Kitchen Confidential (27 page)

The rest, as they say, is history. Luma got a quick two stars from Ruth Reichl at the New York Times and lots of buzz. Restaurants that change their entire approach midstream never succeed-remember I told you that? Wrong! Restaurants owned by guys in the fuel business don't succeed. I might have said something like that, too. Wrong! Operations that expand into multi-units often dilute the qualities that made them good in the first place. Not this time!

Time passed, Luma did well, and Gino and Scott opened Indigo, on West 10th Street, in a spot so poisonous, so reeking of failure that eight or nine restaurants had come and gone in my memory alone. Remember all that yammer about cancerous locations? Sites so cursed that any and all who seek to follow are doomed? Wrong again, jerk.

Indigo was located only a few blocks away from One Five. I'd been hearing quite enough about Scott Bryan, so when the place opened, I remember trudging over in the middle of a blizzard, sitting at the bar and scarfing up free tastings. I thought it was mind-bogglingly good and I told people so. I dragged my crew over, one by one, to try the mushroom strudel, the Manilla clams. We marvelled at Scott's menu, the perfect my-way-or-the-highway document. All the things that conventional wisdom tells a chef he has to do, all those must-have crowd pleasers that eat up half your menu before you can sneak in the selections you actually love,-they weren't there! There was no soup. No vegetarian plate. No steak! The chicken was not some generic roasted bird with non-threatening seasonings; it was a weird, ballsy, spicy concoction, involving red curry, for chrissakes! And good. The only beef was braised shoulder-a daube provenyale so good that my whole crew at One Five now ran over to Indigo after work. Our two kitchens closed at the same time, so we'd phone ahead to say we were coming over, and start cooking that daube-just put it on the bar, for God's sake! Let it get cold, it's okay! The Indigo seafood selections were admirably unpopular fishes-cod and mackerel-and exciting. This was food for cooks. This was food that we got. Simple, straightforward and absolutely pretense-free. Like Scott. Tucking into that daube of beef, or Scott's sweetbreads, was fun for me and my appreciative crew. What's he doing, we wanted to know, while examining a particular item we hadn't tried yet. How is he dealing with mackerel? Then we'd find out.

Everything on Scott's plates is edible. It's food, first and foremost, to be eaten, not looked at-though his presentations are inspired. Try and imagine the clean, unfussy integrity of Japanese cuisine, with the unrestrained flavors and soul-food heartiness of a well-remembered Grandma's best dish. He was braising economy cuts. He was taking greasy, oily fishes that nobody wanted and making magic. He was presenting it in big bowls in pretty stacks where-if you jammed your fork through all three layers-you got something that combined to actually taste good. He wasn't piling food on top of itself because layer one looked good on top of layer two and three. It tasted good that way. And those big bowls? At Indigo, and at Veritas, when something comes in a big bowl it's because there's gonna be sauce left in the bottom; chances are, you're going to be running a crust of bread around in there and mopping it up when the entree has been eaten. It's why Scott has three stars and I don't.

It's why he probably won't be getting four stars anytime soon. His food is too good-and too much fun to eat. You feel you can put your elbows on the table in a Scott Bryan-Gino Diaferia restaurant and get about the serious business of tasting and smelling and chewing the good stuff.

I asked Scott if he thinks about food after work. When he's lying in bed in the dark, is he thinking about what he's going to run for special tomorrow? He said no. 'I come in, see what's on the market. I wing it,' he replied. I didn't believe him.

'Does Scott think about food? When he's not working?' I asked Gino, out of Scott's hearing. He smiled.

'He thinks about food,' Gino said. 'A lot. '

Scott is thirty-four years old. He's got dark, boyish good looks, with an eccentric nose that looks right on a chef. There are dark blue rings under his eyes and he has the skin pallor of a man who's spent too many hours toiling under fluorescent kitchen lighting. He wears the bemused expression of a guy who knows how bad it can get, who's always looking and waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's not so much a screamer anymore. 'I used to blow up all the time. I still yell, if there's laziness, sloppiness, someone thinks they're getting over.' Pointed sarcasm seems more the preferred tactic these days. And he does not share my pleasure in handling a pirate crew. 'Someone has a problem with another cook in my kitchen? I tell them work it out amongst themselves. I don't have time for that. I say, “Work it out, 'cause if you still have a problem with so-and-so tomorrow? You're gone. Maybe you're both gone.'” He doesn't bully, harangue or excoriate; the occasional caustic comment seems chillingly effective. I hung out in the Veritas kitchen recently, knocked off work at Les HaIles and ran over to see how the other half works. It's a very quiet place. During the middle of the rush on a Friday night, with a full dining room, the pace was positively relaxing-more a seriously focused waltz than the kind of hard-checking mosh-pit slam-dancing I live with. No one was screaming. Nobody was kicking any oven doors closed, putting any English on the plates, or hurling pots into the sink. Scott, expediting, never raised his voice.

'Go on, entrees. Thirty-two,' he said in a near-whisper. That's all it took for five line cooks to swing into action and start converging on plates. 'Pick up,' he said, 'table twelve.'

Three waiters appeared, each expertly wiping, garnishing and finishing a different plate, squeezing drops of chive oil, lobster oil or thirty-year-old balsamic from eye-dropper-sized squeeze bottles. No one was cursing or sweating. The stove-tops, cutting boards, counter space, cook's whites, even the aprons were spotless-at eight-thirty on a Friday night! Each sauce and salad, each item was tasted by the person preparing it, each and every time. Three orders of veal cheek special came up at the same time; they were absolutely identical. At Les HaIles, I go through a lO-pound bag of shallots every day, so it was truly jarring to see Scott Bryan's mise-en-place. The shallots on station were not chopped. They weren't Robot-Couped either. They were brunoised-every tiny little piece uniform, textbook, perfectly squared off and near sub-atomic in dimensions. The chopped chives were the same, not a thread, not a single errant or irregular shred, everyone the size of a cloned single-celled organism.

The whole kitchen smelled of truffles. Two thumb-sized knobs of the wildly expensive fungus sat by the garnish tray, where Scott would shave them onto outgoing orders. Truffle oil was being poured into pans like I use olive oil. Sauces were being mounted with foie gras and Normandy butter. And everything-everything-was being made to order. Risotto? Out of the box and into the pot. From scratch.

A tiny young woman worked at a corner station, and I made the immediate Neanderthal assumption as I first took in the crew: 'Extern, maybe from Peter Kump or French Culinary, having a learning experience dishing out veggies.' I passed right over her as I swept my eyes down the line looking for the heavy hitters. In time I began, peripherally, to become aware of her movements. I looked again, closer this time, and saw that she was plating fish, cooking risotto, emulsifying sauces, taking on three, then four, then five orders at a time-all the while never changing expression or showing any visible signs of frustration or exasperation (as I would have under similar circumstances). No worries, just smooth, practiced motions, moves you see in twenty-year veterans: no pot grabbed without side-towel, no wasted effort, every sauce getting a quick taste, correcting seasonings, coming up on her stuff at the same time as the rest of the order-generally holding down her end like an ass-kicking, name-taking mercenary of the old school, only cleaner and better. Her station and her uniform were absolutely unmarked by spills, stains or any of the expected Friday-night detritus.

'Where did she come from?' I whispered to Scott. Not amazed that a woman could do the job, but that anyone other than a thirty-five-year-old Ecuadorian mercenary could do it so stone-cold. (Remember what I said about Americans versus mis carnales from points south? Wrong again.)

'Oh, her?' said Scott casually. 'Alain Ducasse.' Mentioning God's name as breezily as I'd say, 'the Hilton' or 'Houlihan's'.

If this sobering revelation wasn't painful enough, if I wasn't choking down enough crow, there was some more humble pie to come: a waiter came in with a half-empty bottle of wine, a 1989 Le Chambertin, and handed it to the Dominican dishwasher. At this point, I was ready to answer one of those ads in the paper for 'Learn How To Drive the Big Rigs! " maybe take up mink ranching. Anyway, the grateful dishwasher examined the bottle for sediment, promptly decanted the remains, poured some wine into a stem glass-which he held knowledgeably between two fingers by the stem-and then swirled, examining the ropes with a discerning eye, before taking an airy slurp. I was ready to hit myself hard with the nearest blunt object.

Oh yeah: the food. Luxurious, but austere. Bluefin tuna tartare with pickled cucumbers, lime, chile and lemon grass was formed by hand. Unlike a lot of his peers, Scott doesn't like torturing food into unnatural shapes so it looks like something else.

(Metal rings, remember? You might want to reconsider what I said about them too.) Green and white asparagus were spooned with chanterelles and truffle fondue. Chilled lobster was stacked on fava bean puree and drizzled with Ligurian olive oil. Even the green salads were hand picked, one leaf after the other piled gently on the plate, the garde-manger guy tasting the occasional piece. A filet mignon came up in the window with a medallion of bone marrow looking pretty and pink under a thin veneer of sauce.

And Scott still doesn't make veal stock. There was tete du porc en crepinette, monkfish with white beans, lardons, roasted tomato and picholines, diver scallops with pea shoots, black truffle vinaigrette and truffle/chive/potato puree, Scottish salmon hit the pass-through with chestnut honey-glazed onions, old sherry wine vinegar and chicken jus.

Not a damn thing to sneer at. That I do more meals at Les HaIles in forty-five minutes than Scott does all night was cold comfort. The food was all so dead-bang honest. No bogus wild-weed infusions, cookie-cutter piles of pre-made garnishes, no paper collars used to force food into tumescence. Garnishes, such as they were, were edible; the food looked good without them. And the plates were white, no SB logo, no multicolored spirals, baroque patterns, oddball novelty shapes, football field sizes or ozone layer-puncturing space needles of verticality. The patissier whacked off a hunk of Morbier for a cheese plate-a daring selection, touch that stuff and you'll be sniffing your fingers for a week. Bread was from Amy's, along with a rustic ciabatta.

When orders came in faster, the pace quickened slightly, but nobody ran. Nobody seemed hurried. Scott jumped from station to station as his mood dictated: fish, saute, garde-manger, even pastry. In his absence, waiters wordlessly stepped in and did the expediting and plate finishing, with imperceptible change in product. (Waiters shouldn't touch food. Did I say that? Wrong again.)

Is everybody getting their food on time, I wondered. Everyone was so damned calm and collected in here that maybe it's chaos outside, a herd of pissed-off diners glaring silently at their waiters and wondering where their chow is-waiting for that made-to-order risotto so the rest of the order can come up. I decided to see.

No such luck. Outside, the dining room was as relaxed as the kitchen, nothing but happy faces, lingering over appetizers, sipping wine, expressions those of anticipating first-time lovers who just know they're going to be good together. The bar was packed with monomaniacal wine aficionados, pouring over the 1,400-strong wine list like Talmudic scholars-beakers, glasses, decanters laid out in front of them making them look like well-dressed Dr Frankensteins. They had a lot to ponder. The Veritas list is an imposing volume with a very reasonable range of wines from 18 to 25,000 dollars. I asked the bartender, hopefully, if any of these wine wonks ever got into it over the relative merits of say, Cotes du Rhone vs. Bordeaux, or '95 or '98? 'Anybody ever take a poke at another guy, duke it out over grape varieties? Drunken brawls over topsoil, irrigation, drink now or drink later?'

Nope. All is calm. Pleasure rules.

Listening to the customers talking seriously, really seriously about wine, I find yet another reason why Scott is a three-star chef and I'm not: I know almost nothing about wine.

I am not immune to the charms of wine. I've lived around it, enjoyed it, cooked with it all my life. I am not entirely ignorant on the subject, nor am I dismissive of its importance. I still remember vividly, heading off to the vintner in Bordeaux with my Oncle Gustav, to get our empty bottles refilled with vin ordinaire from those giant casks. I can tell the difference between good wine, bad wine and great wine. I have a pretty good working knowledge of the wine-producing regions of France and Italy. I am vaguely aware that California seems to produce drinkable product these days. But I couldn't tell you grape variety with any more assurance than I could talk about stamp collecting or phrenology. And to be truthful, I've always felt that I've survived enough dangerous obsessions in my life; the knowledgeable appreciation of fine wine has always seemed to me to hold potential for becoming yet another consuming habit-an expensive one. When you know what it's like to squat on a blanket on upper Broadway in the snow, selling off a lifetime's accumulation of rare books, records and comic books for drugs, the idea of spending next week's paycheck on a bottle of red seems like, well, something that I probably shouldn't be doing. So, even though I've been gushing here about Veritas and all things Bryan, I'm really doing the place a disservice. The menu, the business, the whole concept of Veritas is built around the wine-a formidable cellar put together by two of the premium collector/connoisseurs in the universe. It should be pointed out that Scott's food at Veritas is designed to complement that wine. I can only imagine that it does. The fish dishes are unusually hearty, drinkable with red for the most part, I believe (don't trust me on this), and the meat and poultry dishes are constructed and refined to match up nicely with the list. Some of the Asian seasonings and ingredients of Early Bryan have been dispensed with in order best to accomplish that mission.