Steal the Menu (29 page)

At the Fat Duck, west of London, in 2009, I dived into Heston Blumenthal’s literal re-creation, both on a plate and in sound piped through an iPod Shuffle, of a littoral teeming with wonderful fishy and crustacean things to eat. (
illustration credit 5.3
)

I read this explanation in
The Big Fat Duck Cookbook
after I had eaten the dish. Blumenthal’s account of the way he stumbled toward its final conception enhanced my appreciation of what I’d eaten. And the recipe that followed let me see exactly how he’d brought it off. This kind of clarity and transparency is not just an accidental habit of the modernist chefs. It is a commitment they share that there will be no more chef’s secrets on their watch.

This is admirable, and practical. It leaves no room for the kind of misinterpretation that inevitably built up around the tight-lipped and subtle masters of nouvelle cuisine. But it does still leave open a major esthetic question.

Since modernist cuisine depends so heavily on surprise and theatricality, will a second visit to these restaurants be as exciting as the first? Once you know that the mousse will vanish in your mouth and that the black fish is really orange inside, will you still want to speed-dial the Fat Duck two months in advance to snag one of the restaurant’s forty seats, and fly in for the day from Melbourne for the occasion? When you know how the magician cuts the lady in half, do you want to see him do it a second time?

Vladimir Nabokov saw this as a central issue for readers of fiction. He made his students at Cornell read all the assigned novels in his course twice so that the second time around they would be able to look beyond the sentimental seductions of the plot to enjoy, say, Jane Austen for her art. Of course, a novel has a fixed text and a restaurant can and usually does change its menu over time. But the question remains: Will the attraction of culinary contrivance and coups de théâtre wear off? Will the excitement of modernist food pale?

For most people, there will be no second chance or even a first, given the difficulty of getting a seat at these places and their high cost. But in the long haul, for the gastronome committed to dining at the cutting edge, it does matter if a cooking style built on magic and chemical disguise, on the novelty of improbable mixtures of ingredients and violations of traditional taste affinities, can weather familiarity.

Science may offer an answer. What may start as dramatic novelty in the laboratory can turn into an indispensable feature of normal life. The original laser was once the stuff of science fiction, but lasers now read DVDs in millions of households.

Something similar has already occurred in the restaurant world. Sous vide cooking, which was nearly outlawed as a health risk by clueless New York City health inspectors, is now a regular fact of life in utterly routine restaurants with no flash to them. Meanwhile, the best of the cutting-edge modernists continue to develop. That is their gift. They build on what they’ve learned. But even a talented modernist chef can end up making you yawn. I was dazzled the first time I ate at Grant Achatz’s Alinea. The second time, his act seemed shallow. a bevy of stunts disguising a lot of dishes of routine flavor.

This may explain why he has opened a second restaurant, called Next, that will remake not only its menu but its entire concept every quarter, doing pastiches and reenactments of food from past eras, exotic venues and other men’s restaurants. Food as a postmodern variety show.

At the same time, the era of the molecular modernists may already have peaked. El Bulli is closed, and the top spot in the San Pellegrino ratings for 2011 was won by a restaurant known for prescientific foraging. Noma, in Copenhagen, built its menu around seaweed and other foodstuffs gathered from Scandinavian shores and forests.

Despite its militantly Nordic primitivism, Noma was a direct descendant of culinary modernism, not a reaction against it. René Redzepi, a Danish citizen whose father is Albanian-Macedonian, worked at El Bulli before founding Noma in an old salt shed on a bleak pier on the Copenhagen waterfront. He also worked for Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, and several members of his staff, when I had lunch there in February 2012, had come from the kitchen of Keller’s Per Se, in New York. And the food, while rigorously sourced from its region, almost pedantically seasonal (including items picked fresh in warmer weather and then pickled or salted for the winter), and austerely presented, could not have existed without the deconstructive irony of nouvelle cuisine or modernism’s experiments in transforming edible raw materials into shapes and textures unknown in nature.

Redzepi’s spectacular success, which has inspired a wave of imitation in Copenhagen and put Denmark on the world culinary map for the first time in its history (Danish pastry is the exception that proves the rule), made Noma the leading current example of the international nature of elite dining.

Ecstatic notices in the foreign press—especially the top rating in London’s
Restaurant
magazine’s annual fifty-best restaurant poll—were followed by reverberations in food blogs and a worldwide assault from foodies competing by e-mail for one of the fifteen tables.

Before I went there for lunch on Valentine’s Day, I had read Redzepi’s manifesto at the front of
Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine
.
^f
So I knew not to expect luxury ingredients such as foie gras or the meat-based sauces typical of French haute cuisine. Other trappings of the Michelin star circuit would be missing, too. So it didn’t surprise me that there were no tablecloths and that the
plates were a jumble of plain old things instead of the hand-painted Royal Copenhagen favored in many other leading Copenhagen eating places. And it wasn’t a total shock to discover that the food was often served to us by the chefs.

This is a growing trend in smallish avant-garde restaurants with the ambition to democratize the dining experience, to take it further away from the aristocratic food service of the past, and to increase the intimacy of the meal, while demystifying the cooking by promoting dialogue between chefs and customers. Young chefs, in particular at Schwa in Chicago and Momofuku Ko in New York, have favored this approach. And René Redzepi is a young chef. He was only twenty-five when Noma opened its doors in 2004.

The starkness of the foraged subarctic and arctic ingredients was part of the legend that preceded Noma’s twenty-four-course lunch. And I fully expected that those mosses and seaweeds, fermented vegetables and strange fish pulled from icy waters would electrify my palate. How many times had I now read reviews bordering on delirium, so many of which ended up with the critic declaring that this had been the “best meal of my life”?

So I thought that, basically, the dishes would sound bizarre but taste great. And this turned out to be true. I was not prepared, however, to find that the presentation of the food, often in simulations of forest floors or tidal pools, was, although deliberately austere compared to the eye-popping techno–trompe l’oeil at El Bulli, Alinea or the Fat Duck, every bit as theatrical, metamorphic and even sometimes comic and irreverent toward local tradition as its more overtly showy and transgressive predecessors’.

This was true right from the first of the fourteen small-plate courses, which were mostly finger food, and which we were encouraged to wash down with a house microbrew based on birch sap. The very first course looked like some kind of Scandinavian ikebana, a faux-haphazard arrangement of juniper sprigs and woody twigs, except that the twigs were in fact branching sticks of malty flatbread.

For a larger version of this menu, click
here
.

Lunch at Noma on Valentine’s Day 2012 was a love feast of foraged, pickled, smoked ingredients plucked from Nordic woods and lakesides, but then transformed by René Redzepi’s decidedly weird imagination into mini-landscapes that fooled the eye into thinking the chef-waiters at Copenhagen’s celebrated restaurant were serving our table a plate of coral anemones (really thin-sliced cylinders of vinegar-steeped vegetables) or marrow bones (caramel). This mad synthesis of nature and technique took place at a pier on an icebound canal, really bleak. So was the roe we ate, which came from a local fish, the bleak. No joke. (
illustration credit 5.4
)

Next came a terra-cotta plate full of reindeer moss, which looked as if it had been dug up outside Valhalla, except that someone clever had fried it a bit so that it crunched, while your palate discovered that the missing mushroom listed on the menu was cèpe powder. Dried carrot sticks were still orange but had taken on the chewy texture and sweetness of licorice, without losing their essential carrothood.

Danes, no doubt, got a special frisson from the lovely arching fried pork rinds covered with a thin layer of black currant leather. This was supposed to remind you of some folkloric local snack made from pork cracklings. It was remarkable enough in its audacious pairing of two “skins,” fatty pork and sheets of purplish acidic fruit.

A bit later came a pan-Nordic send-up of
aebleskiver
and
muikku
, Danish balls of pancake dough and small smoked Finnish fish, respectively. The fish appeared to have swum partway through the spheres, like those arrows on children’s hats that look as if they had pierced their wearers’ tiny heads. Grotesque, yes, but an entirely delicious interpenetration of a traditional Christmas goodie by pesky minnows.

The slightly more imposing ten “main” courses were often constructed as fanciful “habitats,” suggesting locales where their ingredients could have been foraged. Intricately treated oysters had been reshelled and then arrayed on pebbles. Thinly sliced dried scallops perched on watercress and squid ink, but the primitive wheat grains intermixed with them did not fit in this seascape. The chef’s palate must have trumped his eco-aesthetic here, sensing that a touch of prehistoric starch—emmer and spelt—would stand up nicely to the intense, brittle scallops.

I’d say the same about the unforgettable combination of thin-sliced
raw chestnuts and pink roe from the bleak, a local fish. The forest-fresh young chestnut, was, by itself, uningratiatingly woody and astringent. But the delicate buttery roe needed just this gruff, crunchy pairing to match its rich and sea-strong flavor and smoothness. So, for me, the logic of the dish was, once again, in the mouth, not in some simulated landscape.

Certainly, you could not imagine any real-world habitat, except perhaps a coral reef, that would ever have been home to the “signature” platter of seven vegetables pickled in seven different vinegars. Some painstaking apprentice had cut those vegetables paper-thin and rolled the resulting multicolored membranes into cylinders. On the plate, these tubes loomed brightly among pale slices of poached bone marrow, which was a rare intrusion of meatiness (but not muscle meat) into Noma’s almost meatless universe. Each tube had its own taste and color in a surreal rainbow that reminded me of scenes nature offers the scuba diver: polyps and sea anemones standing up on the ocean floor.

It was strange and rich. And, some would say, only for the rich. But Noma’s popularity produced a sort of democracy of the well-heeled. Like all of the great meals now being served around the world in cutting-edge restaurants, lunch (or dinner) at Noma was available only to a tiny fraction of the potential audience of food lovers able and willing to make a special trip to Copenhagen and pay almost $300 (not including beverage) for their four-hour marathon of invention.

The price was high, sure, but compared to what? A mediocre suit? Teenagers find that much money for tickets to hip-hop concerts.

If I were Redzepi or Heston Blumenthal, I’d be more concerned about the visceral distaste their food, or the written accounts of it, have provoked among people who have never adjusted to any of the changes that have challenged traditional food service at every level
of expense and sophistication since the 1960s. Modernist cuisine is only the latest convolution and the one furthest from home cooking. Yet, despite the paranoia of some food-world paleoconservatives, it does not threaten the survival of old-fashioned recipes or of the family life that has sustained them for centuries. The family meal owes its decline to forces far greater than Thomas Keller, Wylie Dufresne and all the artist-chefs to have plated a dish since Fernand Point. Canapés cunningly composed with crackling from hand-raised heritage hogs and leather confected from handpicked black currants will never replace pot roast on the dinner tables of the 99 percent. Packaged food has already done that.

But the dazzling revolution I have witnessed in the food world since 1971 is nevertheless a potent force, more potent across the breadth of most modern societies than the avant-garde achievements of any other modern art. I am talking here about the upgrading of food at all levels of expense and connoisseurship, from the arcane temples of culinary modernism to the airport sandwich shop to the chain supermarket to the average home kitchen. The real revolution everyone above the poverty line enjoys today is a revolution of knowledge and technology, of a food supply of unprecedented variety and ameliorated quality, of a global reach and xenophilia that far surpass the efforts of diplomats and NGOs to bring us all together at one political table.