Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  But Loiseau wanted Michelin's approbation and all the perks it conferred, and he wanted these things entirely on his terms. While his death is both a personal tragedy and a cultural one, Michelin didn't kill him; he killed himself.

  If anything, Michelin appears to have cut him some slack in recent years. It is common knowledge that the guide is slow to demote underperforming three-stars. Loiseau's contribution to the French canon was cuisine a l'eau, in which sauces are fashioned from water, natural juices, and oils, with less emphasis on butter and cream. But he coined this approach ages ago. The first and only time I ate at La Côte d'Or, three years ago, the food was tired and so was he. This was the prevailing view at the time. Nonetheless, it was apparently only recently that Loiseau was warned by Michelin that he was in danger of a downgrade.

  Given the kind of power that the guide wields, its reluctance to act in haste is generally a good thing. So, too, its unwillingness to succumb to the neophilia that afflicts most restaurant critics. Obviously, if Michelin was consistently rewarding mediocrity and ignoring culinary innovators, it wouldn't have the influence it does. In fact, though, it seems to strike a superb balance between the old and the new, keeping haute cuisine firmly rooted in the past while also rewarding progress. Gastronomic temples like Taillevent receive three stars, but so do postmodern virtuosos like Veyrat (among other things, Veyrat has introduced heroin chic to the Gallic dining room: Part of his shtick is having waiters inject sauces into dishes via syringes).

  Loiseau's suicide and the controversy surrounding it have led some commentators here to conclude that the American restaurant scene is infinitely better off for not being subjected to Michelin's scrutiny. (Michelin publishes restaurant guides to 17 European countries besides France but has never had a U.S. edition.) That's like saying American athletes would be better off if they didn't compete in the Olympics. Top American chefs have always measured themselves against the three-stars, and it has become an article of faith in recent years among cooks and critics alike that restaurants like French Laundry, Daniel, Le Bernardin, and Charlie Trotter's are now just as good as the choicest tables in Europe. It would be great if Michelin put that proposition to the test by publishing an American guide.

  If a U.S. restaurant were awarded three stars, the effect would be electrifying. As gastronomy goes, it would truly mark the emergence of a new world order (not only that: half the put-downs in the typical Frenchman's repertoire of anti-Americanisms would instantly be rendered invalid). If, on the other hand, expectations were dashed and no American restaurant received the ultimate accolade, it would be a good reality check and a source of motivation. The rigorous scrutiny would certainly be a change of pace: Chefs here have generally had it a pretty easy with the critics and have come to expect softball coverage (witness the bellyaching when William Grimes became restaurant critic of the New York Times and tried to toughen its grading). Michelin would thrust our top chefs into competition with the likes of Veyrat. It would be edifying and not a little entertaining to see if they could take the heat.

  The Liberace of Chocolate

  Very good chocolate in very bad taste.

  By Sara Dickerman

  Posted Thursday, Feb. 13, 2003, at 7:57 AM PT

  If pastry chef Jacques Torres were ever imprisoned by an evil mastermind, I have no doubt that within 24 hours, he would escape with a hand-wrought, fully articulated chocolate gun. It would fire delicious but deadly cacao nib bullets, and, knowing Torres, it would boast decorative "pearl" handles crafted from white chocolate.

  Torres has become an accumulating presence on the Food Network, with one current series, Passion for Dessert; another, Chocolate With Jacques Torres, in heavy rerun rotation; and a special, Passion for Chocolate, that aired this week. While the stagy setting and the slow pace of his shows cannot compete with the flash and fire of Iron Chef's kitchen stadium, Torres' how-to projects are as absurd and dazzling as those of the feuding Japanese chefs.

  "I am feeling very passionate about chocolate today," says Torres during his chocolate special, affably if not passionately. Unlike several of his Food Network compatriots, Torres' zeal shows in his craft, not his patter. In the chocolate special, he does not discuss how to choose good chocolate, how to chop it, or how to melt it carefully. Instead, Torres puts his energies into insane feats of chocolate engineering. He coats a balloon with drizzles of chocolate, then deflates the balloon, leaving a chocolate cage "like a spider's nest." He's a shade tentative as he deflates the balloon, warning that if it should burst suddenly, the chocolate will fly onto the ceiling, walls, and floor. Torres also uses balloons to make white-chocolate flowers, which are then painted with gaudy food-color paints. Affixed to the chocolate balloon, the result is extraordinary in its fragile grandeur and in its ugliness.

  Torres used to be the pastry chef at Sirio Maccioni's society restaurant Le Cirque and its avatar, Le Cirque 2000, where he established himself as a master of a certain spectacular, yet wholly edible whimsy. There were hats and clown faces, ladybugs, and, most famously, a chocolate stove complete with tiny sauce-filled pots. The waiter would open the oven door to reveal a slice of Opera cake, a gilded chocolate pastry once considered spectacular of its own accord. These days, in the real world, Torres has toned down his act a little: He makes bonbons and hot cocoa for the downtown set at his Brooklyn factory, where he also serves up a few impeccable pastries from the French canon.

  But on television, he sticks to the razzle-dazzle. Torres has the confectioner's version of the Midas touch. There is nothing in our ordinary world he cannot recraft in sugar or chocolate. Molten sugar is shaped into a moon and flowers. He casts an ornate chocolate frame and fills it with a painted white-chocolate canvas. He inverts the concept of a Jell-O mold and uses Knox gelatin to make a flexible cast of a champagne bottle. He later silk-screens the bottle's label, using chocolate as ink.

  While Torres reveals some great pastry tricks, his shows have little pretense of how-to. Equipment requirements are extensive: The chocolate special alone called for florist's acetate, a blowtorch, a mason's trowel, four fat metal rulers, a dozen or so balloons, and an extendable five-bladed pizza roller. One has to refer to the Food TV Web site for Torres' guidance on tempering chocolate, the tricky but essential process of heating and cooling chocolate so that it is hard and glossy when it solidifies. And naturally, the show modestly cuts to commercial during every critical moment of assembly, leaving no ungraceful moments, except for one brief shot of Torres' grubby, chocolate-coated hands.

  His shows do reveal the great irony of the sweet kitchen: It takes the most deliberate kind of precision to create the most frivolous of foods. Unlike chefs, who work spontaneously in the heat of the kitchen line, the pastry chef must work early in the day, when the kitchen is cool and fickle ingredients like chocolate, butter, and sugar can be tamed. Most of the pastry chef's components are made hours or days ahead and then layered together on the plate. This difference in process often makes pastry chefs outsiders in restaurant kitchens. Indeed, Torres is one of the few pastry chefs to rise to name-brand stardom (Francois Payard and Claudia Fleming also come to mind).

  In an effort to flag down a little attention, and perhaps because desserts are always an up-sell, some pastry chefs indulge in garnishes, embellishments, and other bits of drama. Thrilled with the plasticity and strength of their raw materials, Torres and his compatriots push the boundaries of their media. Cue the blown sugar, the foams, and representational pastry. These desserts are rarely constrained by good taste: I once decided not to attend a cooking academy after watching one of the advanced pastry students craft a tepee and squatting Indians out of marzipan. On another recent Food Network special, an international competition judged by Torres, one of France's top pâtissiers solemnly airbrushed a clown's face onto a sugar plaque. Torres' own sweet creations often ignore a century of modernist art and design. (Although he and Jeff Koons might find something to talk about.)

  Torres' valiant commitment to
complex frivolity makes him the spiritual brother of another cable how-to hero, master hot-rodder Jesse James of the Discovery Channel's Monster Garage. James and his crew make cars as pliant as chocolate, converting ordinary limousines, buses, and Austin Minis into firetrucks, boats, and snowmobiles. Both Torres and James are masters of vernacular engineering, both are problem solvers of uncanny cleverness, and both show a weakness for shiny surfaces. I can only hope that Torres and James will get together sometime soon and produce a lowrider made out of cocoa beans and fondant.

  "I Say the Hell With It!"

  School lunches are making kids fat—but collard greens aren't the solution.

  By Ann Hulbert

  Posted Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2003, at 10:43 AM PT

  Congress is preparing to review the $10 billion annual federal school nutrition program this spring, responding to a widespread sense of crisis. The proportion of severely overweight children and adolescents has tripled over the last 30 years, to 15 percent. Health problems have multiplied; Type 2 diabetes, which used to be called "adult onset diabetes," has now encroached on childhood.

  But as America's battle with an epidemic of childhood obesity enters the schools, it's worth being on guard against severely inflated expectations. As if the goal of getting kids to consume moderately healthier lunches weren't daunting enough, some reformers seem to envision wholesale re-education of students' palates. Count on Californians to be out in front of the gastronomic crusade. "Kids don't like Shakespeare, but it's good for them. It's the same with food," insisted a champion of Berkeley High School's recent quest to convert students to "nutritious, fresh, tasty, locally grown food that reflects Berkeley's cultural diversity."

  Given the dismal quality of school food—from canned government-surplus staples in the lunchroom to Coke-and-junk-stocked vending machines in the halls, with no trace of vitamin-rich roughage in sight—a pendulum swing to hyper-wholesomeness is hardly surprising. Dietary issues have always tended to inspire zealotry in this country, where "the perfect diet," "the total health makeover," the "revolutionary weight control program" exert great allure. But when it comes to adults telling children what to eat, the contest of wills is rarely just about controlling appetite—it's also about kids resisting adult control. In other words, the real problem isn't providing children with healthier lunch options; it's figuring out how to make them actually eat what's served up.

  Take what happened at Berkeley High. The public school's healthy alternative to "the airline food model" included organic pork tacos with fresh tortillas—a specialty of the Berkeley queen of cuisine, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse. There were also such delicacies as pesticide-free salads and stir-fried tofu. But even (or especially?) kids reared with a fresh-is-best ethos turned up their noses at the offerings, the New York Times reported. They bought sweets and sodas instead or hurried to nearby fast-food outlets. The program closed down this fall, with the director of nutrition services for the district still vowing that "we are committed to re-establishing healthy food."

  Advocates of super-nutritious lunches may point to the success of a program in Opelika, Ala.—an initiative that was also touted lately in the Times. Opelika's menu is down-home by comparison to Berkeley's Chez-Panisse-style approach, yet just as high-minded. Courtesy of local farmers, students in the rural district of Opelika are served fresh lima beans, butter cream peas, black-eyed peas, collard and turnip greens. And they actually eat the stuff—but that's only because they aren't allowed off school property and vending machines aren't allowed on it. Opelika is unusual in other ways, too: Its school kitchens, unlike most American schools, are equipped to cook food, not just heat it up, and parents and school officials have been happy to fork over extra funds. In short, this wholesome food model (like Berkeley's) is not readily replicable.

  Even if it were, the collard-and-turnip-greens ideal shouldn't set the standard for lunch reform. Public schools have their plates full without taking on the (hopeless) task of turning junk-food enthusiasts into eager veggie-eaters. ("I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it": The complaint dates back three-quarters of a century.) A more feasible—and more useful—aim would be to help kids become wiser fast-food consumers. After all, their lunch hours are rushed. (As one poor Berkeley student remarked, "no one can appreciate cuisine" when there's barely time to sit down.) And they're going to be eating on the run for years to come.

  There is a model out there: Subway, the sub sandwich enterprise founded in 1965 and first franchised in 1974, which last year surpassed McDonald's with more than 13,000 outlets across the United States. Subway doesn't require a perfect or revolutionary dietary regimen (much less an elaborate kitchen: Its franchises are cheap and often cramped, with a set-up most schools could probably match). It markets ordinary cold cuts (which even kids like) as a shortcut to wholesomeness (which is what everybody really wants, not least parents and schools faced with picky eaters). And its company history is itself evidence that eating better need not entail a total health makeover—just some tactical maneuvers.

  Remember the Subway of the early 1970s? It was known for the BMT—the "biggest, meatiest, tastiest" sub, stuffed with salami, pepperoni, ham, and bologna, hardly an example of organic wholesomeness. But the Subway of the late 1990s carved out a hugely expanded niche with an aroma of baking bread and a pitch for smaller, fresher sandwiches featuring "seven under 6 grams of fat." It has stuck to the same basic ingredients through thick and thin, and it packages healthier options as small choices rather big sacrifices: pile on the peppers and pickles, hold the mayo, vary the bread. Unlike McDonald's and Taco Bell—which abandoned the McLean Deluxe burger and the Border Lights menu in the early '90s—Subway successfully taught us that we could like healthy fast food.

  Subway's menu does not promise organic salvation—the closest it has ever come to fruit is the Fruizle smoothie; for dessert, there are cookies rather than, say, apples—but for the most part the sub menu adds up to many fewer calories and a fraction of the fat of the burger-and-fries alternative. And by not requiring a lifestyle transformation, the scaled-down hero can encourage even the least health-food minded to take steps in the right direction, with unexpected results—as evidenced by twentysomething Jared Fogel, a former 425-pound fatso, who, in 2000, became the franchise's poster boy. After a year of eating only Subway's lowest-fat sandwiches instead of his usual mega-Mac diet, Fogel had lost 245 pounds—and it had felt "a little like feasting," he said, "rather than totally depriving myself."

  Nutrition activists, understandably enough, may be alarmed by the spread of corporate logos in public schools (according to Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, the American School Food Service Association estimates that nearly a third of public high schools serve "branded fast food," from Taco Bell to Pizza Hut). But schools don't have to buy the Subway trademark to learn from the Subway strategy. With 28 franchises actually on school grounds so far, and a thousand delivery contracts, Subway has proved a big hit with administrators desperate, as Schlosser reports, to have "kids ... think school lunch is a cool thing, the cafeteria a cool place, that we're 'with it,' that we're not institutional." In the Northwest Independent School District near Fort Worth, Texas, the new Subway franchise whips ups batches of three different subs before each of three lunch periods—there's no time for custom-made fare. And the students flock to it. Without much trouble, the lunch ladies who now dish up soggy greens and mystery meat could be handing out fresh baked bread, recognizable cold cuts, and veggie toppings that plenty of teens—even the trendsetters—would happily eat. After all, Saturday Night Live and Letterman have already made Jared "the Subway guy" a nebishy celebrity for an age of irony—a pragmatist rather than a purist in the realm of appetite, the kind of proselytizer a kid can stomach.

  diary

  By Rahul Chandran

  Rahul Chandran is a development worker in Afghanistan.

  Subject: Entry 1

  Posted Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2003, at 11:07 AM PT

  From the a
irplane window heading into Kabul, you see three hours of sand, interrupted occasionally by squat, ugly rocks. There are no settlements and no roads; no evidence of life. I missed my UN flight a day earlier, so I sat, belted into my bright orange seat on Ariana Afghan Airlines, staring at the desolation.

  Kabul itself is in a valley surrounded by stunning snow-caps. The plane lurches violently toward the airfield (someone has claimed the lurching is related to iron ore in the mountains, but we don't trust him), and as you descend, shapes slowly congeal from the mud, becoming houses, houses, and more houses. There is no visible industry, no smoke-stacks, no gas-tanks, no chemical domes—none of the furniture that surrounds other cities.

  The airport itself is simple but leaps and bounds ahead of where it was four months ago, when I first arrived in Kabul to work for the U.N. A stretch of unemployment, conveniently coinciding with the World Cup, had led to me to tell a friend that I'd like to work in a failed state setting, doing some hands-on development. He took me literally, and I'm returning to Kabul after a brief and surreal holiday in the lands of hot water and power showers.

  In the airport there are windows now and semi-organized queues (although, in a sign of the international presence, half of the two booths are reserved for diplomatic passport holders). Still no heat, though I did see a new heaterlike object wrapped in cardboard lurking menacingly in a corner. There is only one luggage-hauling truck, so it took two solid hours for our baggage to arrive.