Best Food Writing 2014 (38 page)

“People can spend $3 on a big-arsed jar of Smucker's jam or they can pay $14 for my artisanal jam made by hand with the best ingredients I can find,” she says. “There are people who can see and taste the difference and are willing to pay for that. But I'm not going to win over the people who spend $3 for jam.”

Talk of the price of labor makes Techamuanvivit prickle; she's hiring and service workers applying for positions have been open about earning less than minimum wage and no overtime at other area Thai restaurants. “It's appalling,” she says. “If you pay $5 or $6 for a bowl of curry or pho you have to understand what you are complicit in. It's not just the cheap ingredients. It's cheap labor too.”

The new restaurateur also notes that at many area Thai or Chinese restaurants diners will find the same menu made from convenience products, such as premade curry pastes, sourced from the same distributor. Unsurprisingly, much of it tastes the same, she says.

“We have people come in, look at the menu and they say to us, ‘What, you don't have any tom kha gai?' and we suggest the restaurant
across the street. The price is right and it's the food they're familiar with and want to eat. It's a generic Thai restaurant; it's not bad, but it's not doing anything different and that's not what I'm interested in.” That well-known Thai soup sets customers back $8.50 at that particular place.

Kin Khao is striving to make a splash. “I wanted to open a restaurant and cook the food that I wanted to eat: Thai food with the quality of ingredients that I'd find at the Ferry Building farmers market,” says Techamuanvivit. “This is not a place where the menu invites you to pick a protein and a carbohydrate and you tell me how spicy you want it. That's not our kind of food.”

And so far—at press time the restaurant had been open about a month—diners have been lining out the door.

“I thought I might have an uphill battle with my menu but that hasn't been the case,” she says. “I'm happy to be in San Francisco; I don't have to really explain why we're doing what we're doing. The people who come to the restaurant just get it.”

Perhaps no one is as well equipped to see both sides of this equation as Gonzalo Guzman, the chef at Nopalito, who immigrated from Veracruz, Mexico, to San Francisco in 1997. He came here hungry for work and looking for culinary experience. He landed a job in a kitchen, washing dishes in exchange for food. From there, he gradually worked his way up the kitchen hierarchy, accumulating an impressive resume along the way with stints at restaurants like Kokkari, Boulevard and Nopalito's sister restaurant, Nopa.

Now, he oversees two Nopalito locations, in NoPa and the Inner Sunset, where his carnitas, pozole and mole (27 ingredients) receive rave reviews. Guzman learned about the importance of the pedigree of raw products at Nopa and applies that sensibility to his regional Mexican cuisine. The masa for tortillas and tamales comes from house-ground organic corn. Chorizo sausage and queso fresco—also in-house. This is not a burrito joint but a celebration of slow-cooked rustic dishes from south of the border featuring complex, layered flavors that's a rarity even in the Bay Area. And the most expensive items on the dinner menu cost 18 bucks.

Guzman got his big break as a restaurant chef when he was tasked with preparing the evening family meal for the staff at Nopa, fashioning
craveworthy dishes made with leftovers and lots of heart. Let's give him the last word.

“There's a lot of labor going on in our kitchens; everything is fresh, organic and made from scratch,” he says, echoing his fellow chefs. “I'm trying to bring the authentic flavors from my country and represent home-style Mexican food in ways I don't see happening much here and I'm doing it with the best ingredients available. I'm grateful that the people who come to eat in our restaurants see the value in that.”

S
herry Yard is large in personality and small in stature. Blond, Brooklyn-born, 5 feet 2 inches tall, Yard is one of the most respected pastry chefs in the country and, in her trademark bubble gum–pink coat, one of the easiest to spot. But standing in the gaping 4,000-square-foot space at the Helms Bakery complex that soon will house her new venture, Yard looks especially small, and her personality seems especially large. Because what she's talking about, what she envisions for this giant empty space, is one of the most ambitious food projects in L.A. history.

Best known as the longtime pastry chef at Spago, Yard worked for 19 years with Wolfgang Puck in that restaurant's kitchen, and also on many other projects in his massive restaurant empire. In that time she wrote two cookbooks, won a James Beard Award and mentored or influenced an entire generation (or three) of pastry chefs, who now fan out all over the world.

She is finally striking out to do something of her own. With Sang Yoon, chef and owner of Lukshon and Father's Office, Yard is planning to redefine the old Helms Bakery complex.

Next January, Sherry Yard will turn 50. Her gift to herself will be Helms Hall and Bakery.

•

In an industry where male chefs who work with savory ingredients get the lion's share of the glory, Los Angeles is somewhat unusual. There is a strong maternal line in the history of our best chefs and restaurants, and it goes right back to the pastry kitchen at Spago.

Spago's first pastry chef was Nancy Silverton, who went on to open La Brea Bakery and Campanile with then-husband Mark Peel and, after that, her Mozza empire with Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich. Later, in the Spago kitchen, Sherry Yard trained an incredible number of chefs, from Karen Hatfield, who now owns and operates Hatfield's and Sycamore Kitchen with her husband, Quinn Hatfield, to Food Network personality Giada De Laurentiis. It's hard to find a well-regarded chef in L.A. who didn't go through the kitchens of Spago or Campanile, and harder still to find one who wouldn't admit to being influenced in some way by Silverton and/or Yard.

You could read up on all of Yard's accolades, her many awards, her best-selling cookbooks, her badass reputation. But what might be more illustrative, what might give you a better idea of why she has all these accolades, would be to spy on her at the farmers market as she talks to a farmer about Ring of Saturn peaches.

Yard: “You only have three cases? I want all three.”

Farmer: “No, you can only have one. I need to save some for the other chefs.”

Yard, in the tone of a hustle, quick-tongued, full of passion and bravado: “No, no, you can have all of them. Keep them. Tell me the person that's going to do something better with them than me. He can have them; she can have them. But if you say sorbet, pie, cobbler or crisp, they're automatically out. Because how could they not respect the fruit? How could you not look into it and say, ‘What is it meant to be?' ”

She picks up a peach and pries it open. She talks about its perfume; how, at this point in the season, it doesn't smell like almond. It's too young, so it smells like pistachio. She says she'll take the peach and blanch it, dip it in flour, then dip it in egg, then dip it in biscotti crumbs because they have pistachio and anise in them. She'll bake them in the oven, to order.

She gets all three cases.

•

The first time you eat a Sherry Yard dessert, the experience may be somewhat stupefying.

You may have heard of Yard's raspberry chocolate-chip soufflé at Spago, but you'd still be unprepared for the almost childish sugary glee of it, the hot pink mousse-y interior, the melted chocolate, the extra chocolate sauce poured over this insane, puffy ode to sugar. This is dessert with a point of view, but it's the antithesis of the self-serious architectural creations offered by other famous pastry chefs. There's no turning away from the idea that dessert is meant to be fun, that at its heart it's an indulgence and therefore shouldn't become too solemn. This is a celebration of the part of us that, as children, would have risked life and limb—or at least stern punishment—to get our hands on that sweet sticky stuff, and it is the purest expression of that notion (without falling into the trap of mawkish, saccharine overkill) you may ever encounter.

Restaurant critics often hear readers complain, “Why don't you write more about desserts?” The problem is that generally there's only so much you can say about creme brulee and flourless chocolate cake and fruit tart. More often than not, any given version is just like everything else everyone else is serving. The highly technical stuff lacks heart; the rustic stuff you could often make yourself at home. Week after week, it's hard to come up with exciting new ways to say something emphatic about another bread pudding.

But Yard's work is different. When Spago reopened after its latest renovation, the savory food and the stylish new decor both were striking, but what made you stop and pay attention and actually feel something were Yard's desserts. Playful, surprising and intensely technically accomplished, they seared themselves into your sense memory like nothing else at Spago, and as very little else has the capacity to do.

Sherry Yard grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, the daughter of a firefighter. Her grandparents were a fishmonger and a turndown maid at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. She was the second of four girls. You can see some of that Brooklyn firefighter still in Yard's demeanor and attitude; she has the swagger, the twinkle in the eye and the no-bullshit bearing of Sheepshead Bay. Yet so much of what influenced
her earlier in life was what she calls the “simple pageantry” of her grandmother's rituals.

“She had Czechoslovakian china, which she served our eggs on in the morning. Our juice was served in crystal glasses,” Yard says. “We lived in a house in Brooklyn that was two steps above a shanty, but she gave us this sense of glamour. Because she was a turndown maid, everything was about doing things properly. Setting the table properly. I learned that things taste better on pretty plates.”

Yard also credits her grandmother with teaching her how to taste. “She would blindfold us and get us to taste and tell her if she'd put coffee in the ice cream, or what kind of soda she'd bought. She'd say, ‘What does it taste like?' ”

Yard went to a Catholic girls school and received a scholarship to nursing school at 18, but her mother told her, “Give it back. This is not who you're going to be, and you're taking it from someone who can use it.”

She worked at catering halls and at McDonald's and at a dentist's office and at a medical center, and along the way she started baking for people. But she didn't really get bit by the restaurant bug until the mid-'80s, when she went to apply for a job at the newly opened Rainbow Room, during a time she was taking classes at New York Technical Institute. They hired her, first as a cigarette girl, then as a waitress; when she confessed to pastry chef Albert Cumin that she wanted to be a pastry chef, he offered her a spot in the kitchen. “I went to the back of the house and made as much in one week as the pastry wench as I had made in one day in the front of the house.”

Over the next decade, Yard went to culinary school three times (dropping out once, graduating twice), received a scholarship to study in London, worked at some of the best restaurants in New York and then San Francisco, met and worked with and rubbed shoulders with almost every legendary chef you've ever heard of, and made a very good career for herself as a pastry chef. But none of that prepared her for a phone call she got out of the blue in 1994.

She was working as pastry chef in Napa, at Jan Birnbaum's Catahoula. “I got a phone call from some guy with an Austrian accent.” She assumed it was a prank call. “I thought it was my crazy friend Bob from back East. I called Bob and he said, ‘You're drunk.
Don't drink and dial me.' I played the message back, I took down the phone number. It was Sunday night—I called the number and they said ‘Spago,' and I hung up the phone.”

On Monday morning she got up the nerve to call back. Wolfgang Puck told her a mutual friend had said she was looking for her next gig. And he needed a pastry chef. “He asked me when my next day off was. I told him we were closed Monday and Tuesday and he said, ‘OK, I'll see you tomorrow. Hold on.' See you tomorrow? But he got me on the phone with his assistant, and she said, ‘There's this flight out of Oakland tomorrow, we've got your ticket, and we'll have someone pick you up at the airport.' They picked me up at the airport, and 19 years later. . . . ”