In Omaha, bypassing Warren Buffett’s local haunt Gorat’s, where he washes down T-bones with Cherry Coke, I honed in on the rehabbed Old Market center, redolent of handmade soaps and other New Age gifts often found near fern bars. But in and around the exposed brick emporia were a couple of national-level watering holes, one hip and dreamy, La Buvette, the other, V. Mertz, tony and pricey, but smart, too. Both of them were the godchildren of a local boy named Mark Mercer, who had made sure that the Beef State no longer lacked places to consume foie gras poached in Sauternes or mallard breasts bedecked with a medley of fig, green bean, arugula, orange and pattypan squash.
And in Des Moines, I located another true believer at Bistro Montage. Enosh Kelly, the chef-owner at this small, intense neighborhood restaurant, was a national figure in his field and deserved the reputation he was getting, with nominations for best chef in the Midwest at the 2009 Beard Awards and kudos from other bellwethers.
There were plenty of tricky first courses on his menu—a salade niçoise with “house-canned” ahi tuna and Foxhollow quail eggs with a caper, egg and truffle vinaigrette, for example. But I was in a locavore mood and opted for the farmers’ market tomato salad, a mosaic of heirloom tomatoes as many-colored as Joseph’s coat, dotted with tangy white flecks of local goat cheese set atop some mild arugula.
From this celebration of the Iowa terroir, I moved on to “liver and onions,” a clever turn on the homely dish that usually bears that name. Kelly’s liver—an organic local calf’s liver, of course—was crisp on the outside, very pink within, cut in triangles and placed on a circular thin cake of grated potato, the great Swiss dish rösti. And Kelly didn’t forget the onions. They were the caramelized solid matter in the dark brown sauce.
Like the other nice midwesterners in the little dining room, I cleaned my plate and ordered dessert. With no fanfare at all, the menu offered marjolaine, the trademark dessert of Fernand Point, godfather of all things nouvelle. Marjolaine is a pastry chef’s spectacular, with thin layers of nut-embellished meringue and butter cream. On the way out, I glanced at a shelf of cookbooks, heavy tomes by contemporary world-beaters, including Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal. Kelly was keeping the wide world in his sights, from the banks of the Des Moines River.
The best proof that a top chef could land on his feet in the most unpromising, chilly, remote corner of the heartland was a roadhouse named Nokomis, perched on a bluff overlooking the western end of Lake Superior just outside Duluth. Sean Lewis moved up there to raise his children near family and to indulge his passion for hunting and fishing. He opened Nokomis after stints in various Chicago restaurants, including a gig with the gifted and internationally praised chef Jean Joho at the Everest, atop the Chicago Stock Exchange.
I hadn’t been in Duluth since I’d passed through on my way to canoe in the Quetico-Superior Wilderness area before college. Now, fifty years later, I was in town to visit a friend serving a long sentence for embezzlement at a nearby federal prison camp. On a sunny day, on the terrace at Nokomis, I felt as if I were sitting on the first-class sundeck of an ocean liner. There was nothing much between me and my walleye po’boy and Longfellow’s “shining Big-Sea-Water.” Lake Superior is the world’s biggest freshwater lake by surface area (Baikal, in Siberia, has more water).
Longfellow called it Gitche Gumee in his Ojibway epic The Song of Hiawatha; Nokomis is named for Hiawatha’s grandmother (“Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis”), who pitched her wigwam by its shores. Obviously, I told myself, Lewis wants his customers to think about local traditions when they eat here—the Indian legends, French exploration, iron-ore shipping; his menu, while mostly international and modern, featured a few local specialties. He had converted an Atlantic Coast favorite, the crab cake, into a whitefish cake, with a mustard rémoulade, brioche and roasted peppers to surround this peerless lake fish’s smoked flavor and tender flesh. He turned out a hand-chopped and very lean elk burger (farmed, of course, and not gamy but, shall we say, of independent spirit compared with ground beef).
The top of the food chain at Nokomis, for me, however, was that walleye sandwich. Walleye is a very big deal hereabouts. It’s the state fish; Great Lakes fishermen net them in the millions, and restaurants of every sort serve them in every form, from beer-battered to blackened. The perfectly broiled piece of walleye I ate exemplified what cookbooks call “fleshy white fish.” Moist, sweet-tasting and fleshy, this was supreme fish, in a truly superior setting.
If Nokomis showed the spread of advanced ideas in their simplest form at the farthest possible distance from the source, other heartland restaurants were barely less sophisticated than Per Se or San Francisco’s molecular-gastronomic Coi, and much closer to the source of their food.
Josh Adams brought the modernist, locavore gospel from Alinea to bleak Peoria, his hometown. From the open kitchen of June, he could draw on several nearby central Illinois farms, including an eighty-acre certified-organic operation contracted exclusively to supply him.
For someone like me who remembered the gastronomic desert that the heartland had been fifty years before Josh Adams smoked shiitake mushrooms in coffee or turned out eerily tender Muscovy duck breasts by sous vide slow cooking, this return of educated chefs to the rural terroirs of their birth was immensely gratifying. But June was more than a culmination of trends that had started elsewhere. It combined the broad and established locavore-organic-healthy theology spawned by a motley crew of nutritionally zealous aesthetes descended from such diverse gurus as Adelle Davis, Alice Waters, Euell Gibbons and Michael Pollan, with the technical assistance of the transcendental, prestidigitational Mr. Wizards of El Bulli, the Fat Duck and Momofuku Ko. At June, these two opposites—the perfectly pure and homegrown versus the completely unnatural—could coexist in perilous balance on the smallest of carbon footprints.
But in the hurly-burly of the global food scene, the 365-day-a-year Olympics of Michelin stardom and San Pellegrino rankings for the world’s fifty greatest restaurants, there was no perilous balance between purity of ingredients and the inventive genius of the chef. In this arena, the genius chefs triumphed.
Innovation, cheekiness toward tradition—these were the same traits that got the nouvelle cuisine chefs of the 1970s worldwide acclaim. But Guérard and Bocuse and the Troisgros had all built on culinary tradition. The molecular gastronomers had raced beyond them with advanced machinery and food chemistry, much of it borrowed from the kitchens of the commercial food industry. With these techniques, they literally reinvented food, re-formed it.
Led at first by Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, they attracted record numbers of requests for reservations.b In every year before 2010, when Ferran Adrià announced that he would close El Bulli, at the peak of its celebrity, on July 30, 2011, it was in the top three of the San Pellegrino list published in the United Kingdom’s Restaurant magazine. From 2006 through 2009, El Bulli led the list, followed by the Fat Duck. Despite the fame and popularity, El Bulli, according to Adrià, did not turn a profit. Open only half the year, with a chef in the kitchen for every diner, it was an extravagant experiment.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as a sign of the basic vulgarity of the glamorous, chef-worshipping, trendy top end of the restaurant scene. It is pretty clear that the selection system behind the list is a dodgy affair: the writers and bons viveurs who do the voting are not even required to submit proof that they have actually eaten in any restaurant. Some voters have admitted publicly that they form blocs to get their pals or neighbors chosen. It’s important, however, to remember that the list has not created the reputations of its favorites but merely latched onto the coattails of serious chefs already renowned in the gossipy world of food pros and dedicated epicures.
In 1999, three years before Restaurant magazine started the San Pellegrino list, the American wine and food journalist Jacqueline Friedrich proposed an article for my page at the Journal about a radical restaurant in an isolated bay in rural Catalonia. She had been hearing great things about
it in Paris, where she was based. I gave her the assignment. She ate at El Bulli twice, interviewed Adrià, and wrote a highly favorable piece. She said just about everything worth saying about Adrià and the movement he had launched, in 1,241 words. The food was “startling.” Major chefs like Joël Robuchon were making pilgrimages over the scary road from Rosas and coming back with ecstatic reports. Friedrich saw that the tasting menu of more than twenty small plates was a crucial innovation (which would go a long way toward ending the traditional appetizer, main course, dessert format in hundreds of other restaurants).
Adrià, she wrote, was upending basic ideas about salty and sweet combinations; his almond ice cream was studded with garlic slivers and splashed with oil and vinegar. There were deconstructions of Catalan regional dishes: bread rubbed with tomato and garlic, then drizzled with olive oil (pa amb tomàquet) and turned into “grape-sized pellets of crisp pizza dough, which, when bitten into, release gushes of olive oil.” And the tomato? It was on the side as a scoop of sorbet.
These were the conventional items. Then came the notorious espumas, the foams. Adrià got a lot of bad press for these seaweed-gel-thickened essences sprayed out of seltzer siphons. But Friedrich saw that this wasn’t a gimmick and got Adrià to explain why he did it: “Typically you mount a mousse with cream. But that dilutes its flavor. If you mount raspberries with cream, you get the flavor of raspberries and cream. I wanted just the raspberries. Nothing else. I want the pure flavor of the froth you find on top of freshly squeezed orange juice.”
Friedrich, like so many who followed her to El Bulli, got the point of the wilder dishes, the aesthetic joy and surprise that science and imagination could produce. For instance, there was the soup made of frozen peas fresh from the freezer and hot mineral water; it was served in a glass and drunk in one long slurp, during which it changed from hot to cold. She praised the improbable but thrillingly successful, surreal combinations, such as the strip of phyllo dough “topped with diced pineapple” and white truffle shavings and basil and fresh almonds.
I went to El Bulli myself first in February 2001, when it was closed for its long winter nap. The lonely, twisting drive has often been described. Adrià himself has said it is an essential part of the El Bulli experience, making a meal there the reward at the end of a difficult journey that begins with the struggle for a reservation. There is also the setting, a cliff overlooking a lost cove. (Well, not entirely lost. At the water’s edge is a modest retirement community.)
I made the trip again the next year. El Bulli’s twentieth anniversary seemed like a good time to assess the achievement of the place, because the menu featured dishes from all the past years. There were twenty-six courses, mostly small and surreal, beautiful creations unlike anything my wife or I had ever eaten before. Starting with an intense mojito pumped out of a siphon, we moved on to little white paper cones filled with fine white powder. Before the waiter had a chance to say what it was, Johanna knocked hers back and aspirated enough of the pulverized popcorn to precipitate a choking fit. She recovered in time to join me in the “snack” courses, among which were rose-petal tempura, brilliant red orbs en brochette (a melon ball and a cherry tomato), a crunchy object made out of quail egg, and an anise-flavored consommé siphoned into a beer mug and looking quite a bit like a dark ale with a two-inch head.
There was much, much more in which science played a transforming role, with gels and slow-cooking, dehydration, colloidal trickery—all the magic of so-called molecular gastronomy harnessed to intensify and concentrate the diner’s notions and experience of food.
Every one of those dishes and hundreds of others served at El Bulli between its relatively conservative beginnings in 1983 to the end of the 2004 season were meticulously recorded in four very heavy and expensive tomes. Each dish appears in a color photograph and is cross-indexed and pigeonholed as to its culinary parameters. Each volume has a fold-out graphic chart and a CD with recipes for every dish, clear but impractical for the home cook without access to sea cucumbers or the wild mushroom known in Catalan as rossinyol, not to mention such arcane and expensive kitchen tools as sous vide baths, Anti-Griddles, and specialty chemicals, and the will to take on the elaborate tasks that forty-some sous-chefs performed in the very large open kitchen at El Bulli.
Unlike his spiritual forefathers in the nouvelle cuisine revolution, Adrià was determined to tell the world everything, all his discoveries, his theories. So you don’t need me to deconstruct his deconstructions. You do have to be willing to spend several hundred dollars on his books and be able to read them in Spanish or Catalan, but the effort will definitely expand your horizons across many parameters. For example, you will learn that palomitas is Spanish for “popcorn” and cucurucho refers to those paper cones that nearly flattened my wife. And the combination of pictures, recipes and pontification will convince you almost as much as living through an actual meal at El Bulli that it was a place that took a giant step forward in what one might still call cooking.
“Deconstruction” was not a word the man used lightly. He took ingredients and dismantled them, repurposed them and then made them look like normal food, especially normal Spanish food. I’m thinking right now about his morcilla, blood pudding, which is a dish as common in Spain as hot dogs are here. Morcilla, the really common version I first ordered by mistake way past my bedtime in Burgos in 1963, looks, when sliced, like a black blini with white maggots in it. Adrià fashioned faux-morcilla slices that looked just like the real thing with rice and squid ink.
Now, there’s nothing outré about rice and squid ink. It is, itself, a well known combination of flavors around the Mediterranean. So if you grew up on morcilla as well as rice tinged black with squid ink, you would love biting into this dish thinking it’s blood sausage and then having your taste memory tell you it’s rice with squid ink. This is, however, a very different kind of high-level fun from the gentle and buried ironies of nouvelle cuisine. Think about it. Calling thin-cut salmon an escalope, as the Troigros brothers did, merely suggested that those pieces of salmon were “like” veal scaloppine. The menu said right out that you’d be getting salmon, and if you were tipsy from aperitifs or not paying attention, you might have missed the point of the metaphoric labeling, but that wouldn’t have mattered, since the salmon, in its sorrel sauce, was a very excellent dish by any name.
Adrià wasn’t playing that kind of subtle game. He was flaunting his tricks. Anyone who had ever eaten morcilla knew at first bite, if not at first sight, this one was a (brilliant) fabrication. Figuring out what it really was was like a second punch line that just about any Spaniard got the point of.
A lot of the dishes at El Bulli were harder to figure out than the morcilla. The science wasn’t common knowledge for any normal diner, but the intense flavors of those desiccated ingredients—say, the spices and herbs that surrounded the cauliflower turned into couscous—helped justify the magic show. Adrià’s food was full of major flavors, many of them not easily identifiable, because he had combined ingredients rarely, or never before, so conjoined. I am thinking of the smoked eel accompanied by ravioli filled with a mixture of pineapple and fennel he invented in 1998.
In one of many similar anecdotes in his El Bulli almanacs about the origins of his dishes, Adrià writes:
A visit to a Japanese restaurant inspired us to create a dish with smoked eel. But we needed to come up with an accompaniment for it that would balance the fattiness of the eel [desengrasante]. And although we were in the middle of a period of creating new hot raviolis, we thought that the right thing for this [hot] dish was a cold ravioli. Remembering the slices of pineapple in the pineapple soup with candied fennel and star anise flan of 1994, we decided to make a ravioli with the same ingredients. The filling, as in the earlier dessert, would be the fennel, in this case made into a jelly.c
To make fennel jelly, Adrià cooks thin slices and leaves them in boiling water until soft, then purees them in a blender and forces the puree through a fine strainer. The
n he mixes the strained fennel with gelatin and spreads a thin layer of it in a pan and refrigerates the mixture until it gels and can be cut into three-quarter-inch squares.
It is also worth mentioning the delicate cooking of the eel, its meat-stock-based orange sauce and its garnishes (fried strips of eel skin, ground star anise and grated orange peel), as well as explaining that the ravioli skins were very thin squares of pineapple. All that is clearly spelled out in the recipe on the CD.
In the pell-mell of twenty-six courses, it was a definite challenge to appreciate all of these remarkable details, even with the helpful commentary of the waitstaff (three individuals, if I recall correctly). But it was always clear that each dish was intricate, unprecedented and extremely delicious, if sometimes baffling without exegesis.
As a critic for the Journal, I ate in most of the other leading modernist restaurants—the ones I’ve mentioned, the Fat Duck in Bray-on-Thames (U.K.), Alinea in Chicago, both of Thomas Keller’s flagship restaurants, and Momofuku Ko and WD-50 in New York—as well as several others in Spain. They are adventurous places with a commitment to use science to reinvent dining, culinary laboratories that won the feverish allegiance of millions of well-heeled diners around the world for their use of advanced technology in the service of culinary spectacle. They are also the targets of mockery for their more extreme dishes, foams, burning hay, atomized aromas.
I’m biting my tongue to avoid the label the modernists have come to hate: molecular gastronomy. It was coined to describe a workshop bringing together chefs and scientists back in 1992, by the physicist Nicholas Kurti, whom I had met at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. But the term quickly caused more confusion than it was worth, almost inviting people to dismiss its practitioners as shallow stuntmen with no respect for the past or for fundamental culinary values.
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