Best Food Writing 2010 (11 page)

WORLD’S BEST SOMMELIER VS. WORLD’S WORST CUSTOMER

By Frank Bruni From
Food & Wine

Former
New York Times
dining critic Frank Bruni—author of the memoir
Born Round: Secret History of a Full-Time Eater
—knows a thing or two about restaurant impersonations. Here he deliberately sets out to test the mettle of a top Manhattan wine steward.

I
vetoed the Champagne that Le Bernardin’s Aldo Sohm suggested at the meal’s start, telling him my mood wasn’t so bubbly. Rejecting his advice again, I insisted on having a red instead of a white for the charred octopus, then I staged a tabletop tantrum over the price of the Montrachet that he initially paired with the monkfish.

As dinner progressed and Sohm’s face turned an increasingly flustered shade of red, I accepted only one of his recommendations, a sake for a smoked-salmon carpaccio bejeweled with glittering salmon caviar. Otherwise, I grimaced and protested while he stammered and perspired. I wanted to see how well the “world’s best sommelier” could roll with the punches—and just how many of them he could take.

That’s what had brought me and a companion to Le Bernardin, one of Manhattan’s most esteemed restaurants for more than two decades. We were staging a sort of contest, which pitted a pesky, deliberately obnoxious naysayer (i.e., me) against a wine savant of world renown. The restaurant’s venerated chef, Eric Ripert, and a few of his lieutenants knew about our ploy. But they hadn’t informed Sohm, whose reactions to me would ideally reveal something about the flexibility of wine pairings and the deliberations of a master sommelier.

Sohm, 38, is certainly a master. Born, raised and educated in Austria, he moved to New York in 2004 to work with Kurt Gutenbrunner at Wallsé and the chef’s other restaurants, then left to take charge of the wine program at Le Bernardin in 2007. While working full-time there, he boned up for sommelier competitions and bested rivals from around the globe in Rome in 2008, winning top honors from the Worldwide Sommelier Association. He was judged on his ability to recognize wines in blind tastings, to edit a wine list and to suggest pairings for food.

It was the last of these talents that I focused on, assessing the agility and inspiration with which he navigated Le Bernardin’s list of about 750 wines from 14 countries. The wine list emphasizes France, but I wasn’t going to let Sohm do that. Nor was I going to let him return too frequently to his homeland, which he’s been known to do.

“We’re yanking you out of the Alps, Aldo,” I made clear at the start, when he tried to substitute an Austrian Muskateller for the spurned glasses of Champagne. So he toggled to the island of Santorini and a 2008 Thalassitis from Gai’a Wines. He likened the body, bite and citrus notes of the Greek white to a French Chablis. But why was it the right wine for our canapé of raw tuna pressed in briny kombu seaweed?

“Acidity and minerality,” he said, explaining that the wine should brighten and sharpen the taste of the fish the way a splash of lemon and a scattering of coarse salt would.

Bit by bit, Sohm detailed his philosophy on wine-food pairings, saying that not only should the wine burnish the food, but also the food should burnish the wine.

“Food and wine are in a marriage where both should get better,” he said. “It’s a two-way relationship.”

“But shouldn’t it be a three-way?” I asked. He blushed. I explained: “Shouldn’t you consider the drinker, too, and what his or her taste in wine is?”

“That’s true,” Sohm conceded, then added that he was only now learning what kind of wine drinker I was.

I accelerated his education, telling him I’d long been prejudiced in favor of drier wines. That inclination, not just orneriness, was why the Greek white had worked better for me than the Austrian.

It was also one reason I waved away the floral Tramin Gewürztraminer from the Alto Adige region of Italy—the Alps, mind you—that he paired with the exquisite octopus, a Mediterranean-meets-Asian dish combining Bartlett pear with fermented black beans and a squid ink-and-miso vinaigrette. I told him to give me something drier and demanded a red to boot. So he presented two California Zinfandels, which he said would be fruity enough to match the dish. But the first one—a 2006 late-harvest wine from Dashe Cellars—had definite sweetness. The second, a 2005 from Martinelli’s Jackass Vineyard, didn’t, though there was a price for that.

“Seventeen percent alcohol,” Sohm noted, thus commencing a tutorial on another crucial aspect of wine pairings during a meal that includes a half dozen courses or more: pacing. The wines, in sequence and aggregate, shouldn’t exhaust a diner’s palate or leave him too tipsy.

Without being asked to, Sohm chose as many wines for under $100 a bottle as wines that hit or exceeded that mark, even though roughly 80 percent of Le Bernardin’s list falls in the higher-priced category.

But for another stunner of a dish, supple pan-roasted monkfish in a gingery sake broth studded with honshimeji mushrooms, Sohm got a little bit ritzy: He wanted to pour glasses of a premier cru 2006 Chassagne-Montrachet from Domaine Bernard Moreau Les Chevenottes. It was white Burgundy at its most regal, and it cost $150 a bottle.

“Too much!” I declared, trying for the vocal equivalent of a pout.

So he trotted out another white Burgundy, because he said the sake in the dish called for a wine with soft tannins. This one, a 2005 Philippe Colin Maranges, was $75, and, though it paired beautifully with the fish—making the broth’s flavor seem deeper and earthier—it had less elegance than its regional kin. Sohm studied me as I registered the difference.

“When you’ve driven a Ferrari and you go back to a Mercedes, you can feel a little lost,” he consoled me. “That doesn’t mean the Mercedes isn’t any good.” The Maranges was in fact excellent, and its crispness made it in some ways a better match for the monkfish than the Montrachet. We also preferred it to a California Pinot Noir that he threw into the mix at the last minute.

I noticed that the redness in Sohm’s face had faded somewhat, and that he now seemed much too calm. So I became even more strident and implacable for Ripert’s final savory course, an upscale surf and turf of grilled escolar and Kobe beef with pungent anchovy-butter sauce.

“No Bordeaux!” I said, dismissing his pick. “No red wine, period.

“And no white, either,” I pronounced, my voice turning sinister. “In fact, no wine. I want a pairing of hard liquor. It can be in a cocktail. It can be served neat. Your choice.”

Sohm looked baffled. Nervous. Then he vanished.

When he reappeared—too soon, and with a stride too brisk and steady—he had in his clutch a bottle of Zacapa rum from Guatemala, aged up to 23 years. He said it just might work with the Kobe and escolar, and sure enough it did, providing precisely the sweet-with-unctuous charge that distinguishes a classic union of Sauternes and foie gras. And because the rum had been aged so long, it was gorgeously smooth.

By that point, Sohm had taken us to eight countries, presented us with about a dozen grape varietals and, most impressive, maintained extraordinary grace under pestering. What could be left?

As it turned out, beer. In part because of its carbonation, which can cut richness and settle a full stomach, Sohm sometimes likes to throw it in toward the end of a long meal, and on this night he offered a Westmalle Dubbel Trappist beer from Belgium for a milk-chocolate pot de crème topped with maple-syrup caramel. The dessert neatly underscored the vaguely chocolaty aspect of many dark brews. Sampling the food and the beer together, I was put in mind of a chocolate egg cream.

Visions of a Jewish deli staple at a haute French restaurant? The evening’s last laugh belonged to Sohm, who bid us good night with beads of perspiration on his forehead but a triumphant gleam in his eyes.

NIGHTS ON THE TOWN

By Patric Kuh From
Saveur

Author of
The Last Days of Haute Cuisine
, chef / writer Kuh—otherwise known as the dining critic for
Los Angeles
magazine—here opens a nostalgic window on the glamour days of L.A.’s restaurant scene.

I
love dusk in LA, that moment just before restaurants open for dinner. A waiter runs to work, toting his white shirt on a hanger. A kitchen crew wolfs down a quick meal at the empty bar. A parking valet rolls out the pavement stand. The scent of night—blooming jasmine is in the air, and all over the city, against an evening sky whose colors are unique to this part of Southern California, the lights are coming up. They click on in the recessed nooks of a sleek sushi joint. They sparkle on a chandelier in an old-school French restaurant somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. They shine from sconces in a west side bistro. And, everywhere, there’s the neon: “Cocktails,” “Steaks and Chops,” “Seafood.” Night falls, and, feeling the first pangs of hunger, you are faced with that most pleasant of quandaries in LA: Where should we eat?

As a restaurant critic, I spend hours each day driving around this city, asking myself that very question, the same one Angelenos have asked themselves since the earliest days of fine dining in LA. And I spend just as much time sitting in crowded restaurants, considering the service, the food, the setting, and wondering what makes restaurant culture here so different from that of any other city in the world. It’s no secret that LA’s upscale restaurants tend to be more casual and more outwardly trendy than those you find in other great food cities, or that the cuisine here is often lighter and more far ranging. But, why? What made it so?

It’s okay not to have too much of a history in Los Angeles. In fact, being without one is something of a tradition. The past here need reach no further back than the moment the lead character (in drop-dead heels, please) steps off the 20th Century Limited at Union Station and onto the palm-lined street. Over the course of the past hundred years or so, when it came to restaurants in LA, things could quickly get funny. Nothing was native here, so borrowed themes took on their own, distinctive character.

Consider L’Orangerie, the venerable and now defunct French restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard. Until it closed, a few years ago, you could treat yourself to a fine meal there, shielded from traffic by boxed hedgerows, and find that the evocation of the court of Versailles was in no way hampered by the working oil wells down the street. And still today, in the Atwater Village neighborhood, one can have a good prime rib at the Tam O’Shanter, an institution that dates from 1922 and has an interior modeled after a Scottish peasant hut: sagging roof, bulging walls, soot-darkened mantel. The original designer, Harry Oliver, didn’t have any actual link to the Scottish Highlands; he’d perfected the look on Culver City movie lots.

Some call that superficiality; I call it lightness, the defining characteristic of LA dining. The knock against us as a city is that we’re not real epicures, that we are health-obsessed weenies who care only if there’s a star in the vicinity and will hardly eat because we must be doing squat thrusts at dawn up a canyon. The truth is that we are engaged by food but pair that passion with a sense of fun. It’s not fakeness that bothers us but fakeness without heart.

True, like every other place in America, we once had our potted-palm dining rooms where classical French food might be enjoyed, but one can only wonder whether the Angelenos who ate at those places took all that saucy food at face value or whether they thought it was just a bit of show business. With the rise of the motion picture industry in the 1920s, fantasy became part of the landscape of everyday life in LA, and the theme restaurant took root. At the Jail, a restaurant that opened in 1925 in Silver Lake, the waiters dressed as inmates. At Ye Bull Pen Inn, which opened in 1920 downtown, customers dined in rows of livestock stalls. No matter what the theme, most places served comfort-food classics, like fried chicken and steak. But at Don the Beachcomber, which opened in 1934 and kicked off a nationwide tiki trend, the Polynesian menu matched the setting.

And while not every eatery in town banked on fantasy—downtown LA in the 1920s was crowded with sterile-looking cafeterias that catered to the sober tastes of the hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners who were flooding into the city at the time—the movie business was the engine that drove our fine-dining culture for much of the 20th century. In the early years, the stars gathered at night in places like the swank Cocoanut Grove, in Midtown’s Ambassador Hotel, where their comings and goings, documented in newsreel images in thousands of movie palaces, kept the rest of the country fixated on what was happening out here. In those flickering images was the inkling that Los Angeles, once a remote, dusty pueblo, was now a place with a vibrant culture all its own. It would take a few years, however, for that culture to find expression in food.

WELL INTO THE 20TH CENTURY, the fanciest restaurants in LA, like those in the rest of the country, were still looking to Europe for their models. Places like Perino’s—an Italian-owned restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard with a lengthy, haute-Continental menu—were still considered the epitome of stylishness in the 1940s and 1950s. When it came to food, imported cuisine was fine, but Angelenos of certain means eventually came to expect something more—a little sleight of hand, a memorable character. Romanoff’s, which opened in 1941 on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, delivered both, in the person of owner “Prince” Mike Romanoff. The self-styled Russian royal was actually Herschel Geguzin, an orphaned son of a Cincinnati tailor. Everyone knew he was a fraud, but no one cared. On the contrary, guests seemed to admire him for his chutzpah.

Mike Romanoff’s success also owed to this: he knew that for all of Hollywood’s glamour, the inner workings of the city amounted essentially to a bunch of hard-nosed men eating lunch. Romanoff’s, accordingly, was a boys’ club, complete with stiff drinks, deep booths, rich French food, and waiters who were models of discretion. Cigarette girls roamed the big back room; the coveted five tables opposite the Art Déco bar were reserved for the real movers and shakers, and for Romanoff himself. In 1949, M.F.K. Fisher, not yet a doyenne of the food world but a recently divorced sometime screenwriter, expressed admiration for the restaurant’s breeziness and pragmatism. “The attitude seems to be,” she wrote in her book An
Alphabet for Gourmets
, “that all humans must eat, and all humans must make money in order to eat, and therefore the two things might as well be combined.”

Romanoff had recognized an essential facet of LA culture, but an older restaurant had already begun to break through and represent something even more intrinsic about Los Angeles. The Brown Derby had opened across the street from the Cocoanut Grove back in 1926; with its exterior shaped like a giant bowler hat, it seemed to hint at the extravagances of the theme restaurant, and, filled with movie stars, it certainly had élan, but over the years it had gained a reputation for its tasty food. It wasn’t fancy: pan-fried corned beef hash was a popular dish, as was the grapefruit cake with cream cheese frosting. The most famous dish, the Cobb salad, didn’t skew European at all. It is hard to think today of iceberg lettuce, watercress, chicory, romaine, bacon, and avocado as being original, but it was a brilliant combination, as perfect as blinis and caviar, hollandaise and
filets de sole
, and certainly more interesting than any ersatz European grandeur hashed up under dusty chandeliers.

While the Brown Derby had begun to unmoor LA’s fine dining from Europe’s, it took a restaurant called Chasen’s to cut the ropes. In the 1950s, by which time LA had become an important enough city that the Dodgers decamped there from Brooklyn, this low-slung Beverly Hills restaurant was becoming the place to be seen. Its most famous dish wasn’t
coquilles St-Jacques
or chicken quenelles; it was a bowl of chili sprinkled with diced raw onion. Running a close second was the hobo steak, a New York strip steak cooked tableside in copious amounts of butter. Like Romanoff’s, Chasen’s had a manly brusqueness, but unlike Romanoff’s, it rejected dynastic pretensions. Actually, Chasen’s wasn’t really very good. (My aunt, a onetime Vegas showgirl and not one for moist-eyed nostalgia, once summed matters up saying, “Patric, the only things worth having at Chasen’s were the garlic bread and the decaf.”)

The only time I ever visited Chasen’s was in 1999, four years after it closed. The restaurant where Ronald Reagan had proposed to Nancy, where Orson Welles had hurled a flaming chafing dish at the producer-actor John Houseman, was auctioning off all its furnishings. I walked into the massive structure on Beverly Boulevard, with its weird white columned exterior and its green-and-white-striped awning that stretched to the curb, and there it all was: the silver crab forks, the butter holders, the golden cocktail stirrers, laid out and tagged with lot numbers. In the dark, wood-paneled interior, I got a sense of why that bowl of chili with diced onions had been so important. It announced that fine dining, with all its trappings, could be made in America. What remained to be figured out was whether fine dining in Los Angeles could be made to reflect not just America but this particular corner of California.

IT COULD BE ARGUED THAT LA’s unique brand of California cuisine was born on a patch of farmland outside Los Angeles, where a Cordon Bleu graduate named Michael McCarty and a chef named Jean Bertranou, who’d brought nouvelle cuisine to LA with his West Hollywood restaurant L’Ermitage, began farming ducks for foie gras. McCarty had fallen in love with French cuisine as a teenager but was intent on expressing that love in a local dialect. He opened Michael’s in Santa Monica, three blocks from the ocean, in 1979. In a complete departure from the upscale chop house vibe of places like the Brown Derby, Michael’s had a back garden that was suffused with sunlight in the afternoon. Yes, there was foie gras, but it was served by waiters in pink button-down shirts alongside California-made
chèvre
and wines. Whereas Chasen’s could have been mistaken for Manhattan’s ‘21’ Club, Michael’s couldn’t have existed anywhere but Southern California.

The confluence of graceful outdoor living and expensive modern art, of baby vegetables and understated affluence, was the sexiest encapsulation of modern American cooking yet. But McCarty was more than a showman. He was a mentor who believed in his mission of channeling the rigors of French cooking into something new. The LA pastry chef and restaurateur Nancy Silverton—one of a number of now famous alums of Michael’s, including the chefs Jonathan Waxman and Ken Frank—recalls McCarty’s taking her aside and saying of the mousse she was making, “It’s too French.” The dessert was over-aerated, he explained; he wanted more concentration of flavor. The moment was an epiphany, Silverton says, a turning point that would lead her toward her signature, rustic style of baking. “Suddenly, I understood that there was a difference between a good French pastry and a good pastry based on French technique.”

Michael’s had started a transformation, but to start a revolution, it would take a chef who really had something to rebel against. In fact, it took a European truly to see Southern California’s singular lifestyle and incomparable natural bounty for what they were. A few years before McCarty got his restaurant off the ground, a 30-year-old Austrian cook named Wolfgang Puck was living in a rented room with sheets on the windows and an
Emmanuelle
poster on the wall. Puck was a culinary hired gun. Before coming to LA, he’d worked at dowagers of haute cuisine like Maxim’s in Paris and the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo; once here, he got a job at Ma Maison, a Melrose Avenue restaurant that was the height of style in the mid-1970s. Certainly, the place was a change of pace for Puck: the dining room had an Astroturf floor, and the owner, a Frenchman named Patrick Terrail, was known to sport an elegant suit with sandals and white socks. But by Puck’s own admission, the kitchen was still doing a butter-with-more-butter style of cooking.

Puck became famous at Ma Maison anyhow, publishing a popular book on French cookery in 1981 called
Modern French Cooking for the American Kitchen
. But with Spago, which he opened the following year, he became a legend. The first iteration of the eatery was located on Sunset Boulevard in what had been a Russian-Armenian restaurant. Puck saw it as something casual—the dining room had checkered tablecloths—and while there were certain connections to Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse (the same German bricklayer had made both restaurants’ pizza ovens, and they had the same enthusiasm for the produce of California), at first glance there wasn’t anything momentous about it. But Spago was unlike anything LA had seen before. Here was a chef who had been raised on the French “mother sauces” and had chosen not to use them. Instead, he installed a grill and had a truckload of almond tree wood delivered weekly. In the kitchen, he fostered an atmosphere of pure improvisation. The chef Mark Peel, who had come over from Michael’s to work as head chef, recalls the manic opening night. “We cooked with the menus propped in front of us to remember what the ingredients in the dishes were,” he says. This was not cooking from a playbook that had been slavishly passed down from one chef to another.