Steal the Menu

by Raymond Sokolov

  “For me it’s all about the texture,” he said.

  The new spring menu was centered on shellfish. “Americans really love shellfish,” he told me, as if to congratulate me and more than 300 million other compatriots for our good taste.

  He went on to build his new dish by layering the crab mixture with strips of yellow-brown Santa Barbara sea urchin, which he extracted from a neat pile. The crustaceans were only the beginning. Minced raw white cauliflower was also a major ingredient. It would lurk within the crabmeat mix as a stealth carrier of crunch, which Robuchon said he believes makes this dish a no-grain marine cousin of tabbouleh, the ancient Near Eastern salad based on bulgur wheat and mint. To carry the edible metaphor all the way, the chef added mint to his crab creation.

  The diner who ordered this crab-and-cauliflower “tabbouleh” at the start of the 2009 spring menu received a small caviar tin, inside which only black osetra eggs were visible. But when he attacked them with his fork, the action unearthed a chamber symphony of crab, cauliflower and mint, the faux tabbouleh concealed under the caviar emerged, and everything merged on the tongue in the most unexpected and beautiful way.

  “I just had this idea in my head,” Robuchon explained, without, of course, explaining anything.

  On that same February visit, I returned to the jewel-box dining room adjoining but totally insulated from the MGM Grand’s casino, for the restaurant’s winter menu. No course included more than four ingredients, and the often surprising combinations did not war with one another. An egg yolk hid in an herb-flavored raviolo: there it was again, the San Domenico raviolone, raised a notch with a medley of black truffle shavings and orbs of baby spinach foam—two kinds of spherical shapes, one on a convex mount, the other in a concave container.

  Then I got my favorite course, the frog leg fritter. This iconic food of France was presented as a single gobbet of flesh with a matchstick of bone sticking up as a handle—letting you pop the thing, with its crisp, bird’s-nest coating, into your mouth, but only after you’d dredged it through teardrops of garlic cream and parsley puree, chaste reminders of the dish’s origins in Provence.

  I was equally amused and delighted to see how Robuchon ennobled the lowly turnip with candied chestnuts in a foie gras broth. The flavors and textures married as if centuries of trial and error had long since made the combination commonplace. Ditto for the very strange velvety soup of oats studded with toasted almond and red dots of chorizo juice—superior comfort chow pepped up with crunchy almond bits hiding in the porridge. Odd, too, and also magnificent was the “risotto” of soy shoots with lemon zest and chive.

  Toward the end of the evening, the courses turned less fanciful. A piece of veal with a napoleon of vegetables and a natural herb gel preceded an exemplary bass, served unadorned except for its crisp skin and a dark red pool of sauce derived from verjuice, the acidic liquid pressed from unripe grapes. The breathtaking simplicity of these two main dishes only underlined how radical the earlier part of the meal had been. Then, just as I thought he was winding down, Robuchon at his trickiest conjured up a rococo assemblage called Le Coca.

  As in cola.

  This tribute to the chef’s beloved soda consisted of a ginger mousse, an ice made from vodka and Coke, and something dark, a bubble of Coca-Cola gelée crowned with gold. It was a grandiose joke, but Robuchon had taken the world’s most famous industrial flavor and transmogrified it into a high culinary essence—still recognizably Coke, but also something way beyond.

  For a larger version of this menu, click here.

  I ate my way through this menu from Joël Robuchon’s three-star Michelin restaurant in Las Vegas in 2009, after interviewing the world’s most honored chef in the little kitchen tucked inside the world’s largest hotel, the MGM Grand. The menu included a fantasy dessert based, with a magician’s sleight of hand, on Coca-Cola, Robuchon’s workaday drink of choice. (illustration credit 5.1)

  That meal may have been the finest, and it definitely was one of the most creative, I ate in four years of free-range feeding at the summits of gastronomy. I was not surprised, since I had eaten in the same hidden Eden twice before. And in the course of many trips to Las Vegas, I had concluded that it offered the most intense opportunity to eat well in the United States and possibly in the world.

  Robuchon had long ago given up on Paris for his fanciest flights. The economics of New York made it impossible for him to mount one of his “gastronomic” restaurants there. Even the New York branch of his more-relaxed Atelier chain folded in 2011. But in Las Vegas (as in that other gambling capital Macao, where he had won three stars with a similarly grand restaurant), he could count on support from the MGM Grand and from high rollers. This is why most of the big names in the restaurant pantheon have flocked to Vegas. Some, like Sirio Maccioni, of New York’s Le Cirque, have merely knocked themselves off without knocking themselves out to achieve something great.

  And yet the stigma that surrounds Sin City keeps some of my most food-minded acquaintances from going there.

  In 2005, when a crazed foodie I know well decided to take six friends to dinner with her first Social Security check, she picked Chanterelle, the once-great Tribeca address that was cruising toward its twilight. I suggested that if all eight of us pooled our Social Security checks, we could fly to Vegas, eat at Robuchon and fly home on the redeye, all without surrendering a dollar to the gambling industry or tainting ourselves with the vulgarity of the strip’s carnival architecture.

  We went to Chanterelle.

  My final wallow in the Nevada desert as Journal food critic, in early 2010, coincided with the opening of MGM Mirage’s City-Center, the sixty-nine-acre complex that nearly bankrupted Dubai. Gamblers were feeding the slots on the ground floor of the sixty-one-story Aria, the central property. Shoppers were trolling for glitz in Crystals, Daniel Libeskind’s cavernous funhouse of a mall. There was major league art everywhere, by Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer, Frank Stella and, from Nancy Rubins, a monumental assemblage of multicolored boats moored together in the central traffic island. But most enticing for me was the lure of three “fine-dining” restaurants masterminded by three famous chefs.

  How did I pick this trio out of the dozens so toothsomely described in CityCenter’s advance publicity? They had to be outposts of very well-respected venues outside Vegas whose chefs had never worked there before. This may have been unfair to Michael Mina’s American Fish or Julian Serrano’s clever-looking celebration of Spain, named after himself, at Aria, or Wolfgang Puck’s bistro inside Crystals. But food news is food news. And the arrival of three-star French master toque Pierre Gagnaire in North America, as well as the Clark County debuts of Chicago headliner Shawn McClain (Sage) and Masayoshi Takayama (Bar Masa and Shaboo), wizard of rawness at Masa in Manhattan’s Time Warner Center, were the biggest news in this first season of CityCenter’s struggling but apparently viable leviathan.

  If, however, the only restaurant you landed in here was Takayama’s Shaboo, you would have been on your Droid right away selling MGM Mirage short. Admittedly, Shaboo set the bar very high, even for the high-rollingest diner, in an economy unrecovered from the crash of 2008: $500 a person for a set but unpredictable meal, exclusive of wine service and tax. And even if you were willing to blow that kind of money on a blue-chip version of the traditional Japanese hot-pot cuisine, you also had to pass a credit check and not lose your nerve after two warnings, one from a reservationist and the other from a captain on the way to your table, about how pricey your indulgent dinner was going to be.

  My wife, Johanna, and I had Shaboo, with its intimate fifty-two seats, all to ourselves, literally, except for a gallant staff of young women attendants, who helped us get the hang of pushing foie gras and other luxury oddments around in broth simmering over cool magnetic induction burners integrated into our table. We counted eight courses and many ingredients flown in at great cost from Japan. It may be that if we had been a couple of deeply experienced Japanese shabu-shabolators, t
his meal would have been some kind of pinnacle in our overcosseted gustatory lives. But as nonadepts at this form of mink-lined Zen cookery, we had a far finer time for far less liquidation of euroyen across the hall in the vast Aria lobby-atrium-casino at Sage.

  Young McClain wasn’t trying for a Guinness record as the world’s priciest chef at Sage. But he may have deserved one for most eclectically attentive to high-end trends. Sage’s subfusc elegance served as an all-purpose foil for food that represented his personal version of dishes that were hot all around the gastrostratosphere. There was a delicious foie gras crème brulée, a triumph of unctuous texture plays. Also, a slow-cooked “farm” egg, Iberico pork, toffee pudding—and a lot of other then-voguish ideas—were executed with assurance and even originality.

  But what made this voyage westward really worth it was Twist, Pierre Gagnaire’s bistro de luxe on the twenty-third floor of the discreet new Mandarin Oriental. I’d already eaten with mixed emotions at Gagnaire’s flagship restaurant in Paris some years before, finding its food amazingly intricate but a muddle in the mouth, like a failed finger painting by an overly ambitious schoolkid: all those carefully managed ingredients melted together without any unifying taste drama. So I wasn’t going to be an easy sell at Twist, despite its eagle’s view of the lights of Vegas (a rare glimpse of the rest of the city from hermetic CityCenter) and the knowing assistance of a sommelier I trusted all the more since I had spied her at lunch at the Beard Award–nominated Thai restaurant Lotus of Siam, an unglamorous mecca for Feinschmeckers with a renowned German wine list in a grotty mall north of the Strip.‖

  Gagnaire hadn’t totally abandoned his take-no-prisoners style at Twist, but his superego had gained control over his id. The foie gras tasting (four separate preparations, including a terrine with dried figs and toasted ginger bread; a custard with green lentils and grilled zucchini; a seared cube with duck glaze and fruit marmalade; and a croquette with trevicchio puree), served on a rectangular plate divided into four compartments, visually organized your sensations, and added up to an awe-inspiring and analytic tribute to the most overused expensive ingredient of all.

  Gagnaire had also turned into an American locavore (at least in the airborne sense imposed on any cook in the agriculture-deprived environs of Las Vegas), sourcing his never-confined veal in Wisconsin from the estimable Strauss company. And to show what a great French cook can do with American lobster, Twist offered it poached in Sauternes with an impressive entourage of garnishes and a lobster bisque.

  It was Gagnaire and Robuchon’s ability to adapt themselves to such an un-French, uniquely American setting that made their outposts in Nevada so special. If they had merely duplicated their brand of French luxury food in Las Vegas, that would have come off as sterile and smug, the way Alain Ducasse’s first restaurant in New York did. But Gagnaire and Robuchon were able to reinvent themselves in the desert. They weren’t cloning themselves, or conducting some stuffy mission civilisatrice among the heathen, as I felt Guy Savoy, another top Parisian chef, was doing at his restaurant down Las Vegas Boulevard, at Caesars Palace.

  But even at their spectacular best, Robuchon and Gagnaire were pulling off a stunt. Las Vegas was not only not their home base, it was not, with the exception perhaps of a few native-born gastronomes, any of their customers’ home bases either. The big gamblers the casinos call whales, the splurging conventioneers, the food lovers like me—we fly in for a few nights and don’t come back for months or years. The pervasive mood of transience this creates is not the normal atmosphere that has historically nurtured great restaurants. Repeat customers, a sense of place, of rootedness—these are the missing ingredients in the epicure’s paradise of Las Vegas.

  But they are the core strengths of the ambitious restaurants I kept dropping in at in almost every American town I wrote about over those four years at the end of the first decade of the new millennium.

  Behind the molecular-gastronomic smoke and mirrors at Alinea in Chicago was a backdrop of midwestern rootedness. Grant Achatz learned to cook at a family restaurant on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, in Chicago’s hinterland. He established himself first at Trio in Evanston, a Chicago suburb. Charlie Trotter is a Chicago native who lives down the street from his venerable restaurant, which was situated in a town house before Trotter closed it in 2012. For many customers, Trotter’s was a neighborhood eating place, a very good neighborhood place. The Morgan Stanley financier Ray Harris ate at Trotter’s more than three hundred times.

  For a larger version of this menu, click here.

  My dinner with Joel (and Maria) at Grant Achatz’s modernist Alinea in Chicago in early February 2007 included a helpful waiter who stood by to explain this cryptic menu. (illustration credit 5.2)

  Most other cities in this era have restaurants with deep local roots that serve food of “national” quality. “National,” as I took to using it in Journal reviews, meant that a restaurant in Des Moines or Richmond, Virginia, was on a level with the best and most up-to-date dining places on either coast, or in other acknowledged food centers such as Chicago or Miami. And as I traveled around America, I learned, with gratification and diminishing surprise, just how many national places there were.

  Take Sanford in Milwaukee. Like Charlie Trotter’s, it was established in a house, in a residential neighborhood, but the neighborhood was nothing fancy; neither was the little house where Sanford D’Amato and his wife, Angie, transformed a family grocery store into a soberly elegant dining room more than twenty years ago. Combining a cosmopolitan and up-to-date technique with local ingredients, D’Amato applied his French technique acquired at the Culinary Institute of America to roots cooking. When I ate there in 2009, I ordered a timbale of smoked salmon with rye cake, mustard mousseline and dill-pickled rutabaga. This was high-low cuisine, with humble ingredients and flavors you might have found in Milwaukee’s most vernacular saloons.

  But there was nothing plebeian about Sanford’s menu, which featured “green”a Strauss veal gently raised twenty miles to the southwest in Franklin, Wisconsin. The night I was at Sanford, this pampered meat appeared as a sous vide–tamed “17-hour” veal breast with escarole and pickled hedgehog mushrooms in a burnt-orange reduction. I finished the meal with a plate of five Wisconsin cheeses. Snow White goat cheddar and Carr Valley Billy Blue were far from the run-of-the-industrial-barn cheeses Wisconsin sells by the carload to the outside world.

  You could hardly ask for a more harmonious blend of sauce making evolved from classic principles, local sourcing of ingredients and modernist methodology. The humble cut of veal breast illustrated perfectly why the sous vide technique has spread far and wide. Really just a precise form of low-temperature cooking in a water bath, sous vide softens tougher cuts of meat without the aggressive force of a traditional, high-temperature braise. It can also cook a salmon without drying it out, leaving the texture as smooth and as flavorful as sashimi but not raw.

  Sous vide literally means “in a vacuum.” The name has unnecessarily emphasized the fact that food is put in plastic bags, which then have the air sucked out of them, so that they cling tightly, protecting the food from the water in the bath but allowing essentially direct contact with the temperature of the water. Temperatures much lower than those of normal cooking preserved a freshness of flavor in the veal.

  Later in 2008, I continued my heartland odyssey in Denver and Minneapolis, the two cities that hosted the party conventions, and made dining recommendations to the delegates.

  I felt compelled to mention Denver’s taxidermic showplace for regionally farmed game (elk and yak), the Buckhorn Exchange. But the “national” choice here was Restaurant Kevin Taylor in the chic Hotel Teatro, down the street from the convention center in downtown Denver’s cultural and entertainment hub. I admired Taylor’s treatments of red meat, the contrasting textures of tender Colorado dry-aged lamb sirloin and melting lamb belly dressed up with twice-baked eggplant, figs and pimenton peppers; the counterpoint of locally farmed bison si
rloin and barbecued back ribs with black beans, cheddar corn grits and charred tomatillos; and the Snake River Farms Kobe rib eye and beef-cheek two-step, with tasty potatoes and a truffle-accented béarnaise sauce. But I really liked his olive oil–poached halibut cheek—big enough to make you hope he hadn’t thrown away the rest of the fish. (Potato-crusted Alaskan halibut was available as a main course.)

  At the other end of the social and sensory scale was Snooze, on a seedy block of pawnshops in Denver’s ballpark neighborhood, a breakfast place serving coffee specially grown for it at a Guatemalan finca.

  Minneapolis wasn’t a patch on Denver, foodwise. The most original dining choice in the Twin Cities was on a drab block in plain-faced St. Paul, where I did my best to encourage Republican delegates to take their wives. If any of them did follow my advice and eat at Heartland, I am sure their power act didn’t faze my waitress, who brought eight wineglasses at one swoop to a table near me in the storefront establishment’s restrained dining room, with its open kitchen and rack of burly aluminum stockpots suspended above.

  Heartland was locavorous on steroids, and I mean that kindly. Its Wisconsin elk tartare was a rich, dense, meticulously hand-chopped and not-at-all-gamy way to begin a splendid meal. I liked the menu so much I had a second starter: a subtly contrasting salad of chilled Canadian wheat berries and sweet corn with Donnay Dairy chèvre, microgreens and watercress pesto vinaigrette. I followed it with the midwestern mixed grill of Illinois fallow venison and Minnesota wild boar sausage, with Footjoy Farm flat beans, house-cured wild boar guanciale (jowl) and fresh ginger glace de viande.

  Heartland was tucked away in a gray corner of the upper Midwest but cooking its heart out with top modern technique and bonhomie. As jumbo jets bound to shinier destinations flew overhead, the new food gospel was being preached here with expert ardor. Heartland literally inspired me, launched me on a long summer of exploration of flyover country to prove that savvy national places to eat abounded next to cornfields and in cities scorned by folks in New York County obsessed with snagging rezzies at Babbo.