Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  Who Would Do the Dishes?

  Matthews understands the work of a restaurant dishwasher firsthand. He’s done the job himself. Before he cooked at the Relais & Châteaux White Barn Inn in Kennebunk, before he cooked at the James Beard award-winning Inn at Little Washington in Virginia, before he helmed Portland’s beloved Back Bay Grill, he washed dishes at the Lobster Pot in Cape Porpoise.

  “Every chef should spend some time doing the dishes,” he said. “It’s a thankless job, but in a lot of ways, it is the most important job in the restaurant.”

  He actually remembers the dishwasher at the Inn at Little Washington. We’re talking 20 years ago. A guy named Roy, whom Matthews called “a career dishwasher.”

  “He took it very seriously,” he said. “He was very good at it. I felt very lucky to find a similar partner.”

  On occasion, Matthews has substituted for Tucker at Back Bay Grill. It’s easier to do the job himself than try to find someone else to do it, he said. Someone who will live up to Tucker’s exacting standards, which Tucker describes this way: “Do it right the first time, so you don’t have to go over it.”

  Once, Matthews tried to get Tucker help in the dish room, someone to do the pots for a few hours each day. That didn’t work out.

  Not that Tucker needs a substitute much.

  “If Franco doesn’t show up, that means a train ran him over,” Stratton joked. Which got Stratton and Matthews to thinking about the traits of a good dishwasher.

  “Reliability,” Matthews said. “Reliability,” he repeated.

  Until some five years ago, Tucker worked five to six days a week. He cut back to four days so he could get up early Sundays to take the bus to Boston—he doesn’t own a car—to see the Patriots play. His Social Security checks make his new schedule possible.

  “I’ve always been into sports,” Tucker said. Others move to Maine for the beautiful coastline, the outdoors life, the reasonable pace. He said he stayed because he likes the Patriots and the Celtics.

  Did you know Matthews wrestled on his high school team? he added admiringly.

  Tucker substituted for Matthews, sort of, just once. Matthews had the bright idea that Tucker should get a promotion to cook. This was “double digit years ago,” Matthews said. “I thought it would be a great story if I could turn him into a great chef.”

  The tryout lasted all of a day.

  “He had no interest in doing it,” Matthews said. “He didn’t have the passion for it.”

  Tucker didn’t dispute this. Does he cook at home? “Microwave,” he said. About that possible promotion? First of all, cooking in a restaurant kitchen is too hot, Tucker said. Second, “like I told Larry,” who would do the dishes?

  “We could probably get a dishwasher,” Matthews said.

  “I’d probably be dissatisfied with what I see around,” Tucker replied. “Very few (good dishwashers) right now. I can’t recommend anybody.”

  He’s the Metronome

  Tucker has been at Back Bay Grill twice as long as he’s held any other job.

  “Everybody treats me with respect,” he said when asked why. “Not every job they are gonna treat you with respect.”

  Then there are the occasional celebrity sightings. Like two weeks ago, when George Bush Sr. showed up to eat soft shell crabs.

  Tucker has eaten in the comfortable, understated dining room himself. Once, when he had a date, the kitchen prepared a 14-course tasting menu for the couple. Only one problem: The date was a no-show.

  “Actually it turned out good because she was a bad girl,” Tucker said. “It brought me up to what she was all about.”

  He ate the meal by himself. “I usually don’t eat that much.”

  Usually, he is very particular about when he eats. Tucker doesn’t like to work on a full stomach. If he is busy, he may not stop to eat a slice of birthday cake for a co-worker. Sometimes, he eats staff meal with everybody else at the end of service. More often, he scrapes a portion into a container and brings it home to microwave.

  “Everything goes to his time frame,” Stratton said. “I’m pretty sure my day starts on his time frame.”

  “There are a lot of times I feel like Franco sets the rules, and we just follow them,” Matthews agreed, laughing.

  “He is the metronome of the kitchen,” Back Bay Grill server Ian Bannon said of Tucker.

  That respect Tucker feels, that any customer to Back Bay Grill has felt—it’s no accident. It’s in the DNA of the restaurant, the DNA of Matthews and Stratton.

  “If you are respectful to all your employees, your employees will pass that respect on to the guests. It’s trickle-down,” Stratton said. “Your first guest is your employee.”

  Arriving Today

  Eighteen years years ago, Tucker attended Matthews’ wedding at the Danforth Inn in Portland. Do the pair consider themselves friends?

  “Oh yeah. He’s a boss and a friend,” Tucker instantly answered the question.

  “It’s definitely, ah… not a traditional friendship,” Matthews said carefully. “We don’t hang out outside of work. But I try to make sure he’s taken care of, he gets whatever he needs. He hurt his knee a few years back. He had appointments across town. I took him to all those. I don’t know if that’s a friendship, exactly what you’d call it.”

  Tucker interrupted, laughing: “He’s not my enemy, anyhow.”

  Now that Tucker is 68, now that he’s reliably held the same job for 20 years, now that he knows what he knows, what would he tell that 16-year-old boy who stole cars so he could run away from reform school?

  “I never wished I didn’t do it. I would do something else just to get away,” Tucker said. “They don’t give you a bus ticket, they don’t. It could have been a lot worse.”

  Not surprisingly, Matthews sees things differently. He got his own big chance as a young man at the White Barn Inn. He’d already worked at other restaurants by then, but then-chef Gethin Thomas opened his eyes to what the culinary field could be. I could do that, he thought to himself. I want to do that.

  “I think Franco just really needed some consistency and some stability, something he could count on,” Matthews said. “He works very hard. He comes here and is appreciated and taken care of, so he comes back again the next day. And 20 years later, we are doing the same thing.

  “I always wonder what would have become of Franco if he’d had some form of stability earlier in his life… what would happen in a different parallel reality.

  “But this is where he is,” Matthews said.

  When Matthews was young he figured he’d move around from good restaurant to better restaurant cheffing and climbing the ladder. He didn’t figure that then Back Bay Grill proprietor Joel Freund would get terminal cancer and want to sell the place to his star chef. But this is where Matthews is, too.

  The Piano Man of Zuni Café

  BY RACHEL LEVIN

  From Lucky Peach

  The San Francisco restaurant critic for Eater.com, Rachel Levin has also covered the Bay Area culinary scene for the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, and Lucky Peach. Her focus isn’t only on what’s new and trendy, either—witness this fresh take on the classic SF restaurant Zuni Café.

  The six o’clock sun streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the long copper-topped bar and an oddity for a Thursday evening or any evening, really, at Zuni Café: a room full of empty tables.

  Bob Carrau doesn’t seem to notice. He strolls in with his embroidered seat cushion under one arm and a tattered yellow Mexican market bag slung over the other, like he has twice a week, every week, for the last nine years. He nods hello to the hosts, whose names, he admits, he really should know by now, and heads downstairs, to Zuni’s underworld—where dishes are washed and ties are ironed and the staff shares big bowls of pasta—and grabs a small ceramic Mexican plate from his cubby: his tip plate.

  Bob’s not hungry. He had a couple of carrots before he arrived, but otherwise, he never eats befor
e he plays. He rarely sticks around to eat afterward either, unless friends come in. Doesn’t matter what plates pass by: the thick slices of levain with sea salt–sprinkled butter; the Caesar of all Caesars. Not even Zuni’s famed roasted chicken, nestled in warm bread salad, tempts. (As much as he likes it, he likes his partner Tony’s roast chicken more.)

  Somehow, unlike everyone else in the restaurant, his mind isn’t on the food. It’s on his music.

  For the next three hours, beneath “a flower arrangement Liberace could die for,” he’ll play a polished K. Kawai grand piano that’s stood there almost as long as the restaurant itself.

  First, Bob opens his wallet. “Don’t tell anyone I’m doing this,” he says, and proceeds to do what everyone knows everyone with a tip jar—in Bob’s case, a tip plate—does: and feeds himself a five dollar bill.

  Bob never wanted to play for tips! He wasn’t even sure he wanted to play for people. On an average night, he might pull in thirty bucks; fifty on a good night. Tonight—Game 1 of the NBA Finals for the Golden State Warriors—it’s so far looking slow.

  “I’ve learned, how I play has no bearing on how much people tip,” he says laughing. “Depends on the night, their mood…” He could make a million mistakes, he says, and some big hitter might still slip him a twenty. Bob appreciates every penny, but he doesn’t play for the money. He can barely believe Zuni pays him at all.

  “I guess that means I’m a professional?” He half-balks/half-marvels at the thought as he pulls what looks like forty pounds of spiral-bound jazz fake books out of his bag, some dating back decades.

  From fifth grade through age fifty, playing piano was just a hobby for Bob. Something he did on his own, rarely if ever singing along, and always without fanfare. If there happened to be a piano at a friend’s house, he’d sneak off while everyone was making dinner. A performer, he was not, he promises. “I’d just see a piano and want to know what it would sound like.”

  But the thing is: his friends thought it sounded pretty good.

  And his friends owned restaurants. Like Alice Waters (whose speeches and books he sometimes cowrites, including her latest, Fanny in France, which comes out this fall.) And Gilbert Pilgram of Zuni, which had a piano in need of a player. So one rainy Monday afternoon in 2007, he invited Bob to come in and play a few tunes while he and Judy Rodgers worked on the books.

  He doesn’t remember what he played, just how he felt playing. The acoustics were incredible. He gazes from the polished cement floors to the mile-high cathedral-like ceilings. “This room is just beautiful,” he says. “Especially when no one is in it.”

  Tonight it’s just a few fellow regulars: a gray-haired woman in a trench coat sitting by herself. Another who gives him what he calls “the Princess Di wave” as she passes the piano. A bearded man in a blazer stops to give him a hearty hug, marveling at having his pick of tables. “Who knew the Zuni crowd were such Warriors fans?”

  Bob agrees. The Zuni crowd used to be “gayer,” he says, chatting as his fingers flutter effortlessly over the keys to “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” a WWII tune he sneaks in every time. “The first night I ever played at Zuni, the U.S. had just sent more troops to Iraq, or somewhere, and I was just sitting at the piano, looking around the room, realizing how insulated we were from the world,” he says. “It’s my own silly little protest.”

  Bob was a regular back when Zuni was a sliver of an American-Mexican place. Before Judy Rogers took over in 1987, installed the brick oven, expanded, and turned Zuni Café into the iconic restaurant it is today.

  There was always a piano, he recalls. “This one old guy from the Fillmore would play the blues and I’d just stare at his fingers, at how fast they could move.” Like I now sit and stare at his.

  “Zuni was the kind of place you’d come to cruise,” Bob reminisced. In his thirties, he’d drop by around 11 p.m., hoping to maybe meet someone. “I never did,” he says laughing. “But it felt like you could.”

  Now a graying fifty-eight year old in a twenty-year relationship, Bob’s certainly not here to meet men. He’s here to play. And people watch. “I’m a voyeur,” he says. “This gig allows me to be out in public, without, you know, really going out.” Originally a gofer-turned-screenwriter for Lucasfilm (he actually wrote his first script with George), he can’t help but watch the well-coiffed gaggles slurping Fanny Bays and sipping fresh lime margaritas and wonder who they are, where they’ve been, why they’re here.

  He barely chats to anyone save the bartender, who pours him a single snifter of mezcal halfway through his set, or the server who always snaps as he strolls past. “That’s how I can tell the music is getting through,” says Bob. “Sometimes I think I sound great. Sometimes I think I sound like a guy on a cruise ship.”

  Hardly, says Gilbert, who appreciates the warmth and intimacy that live music adds to a restaurant, a rarity in this age of piped-in playlists. “What I love about Bob is he’s not your typical lounge player. You’ll never catch him playing ‘New York, New York.’ He has standards.”

  He’s Zuni’s “regular celebrity,” according to Gilbert. To Bob’s mind, he’s pure background. “People don’t pay attention to me,” he says. “It’s okay.”

  Once, though, Michael Tilson Thomas cruised through and gave him a thumbs-up. That felt good. A few years ago, Hillary Clinton came in, with a friend of his who asked her if she had any requests. She suggested “Moon River,” then ordered a Manhattan. But her friend urged her to try Zuni’s margarita. “‘Oh, I’ll just have both,’ she said!” Bob recounts. “Wait, maybe don’t print that. She’s trying to get elected president of the United States!” (Oh c’mon, if Gerald Ford liked his lunchtime martinis and Teddy Roosevelt drank mint juleps and even President Obama puts back an occasional pint, there’s no harm in Hillary Clinton double-fisting a couple of cocktails, is there?)

  Bob flips the pages of his fake book. He has no premeditated lineup. “I let the room tell me what to play,” he says, and launches into a riff of “Have You Met Miss Jones?”

  Time for his break.

  He rises and wanders out the side door, onto Market Street. “This stretch used to be scarier, all addicts and homeless,” he says, strolling a few doors down to his “office,” an entrance to a mattress shop and a respite from San Francisco’s wintry summer wind. He points to a shiny tech bus and the sleek new sushi spot across the street. A woman jogs by, as does a man pushing a baby stroller, then two matching hoodies. “You never used to see any of these people here—or if you did, they were lost.”

  An almost forty-year-old restaurant with a wall of windows exposes more than just the waning evening light. Somehow, though, because this is Zuni, the changing city remains beyond the glass.

  The clock strikes nine and a few Warriors’ revelers start to trickle in. Bob packs up his music, closes the lid on his borrowed piano, and slips the sole fiver back into his wallet. Time to head home. Perhaps Tony’s roasted a chicken.

  My Dinners with Harold

  BY DANIEL DUANE

  From the California Sunday Magazine, December 1, 2016

  A contributing editor to Men’s Journal and Food & Wine, Daniel Duane has written memoirs about surfing, rock climbing, and learning how to cook. It was cooking that first led him to Harold McGee’s essential tomes on food science. Actually meeting his (and so many others’) culinary mentor? Priceless.

  The first time I had dinner with Harold McGee, he didn’t touch the food. McGee is the bookish 65-year-old author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, first published in 1984, last revised in 2004, and so dense with gripping material like the denaturing effect of heat on meat proteins that it cannot possibly have been read cover to cover by more than two or three people, McGee included. On Food and Cooking is also a perennial bestseller with hundreds of thousands of copies in print—a bible for home cooks and chefs all over the world and the primary reason that McGee has become the great secret celebrity of the contemporary food scene.<
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  I knew for years that McGee lived in my San Francisco neighborhood, and I had been fantasizing about dinner with him ever since the night I tried to make mayonnaise by putting an egg yolk and a teaspoon of water in a bowl and whisking in half a cup of extra-virgin olive oil. This mixture deteriorated into such a disgusting pool of grease that I threw it out. I cracked a second egg, separated the yolk, added more water, and tried whisking in another half cup of olive oil. Heartbreak again, this time coupled with self-doubt.

  I repeated this process five times, ever more certain that something was wrong with me, until I had gone through ten dollars’ worth of oil and all but one of my eggs with only minutes before my dinner guests were due. I owned On Food and Cooking, having bought it long before in the hope of making myself into a superior cook, but I had given up on reading it after repeated runs at Chapter 1: “Milk and Dairy Products.”

  The mayo mess broke my OFAC impasse. Frantic, I scanned the index, found my subject between matzo and mead, and read McGee’s primer on emulsified sauces, of which mayonnaise is one. I felt calmed by McGee’s explanation that the essence of an emulsion is the dispersal of oil into a zillion tiny droplets suspended in water, aided by an emulsifier in egg yolks known as lecithin. I felt reassured by the news that fancy olive oil is notoriously temperamental in mayonnaise, and I nearly wept with relief at the sight of a section titled, “Rescuing a Separated Sauce.” Following McGee’s directions, I put a few tablespoons of water in a cup and then, whisking vigorously, slowly drizzled in my final batch of yolk-speckled oil. Moments later, I emerged as the man I am today, capable of making mayonnaise with confidence.

  I promptly bought McGee’s second and third books, The Curious Cook: More Kitchen Science and Lore (1990) and Keys to Good Cooking: A Guide to Making the Best of Foods and Recipes (2010). I soon experienced similar triumphs—like making french fries that did not fall limp within minutes of leaving my deep-fryer. I came to think of McGee as an imaginary friend who lived in my kitchen, knew everything, and was happy to share.