Best Food Writing 2010 (12 page)

BY THE TIME I MOVED HERE, in 1988, Los Angeles’s role as a brilliantly inventive restaurant city had been cemented. I came as a cook, not a critic, carrying with me well-worn knives from Dehillerin in Paris, where I’d worked for Guy Savoy, and from Bridge Kitchenware in New York, where I was a line cook at the ‘21’ Club. Now the energy was pointing west. Everything seemed to be in flux when I got here. Even at the city’s older, well-loved places like Valentino, in Santa Monica, chefs were changing their stripes. When Valentino’s owner, Piero Selvaggio, opened the place back in 1972, it was a typical high-end
ristorante
with plenty of tableside pyrotechnics. “We didn’t use anything like buffalo mozzarella,” he recalls. “Mozzarella was something breaded and fried.” But by the time I visited, Selvaggio was wheeling an olive oil cart around his dining room, pouring samples over bruschetta so that customers could appreciate the differences between regional oils.

I got a job on the line at Citrus, a new restaurant that the French-born chef Michel Richard had just opened among the production houses and sound stages in the raggedy southern end of Hollywood. At Citrus, Richard wasn’t just mining the local terrain for the freshest beets or handmade charcuterie; he was going to the Thai grocery down the block and coming back to the kitchen with lemongrass and coconut milk. He was shopping at Armenian markets and bringing back things like
katafi
(shredded phyllo dough), which most of us had never seen before, and wrapping local Dungeness crab cakes with the stuff. One day, he became fascinated by watching one of the Salvadoran prep cooks eating a chayote salad. A few days later, we were plating up chayote slaw.

That you could play with culinary genres like that had become a given. Everyone was blurring boundaries: there was Roy Yamaguchi mingling Hawaiian foods like ahi and macadamia nuts with European techniques at his restaurant 385 North in West Hollywood (and later at the LA branch of Roy’s); Nobu Matsuhisa melded Latin American ingredients with traditional sushi at his namesake restaurant in Beverly Hills; and at the Melrose Avenue eatery Border Grill, which opened in 1985, Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken freely interwove strains of regional Mexican cuisines in homage to LA’s countless great taquerías. In a way, this sort of eclecticism was right at home in a city where fantasy and invention, rather than history and tradition, had formed the foundation of high-end dining.

By the end of the 1980s, LA was home to innovative restaurants that boasted an equally novel asset: homegrown talent. When Campanile opened, a few blocks north of Wilshire Boulevard, in 1989, its planked salmon and its grilled prime rib with black olive tapenade—served in a rustic but elegant dining room in a faux-Tuscan complex with a verdigris cupola—caused a sensation. Its owners were Nancy Silverton and Mark Peel, chefs who had come up through the ranks of LA dining and not from New York, France, or Austria.

I’ve eaten at Campanile too many times to count, and every time I do, I feel grounded in this city. Los Angeles is a hard place to know—its fantasyland roots, its ethnic patchwork, and its almost too perfect sense of glamour all defy easy explanation. But sitting in a crowded dining room like Campanile’s, I feel the disparate streams of LA’s history coming together, and I can gaze around me, and at the plates of beautiful food, and say to myself, This is it. This is LA.

AU REVOIR TO ALL THAT

By Michael Steinberger From
Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France

Has France—the country that gave the world
haute cuisine
—truly ceded its place as the epicenter of all things culinary? Known for his controversial wine columns in
Slate.com
, journalist Michael Steinberger argues the case in fascinating detail.

O
n an uncomfortably warm September evening in 1999, I swapped my wife for a duck liver. The unplanned exchange took place at Au Crocodile, a Michelin three-star restaurant in the city of Strasbourg, in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. We had gone to Crocodile for dinner and, at the urging of our waiter, had chosen for our main course one of Chef Émile Jung’s signature dishes,
Foie de Canard et Écailles de Truffe en Croûte de Sel, Baeckeofe de Légumes
. Baeckeofe is a traditional Alsatian stew made of potatoes, onions, carrots, leeks, and several different meats. Jung, possessed of that particular Gallic genius for transforming quotidian fare into high cuisine, served a version of baeckeofe in which the meats were replaced by an entire lobe of duck liver, which was bathed in a truffled bouillon with root vegetables and cooked in a sealed terrine. The seal was broken at the table, and as soon as the gorgeous pink-gray liver was lifted out of its crypt and the first, pungent whiff of black truffles came our way, I knew our palates were about to experience rapture. Sure enough, for the ten minutes or so that it took us to consume the dish, the only sounds we emitted were some barely suppressed grunts and moans. The baeckeofe was outrageously good—the liver a velvety, earthy, voluptuous mass, the bouillon an intensely flavored broth that flattered everything it touched.

We had just finished dessert when Jung, a beefy, jovial man who looked to be in his mid-fifties, appeared at our table. We thanked him profusely for the meal, and my wife, an editor for a food magazine, asked about some of the preparations. From the look on his face, he was smitten with her, and after enthusiastically fielding her questions, he invited her to tour the kitchen with him. “We’ll leave him here,” he said, pointing at me. As my wife got up from the table, Jung eyed her lasciviously and said, “You are a mango woman!” which I took to be a reference to her somewhat exotic looks (she is half-American, half-Japanese). She laughed nervously; I laughed heartily. As Jung squired her off to the kitchen, I leaned back in my chair and took a sip of Gewürztraminer.

By now, it was midnight, the dining room was almost empty, and the staff had begun discreetly tidying up. After some minutes had passed, Madame Jung, a lean woman with frosted blonde hair who oversaw the front of the restaurant, approached my table, wearing a put-upon smile which suggested this wasn’t the first time her husband had taken a young female guest to see his pots and pans. Perhaps hoping to commiserate, she asked me if everything was okay. “
Bien sûr
,” I immediately replied, with an enthusiasm that appeared to take her by surprise. I was in too much of a stupor to engage in a lengthy conversation, but had I been able to summon the words, I would have told her that her husband had just served me one of the finest dishes I’d ever eaten; that surrendering my wife (in a manner of speaking) was a small price to pay for such satisfaction; and that I’d have gladly waited at the table till daybreak if that’s what it took to fully convey my gratitude to Monsieur Jung.

In the end, I didn’t have to wait quite that long. After perhaps forty-five minutes, Jung returned my wife to the table. She came back bearing gifts: two bottles of the chef’s own late-harvest Tokay Pinot Gris and, curiously, a cold quail stuffed with foie gras, which had been wrapped in aluminum foil so that we could take it with us. We thanked him again for the memorable dinner and his generosity, and then he showed us to the door. There, I received a perfunctory handshake, while my wife got two drawn-out pecks, one to each cheek. She got two more out in front of the restaurant, and as we walked down the street toward our hotel, Jung joyfully shouted after her, “You are a mango woman!” his booming voice piercing the humid night air.

Early the next morning, driving from Strasbourg to Reims in a two-door Peugeot that felt as if it was about to come apart from metal fatigue, my wife and I made breakfast of the quail. We didn’t have utensils, so we passed it back and forth, ripping it apart with our hands and teeth. As we wound our way through the low, rolling hills of northeast France, silently putting the cold creature to an ignominious end, I couldn’t help but marvel at what had transpired. Where but in France could a plate of food set in motion a chain of events that would find you whimpering with ecstasy in the middle of a restaurant; giving the chef carte blanche to hit on your wife, to the evident dismay of his wife; and joyfully gorging yourself just after sunrise the next day on a bird bearing the liver of another bird, a gift bestowed on your wife by said chef as a token of his lust? The question answered itself: This sort of thing could surely only happen in France, and at that moment, not for the first time, I experienced the most overwhelming surge of affection for her.

I FIRST WENT TO FRANCE as a thirteen-year-old, in the company of my parents and my brother, and it was during this trip that I, like many other visitors there, experienced the Great Awakening—the moment at the table that changes entirely one’s relationship to food. It was a vegetable that administered the shock for me: Specifically, it was the baby peas (drowned in butter, of course) served at a nondescript hotel in the city of Blois, in the Loire Valley, that caused me to realize that food could be a source of gratification and not just a means of sustenance—that mealtime could be the highlight of the day, not simply a break from the day’s activities.

A few days later, while driving south to the Rhône Valley, my parents decided to splurge on lunch at a two-star restaurant called Au Chapon Fin, in the town of Thoissey, a few miles off the A6 in the Mâcon region. I didn’t know at the time that it was a restaurant with a long and illustrious history (among its claims to fame: It was where Albert Camus ate his last meal before the car crash that killed him in 1960), nor can I recollect many details of the meal. I remember having a pâté to start, followed by a big piece of chicken, and that both were excellent, but that’s about it. However, I vividly recall being struck by the sumptuousness of the dining room. The tuxedoed staff, the thick white tablecloths, the monogrammed plates, the heavy silverware, the ornate ice buckets—it was the most elegant restaurant I’d ever seen. Every table was filled with impeccably attired, perfectly mannered French families. I hadn’t yet heard of Baudelaire, but this was my first experience of that particular state of bliss he described as
luxe, calme, et volupté
(richness, calm, and pleasure), and I found it enthralling.

Other trips to France followed, and in time, France became not just the place that fed me better than any other, but an emotional touchstone. In low moments, nothing lifted my mood like the thought of Paris—the thought of eating in Paris, that is. When I moved to Hong Kong in 1994, I found a café called DeliFrance (part of a local chain by the same name) that quickly became the site of my morning ritual; reading the
International Herald Tribune
over a watery cappuccino and a limp, greasy croissant, I imagined I was having breakfast in Paris, and the thought filled me with contentment. Most of the time, though, I was acutely aware that I was not in Paris. On several occasions, my comings and goings from Hong Kong’s airport coincided with the departure of Air France’s nightly flight to Paris. The sight of that 747 taxiing out to the runway always prompted the same thought: Lucky bastards.

In 1997, a few months after I moved back to the United States, the
New Yorker
published an article by Adam Gopnik asking, “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?” The essay was vintage Gopnik—witty, well observed, and bristling with insight. Gopnik, then serving as the magazine’s Paris correspondent, suggested that French cuisine had lost its sizzle: It had become rigid, sentimental, impossibly expensive, and dull. The “muse of cooking,” as he put it, had moved on—to New York, San Francisco, Sydney, London. In these cities, the restaurants exuded a dynamism that was now increasingly hard to find in Paris. “All this,” wrote Gopnik, “makes a Francophile eating in Paris feel a little like a turn-of-the-century clergyman who has just read Robert Ingersoll: you try to keep the faith, but Doubts keep creeping in.”

I didn’t share those Doubts: To me, France remained the
orbis terrarum
of food, and nothing left me feeling more in love with life than a sensational meal in Paris. I refused to entertain the possibility that French cuisine had run aground; I didn’t see it then, and I still didn’t see it when Émile Jung took off with my wife two years later during that Lucullan evening at Au Crocodile. Sure, I knew that it was now pretty easy to find bad food in France if you went looking for it. I was aware, too, that France’s economic difficulties had made it brutally difficult for restaurants like Au Crocodile to keep the stoves running. In 1996, Pierre Gagnaire, a three-star chef in the industrial city of Saint-Étienne, near Lyon, had gone bankrupt, and the same fate had almost befallen another top chef, Marc Veyrat. I also recognized that I was perhaps prone to a certain psychophysical phenomenon, common among France lovers, whereby the mere act of dining on French soil seemed to enhance the flavor of things. Even so, as far as I was concerned, France remained the first nation of food, and anyone suggesting otherwise either was being willfully contrarian or was eating in the wrong places.

It was the swift and unexpected demise of Ladurée just after the turn of the millennium that caused the first Doubts to creep in. Ladurée was a Paris institution, a charmingly sedate tea room on the rue Royale, in the eighth arrondissement. It was famous for its macaroons and pastries, and it also served one of the best lunches in Paris. I usually went with the artfully composed, perfectly dressed salade niçoise, which I chased down with a glass or two of Marcel Lapierre’s violet-scented Morgon (a Beaujolais) and a deliciously crusty roll. At some point, I discovered Ladurée’s praline mille feuille, which was also habit-forming: I would finish every lunch with this ethereal napoleon consisting of almond pralines, praline cream, caramelized pastry dough, and crispy hazelnuts. Of all the things that I routinely ate in France, it was the praline mille feuille that made me the happiest.

But returning to Ladurée, after a year’s absence, I walked into a restaurant whose pilot light had been extinguished. The first sign of trouble was the lack of familiar faces: The endearingly gruff waitresses who had given the restaurant so much of its character had been replaced by bumbling androids. Worse, the menu had changed, and many of the old standbys, including the salade niçoise, were gone (so, too, the Morgon), replaced by a clutch of unappetizing dishes. The perpetrators of this calamity had the good sense to leave the praline mille feuille untouched, but I had to assume that it would soon be headed for history’s flour bin. While Ladurée was an adored institution, it had no standing in the gastronomic world—no famous chef, no Michelin stars, no widely mimicked dishes. Even so, I now began to wonder if the French really were starting to screw things up—if French cuisine was genuinely in trouble. You might say it was the moment the snails fell from my eyes.

A few days after my dismaying visit to Ladurée, I was in the Mâcon area, this time with my wife and a friend of ours. As the three of us kicked around ideas for dinner late one afternoon, I felt pangs of curiosity. Did it still exist? If so, was it still any good? I quickly began leafing through the Michelin Guide, found Thoissey, and there it was: Au Chapon Fin. It was now reduced to one star, but the fact that it still had any was mildly encouraging. Several hours later, we were en route to Thoissey. By then, however, my initial enthusiasm had given way to trepidation. For the dedicated feeder, the urge to relive the tasting pleasures of the past is constant and frequently overwhelming. But restaurants change and so do palates; trying to recreate memorable moments at the table is often a recipe for heartache (and possibly also heartburn). And here I was, exactly two decades later, hoping to find Chapon Fin just as I had left it.

Well, the parking lot hadn’t changed a bit—it was as expansive as I remembered it, and most of the spaces were still shaded by trees. Sadly, that was the high point of the visit. One glance at the dining room told the tale. The grandeur that had left such a mark on me had given way to decrepitude. Those thick, regal tablecloths were now thin, scuffed sheets. The carpet was threadbare. The plates appeared ready to crack from exhaustion. The staff brightened things a bit. The service was cheerful and solicitous—perhaps overly so—but they were doing their best to compensate for the food, which was every bit as haggard as the room. The evening passed in a crestfallen blur. What the hell was going on here?