in a rush to be crowned as a tastemaker. “I think it’s a wave,” he said during a break in the service. “This is just the beginning! You need another ten years to establish a trend.”

  Even if Zarate fails to ignite a national passion for his style of cooking, that may be a hidden blessing. Chefs who have established food trends are then saddled with their legacy, and often, that can be troubling. Your star rises on the back of a single item, flavor, or concept, and you are forever associated with it. At best it’s a calling card, a high-water mark that establishes a chef’s talents and allows them to move on. But it also has the danger of turning a chef into a one-hit wonder. “As a person, I’m proud of the Kogi taco,” Roy Choi told me. “But as a chef, it took me a long time to get over being embarrassed by it. It’s like having to sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ at every concert. Everyone looks at me, and all they think is kimchi tacos. Before that, I never worked with kimchi. It took me a long time to exorcise my own demons and have fun with it. It’s a tough thing, man. It’s tough to create something that’s become iconic. It’s tough because it’s not everything you are. The person I was when I made that taco is not the person I am now. But people are just starting to catch up to it and just finding out about it, and I have to relive that moment over and over again. It’s a trip.”

  Momofuku’s David Chang, whose stratospheric success launched a thousand pork belly–stuffed buns, hip ramen restaurants, and kimchi-topped dishes, found his early realization that he was a trendsetter profoundly unsettling. Chang would walk into a new restaurant in Denver and find himself face to face with nearly half of his menu and the same minimalist plywood décor that he’d used at Momofuku Noodle Bar. “I try to take it with a grain of salt,” he said. “I try not to eat at those restaurants. I try to avoid them. It would be like watching the cover band of the band I wanted to see. It’s too meta-fucking-weird.” For a while Chang resented the trends he started and all that they had spawned, but as he has matured and his restaurant business expanded, Chang realized that his power as a trendsetting tastemaker was actually liberating. “It allows us to do other things,” said Chang, “to finance and pursue new flavors and more interesting projects. I fully embrace it, and I want to serve the best buns, the best ramens, the best fried chicken of all time.”

  Chang also worried that the increasing importance of food trends for chefs and the restaurant business was skewing the priorities of young cooks, who are less interested in learning the fund
amentals of the classical kitchen than they are with whipping out a bag of edible fireworks, as Michael Whiteman explained. He also has a deep problem with appropriation, which has increased in pace dramatically now that the minutia of every single menu is posted online almost instantly. When Chang first heard about Catalan modernist chef Ferran Adrià, who operated the surrealist restaurant El Bulli in northern Spain, he had no idea what was being described, how the dishes looked, let alone how they were made. Those who wanted to find out had to travel there, work in Adrià’s kitchen, and pick up the knowledge by hand. “But now with the Internet, cooks don’t have to travel and see how something is done.” They can just replicate it from photos and recipes posted online. “Food trends are a very dangerous thing,” Chang warned me. “They can spark innovation but also kill innovation.”

  Chang acknowledged that food culture is an evolution, and even the foolish trends are what push our culture forward. No one creates their ideas in a vacuum. Even when it seems like someone is putting one more molten chocolate cake on their menu, if the chef is tweaking it in any way by, say, adding Mexican-style chilies and cinnamon to the chocolate or making it with something crazy like pig’s blood (something I tried once, and actually liked), it opens up another road for our taste buds to venture down. Trends are the process of a feedback loop, of competition between talents, and they are a balance between following the herd, pleasing customers, and letting creativity flow. Without them restaurants would serve the exact same dishes they did forty years ago—we’d still be eating roast beef, mashed potatoes, and frozen vegetables night after night after night.