Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  Many restaurateurs have taken the same approach, and several have done it better, but Hoffman’s serious study of farm and food issues remains a rarity. Which makes it easy to see why, when Frank Bruni gave Savoy its second glowing two-star Times review in 2009, he called the restaurant New York’s Chez Panisse, an East Coast answer to Alice Waters’s Berkeley-based birthplace of the good food revolution.

  Both Waters and Hoffman drew inspiration from youthful tours of France and Italy, but both ultimately formed consistent allegiance to Americana—from half-wild cress foraged on a Hudson Valley riverbank to wild salmon caught by Native Americans off the Alaskan coast. (“It’s a delicious fish, and it’s supporting indigenous fishing communities,” says Hoffman, for whom the latter is as important a trait as the former.) Both kitchens have served as springboards, their line-cook lineage traced like one big family tree across the country’s locavore landscape. Hoffman’s culinary offspring all but created what New York magazine dubbed “New Brooklyn Cuisine:” Minds behind RoseWater, Diner, the Grocery and Franny’s were all sparked at his stoves.

  But moreover, like Waters, Hoffman has long been happy to leave the stoves to hired hands like Ryan Tate at Savoy and Shanna Pacifico at Back Forty, freeing him up to save the world. While others pursue television spots and lucrative advertising sponsorships—Hoffman has turned down both—this guy is after another kind of action, the kind whose payoff is a different kind of change.

  He’s always been much more than a chef, even back when he was still the one cooking. The man spent 10 years as the only chef on the Greenmarket’s advisory board, helping guide and grow the city’s market system to the marvel and model it is today. He is a founding member of Chefs Collaborative, the national network of professional cooks working to teach their colleagues where, how and why to find sustainably sourced products. And when he’s not considering the concept and a name for his new restaurant—it will balance his philosophy with a price point and feel that fits Soho’s touristy clientele, he says—he’s hard at work on a marketdriven memoir (with recipes) that we can’t wait to read.

  Those projects are only possible when you delegate the day-to-day: Having traded his whites for brown cords and button-downs, he still shows up at both restaurants nearly every day with new product and new ideas, but insists on changes only when something’s really wrong. (Missteps, like a basil cocktail from a new bartender in February, are pretty rare.) “I’m not the chef anymore,” Hoffman freely admits, “but I’m still the culinary director. I hold out a set of guidelines by which the restaurants operate.”

  Those go beyond sourcing to stuff like caring about your staff: “One good thing about Peter,” says Tate, “is he wants his employees to have a life.” For the most part, he lets Tate and Pacifico do what they want if they follow his heart. “It doesn’t have to be his food,” says Tate, “it just has to be his philosophy.”

  This summer he’ll focus that philosophy at Back Forty, which he named after the hidden quarter of land on the Midwestern parcels doled out by the Homestead Act of 1862. The government gave away 120-acre blocks, Hoffman explains, sketching rectangles on a scrap of paper, and the quarter farthest from the road was most likely to be left wild and wooded. It was also the place, he adds with a smile, “where you would go to make out.”

  That’s maybe true of his own Back Forty, too, thanks to its sweet backyard, communal tables and that laid-back menu—”great ingredients in casual delicious ways,” as Hoffman puts it—that will likely inspire what happens at the space where Savoy now stands.

  Back Forty’s menu is largely driven by the butchery skills Pacifico mastered in order to break down whole carcasses from Fleisher’s Grass-Fed Meats upstate. While her vegetables shine—roasted roots and tangles of the sweetest spring greens—Back Forty is a carnivore’s delight: fried pork jowl nuggets with pepper jelly; fat housemade sausages that change nearly every week; a terrine with stoneground mustard; grilled flatbread made with lard and topped with a mouthful of pig’s trotters, bacon, melted onions and thyme. Yet Back Forty is best known for Pacifico’s contender for best-in-city patty, transformed from trimmings of her two weekly deliveries of a half steer, served on a buttered sesame bun with spicy ketchup and a housemade pickle. (Tomatoes, too, says Pacifico, but only in season).

  Despite the handiwork of his chefs, Hoffman is still master of ceremonies, especially during those idea-centric fireside feasts held for 18 years at Savoy. At those family-style nights of dinner and discussion, all manner of tastemaker—from Betty Fussell to Joel Salatin to Stephen Jay Gould—have held forth in front of the upstairs fireplace and, between each course, discussed the fate of local fisheries, the flavors of the Riviera, the follies of the Farm Bill or the forestry skills of Umbrian truffle hunters. Way back in 1995, Michael Pollan spoke about the history of apples in America—a decade before his Omnivore’s Dilemma would hit nearly every nightstand in the nation.

  As much about philosophy as they are about food, those communal hearth-side chats are what we’ll miss most about Savoy, those nights when the place transcended typecast and become nothing less than a salon. Savoy’s final shad dinner this March featured a lecture on the species (and a recipe for the pickled fish) by none other than Chris Letts, who took Hoffman fishing for shad back in 1974 and put him on the path to Prince Street. When he and Hoffman took the floor that night it became a pulpit, as they re-inspired eaters that when it comes to voting with your fork, hell yes you can, and hell yes you should.

  Still, while Hoffman is often called the ur-locavore, he doesn’t identify himself as such: “It’s a simplistic look at an extremely complex topic,” he says of the term. Citrus, olives, chocolate and countless other foods from afar share pride of place on both his menus, just as long as his sustainable sensibilities—that those foods come from independent groves or eco-enlightened fishers—stay true. Moreover, Hoffman claims the question of what to call his culinary philosophy isn’t what matters. “You don’t think Jackson Pollock called himself an experimentalist, do you? He was too busy painting. I could talk about it,” he says of his life’s work, “but mostly I was just doing it.”

  As it happens, for once we disagree. It’s not so much Hoffman’s cuisine that draws us back time after time, or Savoy’s menu that we will miss most, but his fireside wisdom, and his longstanding role in illuminating our place in the world. “Savoy has been my life for the past 21 years,” he says wistfully, “that place, that style and all the rest . . . but now I am getting excited about what it will become.” If that includes conversation by the hearth, then we are, too.

  APPETITE FOR PERFECTION

  By Ed Leibowitz

  From Los Angeles Magazine

  Writer-at-large Ed Leibowitz has profiled everyone from actor Charlton Heston to controversial defense attorney Gloria Allred for Los Angeles Magazine. He has also written about culture and politics for The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, Money, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times.

  Robyn Sewitz is almost done flipping through the latest Bon Appétit this Sunday afternoon when she makes a discovery she just has to share with her son. Brushing back a lock of her auburn hair, she calls to him across her spacious kitchen. “Jon,” she says, “here’s boar hunting for beginners!”

  “Oh yeah?” he says, halting his knife’s progress. Several weeks shy of his 16th birthday, Jon is tall and lean, his full cheeks not yet ready for their first serious shave, but after all those months he’s spent studying cookbooks, mastering culinary modernism, and apprenticing in professional kitchens, he’s a more capable cook than either of his parents will ever be. Jon’s a sophomore at the Oakwood School, a private progressive academy in North Hollywood. His mother is a psychotherapist, while his father, David, designs furniture and window treatments for clients of enormous net worth.

  Like many Oakwood parents, the Sewitzes regard their child’s artistic ambitions not as some passing teenage fancy but as a creative flowering that could lead to great things. When
Jon thought he wanted to be a musician, they signed him up for lessons and invested in a Bellafina double bass. He plays in the school orchestra and jazz band, but much of the time now his instrument sits on its side in the deserted music parlor of their Encino home, like a dejected mastiff.

  Jon’s food epiphany came during a family trip to Spain a couple of years ago. Robyn wasn’t trying to make a chef out of him when she booked dinner reservations at El Celler de Can Roca, which earned three stars in the 2011 Michelin Guide. She wanted to expose him to something that would pique his interest more than the art museums were. Jon’s palate still carries the sensations of that meal: oysters served in the bottom half of a wine bottle with carbonated cava sauce; eggplant soufflé wrapped in white sardines; a lineup of mussels, one bathed in bergamot foam, another in nectarine jelly and caramelized rose petal, and another in “distilled earth jelly,” a clear sauce derived from a dab of mud that was boiled for hours at low temperatures in an evaporator. “It tasted like dirt you’d try when you were a kid,” he says, “when it didn’t taste bad.” Dessert was even more spectacular. “It had apple in it, cinnamon, and vanilla crème,” he says. “They brought out a DKNY perfume bottle and had us taste the dessert as we smelled the perfume, and the dessert tasted exactly like the perfume’s aroma.” In nine courses Jon was transformed. “I would always go back to that experience in my mind,” he says, “how food could be so amazing you could remember it forever.”

  As Jon continues with his knife at the marble-topped kitchen island, he’s joined by 17-year-old Sam Yehros and 18-year-old Macklin Casnoff, both seniors at Oakwood. They dice and pulverize, clarify and puree, strain and scour. For almost two years the friends have been collaborating on original multicourse dinners, charging only for ingredients, that they prepare for special occasions—a brother pushing off to college or a mom celebrating a birthday along with a tableful of relatives and friends.

  If there were any single event that brought these three together as a cooking collective, it would be the Oakwood winter immersion program of 2009. While other students headed out with teachers to roam China or photograph Death Valley, Macklin found himself with 15 classmates in a cabin in Utah contemplating Euclid’s Golden Ratio. They cross-country skied and discussed whether the ancient Greek concept of beauty and proportion could apply to their world. Macklin’s world had been sharks, then skateboards, but lately he had rekindled an old passion for food. Back home, when he wasn’t watching Iron Chef, Macklin and his friend Henry Kwapis would explore how to apply the Golden Ratio to fine cuisine. They tried cold-calling some of the best chefs in L.A. to see if they could come in and ask them about their craft. José Andrés, meeting them at his Beverly Hills restaurant the Bazaar, was so impressed by the philosophical sweep of their questions that he answered in a 45-minute stream of consciousness, punctuating his thoughts with a liquid olive and molecular caprese in a pipette. “Look at the light above your head,” he commanded, loud and jolly. “Now try to eat it. This is how I look at food.”

  When Jon heard about what Macklin and Henry had been doing, he asked to tag along for their talks with Michael Cimarusti at Providence and David Myers at his now-defunct dining room, Sona. Before long Jon was an unpaid apprentice in Sona’s kitchen, and Macklin was learning by Cimarusti’s side. As the two boys began cooking meals for friends and family, Macklin started experimenting in the kitchen with Sam, his Hancock Park neighbor, who had his own apprenticeship with Neal Fraser of Grace. Within a few months the two operations merged.

  “See, look how cool,” says Jon’s mother, holding up the magazine article, which has shots of the hunter and roasted pork, but no dead pigs. “This is a vacation you should take. You can get in touch with your inner Michael Pollan.”

  “What?” says Jon, distracted.

  “You haven’t read The Omnivore’s Dilemma?” asks Sam, referring to Pollan’s book, a James Beard award winner that ends with the author trying his luck at hunting and gathering.

  “I did,” Jon says.

  “You didn’t read all of it,” Macklin says with a smile.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “You admitted to me you hadn’t read all of it.”

  “Well,” Jon says, “I read a lot of it.”

  “Jon is dying to kill an animal, which I don’t approve of,” Robyn tells me. “I don’t like the idea of holding a gun and killing anything, to be honest. It goes against my whole belief system, but it’s better than suffering on one of those terrible farms.”

  Often Sam, Macklin, and Jon seem more like they’re members of a teen rock group than three exceedingly capable cooks. One moment they’ll be chomping blueberry Airheads or playing basketball on the Xbox or downloading Toto’s “Africa” from iTunes just to goof on it. The next they’ll be transfixed by a YouTube video of Chicago chef Grant Achatz demonstrating his solid-sauce technique or discussing the radical foraging philosophy of René Redzepi, the chef at Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. Like a band, the boys have given themselves a name: Samacon (Sam, Macklin, and Jon squished together). For their gigs they even bring in backup players—Henry, who’s 17, and another Oakwood friend, Brendan Garrett, who’s 16, to help out as sous-chefs.

  Unlike teen rockers, though, the Samacon chefs have taken up an art form thoroughly rooted in the adult world and have mastered it with an idealism and fellowship that usually disappears with age. They aren’t cocky about their work or egomaniacal—they are constantly challenging each other but never competing for supremacy. I could tell they knew they were good, but they had no way to measure how good. The friends and relatives at their dinners were cheering for them regardless of what came out on the plate, and the chefs they’ve worked for hadn’t tried the boys’ creations.

  So one afternoon over burgers I asked them if they’d like to put together one of their nine-course meals for the chefs they admire most. “It would be nerve-racking,” Jon told me, “probably the most nerve-racking thing we’ve ever done. But it would be amazing if we could cook for great chefs.”

  After wresting a blank check from my editor to pay for ingredients, I asked the boys for their ultimate guest list and began making calls. Five agreed to attend: Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery and Osteria Mozza; Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook of Animal and the recently launched Son of a Gun; Fraser, of Grace; and Ludo Lefebvre, creator of LudoBites pop-up restaurants, an occasional judge on Top Chef, and starting next month, the star of his own reality show on the Sundance Channel. Now all the boys needed to do was pull off the best meal of their young lives.

  A La Carte

  A week and a day before their big dinner, the Samacon chefs gather at Jon’s kitchen table to hammer out their menu. They agree on the squid kimchi amuse-bouche; the scallop with radish and black sesame; the hay-roasted, kale-wrapped pork medallions; and a whiskey-tangerine-nutmeg palate cleanser. Consulting the list in Macklin’s disintegrating Moleskine notebook, they even agree on the raw oyster with bittersweet chocolate—admittedly a risk. They only have to settle on one more entrée. To Macklin, what their meal lacks is a strong narrative, and he has a solution: “Chefs, I think, are less concerned about being served the type of food they might be doing in their own restaurants,” he says. “I feel like a chef’s favorite thing to eat is, like, a roasted chicken or a fatty piece of pork.”

  “That would be so good,” says Sam, his brown eyes almost moistening behind his horn-rimmed glasses. It’s as if he’s just turned 70, not 17, and has bitten into Proust’s madeleine. “My mom makes roast chicken, and then you add quartered sweet potatoes and then potatoes and carrots, and the fat from the chicken soaks them as you’re roasting.”

  “We roast a chicken and bring it to the table,” Macklin says, “and they pull it apart. It’s not like we’re serving people who want everything to be done for them. Chefs love to get involved.”

  Jon is aghast. “We’d have to carve it for them,” he says with the crumpled brow of somebody whose universe is near collapse.

  “N
o, we don’t,” Macklin says. “I see one of the chefs cutting it. It can be a communal thing, and we can even be out there talking because that’s sort of where there’s a little bit of a break in the meal.”

  “Yeah,” says Jon, “but they’re not coming to this dinner for that. They’re expecting teen chefs who’ve worked at some of the best restaurants. I know it’s cool, but there’s no restaurant that has beautiful, sophisticated plating, and suddenly it goes family style and back to beautiful plating. The menu is all about a story, and it has to flow. If it doesn’t flow, the diners are not happy, and they just leave confused.”

  Like many Macklin concepts—the seemingly impossible wheat grass puree he executed for their last dinner, the rosemary soda company that hasn’t gotten off the ground—his homey chicken interlude could lead to counterintuitive triumph or the abyss. Jon brings to the enterprise his expertise in modernism and molecular gastronomy, and Sam, his more traditional approach. But Samacon wouldn’t be what it is without their combined talent for managing Macklin.

  “I believe,” Macklin says, “that doing a dish that’s family style and the most simple, perfect thing in the world would show our reverence for what food is. What food means. The fact that it brings people together.”

  Eventually Macklin loses his ally. “If we’re trying to make the whole meal communal,” Sam says, “then we have to change the entire menu.” Instead they opt for loup de mer, which will evoke the simplicity of country French cuisine, though Macklin has trouble letting go. “I don’t want to argue about roast chicken anymore,” he says. “Because I have very strong feelings about roast chicken. OK?”