Steal the Menu (27 page)

For a larger version of this menu, click
here
.

My dinner with Joel (and Maria) at Grant Achatz’s modernist Alinea in Chicago in early February 2007 included a helpful waiter who stood by to explain this cryptic menu. (
illustration credit 5.2
)

Most other cities in this era have restaurants with deep local roots that serve food of “national” quality. “National,” as I took to using it in
Journal
reviews, meant that a restaurant in Des Moines or Richmond, Virginia, was on a level with the best and most up-to-date dining places on either coast, or in other acknowledged food centers such as Chicago or Miami. And as I traveled around America, I learned, with gratification and diminishing surprise, just how many national places there were.

Take Sanford in Milwaukee. Like Charlie Trotter’s, it was established in a house, in a residential neighborhood, but the neighborhood was nothing fancy; neither was the little house where Sanford D’Amato and his wife, Angie, transformed a family grocery store into a soberly elegant dining room more than twenty years ago. Combining a cosmopolitan and up-to-date technique with local ingredients, D’Amato applied his French technique acquired at the Culinary Institute of America to roots cooking. When I ate there in 2009, I ordered a timbale of smoked salmon with rye cake, mustard mousseline and dill-pickled rutabaga. This was high-low cuisine, with humble ingredients and flavors you might have found in Milwaukee’s most vernacular saloons.

But there was nothing plebeian about Sanford’s menu, which featured “green”
^a
Strauss veal gently raised twenty miles to the southwest in Franklin, Wisconsin. The night I was at Sanford,
this pampered meat appeared as a sous vide–tamed “17-hour” veal breast with escarole and pickled hedgehog mushrooms in a burnt-orange reduction. I finished the meal with a plate of five Wisconsin cheeses. Snow White goat cheddar and Carr Valley Billy Blue were far from the run-of-the-industrial-barn cheeses Wisconsin sells by the carload to the outside world.

You could hardly ask for a more harmonious blend of sauce making evolved from classic principles, local sourcing of ingredients and modernist methodology. The humble cut of veal breast illustrated perfectly why the sous vide technique has spread far and wide. Really just a precise form of low-temperature cooking in a water bath, sous vide softens tougher cuts of meat without the aggressive force of a traditional, high-temperature braise. It can also cook a salmon without drying it out, leaving the texture as smooth and as flavorful as sashimi but not raw.

Sous vide literally means “in a vacuum.” The name has unnecessarily emphasized the fact that food is put in plastic bags, which then have the air sucked out of them, so that they cling tightly, protecting the food from the water in the bath but allowing essentially direct contact with the temperature of the water. Temperatures much lower than those of normal cooking preserved a freshness of flavor in the veal.

Later in 2008, I continued my heartland odyssey in Denver and Minneapolis, the two cities that hosted the party conventions, and made dining recommendations to the delegates.

I felt compelled to mention Denver’s taxidermic showplace for regionally farmed game (elk and yak), the Buckhorn Exchange. But the “national” choice here was Restaurant Kevin Taylor in the chic Hotel Teatro, down the street from the convention center in downtown Denver’s cultural and entertainment hub. I admired Taylor’s treatments of red meat, the contrasting textures of tender Colorado dry-aged lamb sirloin and melting lamb belly dressed
up with twice-baked eggplant, figs and pimenton peppers; the counterpoint of locally farmed bison sirloin and barbecued back ribs with black beans, cheddar corn grits and charred tomatillos; and the Snake River Farms Kobe rib eye and beef-cheek two-step, with tasty potatoes and a truffle-accented béarnaise sauce. But I really liked his olive oil–poached halibut cheek—big enough to make you hope he hadn’t thrown away the rest of the fish. (Potato-crusted Alaskan halibut was available as a main course.)

At the other end of the social and sensory scale was Snooze, on a seedy block of pawnshops in Denver’s ballpark neighborhood, a breakfast place serving coffee specially grown for it at a Guatemalan finca.

Minneapolis wasn’t a patch on Denver, foodwise. The most original dining choice in the Twin Cities was on a drab block in plain-faced St. Paul, where I did my best to encourage Republican delegates to take their wives. If any of them did follow my advice and eat at Heartland, I am sure their power act didn’t faze my waitress, who brought eight wineglasses at one swoop to a table near me in the storefront establishment’s restrained dining room, with its open kitchen and rack of burly aluminum stockpots suspended above.

Heartland was locavorous on steroids, and I mean that kindly. Its Wisconsin elk tartare was a rich, dense, meticulously hand-chopped and not-at-all-gamy way to begin a splendid meal. I liked the menu so much I had a second starter: a subtly contrasting salad of chilled Canadian wheat berries and sweet corn with Donnay Dairy chèvre, microgreens and watercress pesto vinaigrette. I followed it with the midwestern mixed grill of Illinois fallow venison and Minnesota wild boar sausage, with Footjoy Farm flat beans, house-cured wild boar
guanciale
(jowl) and fresh ginger
glace de viande
.

Heartland was tucked away in a gray corner of the upper Midwest
but cooking its heart out with top modern technique and bonhomie. As jumbo jets bound to shinier destinations flew overhead, the new food gospel was being preached here with expert ardor. Heartland literally inspired me, launched me on a long summer of exploration of flyover country to prove that savvy national places to eat abounded next to cornfields and in cities scorned by folks in New York County obsessed with snagging rezzies at Babbo.

In Omaha, bypassing Warren Buffett’s local haunt Gorat’s, where he washes down T-bones with Cherry Coke, I honed in on the rehabbed Old Market center, redolent of handmade soaps and other New Age gifts often found near fern bars. But in and around the exposed brick emporia were a couple of national-level watering holes, one hip and dreamy, La Buvette, the other, V. Mertz, tony and pricey, but smart, too. Both of them were the godchildren of a local boy named Mark Mercer, who had made sure that the Beef State no longer lacked places to consume foie gras poached in Sauternes or mallard breasts bedecked with a medley of fig, green bean, arugula, orange and pattypan squash.

And in Des Moines, I located another true believer at Bistro Montage. Enosh Kelly, the chef-owner at this small, intense neighborhood restaurant, was a national figure in his field and deserved the reputation he was getting, with nominations for best chef in the Midwest at the 2009 Beard Awards and kudos from other bellwethers.

There were plenty of tricky first courses on his menu—a
salade niçoise
with “house-canned” ahi tuna and Foxhollow quail eggs with a caper, egg and truffle vinaigrette, for example. But I was in a locavore mood and opted for the farmers’ market tomato salad, a mosaic of heirloom tomatoes as many-colored as Joseph’s coat, dotted with tangy white flecks of local goat cheese set atop some mild arugula.

From this celebration of the Iowa terroir, I moved on to “liver and onions,” a clever turn on the homely dish that usually bears that name. Kelly’s liver—an organic local calf’s liver, of course—was crisp on the outside, very pink within, cut in triangles and placed on a circular thin cake of grated potato, the great Swiss dish
rösti
. And Kelly didn’t forget the onions. They were the caramelized solid matter in the dark brown sauce.

Like the other nice midwesterners in the little dining room, I cleaned my plate and ordered dessert. With no fanfare at all, the menu offered
marjolaine
, the trademark dessert of Fernand Point, godfather of all things
nouvelle. Marjolaine
is a pastry chef’s spectacular, with thin layers of nut-embellished meringue and butter cream. On the way out, I glanced at a shelf of cookbooks, heavy tomes by contemporary world-beaters, including Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal. Kelly was keeping the wide world in his sights, from the banks of the Des Moines River.

The best proof that a top chef could land on his feet in the most unpromising, chilly, remote corner of the heartland was a roadhouse named Nokomis, perched on a bluff overlooking the western end of Lake Superior just outside Duluth. Sean Lewis moved up there to raise his children near family and to indulge his passion for hunting and fishing. He opened Nokomis after stints in various Chicago restaurants, including a gig with the gifted and internationally praised chef Jean Joho at the Everest, atop the Chicago Stock Exchange.

I hadn’t been in Duluth since I’d passed through on my way to canoe in the Quetico-Superior Wilderness area before college. Now, fifty years later, I was in town to visit a friend serving a long sentence for embezzlement at a nearby federal prison camp. On a sunny day, on the terrace at Nokomis, I felt as if I were sitting on the first-class sundeck of an ocean liner. There was nothing much
between me and my walleye po’boy and Longfellow’s “shining Big-Sea-Water.” Lake Superior is the world’s biggest freshwater lake by surface area (Baikal, in Siberia, has more water).

Longfellow called it Gitche Gumee in his Ojibway epic
The Song of Hiawatha;
Nokomis is named for Hiawatha’s grandmother (“Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis”), who pitched her wigwam by its shores. Obviously, I told myself, Lewis wants his customers to think about local traditions when they eat here—the Indian legends, French exploration, iron-ore shipping; his menu, while mostly international and modern, featured a few local specialties. He had converted an Atlantic Coast favorite, the crab cake, into a whitefish cake, with a mustard rémoulade, brioche and roasted peppers to surround this peerless lake fish’s smoked flavor and tender flesh. He turned out a hand-chopped and very lean elk burger (farmed, of course, and not gamy but, shall we say, of independent spirit compared with ground beef).

The top of the food chain at Nokomis, for me, however, was that walleye sandwich. Walleye is a very big deal hereabouts. It’s the state fish; Great Lakes fishermen net them in the millions, and restaurants of every sort serve them in every form, from beer-battered to blackened. The perfectly broiled piece of walleye I ate exemplified what cookbooks call “fleshy white fish.” Moist, sweet-tasting and fleshy, this was supreme fish, in a truly superior setting.

If Nokomis showed the spread of advanced ideas in their simplest form at the farthest possible distance from the source, other heartland restaurants were barely less sophisticated than Per Se or San Francisco’s molecular-gastronomic Coi, and much closer to the source of their food.

Josh Adams brought the modernist, locavore gospel from Alinea to bleak Peoria, his hometown. From the open kitchen of June, he could draw on several nearby central Illinois farms,
including an eighty-acre certified-organic operation contracted exclusively to supply him.

For someone like me who remembered the gastronomic desert that the heartland had been fifty years before Josh Adams smoked shiitake mushrooms in coffee or turned out eerily tender Muscovy duck breasts by sous vide slow cooking, this return of educated chefs to the rural terroirs of their birth was immensely gratifying. But June was more than a culmination of trends that had started elsewhere. It combined the broad and established locavore-organic-healthy theology spawned by a motley crew of nutritionally zealous aesthetes descended from such diverse gurus as Adelle Davis, Alice Waters, Euell Gibbons and Michael Pollan, with the technical assistance of the transcendental, prestidigitational Mr. Wizards of El Bulli, the Fat Duck and Momofuku Ko. At June, these two opposites—the perfectly pure and homegrown versus the completely unnatural—could coexist in perilous balance on the smallest of carbon footprints.

But in the hurly-burly of the global food scene, the 365-day-a-year Olympics of Michelin stardom and San Pellegrino rankings for the world’s fifty greatest restaurants, there was no perilous balance between purity of ingredients and the inventive genius of the chef. In this arena, the genius chefs triumphed.

Innovation, cheekiness toward tradition—these were the same traits that got the nouvelle cuisine chefs of the 1970s worldwide acclaim. But Guérard and Bocuse and the Troisgros had all built on culinary tradition. The molecular gastronomers had raced beyond them with advanced machinery and food chemistry, much of it borrowed from the kitchens of the commercial food industry. With these techniques, they literally reinvented food, re-formed it.

Led at first by Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, they attracted record
numbers of requests for reservations.
^b
In every year before 2010, when Ferran Adrià announced that he would close El Bulli, at the peak of its celebrity, on July 30, 2011, it was in the top three of the San Pellegrino list published in the United Kingdom’s
Restaurant
magazine. From 2006 through 2009, El Bulli led the list, followed by the Fat Duck. Despite the fame and popularity, El Bulli, according to Adrià, did not turn a profit. Open only half the year, with a chef in the kitchen for every diner, it was an extravagant experiment.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a sign of the basic vulgarity of the glamorous, chef-worshipping, trendy top end of the restaurant scene. It is pretty clear that the selection system behind the list is a dodgy affair: the writers and bons viveurs who do the voting are not even required to submit proof that they have actually eaten in any restaurant. Some voters have admitted publicly that they form blocs to get their pals or neighbors chosen. It’s important, however, to remember that the list has not created the reputations of its favorites but merely latched onto the coattails of serious chefs already renowned in the gossipy world of food pros and dedicated epicures.

In 1999, three years before
Restaurant
magazine started the San Pellegrino list, the American wine and food journalist Jacqueline Friedrich proposed an article for my page at the
Journal
about a radical restaurant in an isolated bay in rural Catalonia. She had been hearing great things about it in Paris, where she was based. I gave her the assignment. She ate at El Bulli twice, interviewed Adrià, and wrote a highly favorable piece. She said just about everything worth saying about Adrià and the movement he had launched, in 1,241 words. The food was “startling.” Major chefs like Joël Robuchon were making pilgrimages over the scary road
from Rosas and coming back with ecstatic reports. Friedrich saw that the tasting menu of more than twenty small plates was a crucial innovation (which would go a long way toward ending the traditional appetizer, main course, dessert format in hundreds of other restaurants).