Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  23rd Course

  The last savory course of an ambitious tasting menu normally means a hunk of red meat—braised lamb neck, veal breast, beef cheek—but in case you couldn’t tell by now, Noma doesn’t care much for fine-dining formulae. Instead, a cook brings out a cast-iron pan filled with a massive, sizzling turbot steak, which has been roasted on the bone and basted into submission with an absurd amount of brown butter and herbs. After showing off this fabulously bronzed hunk of fish, it goes back to the kitchen to rest for 10 minutes, just like a good piece of beef. “We didn’t think twice about not serving meat,” says Orlando.

  Nor should they. This is easily the meatiest piece of fish I’ve ever tasted, as intensely savory and satisfying as the slow-cooked off cuts that you’d normally find at the end of a meal like this. After being carved from the bone, the turbot is slathered with its own roe, buried in a forest of foraged leaves and wild mushroom slices and set afloat in a tea made from dried ceps and berries. The last time I sipped mushroom tea, I spent the better part of the evening in a corner talking to myself, and everything—the sweet watermelon flavor of the fungus, the butter and brine of the roe, the unbelievable savoriness of it all—suggests that tonight might end in a similar manner.

  24th–26th Courses

  Dessert has come. I think. There is ice cream made from Danish bitters and a disk of yogurt whey frozen solid on top, but there’s only the vaguest suggestion of sweetness.

  Standard high-end restaurant practice dictates that the dessert stage unfolds more or less in the following fashion: light, palate-cleansing pre-dessert, fruit-driven first dessert high in acidity, knockout chocolate intensity, usually involving chocolate cooked, sculpted, and spiked into various iterations of a general theme. The supporting cast—hazelnuts, passion fruit, tea and herbal infusions—are as predictable as the order in which they will arrive. It’s a three-part blueprint that has been baked into the mind of nearly every great chef the world over.

  Noma clearly missed the memo. Everything is cold, but nothing is particularly sweet. Redzepi is on the record as not liking sugar, and it shows. In fact, if no one said anything, you might not even know that the meal had hit its savory apex and was now sliding inevitably towards its lightly sweetened conclusion.

  After the bitters ice cream comes Pear and Pine: half a pear grilled until blackened, then peeled and served with pickled spruce shoots, pear aquavit, lemon thyme, and a spruce parfait dusted with juniper salt. The last dish is the only one that feels like it was intentionally created to be a dessert: a ruby pool of rhubarb juice with an ivory island of milk curd and tiny archipelagos of brown cheese shortbread. “I’m not sure I understand,” Nathan offers after many minutes of silence.

  These are complex, esoteric compositions, but as you eat them, you feel like maybe you’re missing something. The beauty of the plate, the depth of the description, the excellence of all that has come before this bite leads you to believe that is your own deficiency that has created the letdown—which may actually be true. There is sweetness, yes, but there are many of the same effects that came before it: bitterness, salt, smoke, acid. In a four-hour, foot-to-the-floor feast, it’s a gentle easing off of the accelerator.

  You’re left thinking: Is this how it ends?

  The Bill

  The numbers look a little something like this: 26 courses prepared by 40 chefs hailing from 19 different countries served over the course of four and a half hours. Of those courses, 14 of them were stunning, eight were excellent, three were confusing, and one just wasn’t good. When it comes to batting averages, that puts Noma in the Ted Williams camp.

  The biggest number of the evening? $902.47. That’s the pre-tip damage. Staggering, yes, but the hard math paints a much gentler picture: Subtract the wine and juice pairings and the cost per dish works out to be around $11 a dish–what an order of Buffalo wings might run you at Applebee’s in Times Square.

  The Aftermath

  They give us road beers—Noma beers, of course, made exclusively for them by cult microbrewer Mikkeller—for the short stroll through Christianshavn to our little rented apartment. In the canals around the restaurant, boats bob with the shifting tide. Splotches of amber light dance off the water. There is no one out. No one around to notice the stupid smiles on our faces, the triumphant klink of the thick beer bottles, the warm silence of it all.

  If you’re going to eat at Noma, don’t let a cab whisk you back and forth. Take the train to Christianshavn and have a stroll along the canal. Take in the boats, breathe in the sea, let the dim lights of the warehouse district lull you slowly back to reality after a four-hour feast. A meal like this needs to be bookended by quiet, reflective moments, by full consideration for what lies just before—and, eventually, painfully, behind—you.

  Food has always been a way for people to tell stories: Pot au feu tells the tale of French housewives transforming scrap meat into luxury through the alchemy of slow cooking. Gazpacho is the story of sunbaked Andalusian laborers looking for a way to take the bite out of the southern Spanish sun. Even luxury bites come with their creation stories: The salmon cornet, the start to every meal at the French Laundry and Per Se, is the story of a whimsical Thomas Keller and his childhood days at the scoop shop.

  But Noma’s dishes themselves don’t tell concrete stories as much as occupy a vast, interweaving narrative, one that speaks of a new age of cooking. It has most of the hallmarks of great food of the modern age—technical refinery, perplexing combinations, whimsy—but they’re strung together in a way that makes them wholly unique. This is not the lovechild of the French Laundry and El Bulli, even if those are the two most readily apparent antecedents to this cooking. This is not molecular gastronomy, modernist cuisine, or even New Nordic. The meal tonight was the first chapter in a novel waiting to be written.

  THE VIEW FROM WEST 12TH

  By Pete Wells

  From The New York Times

  Even in the Yelp and Twitter era, a thumbs-up or thumbs-down from the chief dining critic of The New York Times can be a game-changer. Since assuming the mantle in January 2012, Pete Wells has adopted a nuanced approach: not just ranking stars but really telling the unique story of each restaurant.

  If we have a shred of sanity left, those of us who never stop thinking about what we’re eating have to wish that once in a while we could turn back the clock. We start to miss the days when you could go out to dinner without all the food talk: the “have you been there yet?” interrogations, the name-dropping of pop-up ramen stands and celebrity milkweed foragers, the tableside decipherings of what is on your plate, moving counterclockwise from the cod milt gelatin resting in a pickled starling’s nest.

  A yearning for simpler times may explain the Beatrice Inn in the West Village, which has been packed to its low rafters since it opened in November. Graydon Carter said that he and his partners in the restaurant, Emil Varda and Brett Rasinski, wanted it to be “a classic chophouse,” a term so dusty that one of the city’s few remaining chophouses, Keens, now calls itself a steakhouse.

  Everything about the place—the burnished paneling; the leather banquettes in law-firm green; the men waiting tables in white shirts and black neckties; the short and to-the-point menu of Hillary Sterling, the chef since February—broadcasts a return to the days when dinner required no explanation. Sorry, Instagrammers, but you will not be posting shots of your steak or salad, because a footnote on the menu reads “Photography is not permitted.”

  It might have added, “Please refrain from talking about your food,” but there’s little danger of that.

  After eating squishy goat-cheese gnudi that were bursting with the flavor of warm New York City tap water and were buried under slices of prosciutto almost too thick to cut with a fork, only one remark came to mind: “How’s your steak?”

  The steak was no conversation piece itself. A New York strip, it had a chewy band of fat at its edge, as if the meat were wearing a protective latex sheath, and the meat was shot thro
ugh with gristle. My dinner companion and I stared and chewed and thought for a long time. Finally, one of us said, “Well, it is medium-rare.”

  There was nothing to say about a stack of carrots that came with a braised and roasted veal breast except that it shouldn’t be possible for vegetables to be both charred and raw. Apparently it is, though, because a steak turned up in the company of blackened and crunchy hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. The desperately undercooked sunchokes with sautéed trout were something of a relief. They were awful, but they were not even a little bit burned.

  For dessert there was crème brûlée studded with dried-out apple fragments that might have come from an envelope of instant oatmeal, and an uncreamy scoop of ricotta gelato on a stiff pool of ice-cold honey caramel with chopped walnuts.

  This time words came easily. We asked for the check.

  Other dishes were unremarkable in a more benign way. Flattened chicken with crunchy, golden skin and a kind of dirty-blond gravy was easy enough to eat. Kale dressed with lemons, chiles and fried garlic was better than that, and so was a salad of watercress and other greens with shaved radish. The strip steak on a later visit was juicier and more tender.

  Lamb porterhouse showered with roasted artichoke leaves was very satisfying once I ignored the grainy, salty sauce of dried black olives around it. So were crisp and fresh fried oysters with smoked char roe, as long as I didn’t focus too much on a bitter and blandly sweet citrus purée. A dessert with fresh grapefruit and whipped cream on top of lemon curd was refreshing and soothing.

  But there I go, talking about the food. The thing to do at the Beatrice Inn is to look and listen.

  Two longtime staff members at Vanity Fair, which Mr. Carter has edited since 1992, are huddled at a cozy round table. They nod to me because I used to work as a fact-checker at the magazine, drifting away around 1994.

  “Everybody is obsessed with Jennifer Lawrence,” the man next to me is shouting. Speaking only for myself, I am more interested in Candice Bergen, who left a few minutes ago. And over there is Charlie Rose and his posse. He seems about to doze off, but he looked that way before he started eating.

  Sleep would be challenging. Those ceilings multiply the roar. On the plus side, they make short people look like models and models look like church steeples. Everybody is roughly twice as attractive inside these walls. This might explain why, when the Beatrice Inn was a nightclub known for youthful high jinks, the previous owners had to put up signs reminding patrons that it was not all right to have sex in the bathrooms.

  Mr. Varda and his partners put a stop to all that. The drug of choice at the Beatrice Inn is now wine, most of it rather expensive, served with laconic grace by Aaron Zebrook. One night he recommended a pinot noir that took me over some rough patches in my meal, and he also led me to a bottle I drank during the one good dinner I had at the Beatrice Inn.

  This was back in January, when the chef was Brian Nasworthy, previously a sous-chef at Per Se. Mr. Nasworthy’s interpretation of chophouse cuisine was careful, smart and refined, although the desserts were still a punt. His shrimp cocktail played gently poached shrimp against a horseradish-chile gastrique that had the lively hot-sweet-sour-salty tension of a Southeast Asian sauce. He baked oyster mushrooms, salsify and spinach under a textbook hollandaise for a clever take on oysters Rockefeller. It was meant to be a sideshow to an over-the-top-rich Wagyu rib-eye for $150, but came close to upstaging it.

  Mr. Nasworthy was dismissed a few weeks later and is now the chef de cuisine at Picholine. Mr. Varda praised his talent but said, “his culinary philosophy did not agree with ours.”

  Evidently not. The four of us at the table that night had talked about the food on the way home.

  TAKAYA OR LEAVE YA: DIDN’T NEW ASIAN GET OLD, LIKE, TEN YEARS AGO?

  By Ian Froeb

  From Riverfront Times

  Before becoming dining critic for the daily St. Louis Post-Dispatch in June 2013, Ian Froeb reviewed and blogged about St. Louis restaurants for the weekly Riverfront Times for six years—long enough to refine the inevitably necessary craft of how to write a negative review.

  The calamari looked innocuous enough when our server brought the appetizer: familiarly curled squid rings breaded and fried to a light golden brown, with aioli for dipping. My wife ate a few. I ate a few. We looked at each other.

  “Where’s the squid?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said and took a close look at one of the rings. It looked like fried calamari, but beneath the fried breading, there seemed to be nothing but . . . more fried breading. “I don’t even know how this is scientifically possible.”

  “It’s like it’s there. But it’s not.”

  Schrödinger’s calamari.

  I scraped as much breading as I could from another piece of squid. There was something underneath, after all: a spindly, off-white ring of squid, utterly desiccated. I snapped it in half with my fingers. It went crunch. I summoned our server. She examined the evidence. She made a face. The face looked like this: o_0. She said she’d tell the kitchen about the calamari. In the meantime, did we want a replacement order?

  We did not.

  The spirit of scientific inquiry notwithstanding, it is with some regret that I report that the calamari was the second-worst dish we had at dinner that evening at Takaya New Asian.

  Takaya New Asian opened in January as part of the new Mercantile Exchange development downtown. Owners Eric and Jenny Heckman also operate Tani Sushi Bistro in Clayton, a restaurant I liked when I reviewed it in 2008 and to which I’ve returned several times since, and happily. Yet Takaya is such a spectacular failure that, as Pitchfork once memorably claimed about a new Weezer album, you have to consider whether the older work is as good as you remember.

  The problems are apparent as soon as you walk in the door. The blissed-out faux-Portishead lounge music like the soundtrack to a soft-core flick on Cinemax. The open fireplace in the center of the dining room. The cushy booths big enough to hold an entire bachelorette party and the bride-to-be’s inflatable replica of Jon Hamm’s penis.

  Is it 1997? No. Did the hostess, having run out of menus on one of our visits, ask us to share a single copy? She did. Does the menu feature Asian-fusion cuisine? You bet your bulgogi sliders it does.

  Those sliders, selected from among the menu’s list of appetizers and small plates, were one of the more successful dishes I encountered at Takaya. An order brings three (two, at lunch) miniature sandwiches with marinated steak on brioche buns. The meat was tender and flavorful, gently sweet, though the bread could have been fresher. Another appetizer, Korean-style grilled short ribs, featured a similar marinade—sugar and soy sauce, with hints of garlic—but tougher meat.

  Grilled hamachi jaw is a “signature” appetizer. (The menu uses the term frequently—and spells it correctly, unlike “makerel” and “massago.”) I thought it logical to try a signature appetizer. Our server took my order. She returned a few minutes later: the kitchen didn’t have any grilled hamachi jaw that evening.

  Another “signature” appetizer is mozzarella tempura—a fancy term for fried cheese sticks. These are crunchy and gooey but maybe not as salty as you want from fried cheese and, oh, God, I’m critiquing cheese sticks at an upscale downtown restaurant.

  There’s a sushi selection, which features nigiri sushi, sashimi and the over-the-top Americanized rolls for which Tani is known, such as the “Oh My God” roll, which arrives at your table completely engulfed in flames. At Tani the delicate knifework and no-nonsense presentation of the nigiri sushi impressed me. Here, ragged slabs of fish sat atop rice swabbed with too much wasabi paste. A piece of “makerel” was weirdly juicy, as if plucked from a bin of brine.

  Dinner entrées include “specialty” sushi presentations, as well as more conventional—and certainly not “New Asian,” however you choose to define that nebulous phrase—dishes, such as teriyaki (your choice of chicken or beef). Among the sushi entrées is “hamachi carpaccio.” This, the
menu boasts, isn’t merely another “signature” dish, but Takaya’s absolutely most outstanding, must-try dish. I thought it logical to try an absolutely most outstanding, must-try dish. Our server took my order. She returned a few minutes later: the kitchen didn’t have any “hamachi carpaccio” that evening.

  In its place our server directed me to a similar preparation with very thin slices of raw tuna and equally thin slices of avocado fanned around a plate. The tuna and avocado sat in an iridescent puddle of various sauces—soy, ponzu, something vaguely chile-mayonnaiseesque (it was difficult to tell)—that looked like an oil slick and tasted like tuna water.

  The worst thing we ate on the night of Schrödinger’s calamari was pan-seared sea bass in a garlic-miso sauce. A large hunk of fish sat atop a mound of rice, with a few paltry asparagus stalks doing garnish duty. The fish was inexplicably, mouth-hauntingly bitter—until I turned it over to reveal a crust of diced garlic that had been burnt black.

  At least I found an explanation for the sea bass. I still can’t figure out the squid. Admittedly, that’s not entirely Takaya’s fault. On a recent episode of the public-radio Zeitgeist prodder This American Life, a reporter obsessively bird-dogged a rumor that (once, maybe) a pork processor somewhere had packaged pig rectums (or, as they’re called in the industry, “bung”) as “imitation calamari.” When the investigation proved fruitless, the reporter resorted to a blind taste test in which he pitted fried calamari against fried bung. One of the two participants preferred the bung.

  I was not one of the tasters, and I’m pretty damn sure I’ve never eaten pig-butt rings à la calamari, but I suspect that in a blind tasting I’d have chosen ‘em over the deep-fried squid I ate at Takaya.