Best Food Writing 2011 Read online

  More vodka.

  At exactly 10 P.M. a bell rings. The cooks whoop and holler and put down their spoons: It is beer time. (They will all share a second one after the last seating, along with a staff dinner that, I’m told, is mercifully lighter than anything on the menu.)

  On to the main courses. First, an off-the-menu croquet-ball-size pork-and-veal meatloaf on a bed of gnocchi; the dainty herbal subtleties of the meat are offset by the brick of seared foie gras draped over it. Then come those pigs’ feet.

  Double vodka shots.

  Picard joins us for dessert. He orders us a bottle of champagne and toasts again: “À la vie!” Though the desserts are rich and outsize, they’re comparatively the most delicate courses of the evening. All of them are sweetened with maple syrup collected in the forest around Picard’s new establishment, Sugar Shack, open only in the spring. (On the restaurant’s wall is a painting by Marc Séguin of a woman with syrup taps in lieu of breasts.) We share a raspberry pie, a pecan pie, a panna cotta and a maple pudding chômeur, which translates to “unemployed pudding,” a throwback to a dessert popular during the Depression.

  By the end of the meal, our back teeth are bathing, as the French expression goes. Thoroughly mellowed by fat, sugar and booze, we discuss Picard’s upbringing in Repentigny, Quebec; his two kids; how, as a lost youth, he decided to study hotel management, then switched to cooking; his apprenticeship in France, Italy and Montreal. And we discuss his philosophy of food. “Fat comforts,” he says. “Fat is the vector for taste. If you have fat in your mouth, the taste will develop.”

  Champagne.Vodka. Mix.

  Pride

  To Picard, the real sin in both cooking and economics is waste—he is a firm disciple of Fergus Henderson’s “nose-to-tail” approach, which calls for using the entire animal, offal, bone and all. Another sin is incompetence. “You need to know how to cook the pig,” he says. “You might be trendy, but at the end of the day you need to take responsibility. I’ve worked hard, I’m competent, and I’m qualified, and that allowed me to personalize my style and convince people I could become a reference for others.”

  Wrath

  Picard gets angry at anything that isn’t concrete, tactile, sensuous, of the earth. That includes food blogs, which he calls marde. (“Do you mean merde?” I ask, referring to the French word for “shit.” “No, marde. It’s the Quebec version. It’s like merde but more fatty.”) His wrath is also aimed at Wall Street. He sees the collapse of the financial sector as a good thing: “There are two economies. There’s the economy where I work, where I employ people, and it brings in money directly. And then there’s the economy Wall Street created, where they make money with money. Today the second economy has deflated, and people have become more grounded. They may have less money, but at least they feel things. Before they didn’t feel.”

  Lust

  After dinner I join Picard, his chef de cuisine, his maître d’ and his beautiful hostess (all the women who work at Au Pied de Cochon are thin, stylish, attractive and likely not eating à la carte at the restaurant) for a night on the town. Our first stop is a high-end strip joint called Kamasutra. Montreal is riddled with churches, and almost every street is named after one saint or another, but since casting off conservative Catholic rule during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, it has become one of the most permissive cities in the world. In this Olympus of hedonism, Picard is Dionysus, recognized and back-slapped wherever we go. “Ehh! Martin!”

  A stripper once told me that food and sex are the only two human activities that stimulate all five senses. Picard, who by this point has unbuttoned his shirt entirely, agrees. “It’s a similar pleasure,” he tells me. “Fucking is always with someone. It’s concrete. And food is always concrete too.”

  Bottle service arrives.

  The same stripper also said that, in terms of the excitement that both food and sex can provide, “less is more.” From my foggy recollection of my night with Picard, it’s hard to imagine him agreeing with that part. My most distinct memory of the evening—confirmed in my greasy, progressively illegible notes—is sitting on a VIP-room banquette next to Picard as his maître d’ pours a bottle of champagne down my throat and two gorgeous, fully naked young Quebecoises go bilingual on each other, in every permutation, on the chef’s lap.

  He raises a glass: “À la vie!”

  That leaves three capital sins of which Picard is most certainly not guilty. When he’s not sweltering over a stove at one of his restaurants or writing a cookbook or tending to his pigs or visiting her purveyors, Picard hosts a show on Canadian Food TV, The Wild Chef, which follows his gastronomical journeys across the country. (He recently cooked up an impromptu dish of mussels and seal fat when dining al molto fresco among the Inuit.) So much for sloth. As for greed and envy, no one can accuse a man who serves such copious portions, who relishes the company of others, who gets hurt if you don’t drink with him and who gives such enveloping drunken bear hugs ... of hoarding and withholding.

  Gluttony had been tested to its limit that night, as had my stomach lining. I didn’t feel quite like the guy who was fed to death in Seven, but I wasn’t far. A night with Picard is a test of endurance, even for Picard: “You can’t just eat fatty in life,” he says. “You can’t just eat only for pleasure—you need nourishment as well.”

  Indeed, no evening is more riotously, competitively gluttonous than when famous chefs get together. Daniel Boulud, who makes a point of visiting Picard every time he’s in Montreal, recalls many such indulgent affairs, when Picard would open the best wines in his cellar. “These Quebeckers,” says Boulud, “always taking their shirts off.” He recalls the most outrageously excessive night of eating as being his own 50th birthday, when he hosted a $2,200-a-plate charity dinner for 24 friends, including many of his former sous-chefs who had gone on to run their own restaurants and who each supplied a course. Robert Parker, the world’s foremost authority on wine, provided the booze.

  Over the meal’s seven hours, according to Boulud, they ate 16 courses and drank a million dollars’ worth of wine, about 85 bottles spanning the 20th century. On another occasion, this one also from the peak of the flush times, circa 2004, Boulud hosted a white-truffle tasting menu for Japanese friends, movie producers and journalists. Halfway through the dinner, chef Masayoshi Takayama—who now owns Masa, the most expensive restaurant in New York—showed up. After everyone had shaved about five grams of a glorious $1,500 one-pound truffle onto their dishes, Takayama whiffed the mushroom and ate the whole thing like an apple, to the stupefaction of the table. Perhaps he had been drinking?

  Two days later Takayama returned to Boulud, tail between legs, to apologize, with a new white truffle in a plastic can as a token of expiation. “I think he wanted his friends to be stunned,” says Boulud. That level of conspicuous consumption, both financial and esophageal, was testing the limits, even in this culinary subculture.

  Yet perhaps Picard himself defines gluttony best by throwing Catholic dogma on its head. Instead of defining gluttony as deriving excessive pleasure from food and drink, Picard says true excess begins “when pleasure is no longer there.”

  HOOKED ON CLASSICS

  By Jay Rayner

  From Saveur

  As one of the UK’s most influential dining critics—award-winning reviewer for The Observer, author of The Man Who Ate the World (2008), and Top Chef judge—he’s a natural source for the definitive word on mega-star chef Heston Blumenthal’s new restaurant.

  In 1995, when Heston Blumenthal first opened his now three Michelin–starred restaurant, the Fat Duck, in the village of Bray, just west of London, it was very much a summer stock, let’s-put-on-a-show-in-the-barn affair. The bathroom was outside. The old pub’s bar still ran straight down the middle of the room. Without a supplier network, Blumenthal sourced ingredients from supermarkets.

  In comparison, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal—which opened at the end of January at London’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, in glossy Kni
ghtsbridge—is a big-ticket Broadway production. There is a shiny, glass-walled cube of an open kitchen and a panoramic view of the verdant fields of Hyde Park. There is wood, and there is leather. The self-taught chef has been coy about just how much his backers have invested in the venture, which draws its inspiration from historical British cookery. The figure is rumored to be a little north of $8 million, much as Chicago is a little north of New Orleans. Just the precise action of the rotisserie, manufactured by a Swiss watchmaker for the roasting of pineapples, cost more than $100,000. There are 130 seats, compared with a mere 45 covers at the Fat Duck, and 45 cooks to feed them.

  For Blumenthal, who often has been referred to as the Willy Wonka of British gastronomy on account of his modernist dishes—like crab ice cream and green tea palate cleansers cooked in bubbling liquid nitrogen—this buzzy brasserie represents a step change in his business. By entrusting the kitchen to the 33-year-old Ashley Palmer-Watts, a close collaborator and onetime head chef at the Fat Duck, Blumenthal is making it clear that he knows what’s at stake. Dinner is less son of Fat Duck—no chubby duckling, this—than an expression of Blumenthal’s notoriously obsessive working method. It presents those who either can’t get into or can’t afford the original restaurant with a chance to engage with Blumenthal’s agenda.

  That, for the most part, it succeeds is due to his attention to detail. The one dish that will come to represent the venture is his Meat Fruit, a silky chicken liver parfait dressed up as a mandarin orange. Through his television shows and books, Blumenthal has loudly declared an interest in Britain’s culinary heritage, pointing out that, in earlier centuries, the British ruling classes were regarded as proponents of gastronomic adventure and whimsy. Working with food historians, he has dug up antique recipes and is using them as a jumping-off point. And so the menu comes practically footnoted. Each dish is listed with a date. Meat Fruit is “ca. 13th–15th century” and apparently recalls a time when the English gentry liked to dress up one foodstuff to look like another. It’s unlikely they ever got their hands on anything this good. It is not simply that the smooth parfait is rich enough to make a cardiologist swoon: It is the perfect execution of the deep orange peel in a light gel with an equally light mandarin tang; a green ruscus leaf (inedible) is inserted just so. The dish sits on a board alongside slices of warm toast. Waiters grin as they deliver it. It is both an outrageous conceit and an encouragement to the appetite. For a while you must simply admire it, before finding the nerve to take its virtue.

  Does the fact that the menu reads a little like the bibliography of a PhD thesis add to the experience? Yes, and no. Blumenthal has always liked to play with language, believing that anticipation of a dish is part of its enjoyment. His snail porridge at the Fat Duck was essentially a risotto made with oats, but the infantilizing word porridge was so much more intriguing in such grown-up surroundings. So when another Dinner starter is listed as Rice & Flesh, with references to 1390, it is worth raising a skeptical eyebrow. So it proves: The dish is essentially a saffron risotto, the color of a Van Gogh sunflower, mined with shreds of long-braised oxtail and dressed with dribbles of meaty, acidulated jus. It is an elaborated risotto Milanese, but a bloody good one.

  Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, enjoyment of these intellectual games gives way to more visceral pleasures. The food is a joy for what it is, not for what it references. A plate of seared scallops with cucumber ketchup point out not just the newly mown lawn aromatics of cucumber but also the light bitterness of the peel. Indeed, it is that finely balanced use of acidity that gives a spring and lift to all the dishes. An expertly cooked filet of turbot comes with cockles, and both the bitterness of the accompanying chicory and the flash of white wine in the sauce lend a heft and sparkle the dish might otherwise not have.

  Dessert brings sweet rhubarb braised in bitter Campari with a brilliant sorbet of the same, or a brown bread ice cream with salted caramel that leaves you wondering where savory ends and sweet begins. But the star is the Tipsy Cake, which, like all great divas, takes awhile to get dressed—so long, in fact, that you have to order it at the beginning of the meal. It is a light, yeasty savarin, drenched in syrup and served alongside hunks of those pineapples from the rotisserie.

  In Britain, dinner is a word whose meaning changes depending on which part of the country and—dreaded word—class you belong to. In many places, the midday meal is dinner and the evening meal tea. The restaurant’s name speaks of a stab by Blumenthal at utilitarianism. The Fat Duck may be couture; Dinner, with its $45 set lunch menu, is meant to be a little more prêt-à-porter. But this is still a serious restaurant in a serious hotel, with a serious price tag and the sort of wine list that will make those on a budget wince. And yet, for all the intense work that has gone into the food, Dinner manages something that is depressingly rare at this level in London: It does not take itself too seriously. Heston Blumenthal has indulged his nerdy fervor for research and refinement, fretted over every detail. And he has still managed to open a restaurant that is playful. That may be Dinner’s greatest achievement.

  CHINESE TAKEOUT ARTIST

  By Lessley Anderson

  From Chow.com

  San Francisco’s hottest new restaurant in 2010 was just the sort of quirky, in-the-know place that Chow readers could be depended upon to love. This definitive review by Chow senior editor Lessley Anderson brought them a little closer to a real meal.

  On an October evening in San Francisco, Lung Shan Chinese Restaurant appeared entirely unwelcoming. Like the pawnshops and 99-cent stores on this dingy stretch of Mission Street, security bars covered its windows. Rank fumes wafted from a busted sewage line out in front. But inside, surrounded by Christmas lights, cheap carpeting, and cheesy posters of galloping horses, every table was filled. The music was pumping, and the chef was hustling. Chef Danny Bowien, a baby-faced 28-year-old Korean American with long, bleached, orange-ish hair under a baseball hat and big ’80s-style glasses, ferried plates back and forth between the kitchen and the front of the house, where he refilled plastic water glasses. He kept his eye on the door, because there was a rumor going around that the band Arcade Fire was going to drop by for dinner.

  They never showed, but if they had, it wouldn’t have been to eat at Lung Shan. Bowien actually runs another Chinese restaurant within Lung Shan with his partner, Anthony Myint. Though the name’s not on the sign, it’s called Mission Chinese Food, and you can order off either menu. Myint and Bowien share a kitchen, waitstaff, and delivery drivers, as well as the profits, with the owners of Lung Shan. But while the Chinese-run restaurant’s food is of the bland, Americanized, sweet-and-sour-pork variety, Mission Chinese Food’s menu reaches deeper into a broad Chinese-food lexicon, interpreting dishes like ma po tofu and sizzling cumin lamb as spicy, rich, full-frontal assaults. Most nights, the restaurant is packed with walk-ins and deluged with delivery orders.

  “Eating at Mission Chinese Food is like being at a powwow for an incipient food revolution,” says Scott Hocker, the San Francisco editor of Tasting Table. But it’s not clear what this revolution is all about. It’s certainly not about local-sustainable: Although Bowien uses the best meat and produce he can find, he keeps that fact from diners.

  “Anyone can buy stuff from fancy farms. Just make good food and leave some mystery to it,” Bowien says.

  Maybe it’s about challenging diners’ notion of what to expect. Since opening in July, Bowien et al. have changed the menu several times, adding made-to-order dumplings and a sous-vide operation built from an old aquarium.

  Or maybe the revolution is just about doing whatever the hell they want.

  “There’s a beauty to it,” says Chris Kronner, executive chef at San Francisco’s Bar Tartine and a longtime friend of Bowien’s. “You go in there, and it’s a shithole, and they’re making really great food, and playing really loud music, and nobody’s telling them not to.”

  Stepping Off the Treadmill

  Bowien remembers the moment he realized h
e had to bail on the fine-dining scene. He was 26 years old, and had spent the past seven years working his way up from culinary school (he dropped out) to cooking gigs at well-regarded restaurants in both New York and San Francisco, sometimes four of them at one time.

  “He’s a very, very, very, very hard worker,” says Bar Tartine’s Kronner.

  Bowien had landed the chef de cuisine position at Farina, a chic, northern Italian date spot in San Francisco’s Mission District. While working there, his boss unexpectedly flew him to Genoa and basically tricked him into entering the Pesto World Championship (Bowien thought he was just tagging along to assist). Though he appeared to be the only non-Italian in the competition, and a Korean American with acid-washed jeans and a Lynyrd Skynyrd haircut to boot, Bowien upstaged everybody and won first place.

  At that point, Bowien figured success meant: ascend the ranks to executive chef, maybe lure investors to help him start his own restaurant, do a cookbook, land a TV show. Bowien grew up in Oklahoma City, the adopted son of a white family that ate hamburgers and canned corn. He’d become interested in cooking through hours spent watching the Food Network: Emeril, Ming Tsai, Mario Batali. So when, not long after his pesto victory, Bowien heard that a casting company was auditioning chefs in San Francisco for The Next Food Network Star, he decided to try out.