Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  There is, naturally, a truck. Just as surely as there are the tattoos, the facial hair, the coif, the Twitter feed, the reality-TV show, the silent pop pop pop of the bloggers’ cell-phone cameras. He who has these—all the signs and signifiers that have replaced whisk and toque as emblems of modern chefdom—is 40-year-old Ludovic Lefebvre, a classically trained, preternaturally handsome Burgundian who’s become Los Angeles’s most talked-about cook. What he doesn’t have is a restaurant. Instead, Lefebvre and his wife, partner, and brand manager, Krissy, run a series of wildly popular pop-ups called LudoBites, which occupy, hermitcrab-like, the off-hour shells of other eateries—first in obscure corners of L.A. and, more recently, across the United States for the Sundance Channel’s Ludo Bites America, debuting July 18. Lefebvre is a kind of walking, talking, preening manifestation of all the blessings and damnations, transcendence and silliness, that mark this moment in American dining.

  In any other context, Gram & Papa’s, a soup-and-sandwich spot in L.A.’s Garment District, would hardly suggest culinary adventure. Nevertheless, that’s where the Lefebvres staged the fifth iteration of LudoBites—LudoBites 5.0—for six weeks last summer. By day, this area downtown was crowded with shoppers at rows of fabric stores and zipper distributors; after dark, it was all but deserted—save, in those weeks, for questing foodies dubiously checking their GPS units.

  The production of high-end food in low-end and otherwise improbable settings is, of course, part of the pop-up phenomenon. But that doesn’t mean a chef raised in the great kitchens of Paris won’t grumble. On this morning, the Lefebvres arrived with Ludo in full temperamental-artist mode. The immediate object of his pique: the state of the walk-in fridge.

  “It’s like fucking Baghdad in there,” he muttered to Mike Ilic, Gram & Papa’s owner.

  Behind the register, Ilic raised his eyebrows. He had invited the Lefebvres to assume weeknight squatter rights in exchange for a fee, a cut of the profits, and the publicity; it was obviously a sufficient trade-off to make him tolerant of his tenant’s moods.

  “They cleaned up Baghdad, Ludo,” he said. “It’s gonna have to be like Afghanistan.”

  “Every morning, the same routine,” said Krissy, rolling her eyes. She was sitting at a nearby table, looking over that night’s reservation list.

  Upstairs, in a tiny storage area, it wasn’t difficult to tell which shelves belonged to Gram & Papa’s and which to LudoBites: On one side, ketchup and La Choy Chinese noodles; on the other, kombu seaweed, industrial-grade gelatin, star anise. Nearby was a pile of Lefebvre’s niftier gadgets: an immersion circulator, which looks like the mating of a heating coil and a medical device, and a Gastrovac, which first cooks ingredients in a vacuum and then reimpregnates them with flavor the moment the seal is broken.

  In the kitchen, Lefebvre’s skeleton staff was assembling. One sous-chef was cutting perfect rectangles of pork belly, uniform and creamy as frosted sheet cake. Lefebvre runs his kitchen in a manner in keeping with his French education. That is, he yells. And the staff is expected to yell back. “I want the kitchen clean before I start!” he hollered now. “Use your fucking heads!”

  “Yes, Chef!” came the chorus.

  Lefebvre’s eye fell on a young cook named Joon Sung.

  “Joon!”

  “Yes, Chef!”

  “Do we have dashi made?”

  “No, Chef!”

  Lefebvre made a face that suggested it might be easier simply to end it all via Gastrovac right there. The dashi broth, infused with kombu, was for a dish he had woken up intent on adding to that night’s menu. It would act as a poaching liquid for oysters that would then be served with a froth of butter infused with the briny taste of their own smashed shells. All this he patiently explained to Sung.

  “You understand, Joon?”

  “Yes, Chef!” Sung thought it over for a moment.

  “Chef!”

  “What, Joon?”

  “The oysters. They’ll be poached à la minute?”—meaning “to order.”

  “Of course!” said Lefebvre. “Or else it’s no fun!”

  He came out front, where Krissy was still at work, and wiped his forehead with a kitchen towel.

  “This is my last LudoBites,” said Ludo.

  “Nice try,” said Krissy.

  They are a pretty couple, in an easily alliterative way: he Gallically goateed, she classically Californian (or blonde and buxom, if you prefer).With his pierced ears and arms covered in ink, Ludo could be an instructional diagram for the Metrosexual Pirate look that has dominated kitchens for the past decade. Both Lefebvres are camera-ready, and even before the Sundance show, both did time on reality TV: Ludo as a contestant, and designated villain, on Top Chef Masters, Krissy on a season of The Apprentice. (She subsequently posed for a Playboy cover.) They met, in an oft-told story, when Krissy, at the time an intellectual-property attorney, was dining at L’Orangerie, the late old-guard French restaurant that was Ludo’s first stop in Los Angeles; she thought the amuse-bouche was a flirtatious gift just for her. In addition to running the front of the house, she anticipates his moods, minds his malapropisms (“I cook through instant.” “Instinct, honey”), and acts as adoring PR agent. That the adoration is obviously genuine and reciprocated isn’t inconsistent with a parallel impression she gives: that of a business-savvy cat with a particularly telegenic bird in its teeth.

  Not that star looks are necessarily good for a man’s culinary cred—just as a Playboy spread doesn’t result in instant respect for one’s litigation skills. This is especially true in Los Angeles, where the local eatocracy has an uneasy relationship with the rules of celebrity that dominate the rest of town. Woe to the big-name chef who arrives from somewhere else and is perceived to worship at the altar of Scene over that of Food. Take San Francisco’s Michael Mina, whose L.A. outpost, XIV, a barn on the Sunset Strip, might as well be Olive Garden for all its reputation among local foodies. Likewise, Rick Bayless’s Red O, which has been pummeled with unequaled ferocity since opening last year. Bayless’s crime, in part, was daring to offer “authentic” Mexican food to a town that thinks it pretty well knows its Mexican. But one got the feeling that the bigger sin was the fedora-wearing valets.

  Angelenos are, of course, susceptible to the status-seeking inanity that infects eaters everywhere. But the logic of the moment demands that their culinary heroes—Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo of Animal and Son of a Gun; Sang Yoon of Father’s Office and Lukshon—be immune to the usual course of Hollywood power, that they be in some sense of the People.

  Lefebvre walks this line closely. A crucial element of LudoBites is its reservations system—a characteristically savvy confluence of idealism and show business. There is no phone number, just a Web site that opens at a random hour posted on Twitter. When LudoBites 5.0 was announced, 3,000 hopeful diners crashed the page within six minutes.

  There have been missteps on the path to fame and credibility. The most egregious is Lefebvre’s cookbook, Crave: The Feast of the Five Senses, published by Judith Regan in 2005. On the cover, Ludo stares intensely into the camera, holding forth a split pomegranate and a spoon. He looks like nothing so much as Chris Gaines, Garth Brooks’s short-lived Goth alter ego. Most infamously, there is the Fish Photo, in which a bare-chested Lefebvre, dressed in tight jeans, stands shin-deep in the surf, a large, glittering striped bass in each hand.

  Among other things, the image presented logical problems: Were we to believe he’d caught the fish with his bare hands? If so: Both simultaneously? Or was he so used to catching fish in this manner that it was hardly worth heading in with just one? If not: Had he brought the fish with him? Or had he found them floating there already dead?—a notion that detracts substantially from the overall sexiness of the picture.

  More to the point: It made him look like a world-class douche.

  Both Lefebvres now express appropriate embarrassment at the Fish Photo. Krissy recalls that it could have been worse; Regan, she says, had already demande
d three new photo shoots, each “sexier” than the last.

  “She wanted him to be rolling around in the sand with the fish,” Krissy says.

  These are the kinds of semiotic negotiations that have become de rigueur in the era of the celebrity chef. It helps that Ludo’s path has taken him to both extremes. He arrived in L.A. in 1996 as starstruck as any would-be actor getting off the bus. “I had never tasted sushi! I discovered jalapeños! Green tea! It was crazy,” he says. Paradoxically, he had a more difficult time exploring such wonders at conservative L’Orangerie than he would have back in Paris, where he had worked under acclaimed and innovative chefs including Alain Passard and Pierre Gagnaire. “I was a very typical French chef. No tattoos. Short hair. Perfect for the army,” he says.

  That changed when Joe Pytka, the mercurial commercial director and impresario, decided to fire the beloved chef at his restaurant Bastide and installed Lefebvre in his place. Up went the sleeves, revealing a chiaroscuro of Hawaiian girls, dragons, and Sanskrit he had secretly accumulated, and out came the liquid nitrogen, gelatins, and other accoutrements of molecular gastronomy. Some critics were smitten by dishes like chicken crusted with popcorn and foie gras piña colada, others less so—L.A. Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila wrote, “I feel as if I’ve been mugged,” and busted Bastide down from four stars to one. (She now says that two stars may have been more appropriate, but stands by the rest of the review: “He was trying interesting things, but it just wasn’t very good.”)

  “She was so mean,” Ludo says, clearly still angry. “I decided I won’t cook for critics anymore.”

  That decision was one half of the epiphany that led to LudoBites; the other—not to cook for investors, either—came soon after. That’s when Lefebvre was lured to Las Vegas to open a 300-seat restaurant at the Palazzo casino. Named Lavo, it came with a “Mediterranean” menu (which, oddly, included a Reuben-stuffed knish “slider”) already set in stone; Lefebvre wasn’t even allowed to add nightly specials.

  ‘“Money,”’ he says sadly, when asked what the investors could possibly have said to lure him into such a creative disaster. “They said, ‘Money.’ I used to go home at night and cry.”

  So what’s a tortured-artist chef to do? Why, throw off the yoke of the restaurant altogether! LudoBites 1.0 and 2.0 took place in 2007 and 2009 at BreadBar, a bakery on the border of Beverly Hills, and were immediate sensations. Iteration 3.0 was staged at a cavernous Culver City gallery-café called Royal/T. Krissy set up a professional light box at one end of the room, the better for the stream of bloggers to photograph each dish. “If they were taking pictures anyway, why not make them as beautiful as possible?” she says.

  Next came the LudoTruck, a thirty-foot-long beauty wrapped in lurid red, decorated with roosters and called the Big Red Coq. In keeping with the lowbrow obsession of the moment, it serves fried chicken—albeit fried chicken whose recipe begins, “Day One.” (There are three in all.) When the LudoTruck debuted at the L.A. Street Food Fest, a three-hour line developed, surprising even the Lefebvres. “There’s nothing three-hours-and-$5 good,” Krissy says.

  Since, the couple set up shop for six weeks in an Italian restaurant in Sherman Oaks, and LudoBites 7.0 is expected to happen this summer. The Lefebvres spent the intervening time filming Ludo Bites America, for which Ludo took on barbecue in North Carolina, chilies in Santa Fe, and, quite literally, buffalo outside Denver: Krissy tweeted a photo of the chef sinking his teeth into a freshly killed bison’s heart.

  The pop-up life has its drawbacks. Lefebvre never gets to work in a kitchen he’s designed for his own needs. He has trouble keeping quality staff at either the front or the back of the house. He can’t build lasting relationships with butchers, fishmongers, and the like.

  In return? No permit issues. No dishwasher and refrigerator maintenance. No electric bills, oil-disposal problems, breakage costs, laundry bills, venting-regulation compliance—all the bullshit that comes along with running a permanent restaurant. And of course, there’s the freedom to cook whatever his heart desires, to treat each night as a piece of harrowing theater, a magnificent fire that only he can extinguish.

  “Joon!”

  “Yes, Chef!”

  “The dashi!”

  “Done, Chef!”

  With service approaching, the kitchen was in full swing. An intern scooped whole steaming octopi from a bubbling pot. Another was monitoring the circulator; the eggs inside would be used in one of the evening’s less obviously pyrotechnic but most sublime offerings—a dish of feathery-smooth potato mousseline capping, shepherd’s-pie style, the barely poached egg and a warm bed of chorizo. As with most of Lefebvre’s food these days, it made use of technology and imagination without seeming to do so for its own sake. The stuntiest item on the LudoBites 5.0 menu—a cheese “cupcake” frosted with chicken-liver mousse—was also the least successful.

  “It’s a miracle what we do every day, working in these conditions. You see that?” he said, pointing to the beat-up four burner stove. “That’s magical.”

  It is magical. It could also, one worries, become a dodge—a perpetual deflection of the question of what someone with this much talent might do with the kitchen and staff of his dreams. Krissy says as much, remembering the thinking that went into LudoBites 1.0: “Just using ‘Bites’ diminished expectations. It could never be a failure, because it had a beginning and an end.”

  Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer-winning dean of L.A. food writing and one of Lefebvre’s earliest and most consistent champions, likens LudoBites to a series of first records, with all the excitement, energy, and rough edges first records entail. Eventually, though, you want your favorite band to risk it all with a double-length theme album.

  Put another way, the question is this: Is it possible to be a great chef without a great restaurant? The kind of place, as Animal’s Jon Shook memorably puts it, where “you go back after it’s been open ten years and it’s still fuck-your-mouth good”? The question matters, because at the very heart of celebrity chefdom there lies a problem that may prove irreconcilably hostile to the future of the restaurant: the boredom of chefs.

  Remember that the stars of the dining world used to be in the front of the house. They were the great maitre d’s, wizards of the seating plan, social impresarios who got their names above the door. That made sense, since every night in the dining room was like a freewheeling improvisational concert, complete with an ever shifting lineup and the ever present potential for disaster. The kitchen was more of a stellar rhythm section: steady, reliable, above all consistent.

  Nowadays, chefs have completed the radical shift from anonymous laborers to celebrated artists. For some, that’s meant leaving the kitchen altogether, traveling the world, expanding their brands. But for those who can’t give up the particular adrenaline rush of being behind the stove, there’s no getting around the fact that the essence of the job—turning out the same dish over and over again, night after night—is deeply, profoundly dull. And that means we may soon be living in a pop-up world.

  At Gram & Papa’s, it was almost curtain time. French rap played over the sound system as Krissy’s team of young waitresses set tables. Taking his position in the open kitchen, Lefebvre carefully laid out his tools: a silver quenelle spoon, a tiny grater with bamboo brush, a Sharpie. At the head of this little shrine, he lit a Mexican prayer candle.

  The doors opened, and the first seating poured in. At one table, each of five diners held cameras or camera phones. One customer presented Lefebvre with a bundle of locally picked Spanish garlic. “Tomorrow we have garlic soup,” the chef announced. “With escargots.”

  Orders came in. Dishes flowed out: a cheese “cupcake” frosted with chicken liver and foie gras; a feathery-smooth potato mousseline capping, shepherd’s-pie style, a barely poached egg and a warm bed of chorizo; a version of a classic French frisée aux lardons reimagined as a tower of greens teetering in a bowl of smooth, rich goat-cheese soup. (When I tried the dish at dinner
with Gold, I nervously approached it with knife and fork. “It’s hard to cut soup,” the critic deadpanned.) All but the oyster dish, which nobody had yet plated or tasted—leaving no assurance that Lefebvre’s morning inspiration would even work.

  One by one, the tickets for oysters piled up. Lefebvre hovered over the simmering dashi, watching as a test run poached. Krissy looked on in a state of bemused panic. Finally, Lefebvre lifted two of the oysters from the water and pried them open, revealing the pair of perfectly swollen iridescent bubbles within. He swiveled toward the counter where Joon Sung was supposed to be assembling the dishes.

  “Joon!”

  “Yes, Chef!”

  “Why haven’t you fucking prepped for the oysters?”

  Something in Sung snapped: “Because I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do, Chef!”

  The kitchen came to a halt. The chef spun slowly in his clogs. Sung waited, blinking. Then Lefebvre grinned, clapped his cook on the shoulder, and screamed right back:

  “Well, neither do I!”

  HOT PLATE

  By Rachel Hutton

  From Minnesota Monthly

  One index of a regional restaurant culture’s vitality is the number of talented food writers it supports. Among the leading lights of the Twin Cities’ lively dining scene is Rachel Hutton, formerly of CityPages and newly named food editor of Minnesota Monthly.

  7:00 a.m.

  It’s going to be another big night at The Bachelor Farmer and Marvel Bar.

  The cooler is stocked. The reservation book is full. And the overnight cleaning crew just eradicated the last trace of yesterday’s service. On this chilly morning, 50 North Second Avenue looks much as it must have a century ago, when the brick-and-timber warehouse was new to Minneapolis’s North Loop. The streets are deserted and the sky is dark except for the florescent lights streaming from the building’s kitchen—a beacon for the hottest thing going in the neighborhood.