So I asked Masa, whom I knew to be, at the very least, a performing artist, and a very good one—tickets to his show started now at $350 a seat, and there would be, could be, no understudies—what he thought.
“Yeah, I think it’s art,” he said. “What I do, I’m showing the people, I’m going to work clean, nicely, fast, each piece of sushi, more artistic, nice shape. Art is not always seen.” He placed an index finger below each eye. “When you taste it, part of the art. Each piece of fish. Rice. Fish. Good combination. Taste, texture, colorwise. Eat it. Beautiful. Melt. Flavor, nice flavor. Is a wonderful art. This is what I believe. Not only to see the art, not only the painting. The food is not the art…. Mostly it’s taste. Our job is taste. Eat. Beautiful. Wow. This is art I think.
“If you don’t have a good personality,” he continued, “you can’t make good food. If you are not a good person, forget it. You have to be honest…. More honest, more open, think more straight. Otherwise, you’ll never get it, what’s good food. We serve direct to customer. We don’t say any lie to the customer. Nothing hide, just straight. We don’t cook anything, mostly the raw fish. If the ingredients are not good, but still OK, people won’t notice? They serve it for the money, people get used to it? They lower quality. That’s the personality. The person has to be the right judge. This is no good, no good no, no good, don’t do that. I tell them, you have to be a nice person, otherwise you cannot make good food. You show the customer face, try to make more entertaining. This kind of personality from your inside, from here. I don’t care, it’s just for money, I don’t care the food, just serve? Those kind of chef cannot stand over here.” He points to his station. “They can see our face. Every single dish has to be perfect.
“This is me,” he concludes. “This is what I am.”
The enduring image I have from my short time in Masa’s kitchen was from watching a lunch service.
At this particular lunch service, there was a single customer, an older woman, seated centrally at the hinoki bar. Masa stood before her unsmiling but looking comfortable in his loose clothing, his round shaved head glowing in the carefully lighted space. He bowed in plying his trade, in cutting fish on his board with his gorgeous knife. He first served the series of nonsushi dishes, ginkgo nuts, the uni risotto for which he’s famous, the lobster-and-foie shabu-shabu for which he should be famous, the elaborate blowfish dish, before moving into the sushi performance that included a dozen different carefully prepared bites of toro, mackerel, grouper, shima aji, tai, hirame, ken ika, tako, kanpachi, anago, ebi, eel. He cuts each piece before the woman, forms a small ball of rice and seasons it with a bit of fresh wasabi or one of a few simple sauces, folds the fish over the pillow of rice, and sets it on a dark stone disk in front of her. The woman lifts it with her hand and, with a small dip of her head, like a bow, eats it in a bite.
The meal lasted more than two hours. Occasionally, Masa would take a break in the kitchen, talk on his cell phone, have some tea, who knows—maybe check in with his bookie or reserve a Sunday tee time, or just relax for a moment. But when his customer, the old woman, had been alone for the right amount of time, he would return and resume his work.
The entire restaurant was empty but for these two people, with fine spots lighting them both up vividly against the black walls of the restaurant, Masa slicing and serving exotic fish and the woman eating what he placed before her, all of it in perfect silence. I stood and stared trans-fixed from my hideout in the kitchen. They were beautiful to behold. A monk serving a monk.
CHAPTER 3
Thomas and Masa
It wasn’t until after I’d spoken with Keller in Per Se that I realized fully how unusual Masa Takayama was in this country. Keller was dressed for work in a dark jacket and white shirt open at the collar, and we talked about the changing role of the restaurant chef, the changing composition of the daily work, and the dramatic transformation of his own life in the wake of the international success of the French Laundry and his subsequent fame.
“What’s a chef?” he asked. “The brigade system has chef de cuisine, chef de partie, chef garde manger. Does the ‘chef’ now become ‘chef-restaurateur,’ head of the restaurant? I don’t know.
“The media are the ones who set the image for who we are. It’s hard for us to set that image ourselves. The image began, you know, that whole romantic process of the chef going to the market, buying the freshest produce and the freshest fish and coming back to the restaurant and processing it and serving it that night. That’s an image that was out there for such a long time—which is not true. Maybe Gilbert [Le Coze, original chef-owner of Le Bernardin] did go to the market in the beginning to learn about the fish and what was available in America, but after a while he wasn’t up at four o’clock in the morning going to the market and then working all day. That’s an impossible task for anybody.
“So what is the perception of what a chef does? That’s really interesting. Because we don’t cook everything. People say, ‘Well the food is better when you’re there, Thomas.’ In some cases, I’ve just arrived. I’m coming in the back door, I put my jacket on, I go out to say hello to a guest, and they say, ‘Oh my God, thank goodness you’re here, because the food is so much better when you’re here.’ It’s not, it’s the perception that it is, which is important. Don’t get me wrong. Perception is about everything. So if the guest thinks the food is better because I’m in the dining room or in the kitchen, then the food is better. And that’s an important thing to realize even though sometimes I believe it’s not legitimate. Sometimes I feel like a fraud.”
The chef had moved out of the kitchen permanently. Or could, if he or she wanted to, and ultimately would have to, even if he or she didn’t want to, simply from physical limitations in a physically grueling job. You couldn’t cook forever. If you wanted to continue to strive, it had to be outside the kitchen, it had to be in multiple businesses, it had to be in providing opportunities to a few devoted and talented staff. Thomas earned a management fee for his work at Bouchon Las Vegas, and he was also a 50 percent owner of it, but money was not the same concern it had been ten years earlier when his office staff had to use milk crates for chairs. He no longer agonized over making payroll. Now he could say with real pride, “Mark Hopper.” I’d met Mark, now chef de cuisine at Bouchon in Las Vegas, when he was on meat station at the French Laundry, across from Grant on fish, had been watching the night he’d let a string go out on a piece of meat, and, humiliatingly and maddeningly, got it tossed back to him when Keller, at the pass and inspecting returning plates on their way to be washed, spotted it. “Mark Hopper is the chef of a twelve-million-dollar restaurant,” Keller said with pride and gratification.
He looked back on his trajectory from when the French Laundry was young and not known, now no longer in chef’s whites but on a plush couch in a four-star restaurant overlooking Central Park. That first kitchen, in what is now the vestibule of the French Laundry, where they’d cooked with secondhand pots and the oven doors wouldn’t stay closed and they prepped each day to the sound track of Reservoir Dogs, hanging out after work and playing softball on days off. Those days were gone and could never return.
“I miss the people,” he said. “I’m sad. I miss being in the kitchen with them.” He smiled. “I want to go back to the sandbox to play but nobody’s there!”
Gregory Short is gone to San Francisco. Grant Achatz is in Chicago. Eric Ziebold is in D.C. None of them work for him anymore. Nor do Ron Siegel and Stephen Durfee, who were part of the opening French Laundry brigade. And those who do remain with the company—Jonathan Benno and Corey Lee and Mark Hopper and Jeffrey Cerciello and many others, front and back of the house—well, his dealings with them are now sporadic rather than routine.
“I’m not a chef anymore and it breaks my heart,” he said. But he knew this had been inevitable, and of course he felt incredibly lucky for the course of his career. Moreover, he knew that the best way to create a legacy was not to cook till he was in his
sixties, like Soltner or Giradet, but rather to pass down his standards to others who are cooking now, his kids, who will create the next restaurants and books and train their own staffs, on and on.
“I’m in transition,” he said, at ease but busy, soon off to Vegas, then to Yountville. “I’m trying to establish a new role for myself.”
All of this put his four-star colleague across the marble mall floor, Masa, in sharp relief for me. Masa, I realized, was something unique in this age of the chef-CEO; he was unique perhaps to any age of the chef. He had created the most extraordinary restaurant experience in New York. “Here is my money,” he’d said, holding up his hands. “Here is my money,” he’d said, touching his chest. He’d realized this as a young man, and he would do something none of the greats had done, not Keller or Soltner or Ducasse—none of them. He’d created a single restaurant that was wholly dependent on his presence. A restaurant that without him couldn’t even open. “When I catch cold, I close the restaurant.” The goal of most chefs was to train their staffs so well that they, the chefs, didn’t have to be there—when the staff could replicate a chef’s goals without his being there, that was an extraordinary achievement. The chefs’ goal was to make themselves completely dispensable—they considered that their ultimate success.
Masa had done the opposite. In an age of the branded chef and TV chefs and Vegas outposts and Olive Gardens and P.F. Chang’s, Masa had created a restaurant so personal, so dependent on his skills and spirit and personality, that it had no meaning when he was not inside it. Masa was the artist.
EPILOGUE
The Reach of a Chef
I’d left Keller at Per Se that day and headed immediately to the airport for one last stop, a return to Chicago to see Grant Achatz. I had to know what he’d come to, where his choices had led—from dishwashing at the family restaurant, standing on a milk crate, to high school line cook, to the CIA, to chopping his own shallots at the French Laundry, to the agar and alginates and a relentless quest for innovation at Trio, to Grant now opening his own restaurant.
When I showed up the morning of May 4, 2005, opening day, Grant was positively cool; the biggest worries were an AWOL fish delivery and a broken paint gun on the patisserie station—in other words, this promised to be a smooth opening. The offices in the basement weren’t finished, the sommelier was still unboxing crates of wine in the cellar to inventory, guys with tool belts strode purposefully through the restaurant adjusting light fixtures and screwing tabletops onto bases, and the brigade de cuisine worked steadily through their mise en place, in their large, long, spanking new kitchen, game day at last.
“I’ve been gone from Trio for nine months,” Grant said. “Me and John and Curtis, we’ve been in the kitchen working on the menu but…I just want to turn an artichoke.”
And so he did. He had put an artichoke dish on the menu, listed by this description: fonds d’artichauts Cussy #3970. That was all. I had no idea what Cussy designated, but Grant wondered if I’d be able to figure out the significance of the number.
The whole menu was odd like this—you couldn’t possibly know what was coming based on the descriptions. Martin Kastner, the sculptor who had designed some of the funky serving pieces for Trio—“the antenna” for the bobbing salmon dish, “the squid” for the tempura shrimp—was now the full-time designer for the restaurant and had created a clean and simple menu design in which a drawing of bubbles, beneath the translucent menu page, wound up between the main ingredients column and the dish description, indicating by their diameter the intensity and size of any given dish. A tiny bubble meant the dish was a small one-biter, a large circle predicted, say, the bison dish. You could at a glance get a feel for the emotional trajectory of a meal here, like reading a musical score (as Grant had wanted long ago), a meal that consisted of anywhere between eight and twenty-eight courses.
The bison dish—five separate preparations of bison, a bite each—was described this way: beets, blueberries, smoking cinnamon. What to make of that? Dungeness crab was described as raw parsnip, young coconut, cashews.
This was the new ultramodern edge cuisine in America—you couldn’t describe it adequately in words, and it didn’t have, at least by name, any reference point.*
But Grant liked this style of menu and these oblique descriptions. “It’s exciting, that’s what I think,” he said, boning three dozen pair of frogs’ legs (FROG LEGS [medium-large bubble]: spring lettuces, paprika, morels). “It’s romantic, like a foreigner’s interaction with service, when you don’t understand everything on the menu. It adds a layer of good service and excitement.” Servers here have to explain a lot, he noted: “They have to coddle, there’s a lot of pressure on them.”
But what about the artichokes and the number? Something at the edge of my mind recognized it, I knew, but nothing came to me.
Grant said, “Escoffier.”
Damn. Of course.
In his book Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1907, Auguste Escoffier numbers every recipe, from 1 (Estouffade, or brown stock: equal parts beef and veal bones; a fresh ham knuckle and fresh pork rind, both blanched; carrots; celery; and bouquet garni) to number 5012 (Vin à la française, claret or Burgundy with sugar and lemon).
Grant had put Escoffier recipe number 3970 on his menu—artichokes Cussy. (Louis, Marquis de Cussy, was “one of the wittiest gas tronomes” of the early nineteenth century, a food writer, and prefect of the palace of Napoleon I, according to Larousse Gastronomique. The French were big on naming dishes after people—a shame we no longer do that.) This, too, was part of the new ultramodern cuisine, a dish straight out of Escoffier. Cooked baby artichoke hearts were stuffed with a foie gras–truffle farce, then coated in sauce Villeroi (number 160; this sauce is sauce allemande, or a velouté flavored by mushrooms, with the addition of ham and truffle essence—meant to be very thick to coat things). After it was dipped in the sauce, then placed on a rack in the freezer to set and become hard, it was breaded with panko and deep-fried for service.
Artichoke #3970 was served as a single bite on a spoon resting in a porcelain ring, a bottomless plate in effect, or “the anti-plate,” as Kastner called it, and garnished with a piece of fried parsley.
“Foie gras, truffles, and artichoke—it’s perfect for us,” Grant says. “It’s a reference point for diners, shows us how far, or not far, we’ve come—I don’t know. It’s more than a hundred years old and it’s new. And”—he grins—“it’s a personal F-U to all those people who say, ‘Ah those guys just work with foam over there.’ We know how to work with foie gras, we know how to turn a lot of baby artichokes.”
The sleek rectangular kitchen, with two islands running on each side of a wide central isle beneath sleek hanging light fixtures, bustled. All cooks had their own stations and, at their stations, lowboy coolers and refrigerated drawers. One of the smartest design decisions he realized they’d made, Grant says, was to eliminate from the design a walk-in cooler. There was one large reach-in cooler and freezer, but for the most part, everyone could store his own food at his station; this way you didn’t have everyone running back and forth to the walk-in—a great time-saver. Each person could more or less arrive at his station, get set up, and stay there all day.
Alex Stupak, the young pastry chef, was out back with a new paint gun from Home Depot. He’d filled it with very fatty chocolate. He’d set liquid chocolate that had been frozen and cut into rectangles on racks over sheet trays and was spraying them with chocolate that would become a shell for the chocolate that would melt within (LIQUID CHOCOLATE [big bubble]: milk, black licorice, banana).
The errant fish delivery arrived, and Curtis was breaking down and portioning turbot. He, too, was very excited the restaurant was at last opening. The biggest surprise in building and opening a restaurant, he said, was, “All the trades that come through here don’t work at the same level of urgency as we do.”
For all the past talk of foams and encapsulated liquids, there was very little visual evidence
of the out-there food Grant was known for. Cooks cutting vegetables, stirring sauces. Grant had gotten to work on a big container of fresh hearts of palms, slicing dozens for the tasting of stuffed hearts of palm. My friend Jeffrey Pikus, who’d run out of bacon months earlier, was on meat station, cooking beets sous-vide for the bison, cleaning morels for the frogs’ legs, rolling sheets of potato for the "beef with A-1 Sauce,” and cooking them in rendered beef fat. Mary Radigan was frying little pieces of dough that had to puff so that she could inject them with chocolate. John Peters cryovacked bison after he finished glazing the artichokes.
If you looked carefully, though, here and there you’d catch signs of the unconventional. One of the pastry cooks was using the sugar tuile technique to create ultra-delicate tubes that he was filling with nuts and puffed wild rice, bulgur, hazelnuts, oats, toasted with curry and honey, and freeze-dried apricots. The syringe at Mary Radigan’s station wasn’t an item you’d find on most cooks’ stations. One of the cooks lifted skin off heated soy milk, called yuba. This skin would become the wrapper for snapper. A white boxlike appliance being set out for service at the rear end of the pastry station island was something I’d never seen. Grant had this built for him by a man who designs cooling devices for hospitals. It’s kind of like a small reverse flattop. The steel surface doesn’t get hot, it gets cold,–47 degrees Fahrenheit. It will freeze a small spoonful of a sour cream mixture dropped onto its surface into a mini-blini shape. The chef in charge of this dish would hold a sorrel leaf in the mixture till it set up, then lift the sour cream off the surface by holding the leaf and rest it in a small circular holder, then shave frozen smoked salmon over it.
The Reach of a Chef Page 34