Gagnaire used certain techniques repeatedly, to bring a vibrancy, life force, and emotion to his plates that I’d not seen from any other chef, much along the lines of what I’d witnessed in the article that had piqued my interest. But the effect in person, and in three dimensions, was breathtaking. For instance, he made croquants with orange, lemon, spinach, eggplant, pumpkin, and onion, just to name a few, and deployed them in a variety of contexts—such as crab with smoked tomato jelly and a variety of croquants; and a papillote of white fish, whole except for the head, cooked on the bone in a vadouvan spice dough, and served with foaming butter and a spinach croquant.
More generally, there was the small white fish called whiting, cooked with white wine and shallots, which was nothing unusual until he paired it with pigeon. There was squid ink gnocchi, which was also not especially revolutionary until it was plated alongside green mango and snails. And ribbons of squid, slowly cooked, then chilled, with an écume de mer (beer made with salt water) foam over the top and a piece of confited foie gras. And a side dish of rabbit kidneys and liver, prepared as a fidueà, with the rabbit loin served alongside with white asparagus.
Dessert was no less eye-popping. For example, a baba au rhum was perched atop a bed of mango confit, a bitter almond cream spooned over the top, blackberries alongside, and a tuile of cumin and cashew nut paste on top for texture. (Having maintained my love of berries and of surreptitiously enjoying them, I often nibbled on them when nobody was looking.)
Tart Rouge
The first chef I’d ever seen create a dish based on a color was Pierre Gagnaire, who served a tart rouge. To me, it was poetry on a plate, a fresh new way of looking at food, just one of many ways in which this modern master opened my mind. It doesn’t seem that revolutionary today, but at the time, the very idea of it was revelatory. Food in London wasn’t as cerebral as what was going on in Paris in general or at Gagnaire in particular.
Over the years, I’ve served a number of color-themed offerings. At Gilt, for example, I served a variety of compositions under the label “Vert” (green). My tribute to the color red features parsnips cooked with Campari, pâté de fruit of pepper, red shiso, trevise, and red onion, all in a little boat fashioned from a savory tart dough.
Scallops/Porcini/Black Rice
This play of earth and sea was inspired by Gagnaire’s ability to seamlessly unite disparate, seemingly incompatible ingredients; were the man a politician, he no doubt could achieve world peace. Here, a paste is fashioned from the scallops, then rolled and shaped into a ravioli that melts in the mouth, giving way to a lemon-verbena cloud inside. The black rice is squid ink risotto that is dehydrated and fried into a chip, and the porcini bring an earthy, meaty gravitas to the plate. It’s all set atop a light lemon-verbena gelée with a black olive paste beneath. The recipe for the Scallop “Pasta” can be found on this page.
Monkfish with Vadouvan Spice
I introduced this dish at Atlas, my first prominent chef position in New York City, and it quite literally wouldn’t have become a part of my repertoire had I not cooked under Pierre Gagnaire. He introduced me to vadouvan spice, which in many ways ignited my lifelong love affair with a variety of spices. Here monkfish is cooked in a quasi-tandoori method, lightly caramelized in a dry heat under the broiler, with no fat whatsoever, and allowed to finish cooking by its own carryover heat. The result is astonishingly tender and moist, and is paired with a royale of foie gras with cucumber, dried kaffir lime, and the citrus fruit combava, another ingredient Gagnaire introduced me to. Japanese in its simple beauty and Indian in flavor, the two influences seamlessly enmeshed. That’s one of the many things Gagnaire made possible for me.
In addition to the sheer, template-shattering originality of the food, there were Gagnaire’s idiosyncratic plating techniques. He had a penchant for side dishes or flotillas of plates sent out to a table en masse. For an amuse-bouche, he might dispatch six plates per person, so for a table of five, we’d send out thirty individual dishes. By the same token, a first course might comprise a number of thematically related dishes. One composition featured various preparations of langoustine. At that point in my career, I’d had plenty of experience with langoustine, but nothing prepared me for the meditation on langoustine that was on display in a series of plates featuring a langoustine tartare, consommé, and royale.
All of this blew my mind. My exhilaration at being there and witnessing it was tempered only by a curious and sometimes painful aspect of my life in Paris and at Gagnaire. For the first three months, I scarcely spoke to anybody, save for the excruciating briefing session each morning, when a chef de partie would have the thankless task of explaining to the lone Brit in the kitchen how to do what needed doing that day. My technical skills at this point were formidable, but Gagnaire’s methods were so different from anybody else’s that the more seasoned guys would have to spoon-feed me. For example, one dish required me to slowly cook a piece of lamb over very low heat, turning it constantly, so as not to extract its water content or cause the fibers to tense up. It was the kind of thing that had to be demonstrated to me at length, never mind what happened to it after I cooked it. It was served with a bitter Seville marmalade and a reduction of lamb juices enriched with a touch of cream, and adorned with a huge brown butter and orange tuile. (In hindsight, it feels like Gagnaire put tuiles and croquants on everything. I came to think of them as little hats, as though the dishes weren’t fully dressed and ready to leave the pass until they had their hats on.)
There was also the age-old bias against Brits to be overcome, which I’d not had to bear in any of my previous kitchen stints. But in time, I proved myself in the kitchen and came to be included in the camaraderie, despite the language barrier. I picked up a little French, and the guys would invite me out with them after service—not every night, but a few times a week, and always at the end of Saturday night, which ushered in our one-day weekend. It was rather touching how some of the cooks took me under their wing. Knowing full well that I hadn’t any money, they would pick up my drinks and pay for my food if we went out to dinner at brasseries such as Au Pied de Cochon. It was nothing fancy, just oysters, pig trotters, and sliced foie gras terrines, but it was a moving show of generosity and my only real exposure to French cuisine outside of Gagnaire’s four walls—where, incidentally, I never had the chance to enjoy a meal during my period of employ.
BRIOCHE NOIR I share this as an homage to Pierre Gagnaire, the man who opened my eyes to food. This is his creation. I think it’s beautiful and timeless as a Prada handbag.
Flatiron of Wagyu Beef
with Black Eggplant Meringue
The direct inspiration for this dish was the char on a piece of steakhouse beef. The challenge for me was to conjure the flavor of steakhouse meat, while cooking the beef in a method elegant enough for the restaurants I’ve led. I decided to employ the method I was taught for preparing that lamb at Gagnaire, slowly and tenderly bringing it to doneness in a sauté pan over low heat.
The char flavor comes from blackening eggplant, then using it both in a meringue that accompanies the meat and in an eggplant oil that’s employed as the cooking medium, taking on a deep, caramelized flavor and some actual caramelization, but with no aggressive heat applied directly to the meat. The technique is the very antithesis of steakhouse cooking, demanding gentleness and patience on the part of the cook; if you’re attentive and the kitchen is quiet enough, you can literally hear how much fat and water remain inside the meat. I think of this as sous vide without the bag: the effects are quietly stunning and the impact of the first bite never fails to pleasantly surprise.
Japanese Mackerel, Black Olive, Bergamot
Japan meets the Mediterranean. Chef David Kinch of Manresa first introduced me to beautiful Japanese goma mackerel, served here with a black olive crumble and black olive fat with bergamot confit and edible sweet potato leaves. The fish’s aromatic smokiness and umami have a natural affinity with the black olive, and the confit provides
a counterbalancing note of gentle bitterness.
Gagnaire himself lived up to his reputation as a bit of a madman. Though the sous-chefs and chefs de partie conferred with him on the pass, stagiaires like me had precious little direct contact with him. “Bonjour mesdames et messieurs,” he would say upon striding into the kitchen, and that was the only time we “interacted with him”—instead receiving his brilliance via the chefs for whom we worked or by stealing sideways glances at him during service. But it must be said that his love of spontaneity affected all of us. New ideas presented themselves to him constantly, as though the dishes were not finished entities but rather sentences in an ongoing dialogue between himself and The Food.
As a result, he was constantly changing things during service, crumbling an eggplant croquant over a dish because it suddenly didn’t look right to him. We stagiaires cringed a little every time he crumbled a croquant because of the work that went into them. The method, developed by chef Michel Trama, involved dipping thin slices of an ingredient, usually a vegetable, into a liquid and blanching it, then putting it on an oil-slicked tray and slow drying it in a low oven. It doesn’t sound that complicated, but doing it right demanded exactitude and patience. At other times, he’d create a new dish out of thin air by pulling together bits of mise en place from different stations. This would cause a ripple of confusion and chaos down the line, and it happened every single night. It wasn’t easy to cook in that context, but it was worth every moment of drama to be that close to his genius.
There was little practical about this, but I felt that I’d encountered a culinary soul mate, somebody who moved me even more than Richard Neat. On an intuitive level, everything about Gagnaire made perfect sense to me, from his plating techniques to his love of improvisation. After years of learning the craft of cooking, here I was face-to-face with the art of cooking. For the first time, I felt that I was experiencing the ultimate in the possibility of food, not just of the flavors but of the graphic aspect of it as well as of the emotion it could provoke. Above all, the feats he performed with food left me with one overriding impression: anything is possible.
And there was something else, something that I’d been slow to recognize but that had to be admitted: my natural, national identity had been working against me. That British impulse toward modesty, the ingrained inclination to always be the gray man, to not stand out or call attention to oneself, was in reality something that was holding me back. Watching Gagnaire, both the man and his food, I realized that I wanted to be as outspoken on the plate as he was, to express myself as freely and audaciously as he did. It was a life-changing lesson. The chef within was just about ready to hatch.
FOIE GRAS/KAMPACHI/CAVIAR Spontaneity: A dish created on the spot from components, perhaps for a special guest.
EMPIRE STATE OF MIND
Despite my belief that every job has a natural life span, I would’ve gladly stayed at Gagnaire for considerably more time than the ten-plus months I was able to, but the simple truth was that I couldn’t afford it. Having racked up about 7,000 pounds in debt, I informed the chef of my need to leave, and the moment I did so, I was overcome with sadness. I remember standing on rue Balzac just outside the restaurant and wondering if I’d ever come back to that place again, ever get to lay my hand on my touchstone.
The thought of returning to London was anathema to me. I felt that I had taken what the city had to offer me as a cook, but that I wasn’t quite ready to be a chef. Or was I? I didn’t know. My thinking was too clouded to make any real decisions. To clear my head, I took a short side trip to the Alps along with a friend I’d met at Gagnaire. Never a terribly athletic sort, I decided to try my hand at snowboarding. Sitting on the top of Black Run, I thought it looked remarkably easy, but as soon as I pushed off, I was tumbling head over tit for 100 meters, dislocating my shoulder on the way down. It was the perfect metaphor for where I was in life just then, headed from the summit to the depths in one fell swoop. (On the other hand, the food in that region was to die for, especially the Reblochon cheese and local ham. And of course the scenery: all those snowcapped vistas and expanses of sky were just what the doctor ordered.)
I returned to London in 1999 feeling a bit like a man out of time at twenty-three years old and after just a year away. Marco still ruled the roost, and Gordon Ramsay was fast on his heels, but there was nothing new for me there. I still pined a little for Richard Neat, who had retired, and I didn’t have a toehold in newer restaurants like The Fat Duck, which under chef Heston Blumenthal had been open for four years and was fast climbing the ranks.
Full of doubt, I did what any young man might do at that time and met my father for one of our dinners. As usual, he had the answer. I mentioned that I was thinking about traveling but that it seemed irresponsible given my financial status. He encouraged me to follow my instinct.
“You’ve worked here,” he said. “What do you want to do now?”
The truth, which I hadn’t even really uttered to myself, was that I wanted to go to New York City, to follow up on that seed of an idea that had been planted in my mind all the way back at Vong. My British friends thought I was mad when I told them I was going to visit New York City. “Be sure to bring a gun” was the most common tongue-in-cheek advice they offered. To uninitiated Brits, New York still suffered from the blood-soaked reputation it had earned during the financially strained, crime-infested 1970s and 1980s. To visit New York City was to invite some form of violation, from mugging to murder. One acquaintance told me this horrific tale: “I had a friend who was walking down to 42nd Street and some guy offered him a ride and he got into this cab and … it wasn’t a cab. They locked the doors and drove him to the Bronx and shot him in both legs.” Based on this and other hearsay, in my mind’s eye, there were gang members camped out on every street corner in Manhattan, waiting to shoot tourists like me, rummage through my pockets, and leave me in their wake like a discarded cigarette butt.
And yet none of that mattered. I had arrived at that time in my life again, that periodic moment of clarity when the chef within sensed what the correct next move was. I had learned to crawl in London, to walk in the countryside of Oxford, to run under the tutelage of Gagnaire in Paris, and now it was time to fly—to get across an ocean and consummate the attraction I’d had for New York City since cooking under Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
And so, with my friend Vaughn, a fellow cook from London just a few years older than I—despite all the warnings and protestations of friends and loved ones—I made a fact-finding visit to Manhattan in the late 1990s.
The flight to the city still shimmers in my memory. I felt an explorer’s sense of pride, like I was discovering the city for myself when, out of the vast expanse of sea and sky between England and the States, suddenly there appeared the island of Manhattan, its signature buildings coming into high relief as we approached: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and at the foot of the island, like a double exclamation mark, the Twin Towers.
The skidding, screeching touchdown. The shove-fest of claiming my luggage and clearing customs. The queue for the taxi and the lurching ride into Manhattan. These were all things that, I suppose, would have been off-putting to many of my friends back home, but felt curiously familiar and correct to me. This was New York City as I had imagined it, and for all of its harsh indifference, I felt right at home. I instantly chucked my paranoia, my plans to avoid eye contact and check over my shoulder, and decided to embrace the city with open arms.
“The Gold Bar”
Glitz and glamour. Timeless elegance. The little black dress of chocolate desserts, with gold foil as the perfect accessory. Techniques learned in Europe finding expression on the other side of the Atlantic. Though I didn’t work pastry at Le Manoir, Blanc’s kitchen was the first place I ever tasted a proper chocolate ganache, which was poured into a terrine and allowed to set. My ganache, like that one, is fashioned with salted butter and pure black cocoa. To me, this skyscraper-shaped dessert, which I m
ake today with the superlative Mast Brothers chocolate from Brooklyn, captures the essence of New York City. The gold foil represents … take your pick: opulence, wealth, ambition, the river of light that illuminates Manhattan at night. For me, this dessert is emblematic of the never-ending ambition that New York inspires, each bite a taste of liquid gold, as satisfying as it is addictive, leaving you forever wanting more, more, more. “The Gold Bar” recipe can be found on this page.
“Red”
This is my tribute to another aspect of life in New York, especially to a newly arrived visitor: the sensation that life is moving at a million miles a minute, that you’ve been dropped into a pinball machine … and you’re the ball. The ephemeral nature of Manhattan, the constant forward motion and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it opportunities, is captured in this almost textureless dish, whose solids all but evaporate on the palate. It’s full of bold, round flavors—red cabbage puree, huckleberry meringue, lime radish—but the absence of proteins means that they are gone before you know it, like the flash of a strobe light, a kiss from a stranger, or any of the other fleeting lures, both real and imagined, that come at you always in this unrelenting city.
The recipe for the Red Cabbage Gelée can be found on this page.
To the Bone Page 10
