Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  Kyle and the culinary team continue to work on finalizing the rest of the dishes, which will fall into three 11-course menus—vegetarian, pescatarian, and full-on omnivore—though what particular dishes each guest can expect will depend entirely on conversations when making their bookings, and with their servers over the welcome bites served in the rooftop garden.

  “I’ve always thought tasting menus are so often presented as something locked in, really missed opportunities to serve guests what they want,” Kyle says. “We wanted to use this format as a way to engage more, not just make things easier on ourselves.”

  Though the menus will follow the flow of kaiseki, with its transitions from refreshing to savory and moments of reprieve, they will otherwise be unbound by formalities. In kaiseki, for example, there is always a futamono course, a soup with a lid to capture the aromas wafting from the broth. Kyle’s take will be abalone with white alba mushrooms in a silver leaf tea—no lid.

  He is keenly aware of the dangers of adopting another culture’s tradition without fully conveying its meaning. “The whole world is open to us. That’s the freedom that we have being outside that tradition,” Kyle says. “We can draw from tradition and pay respect with careful consideration of its nuances. But it would feel weird if we insisted that there were always a lid on this course. It would be replicating a form without its meaning.”

  “This is ultimately food about Sonoma,” Siciliano says. In planning the capping sweet course, known as wagashi, traditionally involving rice flour sweets served with tea, Siciliano deliberately held back from direct references, playing instead with a beet dish with chicory and chervil and a bite of apple butter layered with a lemon coriander cream. “I’m never going to make wagashi the way they do in Japan, because those makers started doing so generations ago,” he says, “so I’m trying to move the conversation forward and create something unexpected.”

  As they await the restaurant kitchen to be completed, the entire culinary team has been working out of Kyle and Katina’s renovated farmhouse on a four-burner Viking range, a portable Cuisinart oven that is usually relegated to the garage for lack of counter space, and the family’s donabe. On one afternoon, three sous chefs and the sommelier were touching shoulders as they used every available countertop and a makeshift plywood workbench to prepare a vegetable tureen, a black cod dish, a melon dessert and various cocktails. Katina squeezed by, dropping off some of the day’s harvest and lugging buckets of flowers she was arranging for the next evening’s test dinner.

  “There’s something about these moments in the very beginning, how you handle the challenges together, that reflect how things will be the future,” Kyle says, surveying the scene. “It’s a moment you can’t have again.”

  In this era of Bay Area startups (culinary and otherwise), there can be a reflexive eye-rolling when you hear someone talk about farm-fresh anything, or R & D, or the romance of cramming a team into cramped quarters before the big launch. It doesn’t help that to pay for all that, prices have to be high—out of reach to many, which is especially wincing as Healdsburg adjusts to hordes of wealthy weekenders while holding town meetings to find ways to keep rental prices down for everyone else.

  But now Kyle attends those meetings and makes a point to be transparent about Single Thread’s hiring and sourcing. Everything within Single Thread is interconnected, and so it is becoming with the community outside it, too. “We live here now, and we want to live here for the rest of our lives,” he says.

  Which is to say that when Kyle and Katina tell you Single Thread is an extension of their home, you can’t help but understand. And when they say they want to give each guest a truly personal and memorable experience, you believe it. Not because of the breathless press or the hefty bill, but because every detail will come from a real piece of the Connaughtons’ journey—from Katina’s mornings in Kyoto, to Kyle tweaking the details of recipes for famous chefs for endless months, and their quiet evenings over donabe as a family. All of this will be distilled into each dish.

  On an afternoon visit to check on the construction of the restaurant, the Connaughtons lingered outside, looking at a barren two-story trellis on which Katina will eventually nurse creeping vines to climb skyward. There was a riot of hammering coming from inside.

  “Sometimes you can’t plan everything, and then it all comes together anyway,” Katina says with a shrug. Like all the parts of their past that have coalesced into this moment, it all feels inevitable.

  A local man who has been admiring the changes peers in the window as he rolls by in his wheelchair. “You gonna buy this place?” he asks.

  “Thinking about it,” Kyle says.

  Michel Richard, 1946–2016

  BY TODD KLIMAN

  From ToddKliman.net

  The immediacy of social media can be powerful. Todd Kliman, award-winning food critic and cultural essayist (the Washingtonian, Lucky Peach, The Oxford American, et cetera), brought that power home in this viral Twitter tweetstorm, eulogizing one of the world’s great chefs in the hours after his death.

  Michel Richard was a genius. That’s not a word to be used indiscriminately, though it often is. But it’s true. He was. One of the few.

  It was easy to see the virtuosic brilliance in his dishes, the dazzling wit that made you smile before you’d even taken a bite.

  What was not easy to see, in part because the brilliance was so blinding, was the world that gave rise to this invented world. A real world of pain and heartache. His food was an escape.

  His father came to Brittany after WWII, to find work rebuilding the country. A drunkard, he beat his wife and abandoned the family when Richard was 6. His mother worked in a factory, and took the five children to live in a house with no running water. At 8, Richard had his first job—he was the family cook.

  He learned how to use every part of the animals he killed, collecting the blood of rabbits to mix it with vinegar for making boudin. He thickened stews with the innards.

  He later went to work in a bronze factory. His skin black with soot at the end of his shifts.

  Somewhere around this time, he made a discovery: the Impressionists. He was enchanted by their renderings of reality. Renderings that improved upon the actual.

  By 14, he was on his path, working 16 hours a day for a pastry chef in a town 100 miles away. This alone was brutal. But the fear of reprisal was just as harrowing. One slip-up, and he could be smacked around by the boss.

  And so he learned not to slip up, to mind the tiniest, most insignificant detail. Three years later, he became a pastry chef.

  After an army stint—he told me a story once about serving an inhumane higher-up his own cat in a stew, a story I have never verified, and never tried, believing it to be true in some form or fashion—he went to work for the great Gaston Lenotre, the granddaddy of pastry chefs.

  Lenotre did not just make pastry; he worked confections up into arrangements that made people’s jaws drop in awe and wonder.

  It was here that Richard learned that food could be more than nourishment; it could dazzle; it could provoke; it could prompt contemplation and even study.

  More than that: it could take you out of one world—our fallen world, brutal and unfair—and into one that was more beautiful and even magical.

  When he was making the transition from sweet to savory, becoming a chef and not just a pastry chef, fine dining was a more solemn and restrained business than it is now. He played his own game. I’ll never forget seeing him walk up to a diner at Citronelle who was gawking at Richard’s version of a Napoleon. The diner was right to gawk. “Smash it!” Richard shouted, standing over him. The man was too paralyzed with fear and perhaps too awestruck. “Smash it!” And so Richard picked up the spoon and, like a little boy, demolished his own creation.

  He smashed things. Rules. Conventions. Should-dos. Expectations. So many of Richard’s greatest dishes were not just great-tasting. They were feasts for the eyes and the mind. His mushroom soup, which was
made to look like a cappuccino, complete with a top layer of (potato) foam. (And let it be said that the soup itself was the most mushroomy I’ve ever tasted, as if the chef had produced not simply a broth but a liqueur.) A mosaic-like arrangement of eel and tuna set on a layer of Saran wrap over a bowl so that it cast shadows below. “Breakfast,” which was, in fact, an over-the-top display of dessert in the form of a grand room-service breakfast.

  Very few chefs have a recognizable style. They have a genre, a way of plating, a philosophy, an approach. Richard had a style, in the same way that Van Gogh had a style, or that Woolf had a style. Distinct. Inimitable.

  The razor-like line of his creations. The trompe l’oeil wit. The irrepressible need to overturn assumption and expectation.

  He will be remembered for many things as a chef, but this has to be foremost among them—that no one did more to demonstrate that French cooking is not a period piece. That it need not be beholden to the past, to tradition. That it is possible both to honor the canon and revere the classics and also innovate. Swapping peak-of-season August tomatoes for beef in a steak tartare. Turning squid into capellini. Making caviar out of pasta.

  Are these lessons that other chefs can be inspired by and follow? Yes. Will we see another like him? I somehow doubt it.

  I’ve tasted the work of many great chefs—here in DC, around the country, and around the world. Great dishes, great experiences. But I have never left the table the way I left the table at Richard’s restaurants when he was there.

  With a sense of lightness and possibility.

  With a belief that life was, or could be, beautiful.

  And this was yet another trick that he performed at the table. The ability to make life look better than it was.

  Yet for all his genius, I think what I will remember most in the weeks to come is his vulnerability and unappeasability.

  He oozed vulnerability. Many chefs are deeply, deeply vulnerable and either hide it or run from it. He didn’t. He used it as a spur to creativity.

  He was up front about what he needed from people. Up front about what he felt he was denied. No amount of recognition or affirmation was enough for him. No amount of honors, accolades, commendations, or stars. There was a massive hurt there, a wound, and that wound was an open wound.

  It was attractive in him, I thought, and not repellent.

  It had its roots in the world that made him. The kitchen, the plate, his imagination at play in a new dish—these were escapes. But that world never left him.

  There were hangers-on. People who wanted to be in his orbit, and share in the spoils. And he did not say no enough. He should have.

  He was bad at business, and that was a terrible shame, too, because it deprived him, and us, of opportunities.

  But I won’t remember those things.

  I will remember his vulnerability, his unappeasability, his genius, his sense of wonder, his refusal to live outside of his imagination.

  I will remember going to the Phillips Collection with him some months ago, and just walking around, taking in the work of the masters.

  And him with his keen and observant eye. His hungry, his devouring eye.

  They Also Serve

  The Chef, the Dishwasher and a Bond

  BY PEGGY GRODINSKY

  From the Portland Press-Herald

  As food editor at Maine’s Portland Press Herald, Peggy Grodinsky chronicles one of the Northeast’s most dynamic food scenes. Here, she pays tribute to an aspect of the restaurant world that’s all too often overlooked: the vital dynamic between chefs and their kitchen staff.

  Larry Matthews Jr., chef and owner of the elegant Back Bay Grill in Portland, and William “Franco” Tucker, dishwasher at the same, have worked together for about two decades. Longer than many marriages last. Longer, by decades, than dishwashers typically stay at restaurants. Longer than either ever expected, and longer than Matthews has worked with anyone else at his reliably first-rate restaurant.

  Matthews, 43, grew up in Kennebunk, where he still lives. He was raised a strict Baptist, and today is married with two children. After getting a college degree in the culinary arts, he worked in a few restaurants—some quite distinguished—before arriving at Back Bay Grill when he was about 22.

  At 24, he was the executive chef, and five years later, he owned the place. He left once, for two months, to cook at a restaurant in Ogunquit. But for most of his life, Matthews has had one home, both professionally and personally.

  Tucker, 68, spent his childhood at the Waco State Home and in reformatory school in Texas; the state removed him from his family when he was a preschooler. He was raised “Southern fried Baptist,” he said. He dropped out of school after eighth grade—he has since got his GED—and a few years later he spent time in jail for stealing cars. He has never been married, and he doesn’t have a girlfriend now, though he smiles when he says he is “always in the hunt.”

  Before he came to Maine in the 1970s, Tucker was a rambling man, living in Alaska; New Mexico; Seattle; Denver; Buffalo, New York; and Tucson, Arizona. He wandered around Maine some, too, looking for work, he said, always looking for work. Over the years, he has held many odd jobs, in welding, construction, and mason tending; making sandwiches, harvesting potatoes and working at an auto parts plant. Home was wherever he hung his hat.

  One packed New Year’s Eve in the late 1990s, the dishwasher at Back Bay Grill walked. Tucker was hired at the eleventh hour to fill in, a trial by fire in more ways than one; that evening the dish-washing machine broke down.

  Since then, he’s left just once, for a year, to be reunited with his sister in Texas whom he’d last seen when he was 4 years old.

  In this industry, two years employment is practically a lifetime. Dishwashers often cycle in for just six months. As for finding one who cares about his work? As likely as finding a fiddlehead in January.

  “It was a long year,” Matthews said of the time Tucker was away.

  “I’d rather be up here,” Tucker said.

  “We Got It Done”

  Tucker mostly works in a tight space directly behind Back Bay Grill’s open kitchen. He’s a scrawny man, which turns out to be handy, as a large man might not fit or be able to pivot with bus buckets stacked with dirty plates, racks loaded with clean glasses, and chinois and bain maries to fetch for the line cooks. Such specialized equipment, called in professional kitchens by their French names, hangs from the ceiling between the kitchen and the dish station, and Tucker can name every item.

  Once, when Matthews was new and cooking on the line, something he does only occasionally these days, he asked Tucker to bring him lettuce.

  “I wanted mixed baby lettuces. I didn’t think he knew what it was,” Matthews remembered. “I tried to describe what mesclun mix looks like.” Tucker went downstairs and came back with the wrong stuff. He made a second trip. And a third. “Finally, by process of elimination he got it and he showed it to me and I was like ‘yeah, that’s it.’ And he says (to me)…” Here Matthews speaks very slowly in imitation of Tucker’s voice, telling the chef, as if explaining to a not very bright child, “Mes-cu-lun mix.”

  Tucker doesn’t remember this, though he does remember the painfully slow evening years ago when Matthews sent everyone in the kitchen home but him. Suddenly, the place filled up, “and the next thing you know, Franco and I were flying around and figuring out how to get it done,” Matthews said.

  “We got it done,” he added.

  Common Core

  In the beginning, their relationship wasn’t all truffles and foie gras—two items that are, incidentally, sometimes featured on Back Bay Grill’s menu. Tucker is set in his ways, Matthews said, and things could get tense. Matthews remembers bickering. A lot of it.

  “I was a chef trying to make my bones, I suppose,” Matthews said. “Everything was very important to me all the time. If I needed a particular pan, that was the only thing. He saw other priorities.

  “Once we understood that we both had the
restaurant’s best interest in mind,” Matthews continued, “that’s when I think we (made) a more cohesive team.”

  When he isn’t washing dishes, Tucker stands at the pass between the kitchen and dish room and watches the line cooks with fierce intensity. He hands them the correct clean pans they need when, say, an order for lavender-marinated duck breast comes in, and he grabs their hot, dirty pans with tongs or kitchen towels, disappearing to scrub them, reappearing a minute later to return them clean.

  He’s got a system. He’s got systems. He knows just how to remove greasy, cooked-in rings from the top of stock pots. He separates the utensils before putting them through the machine—knives with knives (blades up), forks with forks (tongs down). He knows which scrubbies to use with which pans, so the pans don’t get scratched.

  When the waiters come in at 4 p.m., relaxed and sociable, they can annoy Tucker. He starts his day at 2 p.m., and before the dishes pile up and depending on the day’s menu, he peels fava beans and potatoes, cleans fiddleheads, de-beards mussels, shucks corn… He has plenty to do, and it looks to him like the waiters don’t. He can be gruff, Matthews said. Tucker likes his routines, seconds Back Bay Grill General Manager Adrian Stratton, who at 12 years with the restaurant is the next longest-serving person on the staff.

  “Franco is at the bottom of the food chain—supposedly,” Matthews said. “In years past, I had a cook who didn’t get along with Franco. ‘Don’t put me in a position where I have to choose between the two of you,’ he told the cook. ‘It won’t be a hard choice.’”