Eater restaurant editor Bill Addison summed up the state of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse in 2014 in an article called “The Road to the 38” essential restaurants in America.
He introduced Panisse as the restaurant that “implanted the words ‘local,’ ‘seasonal,’ and ‘sustainable’ in our brains,” as well as advancing a philosophy that “rerouted America’s culinary trajectory” and still insists on a simplicity that “also generates its share of backlash.” By 2016 everyone was back in line about simplicity, but where now is the inspiration coming from? I wonder. Is it still anything in California, or is it whatever is found to be great in not just the American cornucopia but the world’s?
Bill’s dining companion answered the California question. “This looks like something you’d serve at home,” he said of the meal at Chez Panisse. Is “a little tuft of salad greens” with the salmon what we should be doing or an original Alice made cliched by time? It’s “graceful,” says Bill, but “nothing sets off fireworks.” He added, “Lovely, and more transformative in doctrine than in experience. Am I dazzled by the meal? No . . . Just like eating at an old friend’s house.”
Do we even need a fiery spectacle to define a memorable meal?
The best American cooking in 2016 is inspired by the intent of the perfect salad green, but no longer a slave to the actual leaves, an intent whose culinary zeitgeist started at New York’s Delmonico and the Four Seasons restaurants in 1900 and 1959, respectively. Both closed, but live on in their approach to making a restaurant and how to serve the food.
If much of what we know now as American food sprang from the James Beard consultancy at the “iconic” Manhattan restaurant, the Four Seasons, what has it really meant to all of us now that it has closed after fifty-seven years? An article in the December 14, 2015, issue of New York magazine tells us what regulars think. Mimi Sheraton, food writer and former New York Times restaurant critic: “It stressed seasonal, natural, and local foods long before that was thought of very much by anyplace else.” Daniel Boulud, chef and restaurateur: “When I arrived in New York in 1982, I still remember where I was seated and the meal I had: the crab cakes, the rack of lamb, and a soufflé. It is the quintessential, classic American restaurant.”
Are we back to that powerful and sustaining everyday simplicity in 2017?
A back-to-the-future trend was identified by food writer John Mariani on Facebook in January 2016. “Good to hear that NYC’s Eleven Madison Park is going ‘180 degrees’ in the direction of simpler food, fewer dishes, no card tricks, no smoke and mirrors, no long recitations. This always happens—except perhaps in Chicago, where among some chefs more and more and more is better. As chefs get older they realize they need not do somersaults to impress guests who just want a fine meal.”
Eleven Madison Park started in 2012 with an elaborate four-hour tasting menu celebrating New York City history. What domes of smoke covering sturgeon for a blini, or a picnic basket, or the waiters performing card tricks had to do with it was every customer’s guess, if one they paid highly for. By 2015 chef Daniel Humm figured out that nothing exceeds like success, and went back to simplicity to keep the restaurant full. A Facebook announcement declared, “Patter from servers will be stripped down to what feels natural and pragmatic. Diners will be invited to steer the kitchen toward courses that sound right.” Democracy in the halls of the Robespierres turning revolution into evolution! A ride back to the future, the clue being the customers now want to choose what they eat. No more showing off how many ingredients can fit on a plate and all the ways they can be cooked. Tout that more is less now, that less blabber from the waiters means more conversation among the guests. “Away with gimmicky,” they might cry—and did. Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of one of Manhattan’s most perfect restaurants, Le Bernardin: “I don’t want to be eating too much,” as in five-hour tasting menus. As for waiter gimmicks, “Those experiences are not really New York because in New York we have so many other things to do.” He points out that many diners just want to eat and don’t want to talk to the waiters, or know “where the scallops are from.”
That’s the customers, but what about the chefs? In the Observer Monthly of December 13, 2015, they confessed the best things they had eaten all year.
René Redzepi, chef-owner of the world’s sometimes most famous Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, hops on a plane any day to the Kadiköy market in Istanbul on his way to restaurant Çiya Sofrasi. He’s “full of tradition but not afraid of innovating,” like lamb stewed with dried cherries.
For London’s chef Yotam Ottolenghi, the perfect meal was a platter of pickled herring from Russ & Daughters in New York: “These are the flavors which define New York for me.”
For the chef and owner of the famous Arzak restaurant in Spain’s San Sebastian, it was “Idiazábal cheese with a shepherd in the Urbia Mountains in the Basque country . . . with all the rich true flavor of the milk and the sense of the environment in which the mother had grazed.”
It reminded me of Richard Olney teaching me in 1977 in the South of France the difference in flavors of the “same” goat cheese depending on what time of year the goats had been milked and whether they grazed in spring or winter pastures. Are we really going back to a real simplicity and not in the emperor’s clothes now defrocked of frills and more-the-merrier ornaments?
Other chefs interviewed made it seem as if we are, at least in London. Sea urchins fresh out of the Irish Channel made one chef “realize how amazing nature is, and how little we should mess with our food.” The development chef of the Gordon Ramsay Group adored sea salt ice cream from Ireland’s County Kerry. Another chef was also in Istanbul at the Sultanahmet Köftecisi worshipping “lamb köftes grilled very simply over charcoal.” England’s food writer Fuchsia Dunlop was on her knees in front of the khao chae at Lai Rod restaurant in Bangkok: “grains of rice in iced water with flower petals, perfumed with candle smoke served with a platter of deep-fried relishes.” Others mentioned shrimp in Mallorca cooked very simply over a grill with wood from the trees around the restaurant; or unpasteurized cream; a perfect baked pasta (“I’ve had millions of lasagnas over the years, but this blew my head off); porcini in Tuscany, roasted whole with a bit of garlic and thyme, two hours after they were picked; lobster pasta; Tarte Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron, France; my friend and great cook Anissa Helou, goat’s curd mousse; and that giant of a chef from one of my favorite restaurants in the world, Fergus Henderson of London’s St. John, the burger at the Four Seasons in New York.
Indeed, sometimes perfect food is just that simple.
There was nothing simple about “American cars so cool in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s,” but that’s the analogy Mario Batali uses to point out the craft we need “to make sure that the twenty-first century isn’t a footnote of the twentieth century—the American century.” To not forget the hand craftsmanship that made those fabulous cars and their time. “And now the hand is coming back. And I think that has a lot to do with food. Farming is hip again and people are going to think about the things that they’re contributing to society. I mean, if Americans have to produce things with their hands, and that’s what food is all about. Hand-making this stuff is going to be the key to our success, to making us better. So cooks knowing the craft—even if they’re not famous—trickles down to have a much larger effect on our society.”
Revolutionary change from the rise of fast food (fast death) to its demise.
A final word as to the veracity of all this. Having known M. F. K. Fisher fairly well, I know she wouldn’t mind my including a thought from the beginning of her To Begin Again, talking about how her family accused her of never spoiling a story by sticking to the truth: It was a “plain lie,” she said, “because I do not lie.” Since she was a storyteller, I can think only of the Russian saying, “He lies like an eyewitness.”