Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  At the restaurant, they make everything from scratch. They bake bread, they can tomatoes, they make pasta. Janos changes the menu every day. Twice a day, before lunch and dinner, he takes a handwritten menu to the copy store, where he uses a typewriter to type the menu before making photocopies.

  After five years in Tucson, Janos and Rebecca start taking Ben hiking in the Tucson Mountains, and Janos begins to fall in love with the desert. He is introduced to Native Seeds/SEARCH, still a new organization focused on saving seeds of desert-adapted plants. He is asked to cater a fundraiser dinner, which he does using only foods sourced from Native Seeds/SEARCH. He begins to connect with the stories of the foods that have grown in the Sonoran Desert for thousands of years—tepary beans, cholla buds, chiles. He describes this as “a window, a portal, a door opening.”

  By the age of 30, Janos has spent half his life in the kitchen. His palate is developed; his technique is honed. The flavor profiles of the desert Southwest begin to collide and intersect with his French technique. He studies regional dishes of the Southwest as though they are science projects—chilaquiles, tacos, enchiladas. He takes the chile relleno and reverse engineers it, questions how and why it is prepared the way it is—the batter, the type of chile, how it’s roasted. And then he rebuilds it.

  He stuffs Anaheim chiles with lobster and brie. He covers it in French sauce. He pairs it with jicama salad. He makes taco shells out of egg roll wrappers. He infuses it with place: his California childhood, a visit to Tokyo with his parents, the mountains of Colorado, the French countryside. “I’m a guy that has tremendous respect for what’s come before me,” he says, “but tremendous respect for what’s possible.”

  In the spring of 2010, Janos is planning the menu for Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails, set to open in October. At the end of April, Governor Jan Brewer signs Senate Bill 1070 into law, which sets off widespread protests against the anti-immigrant legislation. At Armory Park, just one block from the new restaurant, thousands of people gather to protest the law. Janos feels compelled to make a statement against SB 1070, and the new menu is the perfect vehicle. Since his youth, he has experienced the power of protest and the power of food—how it defines home, and how it returns us there, despite time, borders, or miles traveled through the desert.

  Let’s do American food, he thinks, But let’s do real American food. And so the menu is born, an eclectic mix of worldwide cuisines, full of the foods that follow people as they migrate, dishes that serve as “touchstones to home.”

  By now, Janos is conditioned to change. In 1995, he opened Wild Johnny’s Wagon, a food truck enterprise well before the era of food trucks. In 1998, Janos relocated to the scenic Westin La Paloma. J Bar was created in the same location in 1999. In 2002, Janos spearheaded Kai at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa in Phoenix. And in 2010, Janos returned to downtown Tucson to open Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails.

  There is a fire in Janos that keeps him dreaming and creating. Perhaps it’s this same fire that has made him a self-professed browbeater in the kitchen. Janos admits to having developed a chef’s temperament that he is not entirely proud of. He wants his employees to be great, and cannot understand why anyone would give less than their best. Now, he says, he has softened, perhaps with age, and “would rather inspire people by appealing to their highest selves.” Time has also decorated him with numerous awards and recognitions, including a James Beard Award for Best Chef of the Southwest, the MOCA Local Genius Award, and acceptance into the Arizona Culinary Hall of Fame. He is chairman of the board of Native Seeds/SEARCH.

  The Carriage House is the latest of Janos’ endeavors. A culinary teaching and event space, The Carriage House is the manifestation of a decades-long dream of integrating education and cooking. In October of 2014, Janos was walking back to his restaurant from a meeting when he noticed a 1917 brick building in the alleyway directly behind Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails. He contacted the building’s owner immediately. The design process began in May of 2015; construction began in October. In order to function as a restaurant, the space required new plumbing, grease traps, sewer connections, new electrical, gas lines, hoods, and extra ventilation.

  “After so many moves, you gain perspective that everything will be all right, but you don’t take that for granted by any means,” Janos says. “It’s exciting, but there are times when the stress just mounts. It doesn’t all go perfectly. Things come out of left field that you had no expectation of.”

  In February 2016, The Carriage House finally opens. On a Sunday afternoon, Janos hosts a Friends & Family Dim Sum event, which happens to fall on his mother’s 87th birthday. As she sits with Rebecca, Ben, and other family members, Joyce Wilder watches her son move around the room, greeting the many friends and colleagues who have come to celebrate his latest endeavor. The dining room is expansive, with high ceilings and exposed beams. Bartenders pour mimosas and servers push rolling glass carts filled with plated food. At the end of the meal, Janos surprises his mother with a birthday cake. His voice wavers as he honors the woman who inspired his love of cooking. She stands, tears in her eyes, and embraces her son. Nearly 60 years after they danced to Frank Sinatra in their East Palo Alto kitchen, the cooking space belongs once again to this mother and her son.

  Promised Land

  BY TIENLON HO

  From the San Francisco Chronicle

  Bay-Area writer Tienlon Ho writes about food, culture, and the environment, a trifecta of interests that naturally pair with farm-to-table dining. But is farm-to-table a true movement, or just a fad? For a young couple opening a much-anticipated new Sonoma restaurant, the query is anything but academic.

  For the last two years, the buzz has been streaming in from both sides of the Pacific about Single Thread, a farm, restaurant and inn in Sonoma County. Even when it was just an empty building off Healdsburg’s downtown square and 5 acres of weeds a few miles north, it was already being talked up as “the most highly anticipated,” “most important restaurant” headed by “the best chef you’ve never heard of.” It has been regularly mentioned alongside veritable institutions such as the French Laundry, Manresa and Blue Hill in New York.

  If all goes accordingly, Single Thread will finally serve its first guests, at a price of $294 each, at the end of November.

  No fewer than 250 well-publicized restaurants opened in the past year in the Bay Area, each trying to distinguish itself with some form of farm-to-table fare, although for most that means simply sourcing from the California growers we are so lucky to live nearby. In comparison, Single Thread has all the trappings of a PR coup: the farm, a dedicated R & D kitchen, a full-time forager, cooks and servers fresh from stints at three-Michelin star restaurants in San Francisco, New York, Copenhagen and Tokyo. There is a cement fermentation tank in the dining room for guest vintners, plus custom ceramics by obscure artisans, a rooftop garden and tasting menus of California cuisine with strong Japanese and French influences.

  The setup is so perfect that it would be reasonable to deem Single Thread as just another play for the deep pockets of the food-obsessed—that is, until you meet Kyle and Katina Connaughton, the utterly unpretentious and earnest couple behind this most hyped of hyped openings.

  “It certainly is a lot of pressure, isn’t it?” Kyle admits when you bring all this up. “But the biggest pressure is knowing that people on our team have moved here from all over the world to help us do this.”

  And this is when you begin to understand, despite all the hype, how very personal this venture actually is. It is, in many ways, a culmination of their professional lives.

  Its germ was planted in Kyle’s childhood over tuna rolls in Los Angeles sushi bars with his dad, who sold gymnastics equipment in Japan. But the idea sprouted in 2000, when Kyle took Katina on her first trip there. The two met in their early teens at a Face to Face punk show in Southern California. Since then, they’ve never left each other’s side, through Kyle’s early stints in pastry at Spago Beverly Hills and the Ritz-Carlt
on, sushi at Hama Sushi in Venice, then working with Suzanne Goin at Lucques and AOC, and Michael Cimarusti at Water Grill. Katina cooked, too, in a bakery, at home for the couple’s two daughters, and alongside Kyle when he needed.

  In Kyoto, Japan, they stayed in old ryokans, roadside inns from the era of traveling merchants and samurai, where dinner and breakfast were cooked with ingredients plucked from surrounding fields. The most elaborate meals were in the form of kaiseki, a progression of courses that celebrate the seasons, where everything from the condensation on a bowl to the order of each dish’s arrival symbolizes something in nature. In the 1970s, kaiseki so inspired great French chefs such as Paul Bocuse that they created modern degustation menus, the signature of Western fine dining we all recognize today.

  “With kaiseki, the menu can never be the same as it was the day before,” says Kyle. “It reflects that particular moment and place.” Someday at his own restaurant, he decided, he would only cook with ingredients at their peak of flavor.

  For Katina, dinner in the ryokans was theater, but breakfast was something else. “When you are just starting your day, you are in a vulnerable mind-set, not fully dressed or pulled together, needing to be nourished and cared for,” she says. She wanted to find a way to introduce restaurant guests to omotenashi, the utmost of personal and dedicated hospitality that she and Kyle experienced every morning. She thought then that their restaurant should have guest rooms, and to do that right, they would need a farm.

  But first, Kyle wanted to learn more. He accepted an invitation to cook for Michel Bras, the influential French chef and vegetable master, at Toya in Japan, up north on the Hokkaido tundra. For three years, Kyle’s main task was to execute Bras’ signature gargouillou dish, which required wandering the countryside, rooting for the 30 or so distinct greens, herbs, flowers and vegetables that compose the dish, then preparing each in its own way, and finally, setting them in delicate postures, like a salad plated by God. On off-days, he apprenticed in local kitchens learning more about sushi, soba and kaiseki.

  Meanwhile, Katina was studying sustainable Japanese farming techniques, spending the girls’ school hours on strawberry farms, picking up the techniques she might someday sow into her own land. In the winters, the Connaughtons gathered around donabe, clay pots that braise, stew, steam or smoke whole meals while warming everyone nearby. (Kyle co-authored a book on donabe last year.)

  But they delayed their plans when celebrated conceptual chef Heston Blumenthal called with an offer to Kyle to head the Fat Duck’s experimental kitchen in the village of Bray in the English moorlands. Starting in 2006, Kyle oversaw the development of some of the restaurant’s most iconic dishes and techniques, including “granulated” beef, a method of neatly arranging the strands of ground meat for extra tender burgers; the Sound of the Sea, where ocean waves conveyed by an iPod in a conch shell were designed to enhance the flavors of seafood atop edible sand; and even a gilt “pocket watch” that the Mad Hatter might fancy—one that melted into a veal consommé, a recipe that took 18 months of iterations to realize.

  In the summers, Kyle and Katina came home to California and found themselves regularly in Sonoma and Napa counties, where they met kindred spirits among the growers and winemakers. They scouted for the right plot for the project there, for years watching deals fall through, until finally in 2014, they heard the Seghesio family might make available their building on the site of Healdsburg’s old post office and a sizeable corner of a fallow vineyard.

  By then, the Connaughtons felt more than ready. Supporting Blumenthal at the height of his fame, Kyle says, taught him about the motivations that drive a chef in the long run. After topping out on Michelin stars and the World’s 50 Best list, “Heston said it best—accolades like those are a pat on the back and punch in the stomach. There’s nowhere to go but down,” Kyle says. “So the only thing you can ever do is to cook authentically, take creative risks and hope the rest follows.”

  Kyle says his mentor also taught him how innovation depends on each member of the team feeling free to exercise their own expertise. In developing dishes for the Single Thread menu, for instance, he often calls upon each cook to prepare his or her own take.

  Innovation can spring from anywhere this way, including the farm, which is Katina’s domain. Katina plots the plantings for the year broken down into 72 seasons, which breaks down to five-day increments of peak freshness. There are perhaps only five days for a certain variety of negi (leek-like onions), longer for the squashes. Katina sits in bed most nights reading seed catalogs and tracking climate and growth in an almanac of sorts on Google Drive. (“She’ll ask, as I’m falling asleep, whether I’d be interested in purple something-or-other,” Kyle says.) By day, she moves earth in a wheelbarrow bigger than herself.

  “I can’t say that all the varieties are so different to me flavorwise,” she acknowledges. “I grow them because they are each distinct to Kyle. I love that man so I grow him negi!” (Currently, six varieties.)

  While it took more than a year of tilling and growing cover crops to get the farm back in shape, Katina’s beds are so prolific that with the restaurant yet to open, colleagues at other restaurants have been benefiting from gift baskets. The cooks have been practicing dealing with overabundance, too, using whatever is ready in a regular series of test dinners for friends and investors. (Single Thread’s backers include Tony Greenberg of UPVentures; Plan Do See, which owns Omotenashi Hotels in Japan; and numerous local private investors.) Pastry chef Matt Siciliano says resourcefulness is so important here that when Kyle interviewed him for the job, he asked, “How would you feel if a bunch of peas came off the farm right now?”

  Though guests are welcome to visit, the farm isn’t for show. It will supply the restaurant with about 70 percent of its produce needs, mostly Asian varieties of greens like mizuna, mitsuba, tatsoi and specialty herbs like okahijiki (saltwort) that are difficult to source—plus plenty of eggs for breakfast, Katina adds.

  “We don’t plan on growing everything ourselves when we live in such a rich agricultural community with generations of farmers who do what they do so well,” she says. She cites Bernier Farms, a Geyserville allium specialist since the mid-1970s. Not only can Bernier grow masses of quality onions, the growers there were excited to respond to cooks’ specifications, like blanching a crop under soil mounds as they grow so the leaves will be pale and superbly tender.

  That leaves room for Katina to experiment with varieties uncommon in the Bay Area. Along a deep bend of the Russian River, which runs along the farm, she has a crop of myoga (ginger) adapting to the Sonoma heat. In the greenhouse, thick hedges of shiso varieties are thriving. They bolted up so fast, in fact, that the leaves are now too tough for the cooks to use. Rather than waste what was already grown, she took the problem to the research and development team.

  The R & D team is officially Pilot, a food lab in a low-slung house just a 10-minute stroll from the restaurant and four blocks from Kyle and Katina’s home. Kyle founded Pilot in 2014 with Ali Bouzari, a food biochemist; Dan Felder, the former head of the Momofuku Culinary Lab; and Dana Peck, a lawyer who specializes in startups. Besides supporting the restaurant, Pilot develops food products and hones the methods to make them for private clients. Among their early projects were cricket-flour energy bars and a specialized Dremel saw that slices through an eggshell in seconds.

  For Katina’s shiso leaves, Bouzari and Felder tested various methods of pickling and lacto-fermentation to see which countered the toughness while preserving its minty flavor, eventually settling on a straight salt brine.

  The challenges the Single Thread cooks bring the Pilot team run the gamut. When Kyle came with an idea to serve the 11 opening canapes in a way reminiscent of the formal opening course in kaiseki, where little bites are arrayed on a wooden platter, Felder headed to the woodshop to carve insets in planks of raw-edged redwood, adding lichen and moss as cover to make the experience like a treasure hunt in a Sonoma forest. Another week, the
cooks wanted a lower-fat ice cream that retained its smoothness.

  “Other ideas come from living in a beautiful place where delicious things just fall off trees,” Peck says. A couple months ago, loquats were ripening all along the neighborhood streets, so the team picked buckets full and cured them like olives, making “oliquats,” sweet and briny explosions of flavor.

  Between all this, the Pilot team has been consumed for the past six months with creating a bread course for the restaurant. In Western tasting menus, bread is a traditional transition from small bites to the heart of the meal, but for Single Thread, Kyle wanted a new approach.

  The team liked the idea of osembei, thin rice crackers. Instead of mostly rice, Bouzari (whose doctoral thesis earned him the moniker Dr. Potato) proposed a blend with potato starch broken down to a creamy texture with diastatic malt powder. There were troubles with flavor (too much like Pringles) and fleeting crunchiness. They tried molding them in pastry chef Siciliano’s old stove-top pizzelle iron. They played with ratios of starches; temperatures; and other molds, tracking more than 80 iterations until last week when everyone agreed they had a winner. With the recipe set, Kyle and chef de cuisine Aaron Koseba are working on service details, such as how to keep the crackers warm long enough to survive guests caught up in conversation (the current plan involves a bed of heated obsidian and loosely woven cloth).

  All this was just for the interlude between the third and fourth courses, which probably strikes anyone outside fine dining as borderline obsessive. In explaining the motivation behind six months of work, Kyle distilled it to this: “We just didn’t want to destroy appetites with an ‘Oh my god, I ate too much bread’ moment.”