Best Food Writing 2013 (14 page)

He hopes to work directly with more small farms, to get their products trucked to a central location—an idea not so different from Babin's notion of a food hub. The farmers spend so much of their time farming that they often don't have enough time to spend selling, Von Hengst says. Better that than the other way around, but if there's a centralized source for them and if more restaurants and communities could be exposed to their products. . . .

Here he stops and shares what he hopes is a not-so-crazy dream.

“Bear with me a moment, okay?” All we need to do is connect and organize, he says, and we can turn the local dream into a broader reality. The greatest lesson his work with regional purveyors has taught him is that he wields a power he didn't realize he possessed—a single purchasing decision from Silver Diner, with its volume, can have an
enormous effect on the market. Now, suppose other chains—Applebee's, Chili's, T.G.I. Friday's—were to take his example and replicate it on a national scale.

“The Inn at Little Washington and other restaurants that get their good stuff brought to them at the back door every day—that's great,” Von Hengst says. “But fine dining is only a small segment of our world—a special class of restaurant that can only be reached by a few. Now, imagine the chains getting in on this with all the people they reach every day and all the volume they do in their buying. Can you imagine the impact?”

The triumph of an idea in this country, Patrick O'Connell says, is the mass adoption of that idea—and its inevitable dilution as it's reinterpreted and bastardized. The corporatization that Von Hengst invites me to ponder is the extension of this principle to the extreme. In a sense, the idea of Silver Diner multiplied by tens and even hundreds stands for the nullification of local as many in the movement like to see it, as a celebration of the authentic, the artisanal, the uncorrupted.

I'm not surprised to discover that Silver Diner itself counts few fans among the movement, though I thought some might be more supportive. Tom Meyer of Clyde's Restaurant Group, who is far from a purist, likens Silver Diner's version of local to “putting Tiffany lamps on the salad bar.” It makes the salad bar look nicer, but it forever ruins your image of Tiffany lamps.

That crack is more revealing of the movement's advocates than it is of Silver Diner.

You can say the local movement is about distinctions. You can also say it's about us versus them. You can say it's about spiritual connection. You can also say it's about signifiers of status. You can say it's about doing the right thing. You can say it's about business as usual. You can say there have been great gains in four decades. You can say there remain deep divisions in the food world—divisions the local movement and its advocates were supposed to have paved over. Have and have-not. Foodie and food philistine. Vibrant neighborhoods full of resources and food deserts with precious few outlets for even fresh food.

There's no romance about what Von Hengst is doing. There is realism, however imperfect or impure. A sense—perhaps nascent at
this point, but real—of the truly transformative. A glimpse of a future in which local makes good, at last, on its immense latent promise.

If I am to believe—and I want to believe, I do—it will be in this imperfect realism, grounded in the problems of our world and not in a romantic quest for perfection and purity.

A Critical Palate

 

 

C
ONFRONTING A
M
ASTERPIECE

By Matt Goulding

From
Roads and Kingdoms

A former food editor of
Men's Health
and co-author of the mega-hit
Eat This Not That
nutrition guides, Matt Goulding indulges his wanderlust appetites as co-founding editor of the digital magazine Roads and Kingdoms, a journal of exotic travel, food, political reporting, and music.

I
n a mild state of delirium three months ago, I woke up early, opened up three browsers in each of two computers and an iPad, and began furiously clicking. The screens stalled and sputtered and the spinning wheel of death did its foreboding dance of rainbow doom until it felt like the entire Internet was buckling at the knees. But then, suddenly, the skies parted, the wheel stopped spinning, and a calendar with a single green square popped up on one of the nine browsers. This tiny speck of color represented the most coveted table in the culinary universe. One more click and it was mine: no phone calls, no emails, no press credentials—pure, unfettered egalitarianism.

And so here we are in Copenhagen, 90 minutes from what last week was named “the best restaurant in the world” for the third year running by San Pellegrino-sponsored
Restaurant
magazine. (Only elBulli, Spain's former reigning king, has held the distinction longer.) Exciting, yes, but I'm not buying it for a second. First of all, never trust a food critic. Second of all, never trust a cabal of critics voting on restaurants many have never been to. Momofuku Ssam Bar is a better restaurant than the French Laundry? Not a single Japanese
restaurant in the top 25? These are just a few of the embarrassments of the San Pellegrino list.

But that's not my only source of skepticism. I have read dozens of articles praising Noma's genius, watched global opinion levitate like Apple stock, poured over the Noma coffee table cookbook religiously (cursing the entire time about it being one of the most beautiful and entirely useless texts ever published). It all seems too loose, too ephemeral, as if dinner were being put out by a workshop full of forest nymphs.

And yet, even I find myself using that too convenient shorthand. “Why Denmark?” people ask. “I'm going to eat at the best restaurant in the world,” I say. It's too easy, too definitive, too intentionally provocative.

Let's be clear up front. The world needs lots of things: electric cars, an Israel-Palestine peace accord, another season of
Arrested Development.
One thing the world does not need is another Noma article. I will be the 567th critic to file an opinion about this restaurant. I've started and stopped this paragraph a dozen times, but my fingers keep moving. If you've made it this far, I'm sorry for being another voice in the Noma choir. I just can't help it.

How does one prepare for the best meal in the world? Do you train with buckets of cheap caviar and liquefied foie scraps? Do you risk stomach shrinkage with a full-day fast? Or do you follow the lead of competitive eaters like Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut and Sonya “the Black Widow” Thomas and opt for a strict regimen of cabbage and watermelon, mass without the calories, to keep the stomach limber? Perhaps you simply go about your business and hope you arrive at the table ravenous?

I ate a lamb shawarma next to a table of dopeheads in Christiania around noon. That was the extent of my preparation.

“There are no menus. . . . the first part of the meal will come fast and all of it is meant to be eaten with your fingers.” This is James Spreadbury, tall, handsome, skinny tie, exceptional Aussie accent. Exactly the kind of guy you want waiting for you on the other side of those doors.

1st Course

The meal begins with a few twigs. They've been right there all along, in full camo inside a vase of moss and flowers. Magically a little bowl of crème fraiche appears and we are off. The sticks are made like an eggless pasta and dusted in malt. Washed down with a beer made entirely from birch sap, they taste like dead ringers for real sticks.

2nd Course

A tumbleweed of reindeer moss served on a bed of grass. It weighs slightly more than air and tastes slightly better. And just like that, I feel the pangs of preciousness creeping in already. Am I here to eat or am I here to watch a live performance of Planet Earth?

“I know exactly what you mean. It's like someone is whispering to you but you can't hear it.” No, that's not Nathan, my R&K partner and dining companion for the evening. That's René Redzepi, the man himself, chef and owner—the guy who makes Noma Noma. To be fair, he tells me this long after the meal, in a conversation we have by phone, but he then immediately denies it, saying that “generosity is the key of a meal.” But he understands my concerns, which says something. Maybe.

If you've seen pictures of the food before, you know what I mean: These plates are hyper-manipulated—down to the last tweezer-placed sorrel leaf—to look like some enhanced version of reality. Nature on steroids. It's what a forest floor might look like for two minutes each spring.

5th Course

“Catch them if you can.” It feels like a hollow taunt from the server. After all, it's a mason jar filled with ice. But when you pop the top, there they are, two live shrimp, fresh from a fjord just outside Copenhagen. Every time I make a move, it contorts just enough to throw its body an inch off the ice below. It's still fighting—gently scratching against the roof of my mouth—when my teeth take its life.

“It makes you realize that everything you are going to eat in this meal was alive at some point,” says Matthew Orlando, Noma's head chef, a native Californian, and the guy running our meal tonight. “It's
not just some piece of meat that comes from the butcher or some vegetable that comes from the green grocer.”

At one point, Orlando tells me, 40% of diners at Noma were sending this dish back. Delicious? Sort of. Ballsy? Absolutely.

6th Course

Smoked and dehydrated carrot served on a pitch-black bed of hay ash. “It's how a carrot would taste to a starving man if he found it in the forest, half decomposed, and still loved it.” Nathan, globetrotting gastronome, my color man for the evening.

7th Course

A moment of clarity: a single quail egg, cooked sous vide, pickled in apple vinegar, flecked with crunchy shards of salt. It's served in a giant speckled marble egg in which a milky cloud of hay smoke has been trapped. “We use an electric bong we buy in Christiania,” says the server with an impish smile.

Turns out that he's not just a server; he's the guy personally responsible for cooking the eggs in a 64°C immersion circulator. One of Noma's greatest contributions to the restaurant world has been putting the cooks themselves in the dining room. They arrive in their checkered pants and brown aprons carrying the food they spend a dozen hours a day prepping and cooking. It's not just the fact that they can add funky little tidbits like the bong anecdote, or that they can break the dish and the cooking process down to a molecular level; it's that the enthusiasm over a dish feels more meaningful when delivered by the hands that cooked it.

Over the course of the night we will meet a good portion of the cooking staff as they each hand-deliver their creations. Some blush like beets, others beam like Scotty, but they all know exactly what they're talking about.

8th–10th Courses

Our table is flooded like some great Southern family picnic. You can't drop a fork without landing on something smoked or cured or pickled. “What happens when you go to a nice restaurant?” Orlando explains later. “You sit down and the waiter comes and asks ‘Do you
want this? Do you want that?' Then you sit there and you wait for 15 minutes for something to happen. If something doesn't grab onto you right away, then you lose interest. That's why we just hit you. It's our way of saying ‘this is not going to be a boring meal.'”