The Tastemakers (13 page)

T
wo nights after my meal at Picca I returned there to attend a dinner the restaurant was hosting to preview its new menu for a group of journalists and bloggers. Ricardo Zarate and his partners were keenly aware of the media's power in shaping trends, and they frequently reached out to tastemakers in Los Angeles. An hour before they arrived Zarate sat at the counter by the kitchen with his business partner, Stephane Bombet, a French music producer who introduced himself to Zarate after tasting his ceviche at the original Mo Chica and left five hours later with a handshake deal to become the chef's business partner. “There are two types of chefs,” said Bombet. “Those who are simply very talented,” including many French masters like Paul Bocuse and Joël Robuchon, and those like Zarate, “who are leaders and create trends.” Zarate had been working on the new menu for two weeks, and these new dishes would replace a third of the current menu's seasonal offerings. Most of these items began as an idea that Zarate jotted down on his phone, inspired by something he had eaten elsewhere, or an ingredient a supplier brought in. He scrolled through a list of random ideas, which read as recipe haikus, such as
grilled sous vide goose fat fennel
and
stuff yucca with octopus and parmesan aioli
. Head chef Ricardo Lopez kept sending dishes out of the kitchen for Zarate and Bombet to sample, as Zarate consulted photos on his phone of how he'd
prepared them previously. “This one,” Zarate told Lopez in Spanish, pointing to a plate of quinoa that looked too plain. “It should look like a quinoa salad but without the salad.
Comprende?
” He suggested they add to the dish a drizzle of chimichurri, a salty Argentinean steak sauce made from olive oil, lemon juice, and fresh oregano.

“When I build a menu I think about who my customer is, but I also throw three to five dishes in there for the tastemakers,” said Zarate, looking over a plate of braised tongue in Peruvian romesco sauce that had been finished on the Japanese robata charcoal grill with a crisp char. “It should be something challenging. A big writer won't write about a chicken salad, but if you make every single bite a wow, there'll be no balance for regular diners. It's like a football team—you have to build around the stars.” Zarate saw bloggers, Yelp reviewers, and other members of the digital food media as the advanced scouts for the city's foodie scene. They set in motion the buzz machine with their exclamation mark–laden reviews, and their #nomnom hashtagged Instagram photos, all of which eventually lure in more established publications and critics who could still cement a trend with the mainstream diner with far more authority than the more cavalier bloggers and online reviewers. It had happened once before at Mo-Chica with his ceviches, which brought them to the attention of Jonathan Gold, and tonight Zarate was looking to rekindle some of that magic. “I just hope that one of the dishes is a killer,” he said. Clearly, he wanted to recapture some of his early momentum.

Within the hour a dozen people gathered upstairs in a private annex, along a rustic wooden table decorated with votive candles and giant, scattered, black and white Peruvian corn kernels. Some of the guests had their own blogs, whereas others wrote for larger food news websites or magazines, and a few were involved in public relations. Once everyone sat down, Zarate and Bombet thanked them for coming and began serving dishes, each of which Zarate explained in a very straightforward way. Every time something new hit the table, such as the lobster causa, everyone picked up their phones or giant cameras and bathed the food in flash photography,
like starlets emerging onto the red carpet. “Are you familiar with causas?” asked Zarate, explaining that they were cold mashed potatoes seasoned with lime juice and aji amarillo. “Would you like a bit more light?” Bombet inquired, adjusting the overhead lighting as the bloggers clicked away.

I sat next to Matthew Kang, a writer for the LA branch of the national food website Eater who also owned Scoops, a local gourmet ice cream shop. Kang had been following Zarate's career since the original Mo-Chica, and he credited him with putting a spotlight onto Peruvian food, which had been dismissed as a cheap ethnic cuisine before he stepped onto the American scene. “That trend started with Ricardo,” Kang said, diving into a fantastic, grilled branzino anticucho skewer, dressed in spicy huacatay butter and a tangy coleslaw. “He made it bourgeois, with small plates and people willing to pay $50 a person.” Picca was the next step, a destination for diners that Kang not only put on par with the best and most unique restaurants in the city; he considered it a place where you could get food that no one else was serving in the entire country. “From a blogger standpoint, Ricardo Zarate is a chef that we can talk about on a national level. The entire blogging community is supportive of his places.” Zarate's next venture, Paiche, a seafood-focused Peruvian Izakaya in the Marina Del Rey area, was already generating tremendous buzz even though it wouldn't open for another six months.

Despite all of this support and the accolades he received from the media and diners, Zarate had yet to see any of his dishes truly blossom into a trend. It was true that Peruvian cuisine was gaining greater international prominence, especially in Europe and Latin America, but most of that was credited to Gastón Acurio, and in America it hadn't really spread beyond Zarate's own restaurants. Tiraditos, causas, aji amarillo, and paiche were still far from household names, only appearing on scattered menus around the country. Although Zarate was undoubtedly a success—he owned several bustling restaurants that were packed every night of the week—his prediction, among others, that Americans would turn to alpaca as the new red meat had yet to materialize. Zarate himself didn't seem too concerned about this and wasn't in a rush to be crowned as
a tastemaker. “I think it's a wave,” he said during a break in the service. “This is just the beginning! You need another ten years to establish a trend.”

Even if Zarate fails to ignite a national passion for his style of cooking, that may be a hidden blessing. Chefs who have established food trends are then saddled with their legacy, and often, that can be troubling. Your star rises on the back of a single item, flavor, or concept, and you are forever associated with it. At best it's a calling card, a high-water mark that establishes a chef's talents and allows them to move on. But it also has the danger of turning a chef into a one-hit wonder. “As a person, I'm proud of the Kogi taco,” Roy Choi told me. “But as a chef, it took me a long time to get over being embarrassed by it. It's like having to sing ‘Sweet Caroline' at every concert. Everyone looks at me, and all they think is kimchi tacos. Before that, I never worked with kimchi. It took me a long time to exorcise my own demons and have fun with it. It's a tough thing, man. It's tough to create something that's become iconic. It's tough because it's not everything you are. The person I was when I made that taco is not the person I am now. But people are just starting to catch up to it and just finding out about it, and I have to relive that moment over and over again. It's a trip.”

Momofuku's David Chang, whose stratospheric success launched a thousand pork belly–stuffed buns, hip ramen restaurants, and kimchi-topped dishes, found his early realization that he was a trendsetter profoundly unsettling. Chang would walk into a new restaurant in Denver and find himself face to face with nearly half of his menu and the same minimalist plywood décor that he'd used at Momofuku Noodle Bar. “I try to take it with a grain of salt,” he said. “I try not to eat at those restaurants. I try to avoid them. It would be like watching the cover band of the band I wanted to see. It's too meta-fucking-weird.” For a while Chang resented the trends he started and all that they had spawned, but as he has matured and his restaurant business expanded, Chang realized that his power as a trendsetting tastemaker was actually liberating. “It allows us to do other things,” said Chang, “to finance and pursue new flavors and more interesting projects. I fully embrace it, and I
want to serve the best buns, the best ramens, the best fried chicken of all time.”

Chang also worried that the increasing importance of food trends for chefs and the restaurant business was skewing the priorities of young cooks, who are less interested in learning the fundamentals of the classical kitchen than they are with whipping out a bag of edible fireworks, as Michael Whiteman explained. He also has a deep problem with appropriation, which has increased in pace dramatically now that the minutia of every single menu is posted online almost instantly. When Chang first heard about Catalan modernist chef Ferran Adrià, who operated the surrealist restaurant El Bulli in northern Spain, he had no idea what was being described, how the dishes looked, let alone how they were made. Those who wanted to find out had to travel there, work in Adrià's kitchen, and pick up the knowledge by hand. “But now with the Internet, cooks don't have to travel and see how something is done.” They can just replicate it from photos and recipes posted online. “Food trends are a very dangerous thing,” Chang warned me. “They can spark innovation but also kill innovation.”

Chang acknowledged that food culture is an evolution, and even the foolish trends are what push our culture forward. No one creates their ideas in a vacuum. Even when it seems like someone is putting one more molten chocolate cake on their menu, if the chef is tweaking it in any way by, say, adding Mexican-style chilies and cinnamon to the chocolate or making it with something crazy like pig's blood (something I tried once, and actually liked), it opens up another road for our taste buds to venture down. Trends are the process of a feedback loop, of competition between talents, and they are a balance between following the herd, pleasing customers, and letting creativity flow. Without them restaurants would serve the exact same dishes they did forty years ago—we'd still be eating roast beef, mashed potatoes, and frozen vegetables night after night after night.

Zarate was doing his best to break that loop or, at least, inject his own influence into it. Whether something from his kitchen becomes a trend will be up to fate as much as his own kitchen magic.
After eighteen courses the table of bloggers and writers were served Maine lobsters that had been split in half and stuffed with lobster meat, aji amarillo béchamel sauce, and an herbed-panko breading. “It's like a Peruvian lobster thermidor,” said Kang aloud as he took his umpteenth photo of the night. “Yeah, you got it,” said Zarate, watching as everyone put down their phones and took their first bite. The lobster was fantastic. It was buttery, tender, and just spicy enough that it cut through the richness of the béchamel. The table was littered with the debris of Zarate's various attempts at impressing the crowd, and everyone was so full that they refused dessert, an action I found unconscionable, but it was apparently par for the course among Los Angeles foodies, who always seem to be following the latest diet trends, which, in many ways, are even more powerful than chef trends.

Satisfied, Kang put down his napkin and delivered his verdict to me: The meal was great, but “I don't think he has that killer dish yet,” he said. “You need that pork bun.”

T
he morning after my marathon dinner at Picca I drove up into the mountains north of the city to the suburb of Westlake Village and the manicured headquarters of the Dole Food Company. Dole is the biggest produce company in the world, a corporate juggernaut that dominates whole swaths of the fruit and vegetable trade, in everything from bananas and pineapples to plastic fruit cups and ready-to-drink smoothies. I waited in a soaring lobby, decorated with three-story murals of abundant fields overflowing with
fresh fruits, detailed models of Dole's shipping fleet, vintage Dole advertisements, and every painting of a pineapple ever produced. A huge pineapple sculpture anchored the center of the room. It was encased in glass, like a precious gem.

Marty Ordman, the company's vice president of marketing and communications (who bears a striking resemblance to the comedian Tom Smothers), came out to meet me. We walked to a large events room in the building's rear where the Dole Healthy Lifestyle Blogger Summit was beginning its second day. Over a buffet breakfast of mimosas, coffee, Dole fruit platters, and blueberry scones, ten bloggers (all women) were talking about last night's dinner. They ranged in age and background, from Los Angeles–based wellness blogger Erin Haslag and Arizona grocery chain dietician Barbara Ruhs, to Chicago's Jennifer DaFonte, who writes the Mom Spotted blog. Dole had flown everybody out and put them up at the nearby Four Seasons for two nights, though none of the bloggers were being paid for their time and they weren't obliged to write anything about Dole.