Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  “I’m glad that there is one smart person at this table,” says Shook.

  Tentatively the teen chefs peek in, then pull up a few chairs.

  “You’re the calmest cooks I’ve ever seen,” Silverton says. “We think you did . . .”

  “An amazing job,” says Shook.

  “To cook a fish perfectly,” says Lefebvre, “or do a sweetbread perfectly, or cook pork perfectly—that’s not easy.”

  “Everyone at this table was so blown away by the technique that you guys put into the dishes,” says Dotolo, “and the thoughtfulness of them all—even though we all taste the food differently. If you stay in this business, it will constantly happen where some people taste something and they might love it, and some people might hate it, especially if you guys are taking risks, which you’re obviously doing, which is cool. Definitely don’t stop doing that.”

  “We all said that we could have been eating at anyone’s restaurant as a contemporary,” says Silverton. “Anywhere, easily . . .”

  “Now we’re going to do one of the most embarrassing things,” says Shook. “The applause.”

  Slumped in their chairs or over the table, the Samacon chefs absorb it all, exhilarated but beyond exhaustion, their faces still flushed after the clapping dies down. “So,” says Macklin, grinning at the dinner party. “Now are you guys going to cook for us?”

  SUPPER CLUBS IN DENVER

  By John Broening

  From the Denver Post

  Having worked in various big-name kitchens in New York, San Francisco, and Paris, John Broening is now the executive chef of three Denver restaurants, Duo, Olivea, and Spuntino. An ex-English major and son of a foreign correspondent, he keeps his writing skills honed with a weekly column for the Denver Post.

  “If Paul Prudhomme were dead, he’d be rolling in his grave,” says Chris MacGillivray as he seasons his gumbo with a few decidedly nontraditional ingredients: sherry vinegar, agave syrup, and butter.

  The gumbo is a sauce for what MacGillivray calls an “Asian-Cajun dish”—Andouille sausage and shrimp-filled shumai dumplings garnished with a cross-section of fried okra.

  It is the third course of Noble Swine Supper Club’s August dinner, hosted by the owners of Crema, a scruffy luncheonette/coffee shop in the heart of Denver’s warehouse district north of Coors field.

  The Noble Swine Supper Club, a loose collective of line cooks, chefs, managers, servers and sommeliers, has been around since 2010. Liz Batkin, a front-of-the-house manager who calls herself the Club’s “cat herder,” describes Noble Swine as a “floating dinner party.” Batkin prefers to limit the events to about 30 people and mix half regulars with half newcomers.

  Noble Swine events feature place cards with assigned seating (“we aim to inspire unexpected community” the website declares). Democratic, informal, inexpensive to mount, spontaneous, and often wildly varying in quality, supper clubs are the perfect culinary vehicle for the Internet age—they are the culinary equivalent of blogs. Unlike pop-up restaurants, which usually offer an a la carte menu and can run as long as several months, a supper club offers one fixed menu and a single seating. But both formats give otherwise unheralded cooks the opportunity to flex and shine.

  Batkin’s husband, Andrew Van Stee, a slender, bearded wood-oven cook at Potager who helped found Noble Swine, enjoys the freedom to experiment and the freedom from having to run Noble Swine as a for-profit business.

  Traditional restaurant kitchens are usually the expression of the vision and personality of one person and value consistency and obedience to that vision. In a supper club, mistakes, experimentation, involved group discussion, and last-minute, improvisations are not frowned upon but actively encouraged. The menus are, more or less, conceived and executed collectively.

  A group e-mail about the event goes out about two weeks beforehand, listing the date and the site. Previous sites have included warehouses, empty apartments, and backyards. The menu is unknown to the guests until they sit down, but most of the regulars like that just fine. “You’re going out on a limb, but it’s a controlled limb,” says Carl Nixon, a regular who describes himself as an Internet abuse analyst.

  An hour before a recent 7 o’clock dinner, the dining room at Crema is empty of people and furniture. But by 6:30, two folding tables and a few dozen mismatched chairs have been set up, a few rumpled tablecloths have been smoothed out and decorated with clumps of dried lavender, flowering dill and eucalyptus branches. Red-and-white wine glasses are set on the table, flanked by Mason jars for water.

  It’s been a hot day, and by the time the guests start to trickle in, the dining room thermostat reads a sweltering 83 degrees. Andrew Burch, the Supper Club’s sommelier, has toweled off his glistening shaved head and changed his sweat-soaked T-shirt for a marginally dressier plaid button-down.

  Noble Swine does “concept” dinners: a Mexican dinner, a vegetarian dinner, an all-tomato dinner; and the Breakfast for Dinner menu, which featured a now-notorious take on chicken and waffles made with a huge slab of guinea hen. Tonight’s dinner is a market menu, eight courses plus a cocktail, five wines, and coffee for $50.The menu features late-summer fruits and vegetables from the farmers market.

  The vibe in the kitchen is chatty and casual. The food simmers away on makeshift equipment, camping stoves balanced on narrow counters, a three-tiered plastic steamer from Bed Bath & Beyond that looks like something you’d find at a yard sale. Stubby bottles of beer appear on workspaces after the second course goes out. A call for fresh herbs on a chicken liver dish demands a quick foray through a tenant’s apartment to reach herb boxes behind the restaurant.

  Most of the cooks wear street clothes and sneakers. The best-groomed Swiner is the dishwasher, a barista at Crema who works in two-tone wingtips and sports a complicated hairstyle. (“We pay him in high fives and beer,” Van Stee says.)

  The first course is a chilled soup made with Rocky Ford melons, garnished with slivers of yellow Peach tomatoes and shavings of pinkish Coppa salami from Il Mondo Vecchio. The dish pulses with color in the bowl, and on the palate, it tingles with farm-freshness. The soup brings out, surprisingly, the melonlike notes in the tomato. (MacGillivray admits that the combination of melons and tomatoes came from California chef David Kinch.)

  If I’ve had a better restaurant dish in Denver, I can’t remember what it was.

  The chef in me wonders if a few dishes could have been improved by the intercession of a single, authoritative guiding hand. But the batting average is high. Crispy, pungent buttermilk-battered chicken livers with a deeply flavored jam made of heirloom peppers are followed by a moist grilled quail with pickled tomatoes and a sauce made from charred peaches.

  In the long wait between the livers and the quail, BlackBerrys, cellphones, and digital cameras are taken out at the dinner tables. A few of the guests wander over to Crema’s coffee nook, which doubles as the plating area, and chat easily with the cooks.

  Dessert courses appear. A simple, vibrant dish of Red Heart plums marinated in Meyer lemon juice and sweet basil. A rectangle of zucchini cake garnished with pecan praline and brown butter ice cream. The zucchini cake is super-moist and more deeply flavored than most quick breads: Van Stee has replaced the traditional neutral oil in the recipe with cold-pressed hazelnut oil.

  For the Noble Swine Supper Club, this is success—cachet in a small corner of the food world and an opportunity to do the food they want without shortcuts. And enough money to buy equipment and beer and, occasionally, to pay themselves.

  WHY CHEFS SELL OUT

  By Richie Nakano

  From Chow. com

  After several years as a line cook at San Francisco dining hotspot NOPA—a high-octane existence chronicled in podcasts, tweets, and his entertaining blog LineCook415—Richie Nakano launched his own trendsetting noodle shop, Hapa Ramen, a pop-up based at the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market.

  I used to think I was a real cook, legit: burnt arms, late nights, and an unusually high tolera
nce for whiskey. I believed I was part of something, a generational stance on cooking that was a strange mix of punk ethos and military discipline—a savage precision. It felt like the food I cooked was real food. Honest food.

  On any given night you could find me spouting off over a shift drink about all the food world’s bullshit. I would rant about cooking shows I hated, restaurants that were corny, and above all which chefs were sellouts. Guys who pandered to critics made me crazy. And whenever I found myself at another glossy event plating bites of yellowtail crudo, I would scowl and mumble disdain for all the elite foodies I was serving.

  In my days as a line cook there was no degree of compromise I found acceptable. I had come up reading White Heat by Marco Pierre White. Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential informed and usually validated my behavior. Rick Bayless was the crazy guy talking Mexican food in his bathrobe on PBS.

  CHEFS, INC.

  Then came Top Chef and the rise of foodie blogger-ism, Bayless endorsing a shitty chicken sandwich for Burger King, White bending over to do a reality show, and suddenly it was all Bourdain, all the time. Tom Colicchio was hawking Diet Coke, and chefs who’d won James Beard Awards were taking jobs at Chipotle. Just a few weeks ago I saw Thomas Keller (the brand, not the man) in an American Express commercial.

  What does it mean to sell out when you’re a chef? Consulting for a chain restaurant on the side? Sellout. Being slathered in makeup for a TV appearance? Sellout. Pebble Beach/Aspen/South Beach food festivals for the elites? YOU ARE A SELLOUT. And it got worse. Guys I knew who became personal chefs, caterers—they were all compromised. I was righteously purist even with my own kind.

  That is, until I sold out.

  The Fame Racket

  Kitchen lifers are notoriously underpaid. It’s part of the game, what you signed up for. In the beginning, this is fine: You get hooked up at friends’ restaurants, live in a rough neighborhood that compensates with good banh mi. You scrape by. Then you get older. And when a child enters your life, all of a sudden things look very different.

  So when some ad agency for a housewares manufacturer contacted me to appear in a new “edgy” magazine campaign, I listened. They said: Here’s the equivalent of a few months of line-cook wages; all you have to do is fly to New York and have your picture taken for the ads. That’s how I found myself with an endorsement contract in hand, getting caked in makeup for the photos, and plotting out monthly cooking demos I’m legally obligated to do for the next year.

  Back in San Francisco, I ran into a chef I know at a market one day and told him what I’d done. His judgment was quick: “Sellout!” But other chefs—guys who are also dads—they understood. Corporate chefs get to spend evenings home with their kids, make a better life for their families. Shit, with that money I was going to be able to pay off my Diapers. com bill and put some away for the restaurant I’m planning to open. Selling out is always a calculation, a weighing of benefit against cost.

  I have limits. I won’t do any endorsement for food corporations, especially for industrial or fast foods. I refuse to appear at those mega-exclusive events in Aspen and Pebble Beach—I have no idea who those festivals are for, or why they exist.

  But I do know that selling out comes with new responsibilities. Will I totally lose any credibility I’ve built to this point? It’s one thing for an ad executive to look at my tattoos and think I’m edgy; it’s another thing for my food to live up to the hype. The result: I’m under new pressure to be a better chef. The truth is, I took the cash for my kid, but money’s never free. Sometimes the sellout is the realest guy in the room.

  A CHEF’S PAINFUL ROAD TO REHAB

  By Kevin Pang

  From Chicago Tribune

  As the Tribune’s feature writer and Cheap Eats columnist, the prolific Kevin Pang works a dual beat: food and popular culture. Though his approach is usually snappy and humorous, this cautionary tale of a chef’s self-destructive downward spiral reveals the darker aspects of life on the line.

  Here the man falls, all gruff and bravado, falling like a rocket that exploded midflight. One week he’s poised to be the wunderkind chef of a big-time downtown restaurant; the next, he’s slipping away from the success he’d hoped to achieve, falling from the grace he’s yet to taste.

  Brandon Baltzley slides into the middle seat of a taxi. Sitting by the door might give him second thoughts about what he’s about to do. The cab swings out the driveway of the Gold Coast high-rise where his girlfriend lives and onto southbound State Street.

  It is 8:35 a.m. His belly feels scorched from the bottle of Jim Beam and the nearly entire deep-dish pizza consumed the night before, when the thought of the cab ride and where he was heading filled him with such anxiety that he stayed up all night. Arriving at rehab exhausted and hung over isn’t the best idea, but Baltzley has been through this before and is keenly aware of what he is about to face.

  “I definitely don’t want to go,” Baltzley says to his girlfriend, Emily Belden, 24. He exhales loudly, clears his throat. “These 30 days are going to be f———rough.”

  A week earlier, Baltzley, 26, was the head chef at Tribute, an ambitious, 170-seat restaurant set to open in the Essex Inn in the South Loop. He spent months developing his menu, crafting a document to tell the world: This is who I am. Instead, on this morning in late May, he will check himself into a drug rehabilitation program on the Southwest Side.

  The night before, he paid $100 he owed his dealer. He gave his apartment keys to a friend with instructions on locating his cocaine paraphernalia. Throw it all away, he told him.

  In his duffel bag are clothes, two cooking books, toiletries and paper for letters he promised to write Belden every day.

  The pressures of the kitchen drive an untold number of chefs into substance abuse. “Aside from officers and firefighters that put their lives on the line, there’s no other profession that puts demands on an individual and sets (its workers up) so well to fall into substance abuse and failed marriages,” said chef Phillip Foss of the forthcoming El restaurant. “And the vast majority of substance abusers just let it slide.” But Baltzley sought treatment voluntarily, and in the process let go of a high-profile position many cooks would kill for.

  The cab will arrive at the rehab center in eight miles, 26 minutes.

  In the mid-1990s, years before he frittered away what he called his dream job, 9-year-old Brandon needed a stepping stool to reach the kitchen counter. He’d cut corn from the cob, mom would slice cabbage.

  It was the two of them—always the two of them in life—working in The Whistlestop, the cafe Amber Baltzley owned in Jacksonville, Fla., where Baltzley made his first bowl of white corn turkey chowder. His mother sought ways to spend time with her only child and cooking held his attention like no other.

  He was less devoted to his studies, and he dropped out two weeks into high school. Amber Baltzley knew forcing her son to return was a waste of energy, so she cut him a deal: If you don’t go to school, you work full time. By 16, Baltzley was cooking at one of the toniest restaurants in Jacksonville, Stella’s Piano Cafe.

  Baltzley found parallels with cooking and his other love, playing drums. Both provided immediate and intense tactile gratification. For two years he toured with the metal band Kylesa, and he submitted to all the rock star vices—booze, girls, weed, his first line of cocaine. Amber Baltzley first realized her son was dabbling while watching a show. He looked as if he’d been awake for a week, she recalled. After the last song, Baltzley collapsed onto his drums.

  Tired of traveling and eager to cook again, he landed at an Italian restaurant in Savannah, Ga., at 21, but the drug habit lurked. He said he stayed clean in Georgia but lapsed when he moved to Washington, D.C.

  Moving to New York only made things worse. Getting cocaine was as easy as pizza, Baltzley said—you called and they’d deliver in 30 minutes. He was making good money at restaurants like Allen & Delancy and Bouley Upstairs. But the jobs were more pit stops: six months here, nine
months there. On days off, he’d disappear from the world, snorting cocaine alone in his apartment, always fearing the crash that followed the high. In a single four-day binge, he recalled going through $2,000 of product.

  Baltzley was, however, lucid enough to check himself into a rehab facility early last year. He called it the worst 30 days of his life. The withdrawals were hell. His three roommates were legally obligated to be there, he said, and offered no support. And for a chef—the indignity of hospital food! Square slabs of fish served on compartmentalized trays, well, that just put it over the top.

  He emerged a shaken man, with a result that would not hold.

  Three miles, 14 minutes in, the cab turns onto the Eisenhower Expressway on-ramp. He stares down at nothing in particular; Belden is looking out the window. Their arms are hooked at the elbow.

  As Baltzley describes what he’s feeling, the conversation turns to vaccinations, and the feeling of knowing a needle’s coming. How the nurse removes the plastic cap and you catch a glimpse of metal, and every muscle tenses up, and you know the needle’s coming, and your heart’s pounding, and you’re rubbing the tops of your knees for distraction, and still you know the needle’s coming . . .

  “That’s exactly what it’s like,” Baltzley says.

  He sent his resume to Alinea on a whim. Not a chance, Baltzley thought. So when he was hired in September, Baltzley was over the moon. He moved to Chicago, and his trajectory was headed in one direction: to the skies.

  But two weeks after he started at Alinea, his mom’s Jacksonville home was hit by bullets. She lived in a part of town plagued by gang violence. Baltzley flew down to comfort his mother, knowing fully well that if he went home, his old friends would come around, and the urge . . .

  When he returned to Chicago a week later, Baltzley was in bad shape. He’d taken up drinking again. He wrote chef Grant Achatz, and, in one of his most humiliating moments, apologized and said he wasn’t in any state to continue.