by Holly Hughes
The trouble is, chefs don’t look to be re-inventing themselves as people willing to cede any control to their customers. Young chefs everywhere are adopting the tasting menu as a way to show off and control costs at the same time—and to signify their ambitions. Few follow the one laudable exception I know: that of Dan Barber, the visionary chef-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an experimental farm and research center on the lavish Rockefeller estate in Westchester. Some years ago he changed to a tasting menu because, he recently told me, “our menu is dictated by what comes in from the farm in the morning. I don’t think people realize that not having a menu here isn’t a gimmick. Farmers aren’t responding to my menu requests. They’re leading the dance. Always.”
And fewer still have the talent or artistic vision to sustain a long tasting menu. Trying a diner’s patience, though, is an achievement that even a mediocre chef can aspire to. In Somerville, near Boston, the young, self-taught owners of a restaurant called Journeyman made tasting-only menus a part of their business plan, along with the usual local/seasonal/carted-from-the-farm-or-raised-in-our-window-boxes ingredients. When I dined there last year, the inflexibility of the dour, dogmatic servers would have been comical had it not been so infuriating. As more and more restaurants adopt this model, tasting-only menus will empower formerly well-meaning, eager-to-please cooks and servers to become petty despots, and more and more diners will discover that absolute power irritates absolutely.
Service for All!
Even as a new army of fresh-faced Stalins prepares to spread tyranny across the land, at recent dinners at Noma, Next, and even Eleven Madison Park, I saw the seeds of, if not democracy, then perhaps a limited attempt at glasnost.
At Noma, the diner feels desired and attended to, in a way that comes across as collegial, not obsequious or didactic. A main reason is that Redzepi sends aproned, working cooks to the table bearing dishes. They’ll explain as much or as little as you like about what they give you. They make you feel a part of the action, not just the passive subject of it. At the Sicilian-themed dinner I got tickets for at Next, I saw similar glimmerings of a kind of warmth that has never figured in the severely gray-and-white Alinea. To be sure, there were some eye-roll-inducing touches, like the earnest, handwritten notes to each table signed by the chef and the waiters explaining the philosophy of the meal (dictatorships thrive on theoretical manifestos). But, shocking from a chef whose presentations have been manicured and tweezed, there were also dishes served family-style and looking positively sloppy. It felt a bit forced, like a seersucker-and-bow-tied dandy putting on a dirty T-shirt and torn jeans. But I was heartened by the effort.
As for Eleven Madison Park, it comes across as less forced than Per Se. This is because of its origins as a restaurant in the empire of Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group has democratized service in luxury restaurants much as the Four Seasons did in luxury hotels. Humm also added the Noma-like touch of sending aproned cooks to the tables, and he himself makes the rounds of tables at every meal.
How far will this as yet very modest evolution go? A lot farther, we can hope. No one wants a return to the reign of the smirking, tip-taking, tyrannical headwaiter, who indeed put the needs of the diner first (the needs of the richest and most famous ones, at any rate)—an era defined by Henri Soulé, of Le Pavillon in the 50s and 60s, and Sirio Maccioni, of Le Cirque in the 80s and 90s. Obsequiousness is seldom far from its twin, contempt. But, ah, how nice it would be if at the world’s most celebrated restaurants we could get back to the point where the paying customer picks what and how much she or he eats, guided by helpful but not overbearing suggestions as to what a diner might enjoy most.
Could it be that France, the culinary Forgotten Man, the birthplace of haughtiness, will show us the way forward? I recently came upon two signs it could be trying to fight its way back from the unaccustomed gastronomic shadows by adopting an even more unaccustomed humility. One was a radio interview with Jacques Pépin, the masterly, ebullient, encyclopedic teacher and writer on French food in America, who corrected the host when she asked about the chef as artist. “I never equate a great artist with a great chef,” he said with unexpected vehemence. “Food is taste,” not art. “A great chef is still an artisan.” And in an interview with the Financial Times, the Michelin-starred, much-admired Parisian chef Alain Passard replied to a question about whether the customer is always right by saying, “Yes, always. I am there to serve others’ commands, and I always do what I am asked to do. I put aside my own concerns when faced with a client who orders a dish cooked a certain way or asks for a certain seasoning.”
Pépin and Passard are not quite waving the bloody banner and crying, “To the barricades!” But if they did, a hungry mob with knives and forks would be right behind.
IS SEASONAL EATING OVERRATED?
By Katherine Wheelock
From Food & Wine
Food and fashion—and the blurry line between them—are feature writer Katherine Wheelock’s main subjects. She has also earned food hipster cred by working at the urban-farm-cum-pizzeria Roberta’s in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and is a co-author of the new Roberta’s Cookbook.
For a couple of weeks last winter, I went on a kale-eating spree. I didn’t do this on purpose, exactly. I was making my way through a list of newish New York restaurants I wanted to try, or to revisit because fall had surrendered to winter and I knew their menus would have changed. Most of these places had Dickensian names, names broken by ampersands, or names that sounded like old Vermont family farms. Many had menus freshly jotted on chalkboards, the provenance of the main ingredient in each dish noted. And every last one of them was serving a kale salad. Not long into my dining tour, right around the time I confronted a version with apple and dry Jack at a restaurant a block away from where I’d just had a version with apple and cheddar, I began to regard kale salad the way, as a kid, I viewed my mom’s second flounder dinner in the same week: with resentment.
My spree came to an end at a perfectly lovely, smart young Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. It’s not that I was looking forward to carciofi—I knew not to expect out-of-season artichokes at a place known for its market-driven menu. But I didn’t expect to be offered a kale salad. I felt betrayed, sitting there on my stool clutching a season-befitting quince cocktail. I felt like a road warrior so disoriented by sameness, I didn’t know what hotel I was in anymore, never mind what city.
What followed my kale bender, as often does benders, was a mild depression. What’s wrong with me? I thought. Of all the things to complain about, I was criticizing chefs for systematically removing stringy asparagus from my winter plate and replacing it with the sweetest, tastiest, most environmentally beneficent produce around. The proliferation of seasonally driven menus, albeit a trend mostly still confined to a certain kind of restaurant in a certain kind of town, promised better dining experiences and a smaller culinary carbon footprint for America—a win-win. Come spring, I could count on more chefs than ever to rain morels, fiddleheads and ramps down on me. And I was dreading it.
“I came back from Rome in the spring of 2004 to a rampapalooza,” recalls journalist Frank Bruni, the former restaurant critic for the New York Times, reflecting on the early days of seasonal fever. “I remember thinking it was great that chefs were exalting the seasons, but also: Do I need to eat this many ramps?”
I remember those days, too. I was practically braiding ramps into headbands, reveling in Mario Batali’s embrace of spring produce, in Dan Barber’s more priestly devotion to seasonal ingredients, and in the way powerful tastemakers like these chefs were beginning to alter menus all over New York City. Ramp season—and rhubarb, asparagus and strawberry season—was like Christmas. But then Christmas started coming every day. And even more distressingly, seasonally driven menus began to feel less like a genuine celebration of good ingredients and more like some kind of manifesto. “Ramps speak to a lot of different restaurant vanities right now,” Bruni says. “They have become more of
an ideological, moral statement than a gustatory one.”
To be fair to ramps, they didn’t start this trend. The 21st-century seasonal-food movement began four decades ago, when Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse in Berkeley. She established the hallmarks of seasonal cooking: locally grown ingredients, simply prepared. These days, the “simply prepared” part is what many critics of slavishly seasonal menus lament. It’s not the zeal for seasonal produce that’s the problem, they say; it’s the lack of imagination that chefs bring to the task of cooking it.
But the point isn’t that a dish has to be complicated to be worthwhile, or that a gratifying restaurant experience requires culinary acrobatics that a home cook could never perform. I’ve had enough plates of first-of-the-season asparagus kissed with grill heat and olive oil to know that the simplest dishes can have the power of a thunderclap. My problem with seasonal menus is homogeny. It’s not knowing where I am and whose food I’m eating. It’s feeling like the chef cares more about being in sync with the season—and if I’m being paranoid, the culinary zeitgeist—than he or she cares about creating an original dish, or for that matter, pleasing me.
It’s still a question worth asking: Is damnably simple food the problem with all this seasonal cooking? The answer, even on the other side of a kale spree, is no. “It’s our job to seek out the best ingredients,” says Jason Fox, the chef at Commonwealth in San Francisco. “We can’t pat ourselves on the back for that and then not take considered steps to turn those ingredients into something magical.” When Fox gets his hands on spring’s first ramps, he might whip them into a chilled soup garnished with tempura-ed ramp tops, baby fava beans and a dollop of aioli spiked with Meyer lemon. Seasonal, yes. But also totally inspired.
Feeling less like a fool and an ingrate, I began to look at the bright side again—and it proved, of course, to be a big, beautiful bright side. At Chez Panisse, the chefs continue to unfurl hyper-seasonal menus daily. But fried rabbit with sweet-and-sour onions, currants and broccoli? That doesn’t make me tired; that makes me hungry. Even if too many chefs let “seasonal” stand in for “good,” there are restaurants in every corner of the country doing ingenious work with the best of what’s grown around them: Commis in Oakland, California; Le Pigeon in Portland, Oregon; Lantern in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to name only a few. The chef at the restaurant I work for in Brooklyn changes his menu regularly, without fanfare. You’re not expected to applaud him for noticing that celeriac is in its prime—you are expected to applaud him for thinking to marry it with mascarpone, scallions and Piave.
Fingers crossed, we’re in the midst of a significant but finite period in the evolution (or perhaps, more accurately, devolution) of American cuisine, moving back to an era before factory farming and before anytime-anywhere produce was the norm. If so, I expect only more seasonal food to come. I also expect, or at least hope for, a rebalancing. Let a reliance on seasonal produce become a given. Let fearless, pioneering restaurants that apply original ideas and techniques to seasonal produce prosper. And equally important, let stellar restaurants without a seasonal flag fluttering out front continue to thrive. We need them to remind us what going to a restaurant is supposed to be about in the first place: pleasure.
When Sara Jenkins opened her second New York City restaurant, Porsena, last winter, she created a minor stir by declaring that the menu wouldn’t be especially seasonal. “I buy not-local asparagus in February,” Jenkins told me. “Even in ancient times, food was shipped left, right and center. We get so obsessive about things that we tend to make eating a chore. It’s one thing we’ve never really picked up from Europe—how to take great pleasure in eating.”
In that spirit, I resolve to stop thinking of eating a cherry tomato in January as the equivalent of smoking a cigarette inside or telling a politically incorrect joke. And the next time I see a grim-faced soul ingesting what’s clearly not his first kale salad of the season, I’ll quietly slip him the following recommendation: any month but August, the sliced tomato salad at Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn (or any steak house, really). And a bowl of seasonally agnostic spaghetti with clams at Porsena, which is no slave to the farmers’ market—only to excellent cooking.
THE TERRIBLE TRAGEDY OF THE HEALTHY EATER
By Erica Strauss
From Northwest Edible Life
From her flourishing Seattle-area organic garden, former restaurant chef Erica Strauss breezily dishes the dirt about her “suburban homestead” lifestyle (yes, she raises chickens too) on nwedible.com, her popular blog site. Here she has fun with the food world’s version of political correctness.
I know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.
Before Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:
I eat pretty healthy. Check it out: whole grain crackers, veggie patties, prawns, broccoli. I am actually pretty into clean eating.
After Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:
Those crackers—gluten, baby. Gluten is toxic to your intestinal health, I read it on a forum. They should call those crackers Leaky Gut Crisps, that would be more accurate. That veggie burger in the freezer? GMO soy. Basically that’s a Monsanto patty. Did you know soybean oil is an insecticide? And those prawns are fish farmed in Vietnamese sewage pools. I didn’t know about the sewage fish farming when I bought them, though, really I didn’t!
The broccoli, though . . . that’s ok. I can eat that. Eating that doesn’t make me a terrible person, unless . . . oh, shit! That broccoli isn’t organic. That means it’s covered with endocrine disrupting pesticides that will make my son sprout breasts. As if adolescence isn’t awkward enough.
And who pre-cut this broccoli like that? I bet it was some poor Mexican person not making a living wage and being treated as a cog in an industrial broccoli cutting warehouse. So I’m basically supporting slavery if I eat this pre-cut broccoli. Oh my God, it’s in a plastic bag too. Which means I am personally responsible for the death of countless endangered seabirds right now.
I hate myself.
Well, shit.
All you want to do is eat a little healthier. Really. Maybe get some of that Activa probiotic yogurt or something. So you look around and start researching what “healthier” means.
That really skinny old scientist dude says anything from an animal will give you cancer. But a super-ripped 60-year-old with a best-selling diet book says eat more butter with your crispy T-Bone and you’ll be just fine as long as you stay away from grains. Great abs beat out the PhD so you end up hanging out on a forum where everyone eats green apples and red meat and talks about how functional and badass parkour is.
You learn that basically, if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up and wheat is entirely to blame. What we all need to do is eat like cave-people.
You’re hardcore now, so you go way past cave-person. You go all the way to The Inuit Diet™.
Some people say it’s a little fringe, but you are committed to live a healthy lifestyle. “Okay,” you say, “let’s do this shit,” as you fry your caribou steak and seal liver in rendered whale blubber. You lose some weight which is good, but it costs $147.99 a pound for frozen seal liver out of the back of an unmarked van at the Canadian border.
Even though The Inuit Diet™ is high in vitamin D, you learn that every disease anywhere can be traced to a lack of vitamin D (you read that on a blog post) so you start to supplement. 5000 IU of vitamin D before sitting in the tanning booth for an hour does wonders for your hair luster.
Maxing out your credit line on seal liver forces you to continue your internet education in healthy eating. As you read more, you begin to understand that grains are fine but before you eat them you must prepare them in the traditional way: by long soaking in the light of a new moon with a mix of mineral water and the strained lac
to-fermented tears of a virgin.
You discover that if the women in your family haven’t been eating a lot of mussels for at least the last four generations, you are pretty much guaranteed a $6000 orthodontia bill for your snaggle-tooth kid. That’s if you are able to conceive at all, which you probably won’t, because you ate margarine at least twice when you were 17.
Healthy eating is getting pretty complicated and conflicted at this point but at least everyone agrees you should eat a lot of raw vegetables.
Soon you learn that even vegetables are trying to kill you. Many are completely out unless they are pre-fermented with live cultures in a specialized $79 imported pickling crock. Legumes and nightshades absolutely cause problems. Even fermentation can’t make those healthy.
Goodbye, tomatoes. Goodbye green beans. Goodbye all that makes summer food good. Hey, it’s hard but you have to eliminate these toxins and anti-nutrients. You probably have a sensitivity. Actually, you almost positively have a sensitivity. Restaurants and friends who want to grab lunch with you will just have to deal.
Kale: it’s what’s for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast.
The only thing you are sure of is kale, until you learn that even when you buy organic, local kale from the store (organic, local kale is the only food you can eat now) it is probably GMO cross-contaminated. Besides, it usually comes rolled in corn starch and fried to make it crunchier. Market research, dahling . . . sorry, people like crunchy, cornstarch-breaded Kale-Crispers™ more than actual bunny food.