by Holly Hughes
How did the diner get demoted from honored guest whose wish was the waiter’s command to quivering hostage in thrall to the chef’s iron whim? I found clues in the signed menus on the walls of the guest bathrooms at Trotter’s—a history of revered restaurants of the past 25 years, almost all of them in France, the menus inscribed affectionately to Trotter. Paul Bocuse, Frédy Girardet, Michel Guérard, Marc Veyrat—these were the kings of nouvelle cuisine, champions of the techniques of classic cooking married to rigorously seasonal and local ingredients, and lightened to create a supremely elegant dining experience. Many of the menus were degustations, or tasting menus—but tasting menus that were modest in their ambitions. They listed four, five, maybe six courses.
The model Trotter emulated was honorable. Many French chefs built their reputations by naming their restaurants for themselves; they kept control by owning their own places, with the husband running the kitchen and the wife running the dining room and keeping the books—a mom-and-pop model that in this country had been the province of mostly diners and simple spots. In big American cities, financial control of luxury restaurants was in the hands of the manager, who set the tone and attracted the customers. Chefs were employees—invisible and, in the case of the fast-food franchises that began to dominate the American landscape in the 1950s, irrelevant. Even in what many gourmets considered New York City’s, if not the country’s, best restaurant, Lutèce, the chef-owner, André Soltner, didn’t put his name on the door and was famously modest. Nouvelle cuisine brought international media attention to its pioneers, whose names were worth big consulting and franchising fees at Asian—and American—luxury hotels.
Trotter, logically, wanted in on that action. He put his name on the door. He owned his name and his premises. But to that sound, relatively restrained French model he applied a peculiarly American, boosterish, Rotarian spirit. If French chefs made brief handshaking rounds at the end of the meal, Trotter would be more visible than his own maître d’, glad-handing everybody in the room and making the chance to be in his presence for the entire meal—a “chef’s table” in the previously off-limits kitchen—the hardest reservation in town and, for a while, the country.
Much of this could be explained away as an American form of entrepreneurialism. Trotter’s name would be synonymous with the very best: he built a wine cellar with the biggest-name, highest-priced vintages from France, Italy, Germany, and California. He pushed the meticulousness of nouvelle cuisine chefs to a kind of technique-obsessed extreme, making plates as precious as they were pretty. In the most dangerous entrepreneurial touch of all, he took a tire pump to the usual nightly French degustation. If 5 or 6 courses were good, why not 10? Or 12? Or more? He might as well have put gigantic tail fins and hood ornaments on the plates.
Trotter was also a press hound—a relentless self-promoter with a ravenous hunger for fame. Anthony Bourdain has called him the country’s first celebrity chef. He may have meant that as praise. In fact, it was the beginning of what can be considered a dining disaster: taking the underside of the French system—the fierce discipline, the screaming in the kitchen—way too far, making a virtue of the red-faced, toque-wearing, will-breaking drill sergeant. Trotter’s notorious outbursts in fact led many apprentices to quit his kitchen.
Overboard as his behavior may have been, Trotter paved the way for reality TV, in which hair-trigger eruptions and chef-imposed meltdowns are a gladiator sport. This abuse, long an open secret in French kitchens, spilled over into dining rooms and became a blood sport diners wanted a taste of. The irony is that Trotter, who made Gordon Ramsay’s profane and public tantrums possible, was too early to benefit from the television celebrity he likely craved. (The restaurant closed at the end of last August.) But he did leave a lasting legacy: his totalitarian style has become, in many restaurants, the norm. And recently it is enjoying a resurgence.
Unconditional Surrender
The most telling echo of the kind of rampant ego Trotter set in motion in this country was a framed Catalonian menu in a guest bathroom dated 1998: it was from El Bulli and signed by its chef, Ferran Adrià. Starting in the mid-1990s, every ambitious diner had to take a plane and snare a reservation—often in that order, the bleary traveler throwing himself on the maître d’s mercy for a cancellation—at two places: El Bulli, a notoriously difficult two-hour drive north of Barcelona, and the French Laundry, a far easier drive from San Francisco to the wine country of Napa Valley. The cuisines at the two restaurants differed in important ways. Thomas Keller, the chef at the French Laundry, was rigorously trained in French technique and incorporated the best of California’s artisan food producers into his heavily French, generally heavy (because butter-laden) dishes. Ferran Adrià began as a cook of relatively rustic Catalonian cuisine. But he started experimenting with new techniques and processes that had been the province of the food industry, creating disorienting novelties that acquired a name that he never liked but will forever be associated with: “molecular gastronomy.” Adrià wrested the crown of the world’s most influential cuisine away from the French and became the chef ambitious cooks had to work for—even knowing that they would be treated like slaves by an exploitative overseer, as Lisa Abend documents in her entertaining book, The Sorcerer’s Apprentices.
The two restaurants shared something important, though: they extended a typical meal to hitherto unknown numbers of courses—50 at El Bulli, 40 or more at the French Laundry. They didn’t give you a choice of what you ate. Adrià and Keller might have begun with similar ambitions: to startle and delight the diner. Adrià wanted to push the sensory experience beyond where it had ever gone, disguising food so that deliberately disoriented diners had to work to recognize a flavor—making hot things cold, soft things hard, solid things powder or air (or, horribly because the technique became ubiquitous, foam). Keller said he was merely overcoming his own palate fatigue, in which his concentration and pleasure eating a dish dropped precipitously after two or three bites. But Adrià and Keller’s lasting contribution to the world of restaurants was to shift the balance of power from diner to chef. They demanded unconditional surrender.
I was present at a French Laundry dinner convened by Phyllis Richman, then the restaurant critic of The Washington Post, in 1997. The meal became famous because a friend Richman had invited, Ruth Reichl, scooped Richman by quickly writing a column in The New York Times declaring the French Laundry to be “the most exciting place to eat in the United States.” Richman said that it was “as good as a restaurant gets in this country, maybe as good as a restaurant gets anywhere.” I later went back and spent several days and nights in the kitchen to write about Keller.
Besides being impressed by much of the food, though, what we all remembered from that famous dinner was trying to stay awake until long after 1 a.m., when the meal that had begun in the garden at about 8:30—with the signature ice-cream cone of salmon tartare in a savory tuile (it became as much a cliché as Adrià’s foams)—was drawing to an end. Or so we fervently prayed. The intent was to dazzle, and indeed any tenth of one of these 40-course meals would have dazzled. At the chef-commanded full length, the meal felt like a form of torture.
Could that sort of long, by necessity leisurely meal translate from the flagstone garden of the French Laundry, planted with rosemary and roses, to the sterile mall of the Time Warner Center, in the heart of New York City? Keller opened Per Se in 2004 to immediate rave reviews. But with the taxis of Central Park South flashing their headlights through the restaurant’s floor-to-ceiling windows, a very long tasting menu seems endless merely midway through, when thoughts inevitably turn to unanswered e-mails and meetings the next morning. Even people who are willing to sit at the French Laundry for four or five hours, and who find any excuse to wedge in mentions of their dinners at El Bulli, told me they didn’t have the patience for Per Se—that what seemed charming in wine country was pompous and overblown in Manhattan. And expensive: with wine, it’s hard to get out of Per Se for under $400 a person.
Yet its three Michelin stars and four stars from two New York Times reviewers keep Per Se busy—mostly with tourists, who don’t have to worry about work the next day and are the only people who can think about sitting through a nine-course lunch. (The restaurant recently added its version of an express lunch, five courses, which makes almost as little sense to a New Yorker.)
When I dined at Per Se recently, the differences from my visits to the French Laundry were notable. There was no one at the check stand to greet me—no visible staff members in the large entry area and bar at all, despite my arriving at the hour of my reservation. If there were New Yorkers in the room, the life had drained out of them. The atmosphere was quiet, reverent, even somnolent. The contrast that makes the French Laundry memorable, with very correct waiters and formal service in a California-casual context, doesn’t apply, so the brown-and-beige room just seems cool and somber. The waiter was friendly and relatively informal, but the sommelier was indifferent and condescending to a young French guest who happened to know a good deal about wine and later pronounced himself shocked at the obviousness of the wine choices—for instance, sweet Sauternes paired with foie gras. The parade of gastronomic giveaways before and after dinner seemed shorter and less oppressive than I remembered from California. Nonetheless, when course after course keeps arriving and demands an explanation from the server, genuine or meaningful exchange with one’s fellow guests is not a possibility. The focus must be squarely on the food, not the company. As at Per Se’s fellow three-Michelin-star restaurants, technique and precision are what count—not freshness or spontaneity.
Some Per Se dishes did register strongly, not just for the ramrod-straight technique that underpins them all but for the sheer elegance of conception and flavor. Roast lamb with delicate green almonds and intensely flavored cauliflower cream was a triumph, one that will be a taste-memory benchmark. So was the burst of fresh sweet-tart flavor in a gooseberry sorbet with elderberry foam over a toasted corn cake. Impossibly thin and translucent ribbons of cucumber carefully draped over a plate; little green strawberries and sweet melon squares compressed via sous vide, a Keller specialty, to give them gem-like tones; squares of pumpernickel also compressed into paper-thin sheets for tiny sandwiches layered like Viennese tortes—much of the food is exquisite.
But exquisite is different from remarkable or transporting. And exquisite can also seem tormented, like so many French gardens. Another guest raised partly in Paris was scandalized by the number of courses: “How is it possible,” she asked before the numerous dessert courses arrived, “to eat this much without feeling . . . heavy?” Seen through French eyes, what began as an earnest re-creation of a French model looked like it had passed through Disney World with a stop at Mount Rushmore.
The Apprentices
The counterparts of Adrià and Keller 15 years later are Rene Redzepi and Grant Achatz, who both indentured in Adrià’s kitchen—in, as it happens, the same year, 2000. Redzepi, whose Muslim immigrant father met his Danish mother when they were working at the same Copenhagen cafeteria, returned from his time at El Bulli with the idea of overthrowing the Mediterranean ingredients that had world cuisine in a choke hold. So he went foraging in the Scandinavian woods and meadows, and on the Icelandic tundra, for herbs, plants, and wildlife of all kinds to use in ways both traditional and inventive (his latest love is ants). Achatz had been sent to El Bulli by Keller, his mentor—he worked his way up to being sous-chef at the French Laundry (he was in the kitchen the night of my seminal dinner there), and named one of his two sons Keller—and returned with the idea of pushing industrial techniques and ingredients even farther than Adrià had. But he brought to them a stronger sense of design and restraint, and a stronger rooting in French cuisine and technique from his training with Keller. The two apprentices also returned from El Bulli with the philosophy that the chef decides the day’s multi-course menu, and the diner gets that, period.
Ten years later, Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, took from El Bulli the title of “world’s best restaurant” in a poll of about 900 chefs, restaurateurs, and critics from around the world run by the British magazine Restaurant. Noma has kept that title for three years running, just as El Bulli kept it for the previous four years. (In 2003–4, the French Laundry held it.) The list is frequently criticized—most loudly by chefs whose rankings have dropped or who haven’t yet made the list—as corrupt and promotional, but it does make people get on airplanes. And now that Adrià has closed the money-losing El Bulli to run a food-research lab and cash in on consulting contracts with the food industry, Noma is the impossible international plat (or rather plats) du jour.
I never made the pilgrimage to El Bulli and never wanted to, having been in Adrià’s papal presence on too many occasions. But eating at Noma recently, I felt everything that diners at El Bulli reported in its glory days (and was certain I wouldn’t have felt had I gone): the thrill of the new, one spectacularly good dish after another presented in thrillingly fast succession. El Bulli–style whimsy was on the menu: for instance, little flowerpots with baby turnips and carrots embedded in “edible soil” made with malt, hazelnut, and other flours, and butter. El Bulli–style disorientation and surrealism bordering on the sadistic (blood-red meat, raw-looking organs really made of high-tech Play-Doh) were not. But neither was choice.
Achatz’s Chicago restaurant Alinea was named the best restaurant in America by Gourmet a year after it opened, in 2005. A second restaurant Achatz opened in Chicago last year, Next, sells reservations like theater tickets—pay everything when you book, use it or lose it—in three-month blocks, to coincide with changes in themed menus. After watching all of his Next tickets for an entire year sell out in minutes—at a cost of up to $300 with wine pairings, but much higher when scalped—Achatz and his business partner put seats at Alinea on the same sales system.
This ticketing regime can be seen as the ultimate power grab by a chef: the diner is, like a theatergoer, a passive participant in a spectacle he can either like or lump. It’s a dream come true for young chefs on tight budgets, to control food costs and be able to collect revenue. It’s less dreamy for diners who stubbornly cling to the antique idea of booking a table when it is convenient for them, not for the restaurant, and persist in hoping they won’t lose the price of a meal if they need to reschedule.
In Manhattan, at Eleven Madison Park, the four-star successor to Per Se for the mantle of most fought-over chance to spend a lot of money on a meal someone else decrees, the Swiss-born Daniel Humm has acquired a local reputation as exalted as Keller’s. Oddly, I found the cuisine itself a half-thought-through version of the kind of high-style, high-tech experimentation Achatz and Keller and others engage in, with immaculate technique but wan flavors and a use of technology that seemed gimmicky rather than creative.
This became worse when Humm changed from a tasting menu with a 4-or 8-course option to a single 15-course menu at both lunch and dinner, supposedly redefining New York City cuisine with elaborate takes on either locally grown foods or dishes associated with the city. Slices of sturgeon were presented in a giant glass cloche swirling with menacing white smoke from applewood charcoal. “Don’t lift the glass,” the server warned as she set it down—but later admitted that the fish had been pre-smoked and the show was in fact just for show. The harsh last-minute smoke did lend an urban flavor—as if the fish had come off a New York trash fire. Another server clamped a meat grinder to the side of the table and put into it a long, fat, bright-orange carrot with bright greens attached by a tightly wound yellow elastic band. He tried to deny that the ponytail of greens had been re-attached until he admitted that the carrot, which went through the grinder with suspicious ease, had been simmered with olive oil and salt. This was a version of the steak tartare that, his rehearsed patter informed us with sweeping inaccuracy, every New York steakhouse in the 50s and 60s like Delmonico’s (which closed in 1923) and the Four Seasons (which opened in 1959) would serve when you came through the
door. He put the bright, insipid gratings onto a wooden plate with a dozen or so shallow indentations filled with seasonings for you to mix in at will—an inferior mash-up of the famous Noma egg you fry and stir yourself, and the long fat Noma ash-roasted 24-hour carrot that comes to the table looking like a revolting stick of charcoal but reveals a marvelously sweet, custard-like texture and flavor.
The servers had no sense of whimsy or humor about a menu that depends on humor: they almost ran away when we asked for a wine list, and generally seemed terrorized at being overly garrulous, as the estimable restaurant critic Pete Wells had accused them of being in a New York Times “Critic’s Notebook” that ran immediately after the menu change. You need to like them, and your guests, to endure the meal: we arrived at 1:00 and were not served our last course until a bit before 5:30. At 4:00, a server disconcertingly began visiting every empty table with a white steam iron, to smooth the tablecloths, and by the time we had paid the check, at 6:00, the tables had begun to fill for dinner.
Worse than bad—which most courses weren’t, really—the meal was tedious. Certainly, surprise and delight and originality shouldn’t be banished. But in meals this long and ambitious you hope to see the soul of the chef—as you do with Keller and Achatz. In only two of the many courses at Eleven Madison Park did I think I saw Humm’s: a seafood stew with bits of bay scallop and apple in a sea urchin and squid custard, subtle, simple, and silken; and an elaborately presented, many-days’-process roast duck served with a dish of fantastically clear and intense consommé, both of them strictly bourgeois and rooted in French technique. Both were food to dream of eating again, food that only someone with Humm’s training, background, and staff can produce. True, if chefs don’t continually re-invent themselves, their food—especially if they traffic in trendy technology—threatens to look as dated as Trotter’s nouvelle cuisine. But as one chef or another seizes the international culinary imagination, Humm seems to be re-inventing himself to chase trends, something he’s too talented to do.