Best Food Writing 2013 (7 page)

This ticketing regime can be seen as the ultimate power grab by a chef: the diner is, like a theatergoer, a passive participant in a spectacle he can either like or lump. It's a dream come true for young chefs on tight budgets, to control food costs and be able to collect revenue. It's less dreamy for diners who stubbornly cling to the antique idea of booking a table when it is convenient for them, not for the restaurant, and persist in hoping they won't lose the price of a meal if they need to reschedule.

In Manhattan, at Eleven Madison Park, the four-star successor to Per Se for the mantle of most fought-over chance to spend a lot of money on a meal someone else decrees, the Swiss-born Daniel Humm has acquired a local reputation as exalted as Keller's. Oddly, I found the cuisine itself a half-thought-through version of the kind of high-style, high-tech experimentation Achatz and Keller and others engage in, with immaculate technique but wan flavors and a use of technology that seemed gimmicky rather than creative.

This became worse when Humm changed from a tasting menu with a 4-or 8-course option to a single 15-course menu at both lunch and dinner, supposedly redefining New York City cuisine with elaborate takes on either locally grown foods or dishes associated with the city. Slices of sturgeon were presented in a giant glass cloche swirling with menacing white smoke from applewood charcoal. “Don't lift the glass,” the server warned as she set it down—but later admitted that the fish had been pre-smoked and the show was in fact just for show. The harsh last-minute smoke did lend an urban flavor—as if the fish had come off a New York trash fire. Another server clamped a meat grinder to the side of the table and put into it a long, fat, bright-orange carrot with bright greens attached by a tightly wound yellow elastic band. He tried to deny that the ponytail of greens had been re-attached until he admitted that the carrot, which went through the grinder with suspicious ease, had been simmered with olive oil and salt. This was a version of the steak tartare that, his rehearsed patter informed us with sweeping inaccuracy, every New York steakhouse in the 50s and 60s like Delmonico's (which closed in 1923) and the Four Seasons (which opened in 1959) would serve when you came through the door. He put the bright, insipid gratings onto a wooden plate with a dozen or so shallow indentations filled with seasonings for you to mix in at will—an
inferior mash-up of the famous Noma egg you fry and stir yourself, and the long fat Noma ash-roasted 24-hour carrot that comes to the table looking like a revolting stick of charcoal but reveals a marvelously sweet, custard-like texture and flavor.

The servers had no sense of whimsy or humor about a menu that depends on humor: they almost ran away when we asked for a wine list, and generally seemed terrorized at being overly garrulous, as the estimable restaurant critic Pete Wells had accused them of being in a
New York Times
“Critic's Notebook” that ran immediately after the menu change. You need to like them, and your guests, to endure the meal: we arrived at 1:00 and were not served our last course until a bit before 5:30. At 4:00, a server disconcertingly began visiting every empty table with a white steam iron, to smooth the tablecloths, and by the time we had paid the check, at 6:00, the tables had begun to fill for dinner.

Worse than bad—which most courses weren't, really—the meal was tedious. Certainly, surprise and delight and originality shouldn't be banished. But in meals this long and ambitious you hope to see the soul of the chef—as you do with Keller and Achatz. In only two of the many courses at Eleven Madison Park did I think I saw Humm's: a seafood stew with bits of bay scallop and apple in a sea urchin and squid custard, subtle, simple, and silken; and an elaborately presented, many-days'-process roast duck served with a dish of fantastically clear and intense consommé, both of them strictly bourgeois and rooted in French technique. Both were food to dream of eating again, food that only someone with Humm's training, background, and staff can produce. True, if chefs don't continually re-invent themselves, their food—especially if they traffic in trendy technology—threatens to look as dated as Trotter's nouvelle cuisine. But as one chef or another seizes the international culinary imagination, Humm seems to be re-inventing himself to chase trends, something he's too talented to do.

The trouble is, chefs don't look to be re-inventing themselves as people willing to cede any control to their customers. Young chefs everywhere are adopting the tasting menu as a way to show off and control costs at the same time—and to signify their ambitions. Few
follow the one laudable exception I know: that of Dan Barber, the visionary chef-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an experimental farm and research center on the lavish Rockefeller estate in Westchester. Some years ago he changed to a tasting menu because, he recently told me, “our menu is dictated by what comes in from the farm in the morning. I don't think people realize that not having a menu here isn't a gimmick. Farmers aren't responding to my menu requests. They're leading the dance. Always.”

And fewer still have the talent or artistic vision to sustain a long tasting menu. Trying a diner's patience, though, is an achievement that even a mediocre chef can aspire to. In Somerville, near Boston, the young, self-taught owners of a restaurant called Journeyman made tasting-only menus a part of their business plan, along with the usual local/seasonal/carted-from-the-farm-or-raised-in-our-window-boxes ingredients. When I dined there last year, the inflexibility of the dour, dogmatic servers would have been comical had it not been so infuriating. As more and more restaurants adopt this model, tasting-only menus will empower formerly well-meaning, eager-to-please cooks and servers to become petty despots, and more and more diners will discover that absolute power irritates absolutely.

Service for All!

Even as a new army of fresh-faced Stalins prepares to spread tyranny across the land, at recent dinners at Noma, Next, and even Eleven Madison Park, I saw the seeds of, if not democracy, then perhaps a limited attempt at
glasnost.

At Noma, the diner feels desired and attended to, in a way that comes across as collegial, not obsequious or didactic. A main reason is that Redzepi sends aproned, working cooks to the table bearing dishes. They'll explain as much or as little as you like about what they give you. They make you feel a part of the action, not just the passive subject of it. At the Sicilian-themed dinner I got tickets for at Next, I saw similar glimmerings of a kind of warmth that has never figured in the severely gray-and-white Alinea. To be sure, there were some eye-roll-inducing touches, like the earnest, handwritten notes to each table signed by the chef and the waiters explaining the philosophy of the meal (dictatorships thrive on theoretical manifestos).
But, shocking from a chef whose presentations have been manicured and tweezed, there were also dishes served family-style and looking positively sloppy. It felt a bit forced, like a seersucker-and-bow-tied dandy putting on a dirty T-shirt and torn jeans. But I was heartened by the effort.

As for Eleven Madison Park, it comes across as less forced than Per Se. This is because of its origins as a restaurant in the empire of Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group has democratized service in luxury restaurants much as the Four Seasons did in luxury hotels. Humm also added the Noma-like touch of sending aproned cooks to the tables, and he himself makes the rounds of tables at every meal.

How far will this as yet very modest evolution go? A lot farther, we can hope. No one wants a return to the reign of the smirking, tip-taking, tyrannical headwaiter, who indeed put the needs of the diner first (the needs of the richest and most famous ones, at any rate)—an era defined by Henri Soulé, of Le Pavillon in the 50s and 60s, and Sirio Maccioni, of Le Cirque in the 80s and 90s. Obsequiousness is seldom far from its twin, contempt. But, ah, how nice it would be if at the world's most celebrated restaurants we could get back to the point where the paying customer picks what and how much she or he eats, guided by helpful but not overbearing suggestions as to what a diner might enjoy most.

Could it be that France, the culinary Forgotten Man, the birthplace of haughtiness, will show us the way forward? I recently came upon two signs it could be trying to fight its way back from the unaccustomed gastronomic shadows by adopting an even more unaccustomed humility. One was a radio interview with Jacques Pépin, the masterly, ebullient, encyclopedic teacher and writer on French food in America, who corrected the host when she asked about the chef as artist. “I never equate a great artist with a great chef,” he said with unexpected vehemence. “Food is taste,” not art. “A great chef is still an artisan.” And in an interview with the
Financial Times,
the Michelin-starred, much-admired Parisian chef Alain Passard replied to a question about whether the customer is always right by saying, “Yes, always. I am there to serve others' commands, and I always do what I am asked to do. I put aside my own concerns when faced with
a client who orders a dish cooked a certain way or asks for a certain seasoning.”

Pépin and Passard are not quite waving the bloody banner and crying, “To the barricades!” But if they did, a hungry mob with knives and forks would be right behind.

 

 

I
S
S
EASONAL
E
ATING
O
VERRATED?

By Katherine Wheelock

From
Food & Wine

Food and fashion—and the blurry line between them—are feature writer Katherine Wheelock's main subjects. She has also earned food hipster cred by working at the urban-farm-cum-pizzeria Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and is a co-author of the new Roberta's
Cookbook.

F
or a couple of weeks last winter, I went on a kale-eating spree. I didn't do this on purpose, exactly. I was making my way through a list of newish New York restaurants I wanted to try, or to revisit because fall had surrendered to winter and I knew their menus would have changed. Most of these places had Dickensian names, names broken by ampersands, or names that sounded like old Vermont family farms. Many had menus freshly jotted on chalkboards, the provenance of the main ingredient in each dish noted. And every last one of them was serving a kale salad. Not long into my dining tour, right around the time I confronted a version with apple and dry Jack at a restaurant a block away from where I'd just had a version with apple and cheddar, I began to regard kale salad the way, as a kid, I viewed my mom's second flounder dinner in the same week: with resentment.

My spree came to an end at a perfectly lovely, smart young Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. It's not that I was looking forward to
carciofi
—I knew not to expect out-of-season artichokes at a place known for its market-driven menu. But I didn't expect to be offered a kale salad. I felt betrayed, sitting there on my stool clutching a season-befitting
quince cocktail. I felt like a road warrior so disoriented by sameness, I didn't know what hotel I was in anymore, never mind what city.

What followed my kale bender, as often does benders, was a mild depression. What's wrong with me? I thought. Of all the things to complain about, I was criticizing chefs for systematically removing stringy asparagus from my winter plate and replacing it with the sweetest, tastiest, most environmentally beneficent produce around. The proliferation of seasonally driven menus, albeit a trend mostly still confined to a certain kind of restaurant in a certain kind of town, promised better dining experiences and a smaller culinary carbon footprint for America—a win-win. Come spring, I could count on more chefs than ever to rain morels, fiddleheads and ramps down on me. And I was dreading it.

“I came back from Rome in the spring of 2004 to a rampapalooza,” recalls journalist Frank Bruni, the former restaurant critic for the
New York Times,
reflecting on the early days of seasonal fever. “I remember thinking it was great that chefs were exalting the seasons, but also: Do I need to eat this many ramps?”

I remember those days, too. I was practically braiding ramps into headbands, reveling in Mario Batali's embrace of spring produce, in Dan Barber's more priestly devotion to seasonal ingredients, and in the way powerful tastemakers like these chefs were beginning to alter menus all over New York City. Ramp season—and rhubarb, asparagus and strawberry season—was like Christmas. But then Christmas started coming every day. And even more distressingly, seasonally driven menus began to feel less like a genuine celebration of good ingredients and more like some kind of manifesto. “Ramps speak to a lot of different restaurant vanities right now,” Bruni says. “They have become more of an ideological, moral statement than a gustatory one.”