The Tastemakers (11 page)

Zarate was born in Lima and is broad shouldered with a full head of shiny black hair. He has a wide Cheshire cat's grin and the plump cheeks of a newborn baby, which are often bearded or covered in stubble. The eleventh child of a housewife and a taxi driver, Zarate grew up in a crowded, modest house where every one of his dozen siblings pitched in. At twelve years old each child was expected to enter the kitchen and assume the position as the family cook, occupy it for six months, then hand it off to the next in line. “There was no choice. It was your duty, but I liked to cook before that,” recalled Zarate over a coffee one day at his restaurant
Mo-Chica in downtown Los Angeles. “I was always trying to sneak myself into that position.”

Once Zarate entered the family kitchen he was hooked and quickly grew addicted to the praise he would receive from the family after cooking a good meal. He fed this ego boost by constantly trying to outdo his last meal, vowing to put something new on the table each night. Zarate picked up tips and techniques from his friends' mothers and saved up to take cooking courses advertised in the newspaper. At sixteen he was working as a security guard at a large corporation, where many of the executives were Japanese (Lima has a large Japanese population). Zarate overheard one of his bosses talking about the annual employee's Christmas barbecue, given for all eight hundred of the company's workers, and Zarate immediately offered to cater it, despite lacking any experience beyond his family's house. As Christmas approached, he learned some recipes from a friend's mother who worked as a maid for a Japanese family, and he built the feast around a dish of octopus with soy sauce, wasabi, sesame, and aji limon (a hot, citrus-flavored pepper central to Peruvian cooking).

That meal would come to define Zarate's cooking. He quit the security job and enrolled in culinary school for the next three years. At this time Peru's government was in the midst of a brutal conflict with the Shining Path, a Marxist guerilla group, and life for most Peruvians was pretty miserable. “I was angry,” said Zarate. “The country was at war. There were bombs everywhere. It was destroyed.” In 1994, with great reluctance, he fled to London on a student visa and landed in a city that was incredibly foreign. Zarate found work in a Japanese restaurant during the height of the sushi trend and worked his way up the ranks in a number of Japanese kitchens until he moved to Los Angeles in 2004, when he assumed the role of head chef in another sushi restaurant.

By 2009 Zarate was getting antsy. He had comfortable work, but he was already thirty-six years old, and though he knew sushi inside and out, he really wanted to cook the food close to his heart. Zarate believed he could advance Peruvian cuisine beyond a cheap ethnic staple of rotisserie takeout chicken, which was how
most Americans saw it. There had been a buzz building around Peruvian cuisine internationally, spearheaded by the success of Lima-based chef Gastón Acurio, who operated a series of popular ceviche restaurants around Latin America and abroad. Acurio's success had many, even in nonculinary publications such as the
Economist
, heralding the imminent global upswing of Peruvian cooking in the twenty-first century. “What Acurio did for Peru was amazing,” said Zarate. “He made us feel proud about something for the first time.”

With $30,000 of his own savings, Zarate took over a tiny stall in a run-down Latin American food court in the city's downtown garment district, which was as far from a foodie's destination for most Angelenos as Peru itself. The stall, which he called Mo-Chica, revolved around a concept Zarate called “Peru, Nice to Meet You,” and the six-item menu was based on the favorite meals Zarate cooked at home, updated with the best ingredients he could buy. He sold stewed oxtail, chicken and rice, seafood stews, quinoa risotto, dried lamb, lomo saltado, and a number of fresh ceviches made with sashimi-quality fish purchased from his Japanese suppliers. “I didn't care about the money,” he said. “I just wanted people to put one bite in their mouth and say, ‘Wow!' ”

Instead, no one said anything. The nearby University of Southern California students Zarate had counted on for business weren't interested in his offerings, and the Latin American garment workers found it too costly. Mo-Chica's sales averaged just $200 a day during the first month, and Zarate quickly fell into a depression. Then things slowly turned around. Word of exceptional Peruvian food in an unexpected place spread among adventurous diners, who began posting ecstatic reviews of the cooking (especially the ceviches) on the social network Yelp and their personal blogs. One day Zarate spotted a man who “looked like George Washington” taking photos through the window. Zarate asked whether he was a blogger, and the man gave him a bit of an obscure answer. When a review of Mo-Chica appeared in
LA Weekly
soon after, Zarate quickly realized the presidential mystery man had been Pulitzer Prize–winning food critic Jonathan Gold, the most powerful and respected tastemaker in the city's dining scene.

“Since Nobu Matsuhisa blew into town 20-odd years ago, high-quality Peruvian seafood has not been hard to find in Los Angeles, but this was somehow—earthier, more sensual, more Peruvian, speaking as much of the mountains as of the sea,” wrote Gold in the review, referring to the namesake Japanese proprietor of the Nobu empire who had previously cooked in Peru and is credited with starting a trend of his own: the introduction of modern, global-fusion sushi dishes in the 1990s. “What Zarate is attempting is the professionalization of Peruvian cooking at popular prices, and the food he is turning out so far is sharper, more beautifully composed than any Peruvian food we have ever seen in Los Angeles.”

Everything changed for Zarate with that review. Business tripled overnight, long lines formed outside Mo-Chica, the other local media outlets came calling with their own articles and reviews, and offers to finance more of Zarate's restaurants flooded in. “Jonathan Gold really saved my life,” Zarate said, reflecting on his turn of fortune at the current Mo-Chica, which is a polished loft-like space in a revitalized corner of downtown that opened in 2012. “I will never forget that.”

Ricardo Zarate's trendsetting ambition is based around popularizing his flavor profile. “The idea is to be a trend,” he said, “to create something new but not extreme. Something familiar, but you don't see it right away.” That profile is built on aggressive Peruvian ingredients, such as the spicy yellow pepper aji amarillo, the black mint huacatay, the whole grain quinoa, and the giant Amazonian river fish paiche. If he succeeds, Zarate hopes not only to open multiple restaurants in Los Angeles and in cities such as New York and Chicago but also that his success will spur other chefs to adopt and adapt the flavors he is popularizing, until every house in the country uses aji amarillo in their kitchens and throws alpaca steaks on their barbecues. “Peruvian food is a hard diamond that needs to be polished,” Zarate told me with great hope.

All of this sounds preordained when Zarate predicts it through his wide grin, especially if you've just eaten a hearty lunch of his lomo saltado, a Peruvian beef tenderloin stir-fry laced with black peppercorns, garlic, and scallions, and washed it down with Chicha
Morada, a thick and intensely sweet purple juice made from a special strain of corn. But the road between a chef's lofty ambitions and their ability to successfully establish a food trend is long, twisted, and littered with the burned-out hulks of unrealized dreams, poorly timed schemes, and unfulfilled careers. Food trends don't just emerge fully formed onto the plates of the chefs who dream them up; they are as unpredictable as they are powerful, and they are more difficult to forecast than picking winning companies in the stock market. Each food trend that begins with a chef is the product of a number of disparate factors, from talent and personality to timing, luck, and media attention, all of which have to line up with near cosmic symmetry to allow something to take off.

First, you need a chef. They need to be talented, young (like musicians, older chefs are rarely trendsetters), independent, and just a touch cocky. “You need the conviction and balls to stand by an idea that no one else is doing,” said Sang Yoon, a Los Angeles–based chef who takes credit for two other trends: the gourmet hamburger and the so-called gastropub (basically, a food-focused bar and grill), in the early 2000s. “Today, things either catch very organically, or they don't.” A native of LA, Yoon had worked at some of the city's top kitchens, including Wolfgang Puck's Chinois and Michael's, a restaurant that was central to the development of California cuisine, but remained relatively unknown before he bought his favorite Santa Monica dive bar (a place called Father's Office) in 1999 with an eye on turning it into an authentic tapas bar.

“It was straight-up Andalusian tapas,” said Yoon of the original menu. “Anchovies, chorizo, a cheese plate—basically anything that could be made in a kitchen the size of a phone booth.” Business was brisk initially until the day Yoon's friend suggested he put a hamburger on the menu. Yoon is an obsessive chef who prefers to conduct meticulous research and experimentation in an isolated test kitchen where he hones his recipes. When he decided to put a hamburger on the Father's Office menu, Yoon set out to make sure it was the best burger on earth. He would deconstruct the idea of a hamburger down to its essential elements (beefiness, toppings, bun, cheese, flavor, texture) and then reassemble the disparate parts to
highlight each element in perfect harmony. He began his research by keeping a hamburger journal, taking notes on over forty burgers he sampled over many months. Their qualities were eventually inputted into a spreadsheet, with the data ranked on criteria that reflected Yoon's own tastes. Then Yoon went to work, assembling the different parts of his perfect burger through experimentation and trial and error until he had what he felt was his perfect burger, which he introduced to his customers in 2001.

The beef was dry-aged scrap from a New York strip steak and ground up with fresh chuck, which gave the meat a funky, intense gaminess that was so flavorful, the patty could “stand up on its own,” according to Yoon. Soft buns soaked up juices too readily and often fell apart, so Yoon commissioned a small French demibaguette from a bakery, with a texture that could be toasted but would still yield easily with each bite. On top he put a pile of fresh peppery arugula because he knew the slightly bitter lettuce paired well with beef from his time at Michael's, the Hollywood restaurant he had worked at, which featured a steak and arugula salad. For cheese there was a mix of Maytag blue cheese and gruyere, which together hit with a one-two punch of creamy mouth-feel and sharp flavor punctuation. And all of it was topped with an onion compote that had crumbled bacon in it, which hit like a double exclamation mark!! Served in a basket with a mountain of thin-cut French fries, the salty, skunky, buttery juices of the Father's Office burger dripped down its diners' chins with each ravenous bite and right into their hearts (emotionally and arterially). Not only was it more expensive than most other hamburgers sold in bars ($10 initially, $12.50 to-day), but Yoon insisted, without exception, the Office Burger also couldn't be altered whatsoever. In Los Angeles, where people regularly order along the lines of “can you hold the cheese, but could I get lettuce instead of bread, and also, maybe fish instead of beef?” it was a move tantamount to declaring martial law. “People said, ‘That's really ballsy,' and we got a ton of blowback,” recalled Yoon, talking one evening outside the second location of Father's Office in Culver City. He stuck to his guns, though, and the Office Burger affected dining in several fundamental ways.

First, Father's Office kicked off an arms race in gourmet hamburgers that quickly spread from Los Angeles to New York, where French chef Daniel Boulud responded with the Original db Burger at his db Bistro Moderne restaurant. Ground prime rib was stuffed with a center of braised short rib, foie gras, and truffles and served on a parmesan bun, baked in house. An upscale shrine to American-style excess, Boulud's burger sold for $32 and set a gourmet burger frenzy in motion nationwide. Other restaurants followed, trying to outdo one another for burger decadence with increasingly outlandish interpretations, from caviar-topped burgers to an edible joke called the Douche Burger, sold for $666 in New York, with a patty wrapped in gold leaf. Even Burger King got into the game, launching a £95 gourmet burger at its West London location, made from Wagyu beef, white truffles, shaved Spanish pata negra ham, and onion tempura rings made with Cristal champagne (the proceeds for the publicity stunt thankfully went to charity).

Beyond the towering piles of luxury ingredient–stuffed gimmicks that Yoon's burger inspired, the overall quality of hamburgers everywhere began to improve as a result of all the attention. This food, possibly the most central to postwar American culture, had been so commoditized by fast food chains over the years that few put any thought into the burgers they served anymore. But with gourmet burgers now popping up on nearly every menu in the country, from fine-dining rooms to family restaurants, and with the press that they effortlessly generated, even the humblest bars and largest fast food chains began rethinking the quality of their hamburgers. Where previously chefs just used frozen patties to make hamburgers, now they experimented with house-ground combinations of various cuts, from skirt and short rib trimmings to aged sirloin and rump. They baked the perfect buns for these burgers and created whole new categories of condiments to top them. Hamburgers went from a maligned food to something worthy of culinary attention. Yoon realized the full impact of this when he visited Hong Kong a few years back and ate a gourmet hamburger in a mall food court there. “People were lined up for it,” he recalled. “I think it's awesome. I planted a seed, and now I see the offspring everywhere.”

More importantly, Father's Office demonstrated that great chefs could serve excellent food for reasonable prices in pretty much any setting that had a working kitchen. “That burger started a huge trend,” said Yoon. “This was the first place where a pedigreed chef stepped away from a tablecloth restaurant to cook in a casual setting. I'm the first person to do that.” Sure, other chefs may dispute Yoon's claim to being the inventor of both casual fine dining and the gastropub, but undoubtedly his burger's success and the format of Father's Office played a significant role in the emergence of one of the most significant changes in dining in the past century. In the decade since he opened up shop a generation of talented young chefs cast aside the confines of fancy, hierarchical, European kitchens in order to take an entrepreneurial stab at something smaller and more relaxed where they could cook the food they wanted to make. Whether it was grandma's spaghetti, perfect roast chicken, or artisanal pastrami, they got the same respect from diners and critics that was usually reserved for those serving refined tasting menus. Yoon's Office Burger proved to be the opening salvo in a revolution that democratized the way we eat in restaurants. No longer the province of hushed, suit-wearing diners and haute cuisine, the act of dining out has become a more expansive, even populist activity. Indirectly, Father's Office helped usher in popular restaurants like Chang's Momofuku Noodle Bar; Portland's Thai street-food mecca, Pok Pok; and San Francisco's permanent pop-up Mission Chinese. The success of these kinds of restaurants has been so conspicuous that the white tablecloth restaurant is now on the endangered species list.