Steal the Menu (25 page)

No can say with certainty how what was not so long ago a gastronomic wasteland between the coasts turned into a happy hunting ground for the sophisticated eater. But it seems clear that, starting in the late sixties, a critical mass of information and training kept growing. Food-minded tourists came home and began to cook the food they’d tasted on its home ground, guided by authentic and practicable recipes that put the foods of France (Julia Child), Mexico (Diana Kennedy), Morocco (Paula Wolfert), Sichuan (Ellen Schrecker and, much later, Fuchsia Dunlop), Italy (Marcella Hazan and many others), Greece (Diane Kochilas), Spain (Penelope Casas) and the Middle East (Claudia Roden) within reach of home cooks. Professionals could train seriously in various schools around the country, most of which hadn’t existed in 1970.

Many of the most ambitious students spent time in European restaurants as apprentices to famous chefs, an opportunity that had barely existed in the old days. When they returned home, the hugely enlarged network of quality restaurants gave them interesting work and a chance to burnish their résumés.

Grant Achatz, born in 1974, grew up in a family restaurant business before attending the Culinary Institute of America, which landed him a job at the French Laundry, from which he rose to be top chef at the pathbreaking Trio in Chicago, a stepping stone to his even more radical, molecular-gastronomic megasuccess Alinea, also in Chicago.

Najat Kaanache, born in 1978 in Spain of Moroccan parents who worked in agriculture, abandoned a career in acting for culinary school in Holland, where she apprenticed with François Geurds, a former sous-chef under Heston Blumenthal at the three-star Fat Duck, outside London. To consolidate her training, she arranged
stages
under Achatz, René Redzepi of Noma, in Copenhagen, and with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, north of Barcelona.

That almost all of her mentors are household names, at least in food-conscious households around the world, is a remarkable fact entirely apart from this young woman’s ability to navigate so sure-footedly in a global network of superstars. Still more remarkable is that this network exists and that its biggest names transcend national borders, influence one another and reinforce the culture of food that has fostered their careers.

At the weeklong celebration of Charlie Trotter’s twentieth anniversary as Chicago’s most honored chef, in 2007, six other world-beating chefs cooked the main banquet. Adrià was in the kitchen, as was Blumenthal, who stole the show with a pictorial and auditory shore dinner. He hid iPod Shuffles in whelk shells that sat next to a delicious seafood mixture on each of eighty guests’ plates, so that they could listen to sounds of the sea on earphones while they ate a complex seafood medley bathed in seafood foam.

This confraternity of stellar cooks was, even for the twenty-first century, a notable gathering of globalized culinary celebrity. But it was only the most glamorous example of a less public networking that connects the alert kitchens of our day, most concretely in the form of hot new recipes that spread around the cybersphere instantaneously and then end up in slightly varied versions on plates far from their origins.

In 1977, I caught an early glimpse of this on a tour of Michelin three-stars in France, where virtually every menu offered some form of early asparagus in oblong boxes of puff pastry. I was tempted to sleuth out which chef had started this mini-vogue, but what mattered was that all of them were so aware of this new idea and that they all had latched onto it that same month. And that was before the Internet.

By 2007, dozens and dozens of chefs, not just the mandarins of the French Michelin, were blithely appropriating the newest wrinkle, from the most distant kitchens, instantaneously, in cyberspace.

When Anne Burrell, a protégée of Mario Batali’s, opened Centro Vinoteca across the street from me in Greenwich Village, among the Italianate small-plate dishes on her menu was an intriguing pasta, a single large ravioli with a liquid egg yolk concealed inside. In the restaurant’s basement kitchen, I observed as a meticulous fellow called Humberto rolled out a long, thin layer of dough for the steroidal ravioli and cut out three-inch disks from it with a sort of cookie cutter. Onto them he spread a mixture of ricotta and Parmesan cheese. Then he cracked an egg, separated the yolk from the white and gingerly deposited a perfect sun of a yolk on the cheese. A second disk of dough went on top and was pressed in place to make a single large raviolo (“ravioli” is the plural), or, to be more exact, a
raviolone
(the last syllable, an Italian “augmentative,” implies bigness beyond the normal) with a raw yolk inside.

After a brief (say, three-minute) poaching in gently simmering water, the dough was barely cooked, as was the still-liquid, ready-to-burst-on-fork-contact yolk. When the
raviolone
was served upstairs, Burrell would emerge from the open kitchen to shave an ounce of white truffle over it.

Even without that pricey fillip, her delicate egg surprise was an established winner well before Ms. Burrell brought it to Seventh Avenue South. Long before she tried her hand at making one, this witty dish had helped earn the reputation of the great Italian restaurant San Domenico, at Imola, near Bologna.

From there, it had spread not only to my corner but across the country. Diners had reported encounters at Boston’s Prezza and at Prima Ristorante in Boulder, Colorado. Rising star chef Steve Mannino was stuffing his pasta pouches with quail eggs and wild mushrooms at the Las Vegas Olives, in the Bellagio Hotel. And at classy Fifth Floor, in San Francisco, before it got a Michelin star, Chef Melissa Perello had put her signature on the dish with a duck egg, porcini mushrooms, peas and serrano ham.

In another example of fast-moving recipes, at just about the time the egg
raviolone
was making the rounds, the lucky gourmet could find the same elegant butter-poached lobster recipe adorning tables at the French Laundry and at Barbara Lynch’s No. 9 Park, on Beacon Hill in Boston.

Circulating apprentices, food blogs, tweets and other Internet channels all were playing a role in the spread of food ideas. But the most powerful multiplier of food news and stoker of chefs’ ideas and reputations was undoubtedly television. It started with Julia Child’s black-and-white series
The French Chef
, which made her the first star of noncommercial TV. A few serious cooks flourish on television today, but it is impossible to imagine Julia making a career in the same shrill, crass universe reigned over by Paula Deen and others who didn’t make any major culinary mark before television brought them fame. Deen, exhaustingly exuberant, was, when I checked in 2006, on the air sixteen times a week and being watched by a total of seven million viewers as she demonstrated conventional recipes drawn from traditional southern cooking.

The lunch I ate at Ms. Deen’s equally popular Savannah restaurant, the Lady & Sons, wasn’t any good. But the crowd around us in that multistoried eatery that serves hundreds of meals daily looked happy enough, ratifying their fandom with knife and fork. Would they have been as happy eating better versions of the same regional food at a nearby tavern called Moon River Brewing Company (after the hit tune by Savannahian Johnny Mercer)? Would they have been as thrilled as I was by superb renditions and improvisations on these dishes at the Beard-award-winning Elizabeth’s, down the road? I’d like to think so.

Someday, I want to test the idea that everyone is born with a good palate. I would conduct the experiment on my own TV show, a culinary remake of
The Millionaire
. I’d find a lucky couple at a
fast-food restaurant and whisk them off to some five-star temple, where I’d let them eat their way through the menu. At the Lady & Sons, I fantasized for a bit about that couple’s purrs of pleasure, until the reality show around me—equal parts
Six Feet Under
(dead victuals) and
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
(unsightly victims of criminal cooking)—preempted my attention.

I walked swiftly by the tired buffet of southern fried chicken and soulful veggies. At the bar, I ate soggy fried green tomatoes and munched fitfully on a doughy biscuit while the couple next to me drank their meal and left with cocktails in hand for a trolley tour of the settings of John Berendt’s best-selling account of decadent Savannah,
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
.

My main course consisted of stringy crab molded into an uncrisp cake. It reminded me of what I’d known all along: there’s no business like show business.

Deen on the tube is a superior cook to the Paula Deen whose actual food you eat in Savannah. Her recipes are perfectly respectable versions of southern home cooking. The entire stick of butter she likes to drop into the pan with a lascivious leer is no cruder than the river of
beurre
Joël Robuchon works into the mashed potatoes that helped vault him to the top of contemporary French cooking. Deen’s rise from humble beginnings as a purveyor of lunches hand-delivered by her sons is a winning yarn, no less convincing because it is true.

The trouble isn’t in the star, but in her success—that her restaurant is an insult to the very fan loyalty it sells out. The place is just too big. When Berendt wrote, in an introduction to
The Lady & Sons Savannah County Cookbook
in 1998, that the earlier restaurant offered “a short course in the meaning of Southern cooking—the flavors, the ambience, indeed the very
heart
of Southern cooking,” it had eighty-five seats. The Lady & Sons lost its soul when
it moved, in 2003, into its 330-seat, fifteen-thousand-square-foot dining headquarters.

I experienced the gracious heart of southern cooking in Savannah, at Elizabeth Terry’s turn-of-the-century Greek Revival mansion just south of downtown. There the cheese biscuits had just come from the oven, nicely browned. There the crab cakes were nicely crisped and contained pieces of crabmeat that looked as if they came from crabs, not an industrial processor.

In the dining room, fitted out with Windsor chairs and trompe l’oeil murals of flowers and household objects, local food tradition was honored with such presentations as spicy shrimp and country ham in redeye gravy, flanked by wedges of fried grits standing on edge like sentinels. This fine thing, like the equally fine crab cake, cost $13.95, less than a dollar more than the crab cake at the Lady & Sons. You could, of course, spend considerably more on main courses at Elizabeth’s. The grouper special, an imaginative fantasia of local fish and vegetables, ran $33.95. Yet it wasn’t egregiously pricier than the Lady & Sons’ beef-and-tomato pie ($24.99).

The only things missing at Elizabeth’s were the pizzazz and lugubrious self-promotion of the Lady & Sons. The eponymous Elizabeth and her two daughters haven’t, so far as they have let on in the limited publicity they have released, suffered like Paula Deen from agoraphobia, been robbed at gunpoint or rallied from a divorce to find middle-aged romance with a bearded boatman.

I doubt, in other words, that food television, in its flamboyant new mode, is doing much for the encouragement of good taste and culinary knowledge in its public of millions.

Exposure on TV has surely benefited the careers of authentic talents such as Mario (“Molto Mario”) Batali, while the young chefs who prosper in the preposterous cooking competitions staged for television can leverage their ability to concoct a winning dish out of seven never previously combined ingredients into
financial backing for a restaurant. But real creativity in the kitchen is not a stunt carried off under terrible time pressure. Indeed, creativity hasn’t been a central notion in the historical narrative of the kitchen, even, or perhaps especially not, in the development of haute cuisine, until the current period of chef worship and perfervid admiration of novelty.

I saw the effect of TV food shows at its worst at a wildly popular new restaurant in Chicago, Girl & the Goat, created by a
Top Chef
winner named Stephanie Izard. Girl & the Goat’s menu is a catalog of dishes straining for originality, a chaos of strong-flavored ingredients that knock one another out: kohlrabi salad with toasted almonds,
and
pear,
and
ginger dressing; or fennel potato-rice crepes with butternut squash,
and
shiitake kimchi,
and
mushroom jus.

In 2009, I got a chance to see a real top chef invent a dish, and it was a very different, careful improvisation. With over twenty Michelin stars worldwide, Joël Robuchon is arguably the planet’s most successful restaurateur. Three of his many branches have the red guide’s highest ranking, three stars: one in Macao, one in Tokyo and one in Las Vegas, in the MGM Grand Hotel.

Four times a year, Robuchon visits Nevada to redesign the menu at this fabulous, small pinnacle of gastronomy. I arranged to meet him there and watched him tweak a crab recipe for his new spring menu.

The world’s most decorated chef was drinking a Diet Coke as he entered the immaculate kitchen, followed by a small posse of underchefs. He inspected a small circular tin of osetra caviar and then pulled apart an Alaskan king crab the size of a puppy.
^§
“Where is the coral?” he asked, setting off nervous scurrying and
whispers. Coral, the red, deeply flavorful female crab’s egg mass he needs for the sauce, was found in another big crab. The kitchen had previously prepared cooked meat from king, Dungeness and blue crabs, which Robuchon tasted in different mixtures, pulling out samples with his fingers. In the end, he decided on a mélange of king and Dungeness.

“For me it’s all about the texture,” he said.

The new spring menu was centered on shellfish. “Americans really love shellfish,” he told me, as if to congratulate me and more than 300 million other compatriots for our good taste.

He went on to build his new dish by layering the crab mixture with strips of yellow-brown Santa Barbara sea urchin, which he extracted from a neat pile. The crustaceans were only the beginning. Minced raw white cauliflower was also a major ingredient. It would lurk within the crabmeat mix as a stealth carrier of crunch, which Robuchon said he believes makes this dish a no-grain marine cousin of tabbouleh, the ancient Near Eastern salad based on bulgur wheat and mint. To carry the edible metaphor all the way, the chef added mint to his crab creation.