The Tastemakers (12 page)

One beneficiary of the rise of casual fine dining was another LA chef named Roy Choi. Choi's family, who were Korean immigrants to Los Angeles, had owned various small restaurants, markets, and liquor stores around the city, and Choi grew up around food. He worked in restaurants during high school and, later on, in his twenties, spent a number of years in New York, bouncing around kitchens at celebrated restaurants like Le Bernardin, and hotels in Los Angeles. He likely would have kept moving between various restaurants were it not for a stroke of fate.

In mid-2008, as the financial crisis hit the hospitality business, Choi was laid off from his latest job. Shortly after, he was approached by Mark Manguera, a Filipino who had married into a Korean family, with the idea to put Korean BBQ meats, such as sweet bulgogi, spicy pork belly, and crispy-thin short ribs, into tacos topped with Mexican salsas and kimchi, thus marrying two of Los Angeles's most prominent ethnic flavors. The two joined forces, commissioned a taco truck from a Los Angeles caterer, and launched the Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck shortly after Thanksgiving. They would park the truck in several different locations every day, each time posting their location to their Twitter feed in order to alert customers. The truck generated a fan base so devoted that it spawned the term
Kogi Kulture
. As Korean taco lovers chased the truck around the city like hippies trailing the Grateful Dead, lineups for the truck could stretch as long as eight hundred people who would stand patiently for up to two hours simply to eat a bulgogi taco on the curb.

Choi, who now has four Kogi branded trucks roaming Los Angeles and three sit-down restaurants, has been hailed as one of America's best new chefs by
Food & Wine
magazine and is an internationally known celebrity, said all of this happened over the course of a month. The idea came to Manguera, Choi whipped up the recipes, the truck hit the streets, and voilà! Two big trends emerged from the Kogi Korean BBQ experiment. First, Choi's Korean taco, like Yoon's burger, became a national phenomenon and quickly found its way onto menus far and wide. Other Korean BBQ trucks popped up within four months, and in less than a year large chains like California Pizza Kitchen, Baja Fresh, and even TGI Fridays were serving Korean-style tacos to mainstream Americans. More importantly, Choi provided the first high-profile example of a chef-driven food truck that could build a following through social media and eventually transform into a financially successful business. In Los Angeles budding cooks started taking to the streets in the months following Kogi's launch, buying old catering and taco trucks or commissioning gleaming new ones in order to sell everything from bacon-spiked snacks to Sprinkles cupcakes. Chefs in
other cities took notice, launched their own trucks, and an entire industry of gourmet food trucks blossomed across North America and the world, upending the entry-level restaurant business in many cities and creating a whole new class of edible entrepreneurialism, with Kogi BBQ credited as its godfather.

T
he difference between today's chef-driven trends and those from a generation ago has less to do with what's going on in the kitchen and more with how the media is covering it. No tastemakers are more reliant on the media's voice than chefs, whose craft is increasingly driven as much by personality and on-camera savvy as it is their knife and sautéing skills. As we saw with the great cupcake boom, the modern food media's innumerable messengers operate in a hierarchy of news, reviews, and looping feedback, whipping trends into a frenzy like summer winds spreading forest fires. They have transformed the very nature of chef-driven food trends, speeding up their evolution and changing the way chefs approach their cooking.

The modern food media is a relatively recent phenomenon. Craig Claiborne was the first editor of the
New York Times
dining section to move away from articles aimed at mostly female home cooks and to devoted journalistic coverage of restaurants, chefs, and the new flavors they were introducing. The starred restaurant review, which Claiborne introduced in 1962, added an element of competition to dining out. Suddenly, chefs were vying to outdo their competition for accolades, and the dining public responded, pouring favor on the highest-ranking restaurants. This often had the side effect of creating trends in their wake, as others emulated the favored menus, techniques, and flavor profiles. A few specialty publications, such as the now-extinct magazine
Gourmet
, wrote profiles of the men behind the stoves, but for the most part chefs were anonymous workers, emerging from the kitchen once in a while to pose for photos in giant white toques beside comically large buffet spreads. If they had tattoos, they hid them. No one called them celebrities.

In this climate chef-driven food trends took a long time to move beyond their restaurants and have a broader impact with the public. Someone would have to dine there, notice something extraordinary in a particular dish or technique, and spread the word organically, person by person, until a newspaper critic took the time to eat it. If the critic wrote for a large, well-read paper, such as the
Times
or the
Washington Post
, the restaurant review might have an impact beyond its particular market, spreading the trend to other cities. “It took two years for Paul Prudhomme's blackened red fish to make it upstream from New Orleans to Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s,” recalled restaurant consultant Michael Whiteman over lunch at Rosemary's, a farm-to-table restaurant in New York's Greenwich Village. “Today it'd take about ten minutes.”

Whiteman, who runs the restaurant consulting firm Baum + Whiteman, has created, nurtured, and tracked restaurant trends for over forty years. His partner, Joe Baum, was the mind behind legendary New York restaurants the Four Seasons, La Fonda del Sol, and Forum of the Twelve Ceasars and is regarded as the father of the theme restaurant, which broke the stranglehold that ostentatious French dining rooms and clubby steakhouses had on American dining. Baum and Whiteman were innovating with globally inspired tapas and classic cocktails twenty years before these trends caught on elsewhere, but since the late 1990s, as the media coverage of chefs and restaurants has exploded in both traditional outlets and online, Whiteman has seen the cycle of dining trends speed up exponentially. “The life cycle of a trend is interesting,” said Whiteman as he picked at a kale and beet salad, which, he acknowledged, had become a mandatory appetizer on every farm-to-table restaurant menu in the country. “If Cajun blackening were invented today, you could easily call it a fad because it'd be gone in three years.”

Chefs and restaurants today receive relentless media attention. There is 24/7 chef and food programming on two dedicated television networks (Food and its sister, Cooking), dozens of food shows on other networks (
Top Chef
,
Hell's Kitchen
,
Master Chef
,
The Chew
,
Cake Boss
,
Bizarre Foods
,
No Reservations
,
Diners, Drive Ins and Dives
,
etc
.), profiles and articles in the food sections of
local and national newspapers, as well as a plethora of national and international food magazines (
Saveur, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach
), national food blogs churning out dozens of stories a day (
Eater
,
Grub Street, Chow, Serious Eats, Gayot
), hundreds of thousands of independent and specialized food blogs (on cupcakes, vegan chefs, recipes, dining out in Tucson, etc.), and a number of massive social networks, including Chowhound, Yelp, Citysearch, Urbanspoon, and countless other upstarts that are derived from recommendations and reviews that skew heavily to restaurants. Between all of these, every single minutia of our dining world is being chronicled, photographed, critiqued, and commented on in a relentless cycle that has no off switch.

Celebrity chefs have been compared, without a trace of irony, to geniuses and great artists. They are photographed by the paparazzi, dispense autographs like Hollywood hunks, and pen piles of memoirs and cookbooks each year. Celebrity chefs will talk about their “personal brand” regularly, with their faces appearing on cookware, clothing, and packaged foods that have been licensed by third parties. The top-tier chefs no longer cook nightly in restaurants—they build empires, with outposts in Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Las Vegas that they visit a couple of times a year as they fly between their homes, TV shoots, and various charity events. Even the tier or two below the heights of A-list chefs like Mario Batali, David Chang, and Gordon Ramsay—the local young Turks, with their heavily followed Twitter accounts, and in-your-face menu items—are treated as sex symbols in their respective markets, doted on by the local media and the dining public. Once upon a time, if you were a chef, your greatest ambition was to own a restaurant. Now that's just a stepping stone to the true goal of global fame.

“There are large numbers of chefs who have set out already to be famous,” said Whiteman, who blames the Food Network and the media for changing the way chefs approach their work. The attention has driven more and more chefs to focus on creating the next trend that the media will embrace rather than simply cooking good food for their customers. Young chefs are no longer content to work their way up through kitchens over the course of a decade;
instead, they want to create wild masterpieces the first day out of cooking school. “It's upped the ante,” said Whiteman. “Because the media is voracious in scavenging things to write about, a chef says, ‘You want something to write about? I'll give you a pastrami egg roll. You want something to write about? I'll smoke my meat over balsa wood with mussel shells ground into my smoking mixture!' I mean, why should the Kardashians have a monopoly on the bizarre? There's constant pressure on chefs' creativity to capture the media's attention.”

The result, according to Whiteman, is food screaming out for media attention. The dishes these chefs create rattle around in the mouth and excite dopamine in your loins. The food clashes rather than harmonizes and disrupts rather than soothes. It's an oyster paste and blood sausage–stuffed, Sriracha-basted chicken, cooked sous-vide and then flash fried rather than a perfectly roasted chicken with fresh herbs and lemon. It is food that shoots for a trend and not often for the better. A city like Los Angeles, where Zarate has established himself, is highly susceptible to this. “In LA most of our restaurants are trend driven,” said Leslie Shuter, the dining editor of
Los Angeles Magazine
and a chronicler of the city's extensive food scene. Shuter believes that when we're talking about restaurants and food trends, it is really driven by a small elite of foodies and bloggers who exert an outsized influence on the direction of popular restaurants; and those trends eventually filter down to the places where 90 percent of the public regularly eats. “The blogosphere changed everything,” she said. Blogging is instantaneous, like an ongoing news ticker, and because of that, bloggers are only interested in what is currently trending. “If roasting whole goats on a patio is hot now, bloggers won't be interested in it in a year. They're not interested in consistency or longevity.”

What results is a self-contained and highly predictable churn of trends. One outlet will write about a dish and then everyone will pile on in a sort of food media scrum, offering their own spin on the same story, whether it is gourmet hamburgers or food trucks or Peruvian cooking. Other chefs take notice and offer up their own interpretation of the growing trend because it will sell to the dining
public and inevitably generate for that chef some coveted publicity. More stories are written about the trend around the city and, eventually, the country, culminating in top-ten lists of the best Korean tacos or the fifty hamburgers to eat before you die. Eventually the story can only be told so many ways, and the media moves on, openly declaring that trend dead even if the food in question is still delicious and many people still enjoy eating it. This is how we've arrived at a time when a restaurant can be absolutely packed to the gills seven nights a week, and six months later it sits empty, even while the food tastes exactly the same. The media trend cycle has chewed it up, digested it, and unceremoniously flushed it away.