Best Food Writing 2010 (17 page)

In mid-February, Dotolo got his hands on a whole lamb from a local purveyor. “I can’t say who, ‘cause it’s not approved, but it’s fuckin’ good,” he said. “It’s all fed on apples and pears and lettuces.” Shook butchered it in the kitchen. They prepared the liver with roasted butternut squash and sage brown butter, and the leg with green-garlic tsatziki, farro, and rutabaga greens. “Now I just have two tenderloins and a neck to use,” Shook said. They served the brain to Rory Herrmann, the chef de cuisine at Bouchon in Beverly Hills, when he came in to eat one night. “I cut the skull open—whack!—with an axe,” Dotolo recalled. “Most guys use a band saw.”

The next day, seven frozen pigs’ heads arrived from Niman Ranch, and the following morning they went into a brine. They were for head cheese, which Shook and Dotolo were taking to a food festival in South Beach. In the afternoon, Shook opened the walk-in cooler and checked on the heads. One, in a pot, was already cooked; it was for the restaurant. “I was talking to my friend Tandy Wilson, at City House, in Nashville. I was, like, ‘Man, your head cheese stays so fuckin’ moist,’” Shook said. “We got real wasted and he said, ‘Boy, the trick is to cook the head and leave it in the pot overnight.’ So we tried it and it worked amazing.”

In the kitchen, Dotolo stood over the cooked head—cartilaginous, magenta, baring its teeth—and rooted persistently around the cheek and neck for the prime bits. “We’re partially professionally trained chefs, partially self-trained,” he said, removing a delicate layer of skin, like a pink satin blanket, and tossing it into a garbage can. Then he tore a hunk of flesh from the jaw and shredded it with his fingers. “It’s a pretty meticulous job,” he said. “Some people don’t see the worth in it. I think of it as the transformation of something you would never eat into something really tasty.”

The food lovers of South Beach were, if not delighted, at least challenged. Shook said that everyone kept saying, “Head cheese? What’s head cheese? Is that like blue cheese?” One woman, when Shook finally had a chance to explain, spat it out on the table and said, “Oh my fucking God, I’ve been kosher for thirty-two years.” Shook giggled, recollecting. “Not any more you ain’t!”

THE SATURDAY of Oscar weekend, the Animal boys had a gig catering a five-hundred-person party hosted by Moët & Chandon to honor the work of a celebrity photographer named Tom Munro. The guest list included Dustin Hoffman, Justin Timberlake, Seth McFarlane, and Garth Fisher, a plastic surgeon to the stars. Shook arrived at the venue, a gallery on Melrose Place, at four, wearing shorts. Out front were a red carpet, a disco ball, and moveable hedges; a decorator was tacking faux greenery to the lintel. The kitchen, in the back alley, consisted of a fryer and a grill underneath a tent, next to a Dumpster.

“Want to go on a long walk off a short pier?” Shook asked two of his line cooks, when they had finished setting up. He grabbed a lighter and the three of them set out jauntily down the alley.

An hour before the party, it was pouring rain, and Shook was in high gear, prepping food; interviewing the line cooks about their outfits, with an imaginary microphone; and dealing with the Fire Department. “You guys hungry?” he asked the inspectors, when they came to check out his set-up. They looked dubious—open fire, tent, gas tanks—until he fed them each an heirloom carrot coated with clarified butter and dipped in rye-bread crumbs, causing them to smile and go away.

Planning the party, the coordinator from Moët had specified an all-male serving crew: “Tall, handsome, good-looking
dudes
.” Alex Meyer, a promising young line cook, showed up, dressed in black on black, to work as a waiter. He hit the floor carrying a tray of meatballs. Two made-up blond women cut through the crowd to reach him. “You’re killing us,” one said. “I’m not going to fit into this dress anymore.” Victoria Keon-Cohen, an Australian model in town for a few months, popped a beer-battered squash ring, which she mistook for calamari, in her mouth. She said she was working to promote the cause of models eating, and speared a meatball from a passing tray.

At nine-twenty, a black Escalade appeared in the alley, and Madonna got out, wearing dark glasses. Twenty minutes and no hors d’oeuvres later, she was back in the Escalade. The cooks congregated at the mouth of the tent to have a look. One of them, Carlos, asked who she was. A line chef filled him in, and Carlos looked baffled. “The singer, not the mom of Jesus,” the line chef said.

Back at the restaurant, Dotolo, in a camouflage hunting cap, was expediting orders from the kitchen. Just before midnight, Mario Batali came in with the chef Nancy Silverton, with whom he owns Osteria Mozza, a popular local restaurant. They were accompanied by Mozza’s wine director, pastry chef, and sous-chef, and by a mixologist, a magician, and two musicians, one of whom was Mike Mills, the bassist of R.E.M. It was Batali’s first time at Animal, and he was famished, having just come from cooking at a party for
Vanity Fair
advertisers. “Is there anything we shouldn’t miss?” he asked the waiter. “The pork belly,” the waiter replied.

“Five of those,” Batali said.

“The poutine.”

“Like the fries with the fat gravy? We’ll take five.”

“Five?” someone at the table said, alarmed.

“Shut the fuck up. O.K., three,” Batali said, and glanced at the menu. “And two pig ears, two gnocchi, two sweetbreads, two quail, two fluke, and then, after
that
, two crispy rabbit legs, two pork ribs, two flat irons medium rare/rare, two veal breasts—what’s loco moco? Two-a them. And I don’t want any fuckin’ vegetables.” He took a swig from an open wine bottle.

In the kitchen, Dotolo slumped intently over the salad station, strewing balsamic onions over chicken-liver toast. To Batali’s order, he added everything else on the menu. Shook took over expediting, and told the cooks to fire the ears, fire the quail, fire the sweetbreads and poutine. Dotolo looked up testily from his ministrations; he didn’t want there to be too much food on the table at once. “Just ‘cause you’re hungry, doesn’t mean we have to fuckin’ kill ‘em,” he said. But Shook ignored him, and killed them anyway.

SWEET LIFE

By Francis Lam From
Gourmet

A former
Gourmet
contributing writer, now the food editor for
salon.com
, Lam combines curiosity, enthusiasm, and stealthy wit. As a CIA-trained chef himself, he gives us a unique chef’s perspective on the process of developing the menu for a hot new L.A. restaurant.

T
heir Los Angeles restaurant, Street, is just weeks from opening, and Susan Feniger and Kajsa Alger are living the dream: wrangling with contractors, getting permits, and reporting break-ins. So this weekend, they’re unwinding by trashing Feniger’s house—breaking cupboards, warping wallboards, burning holes in the upholstery. The crash and bang of professional cooking does not enter the home quietly, and these two are cranking out recipes, testing and tasting and retesting them for their menu.

“Tomorrow we’re testing food and beer; Sunday it’s Champagnes, liquor, and food,” Alger told me with military precision when I met her. Then she smiled. “It always sounds so organized when I talk about it. But when we’re three cocktails in, not a lot of food happens.”

I’m up in the hills of L.A., in Feniger’s home, learning how the two partners decide what goes on the plate and which plates go on the menu. Because a menu is a funny thing. When you’re at the table, with a drink in your hand and hunger in your belly, its purpose is obvious. For a chef, however, it might be a statement of vision or a document of her past. For the kitchen, it’s a plan for how to use precious space and manpower. For the accountant, it’s all numbers: What’s going to sell well enough to keep the lights on? As chefs and owners, Feniger and Alger have to look at every dish from all of these angles, and so, as with all your favorite movies and all your favorite records, lots of ideas get left on the cutting room floor.

Like the hot dogs. A street-food-inspired restaurant should have some hot dogs on offer, right? So Alger did some research, which is to say she ate 42 hot dogs in one brutal day in Chicago, and followed that up with a 30-dog day in L.A. She and Feniger then developed enough hot dogs to occupy a whole section of the menu, only to realize (eventually) that, you know, people might not want to come to your restaurant and spend more than $2.50 on a hot dog. So they ditched them. The lesson: When writing your menu, be sure that you know your price point and your clientele’s perception of value. And, apparently: Be ready to sacrifice your life for your restaurant.

The hot dogs were a dalliance they thought better of. But sometimes they’ll fall a little in love with something even if they know they shouldn’t. Alger takes leaves of collard greens and carefully cuts circles out of them while Feniger chops piles of limes, chiles, dried shrimp, coconut, and ginger and pulls out bowls of roasted peanuts and tamarind caramel made earlier. The Thai Bites are becoming unwieldy, each component crowding the cooler in its own container. And I imagine the poor pantry cooks, every time an order comes down, having to whip out all this stuff and arrange it neatly in ramekins as Alger was doing. Feniger smears a collard round with caramel, wraps it around the fillings, tries one, and offers it to me. Her eyes widen with excitement behind her Bunsen Honeydew glasses, and her words purr and gear up before being blurted out. “Ffffffabulous!” she says. It’s sweet, sticky, salty, sour, hot, and wild; crunchy and cool and sharp and round. It’s crazy, and it shows on my face. Alger nods. “It takes up too much time and space, but it’s worth it. We’ll just have to drop two or three things from the menu so we can keep this one on,” she says.

But it’s not always the needs of the restaurant that dictate a dish. Sometimes, a dish can dictate the restaurant.

Twenty-five years ago, before she had four restaurants, before she had cookbooks and TV shows as one of the Too Hot Tamales, before she had managers and accountants and assistants, Feniger was just a young chef visiting a friend in India. He took her to a small village, where women offered them a dish of tapioca, chewy and sticky, festooned with pungent spices and
neem
leaves. It wasn’t delicate, it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t anything like the French cooking that she had trained for and maybe even understood. But in that moment, with those people, it was everything she wanted to eat, the most serendipitous and yet fundamental of shared experiences.

So when she decided that she wanted to see if she could go back to scratch and start a new restaurant on her own, without the whole apparatus that she and business partner Mary Sue Milliken had built up over the years, Feniger went back to India. She ate from 8 a.m. through midnight for 14 days, until she came back to that village. Those women were still there, making that dish, and Feniger decided Street would be where she would share those memories, those flavors you find when in a community that is not your own but that, with a bite or two, might become a little more so. “The thing with street food,” Feniger says, “is that it’s not food created for carts or trucks. It’s food that came out of someone’s home.” No wonder, then, that people take their street food so personally. It’s iconic; it’s their culture.

“But how do you make sure your dishes are true to those cultures ?” I ask. The easy answer is that Feniger and Alger called in ringers, experts who could train them in the flavors and techniques of cuisines they didn’t know firsthand. But it’s bigger than that. Alger is thoughtful, excited and challenged by this question, and finally says that the lines she won’t cross are felt rather than delineated. They made Korean-style dumplings, for instance, flavored with cilantro. They loved them but couldn’t find any cilantro in Korean cooking, so they dropped them, too. “The more we learn about these cuisines, the harder it gets,” Alger says. “At first I might think, ‘Let’s do a stir-fried noodle dish.’ And then we’d cook with a master who shows us twenty different variations, and all of a sudden something called ‘stir-fried noodles’ just sounds so amateurish. So we pick one and learn to nail it and it looks and tastes and sounds great, but now the kind-of-lame dishes we had penciled in next to it on the menu sound totally ridiculous.”

But there’s one dish they feel they’ve nailed for sure. Alger draws me to the stove and shows me a bowl of tapioca balls soaking in water. She fires up a pan, gets some ghee good and hot, pops some spices and chiles, and stirs in the starchy pearls. “When I first tried to make this, I was trying to chef my way through it too much,” she says. It was looking too gluey, so she tried to sear it with high heat, but it became weirdly chunky. For this dish, she had to learn to cook against her instinct, to let it ride the way Feniger suggested, to let it get mushy, sticky, tacky. Alger hands me and Feniger spoons. It’s like chewy butter, heat and cumin and grassy herbs. “Prrrrretty nice,” Feniger says. She takes another bite. “Mmm! That’s rrrrreally good.”

The women pause to notice the sun going down, the light so low, so directed, so yellow and beautiful. We go outside to take a break and marvel, and Feniger’s cat Squirt takes advantage of our distraction to nuzzle her nose right into a big bowl of bacon. They start to freak out. Then they stop and look at each other. “Do you . . . care?” Alger asks.

“Well . . . as long as we’re not serving it to patrons,” Feniger laughs. There are no health inspectors in the living room. This isn’t Street food quite yet.