Best Food Writing 2015 (11 page)

The Last Supper
The Last Supper

B
Y
T
OM
J
UNOD

From
Esquire

          
Esquire
staff writer Tom Junod has covered a host of topics since he joined the magazine in 1998. In this elegy to New York City's acclaimed restaurant wd-50, he widens the scope beyond chef Wylie Dufresne's culinary innovations, digging into how wd-50 redefined dining culture.

“Who are you calling a pussy?” Wylie Dufresne asked.

We were at a booth in the back of his restaurant, wd-50, next to the entrance to the kitchen. The kitchen did not have a door but rather a garage-doorsized opening that afforded people eating dinner an unimpeded view of—and, if they asked, unimpeded access to—the people making it for them. That Dufresne, known as the great trickster of American cuisine and its chief practitioner of molecular gastronomy, insisted on absolute transparency was one of the paradoxes he engineered into the experience of eating at wd-50, his way of saying
There are no tricks
. The wizard might fry mayonnaise, but he never hid behind the curtain.

For the 11 years Dufresne cooked at wd-50, diners watched him cooking. He often stood at the entrance of his kitchen and watched them dining. What I didn't know until my last supper at wd-50 is that he also listened.

Now, it was true that a gentleman at our table had called American chefs “a bunch of pussies.” But then he had also said the same thing about American writers. And he was calling American chefs and American
writers a bunch of pussies only to contrast them with Wylie Dufresne. Indeed, there were five of us, and we had come to the vinous consensus that everybody involved in the production of American culture was a pussy
but
Wylie because everybody but Wylie had compromised.

Of course, we often hear of “uncompromising chefs”—chefs fanatical about the quality of their ingredients. But Dufresne was uncompromising about his
ideas
, about his refusal to use an ingredient that hadn't been reinvented or at least recontextualized. He wasn't just an artist with food; he was an artist with
hunger
who had confronted diners with the question of just how much artistry they found appetizing. He had no ambitions for empire, no designs on wd-50s in Vegas and Dubai. His struggle to keep wd-50 open even in the face of a dining room often half filled was no more and no less than a struggle to keep cooking the way he wanted to cook until someone stopped him.

And now someone had stopped him. His landlord had sold the building, and the new owner intended to build something in its place. The official line was that wd-50 was a victim of progress, not of taste. But it was still closing, and the five of us, like many others, had come there to mark its demise after not having eaten there in years. We told ourselves that we were celebrating Dufresne's achievement, and it was not until he came to our table that we understood the sadness of the occasion. He had always been the essence of modesty and congeniality in a business that lavishly rewards egomaniacs and assholes. He still looked the same, with his unstained chef's whites and his pinstriped black apron, his owlish eyeglasses and his long straight hair parted on the side, his fine patrician nose and his quick smile, which flashed both amusement and forbearance. But his pride was all the more apparent for its having been wounded, and when he came out of the kitchen there was something I had never seen in him before—a proprietary and almost imperious sense of solitude. He had never been anything less than determined. And now he was determined to see wd-50 through to its end, and he walked through the restaurant sharp-eyed and sharp-eared, as though on patrol.

This is not to say he was unhappy when he visited us. We were four dishes into his tasting menu. We had eaten oysters in edible shells. We had eaten cuttlefish with a square of “schmaltz”—the rendered chicken fat once so ubiquitous in the delis of the Lower East Side that it became
synonymous with Jewish sentimentality was now so thoroughly alchemized that it dissolved on the roof of the mouth like a communion wafer. We had eaten ropes of raw tuna tied into knots that presented not just culinary but also mathematical conundrums. He wanted us—he wanted everybody—to be delighted and we were, even when he enthusiastically explained that he had used a “bonding agent” on the tuna. “Mmmm, nothing makes me hungry like the words ‘bonding agent,'” said the gentleman who had first gotten Dufresne's attention by castigating the conservatism of American chefs . . . all right, by calling all American chefs a bunch of pussies.

Five minutes later, Dufresne returned with the next course, a scrawl of liquefied chicken liver “hit with a blowtorch” and flanked by intricate mounds of mousse-like honeydew melon compressed with yuzu juice. Four of us couldn't read the script on our plates because Dufresne had invented a language that didn't include words. But one of us could. Dufresne personally delivered his plate after writing in charred chicken liver the word
pussy
, curved along the bottom of the plate like a smile.

Of course there was music playing. There always was, not in the restaurant but rather in the kitchen, so loud that the people eating in the restaurant could hear it. Dufresne was a music fan, devoted to classic rock and the Grateful Dead. He had put a list of wd-50 favorites on the menu under the moniker “From the Vault,” in honor of the series of live albums that the Dead had made from unearthed tapes, and he told us that Phil Lesh was scheduled to come by and eat when he came to New York the following week. But what was striking about Dufresne's food was not just its rock 'n' roll spirit; it was also the tension between its rock 'n' roll spirit and the rigor of its preparation. The Dead were famous for feats of improvisation; Dufresne was famous—or almost famous—for feats of control, for molecular gastronomy Dionysian in effect but ruthlessly Apollonian in execution. He wanted to be Garcia; he had turned out to be Owsley, the band's chemist, creating dishes almost pharmaceutical in their precision. He made tiny time capsules of food that delivered not only novel combinations of flavor but also novel combinations of flavor designed to be experienced in the order Dufresne intended. He served us plates of lamb bacon meant to answer the persistent criticism that his food wasn't “delicious” enough,
but what lingered was the taste of the dried black chickpeas scattered on the plate like crumbs. He described them as “blackchickpea hummus,” but sampled alone they tasted like nothing at all—postmodern parsley, a throwaway element that functioned only to interrupt the void of the vast white plate. Tasted in conjunction with the lamb, however, they became intensely peppery and made the slippery lamb almost crunchy in texture. They appeared, disappeared, and reappeared, and, like all of Dufresne's best inventions, they kept doing his will in the staging area he made of your mouth.

The kitchen was playing “When the Levee Breaks”—the Led Zeppelin song that sounds as though John Bonham is playing with cinder blocks instead of drumsticks—when Dufresne came to the table with the lamb bacon. And the juxtaposition of what he served and what they played raised a question: “Hey, Wylie, in the years you've been running wd-50, food has surpassed music as the thing people talk about, at least in New York City. But do you think that food can ever be as good as music? Do you think it can deliver the same experience as ‘When the Levee Breaks'?”

“Do I think that food can be as
heavy
as ‘When the Levee Breaks' or ‘Achilles Last Stand'?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don't know. Those songs are pretty heavy. But it's a good question. Let me think about that one for a while.”

But he didn't leave. He didn't go back to the kitchen, because he had tried to make art out of food, and he wanted to tell us what he'd found out. “It's been a struggle to get people to come eat for fun,” he said. “You know, the way they listen to music. You can do all kinds of things with music. But food—it's something people
need
, and that changes everything. You start playing with it, people have all sorts of reactions.”

He was a pioneer who wanted to start a movement and now had to be satisfied remaining a pioneer. “When I first opened, I thought there would be 15 people in the city doing what I do. Instead, Copenhagen has more of these kinds of restaurants than New York City does. The small town of
San Sebastián
has more of these kinds of restaurants than New York City does.

“I don't know,” he said. “I just never thought I'd be the only one.”

I wanted to tell him that rock 'n' roll was dying, too. But as Dufresne
scanned the room from his place alongside our table, he did not look like the musician he styled himself to be. He looked like an astronaut who still can't believe that humans would never return to the moon.

The last course before the desserts was described on the menu as “Wagyu Flatiron, Watermelon, Fermented Black Bean.” This was typical of wd-50—the seemingly discordant list of ingredients stated without elaboration, the provocation of a simultaneously mild-mannered and supremely self-confident man. But the last course before the dessert—the meat dish—had always been the course that revealed the weakness of wd-50, and we did not know what to expect of it. The meat dish is supposed to be the climax of the meal, at least in America, and Dufresne had never done anything to dampen anyone's sense of expectation. Indeed, by orchestrating and calibrating every aspect of the menu leading to the meat dish, he only sharpened the hunger for a final transcendent gesture, for meat that had been somehow reinvented. But meat turns out to be as hard to reinvent as the wheel. It's not that the beef and pork and chicken that Dufresne served weren't delicious; it's that people eating beef and pork and chicken are looking for pleasures
outside
deliciousness, and Dufresne was often loath to provide them. He often cooked meat with water as much as fire, with the perfectly controlled and calibrated technique known as sous vide. He often served meat not only without blood but also without smell, and it made the wide-open atelier of his kitchen seem suddenly as antiseptic as an operating room.

But Dufresne was
cooking
on this night, in every sense of the word. I do not remember anything about the watermelon or the fermented black bean that accompanied the lobe of Wagyu beef. But I remember the meat. It was red without being bloody, all the way to the lightly charred margin, and though it lacked smell, it looked like a heart, with a strange kind of life preserved in its density of flavor. Ah, we agreed, with our presumed sophistication,
this
is the kind of meat for which sous vide was created. The molecular had at last found expression in the elemental, so we moved on to the desserts feeling freed of the spectre of disappointment. And it was here that we confronted Dufresne's willingness to experiment with what he called “the undelicious,” in the form of the final dessert, a nod to the gin and tonic in the form of a sorghum
parfait, with a cake made of quinine and the taste of tonic replicated in tiny heaps of clear jelly.

It wasn't the invention of Dufresne but rather of his pastry chef, Malcolm Livingston II, but in a way it was what we were all waiting for—the risk that did not pay off and, in not paying off, confirmed that we were in the hands of a kitchen genuinely willing to take risks. How do we know that Wylie Dufresne is an artist and not just a gifted and daring chef? Because he sometimes does the impossible. How do we know he does the impossible? Because he sometimes fails to do the impossible. And it was that whiff of failure that hung on the night of our last supper at wd-50 and confronted us just as surely as quinine cake. Dufresne's experiment—a truly experimental restaurant—was closing. Did that mean it had failed? Did that mean
he
had failed? Or was the failure our own?

He did not accompany us to the door when we were leaving. He showed up when we were waiting outside and invited us back in for sake at the bar. It was late, yet wd-50 was more crowded than it had been in the flush of many an evening before Dufresne had announced its end. Now he looked at the people at his tables and listened to their clamor with the same look of vigilance that had crossed his face when he thought we were calling him names. “It's great,” he said, “and it's really gratifying. But where were they two months ago? Where were they last year and the year before that?”

He didn't know what he was going to do next. He was obsessed with two things as a chef: the food of the Lower East Side as it existed before restaurants like wd-50 started moving in and the excellence of the egg. Hell, what most people didn't understand was he was obsessed with
cooking
, so maybe he would open a restaurant where he could work as a short-order cook, frying and scrambling eggs without feeling the need to transform them, like Picasso returning to sketch work just to show that he could draw.