MARIANI’S
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This newsletter is
also available on the very
comprehensive food site www.sautewednesday.com
, which has dozens of other links to food articles
from
around the world.
COVER STORY: STARS OVER MIAMI--Pao, Timo, and Wish by John Mariani
NEW YORK CORNER: Le Cirque 2000 by John
Mariani
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STARS OVER MIAMI
by John Mariani
Having
been on the road
trying out new American, Mexican, French, Italian, Greek, and every
other kind
of cuisine for weeks, I was very much in need of a good Chinese food
fix, which
I finally got, of all places, on Miami Beach. Pao
(
Chef
Kiki Anchana Prapaopkul (hereafter, Kiki) is a diminutive Chinese woman
with
birth
roots in Thailand, and her insistence on buying first-rate Chinese
ingredients
(not
Photo by Ron Francis
all that easy in Miami) buoys her food above the usual Imperial
Dragon Hunan Lotus
Garden Balcony-style eateries in a city that has both a Little Havana
and
Little Haiti but no Chinatown (which I
find odd, since Chinese and Cuban food have been successfully
married
elsewhere for decades). Kiki's menu
is not in itself particularly innovative, for the dishes are mostly of
a
kind
you’ll find on Chinese menus with the usual black-and-red
typography. But her cooking is far more convincing and refined
than what you'll currently find at Jean-George Vonghericten's new
Sino-restaurant, 66, in NYC.
Thus,
you can begin with some delicious salt-and-pepper
shrimp that have real bite, or perhaps a plate of spicy pan-fried,
crisp wontons
(which, I
warn you, are addictive) with a ginger-soy sauce. Crab
rangoon--a Chinese-American
kitsch dish of crab and cream cheese-- rises well above the ordinary by
virtue
of careful melding of good ingredients; it is certainly a guilty
pleasure. Pao’s spare ribs are plenty
meaty and give
every evidence of having been cooked slowly and carefully, rather than
left
sitting around for hours in a pan. The
sauce on them is a bit thick to my taste, but they are good.
I
tried two fried rice dishes, one fairly bland made with
jasmine rice and vegetables, the other nicely complex, with
chicken, pork,
shrimp, and vegetables well incorporated. There’s
a good vegetable section from which I highly
recommend the spicy
long beans with chile peppers, ginger and garlic, and if you’re in the
mood for
seafood by all means try the whole crispy striped bass beautifully
glazed in a
sweet-hot sauce. Hot-and-sour snapper
fillet had too doughy a batter to make them in any way remarkable.
For
me the pièce de résistence at Pao is Kiki's classic roast
duck (at $16 for a half and $29 for a whole duck, this is a steal), the
meat
extremely tender and flavorful, the sauce only moderately sweet.
For
“Happy Endings” the lemon grass crème brûlée and
chocolate mousse might puzzle a Chinese guest, but they’re both good
and creamy
and better than the deep-fried banana wontons with sesame honey.
Pao’s
menu reads, in Chinese characters, “Eat, Drink,
Chill,” and there’s a heavy emphasis on the last here, which
unfortunately
translates to a lackadaisical staff that, on the night I visited, was
wholly
absent from the dining room for several stretches during the evening. One runner, coaxed out of the kitchen, came
to the table smelling of a just snuffed-out
cigarette.
Pao Dining Room
The
one-page, 24-label winelist (with no vintages given) here isn’t exactly
encouraging enough
to convince people that wine is very adaptive to hot, spicy Chinese
food, but
there is a decent selection of varietals like viognier,
gewürztraminer,
and a
New Zealand Crossings pinot noir with sufficient
spice for the job. Prices appear to be about double retail, sometimes a
bit more. Prices at Pao are quite reasonable, with main courses $15-$27.
Timo
When
Tim Andriola was chef
at Mark’s
Andriola’s
stints at haute restaurants like Chez Panisse
and Charlie Trotter’s gave him the finesse he now turns towards the
kind of
Pan-Italian food he is now cooking, to the obvious delight of full
houses
he enjoys most nights of the week.
Timo's Dining Room
By
all means start off with one of the pizzas here--there
are six of them--some
Andriola excels at his
pastas. The two I
tried were outstanding--a semolina gnocchi with a robust, intensely
reduced
oxtail sauce, and a luscious timbalo
of macaroni, eggplant, ricotta and
tomato
very much in the true style of
Sometimes Andriola goes a little
too
haute when he should instead respect the traditions of Italian
simplicity, as
when he glops Sambuca-flavored cream and fruit on some perfectly good
granita. But when he delivers, he
delivers effectively. Timo
opened last spring and is still getting both its act
together and its menu fine tuned. With a
few less items on the very extensive menu,
Andriola
could turn this into one of
Appetizers
here range from $6-$12,
pastas $11-$17, main courses $17-$25. The wine list , which has about
80 selections, includes a good many unusual bottlings listed under
"Bright, Light & Refreshing Whites, "Dry and Flavorful Roses,"
"Full-Bodied & Rich reds," and so on. The mark-ups tend to be
a little over double retail.
WISH
When Wish
((801 Collins Ave.;
305-531-2222;
thehotelofsouthbeach.com) opened
in The
Hotel (yes, that's its name: The Hotel, formerly The Tiffany)
back in 1998, after a silly flirtation
with health food, its chef, Andrea Curto, became a fast-rising star who
put big
flavors on the plate at a time when most Miami Beach cooks were futzing
around
with pasta primavera and Asian fusion. When Curto left two years ago to
open
her own place (Talula), The Hotel hired E. Michael Reidt,
with a
mandate to bring the menu to a still more sophisticated level. That he has succeeded is evident from the
first morsel of his avocado vichyssoise with smoked shrimp, sweet
peppers and
cilantro, a glory of color and good taste.
Here
in a Todd Oldham-desiged dining
room, which now spills
over into the lobby of this old art deco hotel ,
Reidt
works a wide palette, with an obvious emphasis on that day’s best
ingredients,
as in his crisp yellowtail snapper with shrimp-okra stew and a crab beurre
noisette, and milky sea scallops
with
caramelized onions afloat in a rich corn broth. His
ceviche of big eye tuna with black quinoa, chayote
slaw, and sirachi jelly has
plenty of panache and a little wit, since it is
topped with a
few
kernels of popcorn. Pan-roasted chicken
comes with ravioli stuffed with shredded meat, “feijoada” style, with
spinach
and pistachios. Braised veal cheek with a celery root purée,
papaya and
smoked
shiitakes was delicious and lightly sweet.
On
the other hand a much vaunted corn ravioli in a
bacon-and-boniato chowder with a saffron and chive emulsion didn’t
lived up to
its billing, being rather insipid, except for the too-assertive bacon. And Reidt really should cut down on his
tendency to smoke everything in the kitchen, including a sirloin with
onion
succotash and fig glaze.
Desserts
are all quite lavish--the best I tried being a dulce de leche with
caramelized bananas and crushed Oreo cookies and
twist on
donuts with a vanilla-coffee brûlée,
coffeee-hazelnut sorbet and
something
called “coco-coolatta.”
Appetizers
at Wish run $8-$18, entrees $25-$34 (and you get
a good portion of food on the plate), with desserts each $8.
NEW YORK CORNER
Le Cirque 2000
by John Mariani
So I thought there was no better place to
kick off
my own yearnings for the familiar and the autumnal than to return to Le Cirque 2000
(455 Madison Avenue; 212-303-7788),
still one of the most glamorous restaurants in the world and recently
closed for several weeks for a restoration. Not that much can be
done with the landmark interiors of the great Villard Mansion in which
the restaurant resides (surrounded by but not bothered by the New York
Palace Hotel). In fact, not even a nail hole can be made in the
gorgeous woodwork of what are now two dining rooms, and Adam Tihany's
circus-color decor was as much wheeled in as it was installed when the
restaurant opened three years ago.
Sirio
Maccioni and his sons Marco and Mauro,
together with a team of longtime professionals, led my maître d'
Mario Wainer, have kept Le Cirque 2000 the
grand luxe dining experience that it always has been, since opening in
1974 in other premises, under successive
chefs going back to Alain Sailhac, Daniel Boulud, Sylvain Portay,
Sottha Kuhn, and now Pierre Schaedelin You can always bank on Le
Cirque having not the first but the first of the best white truffles in autumn, and
there will be fresh porcini
in profusion this fall.
That Le Cirque retains a nightly parade of
celebrities, magnates, and the kind of oddly tanned people who live on
three
continents goes without further need of description (if you're
interested in star gazing, check out the restaurant's web site, www.lecirque.com)
In fact, let's get down to the heart of the
matter: Le Cirque remains, for all its shiny marble and polished wood,
and a clientele that could afford just about anything, one of the best
priced values for fine dining in New York. I shake my head when
people who say they were astounded by running up a tab of $1,000 for
four at Le Cirque--which is easy enough to do, if you order a $175 bottle of
Champagne, a cup of beluga at $75 an ounce, a $300 Burgundy, and dishes
showered with
white truffles. The black-and-white of the matter is that Le
Cirque's menu offers everything from a 3-course prix fixe lunch at $44
to a 5-course degustation dinner at $105 (3 courses at Alain Ducasse NY
run $150 fixed price; 5 courses plus two desserts at Le Bernardin are
$135). À la carte
entree prices at dinner range from $30-$43 (a simple steak at any of
NYC's best steakhouses will run you $31-$34, without any side
dishes). Certainly not cheap but certainly not the highest in
NYC, plus you get a landmark interior,
More often than not I just leave the menu up to the
chef, which my wife and I did last week. Our meal was a mixture
of old and new dishes, classics and homestyle, beginning with a
delicious Alsatian tarte
flambée or flammekueche--a
very crisp puff pastry with bacon and white cheese, much
like a pizza, whose name refers to its being cooked in a wood-fired
oven. Next came another oddly
named dish--"lobster Thermidor with a tagliani and spaghetti of
vegetables," which was nothing like the classic lobster Thermidor
(named in 1894 after a play of that title by Sardou) lavished with a
gratin or Mornay sauce with mushrooms. Le Cirque's is a half
lobster cooked with pasta noodles and
vegetables cut like noodles dressed with a black truffle sauce,
accompanied by a
marvelous ballotine of
cabbage and more lobster meat and an herb
butter.
Quite classic and very correct was a dish once
ubiquitous in New York French restaurants, now making a comeback
here and at Dumonet, though long a signature item on the menu at La
Caravelle--quenelles of pike,
which at their best, as at Le Cirque, are ethereally light, bound with
egg whites and treated to a lobster sauce with a julienne of
vegetables. Not so successful was a more modern dish one might
expect to get at a place with a name like the "Sonora Cafe &
Grill"--a tamale of redfish with tomato, zucchini, peppers and capers
compote, sidled by a corn cake, with none of the refinement one
associates with Le Cirque's kitchen.
Our main courses drew from the lustier side of what
Le Cirque calls "Weekly Classics," daily items that range from braised
short ribs on Monday through pieds
de porc farci on Saturday. We lucked out with the first choucroute royale of autumn, a
splendid and huge portion of Alsatian sausages, bacon and Wursts with tangy, wine-saturated
sauerkraut and four kinds of mustard. The kitchen also reproduced
Signora Egidia Maccioni's robust duck stew (a staple at their other
restaurant, Osteria del Circo), which was very Italian in its rich,
sweet onion-tomato reduction--a dish I hope is offered often.
There is, of course, a fine selection of cheeses
from a cart, and Le Cirque has always been famous for its desserts,
which under Luis Robledo-Richards
Incidentally, Le Cirque's menu reads, "We
thank you for not
using cellular phones at the table," a request they cordially
enforced the other night when one brazen woman's cell kept going off
with the regularity of a Snooze Alarm. She protested of course,
asking, "Well, how am I
supposed to get my phone calls?"
All of which I'm sure were very,
very important!!!
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BOOK REVIEW: A
New Jeremiad on Why We Eat
What We Eat
Much
has been made in the press of Jeremiah Tower’s trashing of his
former boss, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, in his new book, Dish:
What I Saw (and Cooked) at the
American Culinary Revolution (Free Press), especially among those
California foodies for whom Waters is guru, icon, and earth mother of
all
goodness that has flowed from the California cornucopia since she
opened Chez
Panisse in Berkeley back in 1971. But
while it is true that Tower again and
again dismisses Waters’ reputation as a great chef—which she has never claimed she was--rather than as the guiding light
of Chez
Panisse, the book as a whole is a good, highly readable history of
American
gastronomy from 1970 to the present—even if Tower himself, once
credited by the
press as being one of the primal leaders of the “California Cuisine
movement,” long
ago
dropped off the radar screen as contributing anything of
significance to
the present American food scene.
Tower
certainly does not avoid self criticism, including his own
drug
use, pretentiousness, and flagrant self-promotion, though Tower cannot
help but
drop name after name of his good, good friends along the celebrity
circuit.
Oddly enough, for someone who rarely hid his social life from public
scrutiny,
he makes barely any mention of the kind of love affairs and fleeting
assignations that have become unfortunately requisite in similar
gastro-memoirs
of the day. He is not, however, above
quoting others who have fallen in thrall to his
once-patrician looks
: ”Tower is a photographer’s fantasy, he stands tall and regal, cool
enough to
tame the fire,” wrote one infatuated reporter. (For
some reason, a recent New
York Times article on the book caricatured the red-faced,
60-year-old roué
looking more like a 40-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger.)
Nevertheless
he writes honestly and well about his shortcomings, though not quite so
fervently
as he does about his achievements, which he considers to outweigh
by far those of
just about any of his colleagues who came up with him in the 1970s and
‘80s. They are all named in long
lists—Larry
Forgione, Jimmy Schmidt, Jonathan Waxman, Robert del Grande, and many
others—but given very short shrift indeed as to what part they might
have
played in what became known as "New American Cuisine"--and those
achievements were
considerable
and highly diverse. The fact is, what
Tower, under Waters’ directive, always cooked at Chez Panisse was
straight
down-the-line French Provençal bourgeois cooking (it still is),
with a good
dose of Richard
Olney. And very good food it was. But
not until the 1980s, long after others had refined American regional
food of
New England, the South, the Midwest, and the Northwest—not to mention
the
contributions of Southern Cal chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Michael
Roberts—did
Tower really begin to apply his staunchly Francophilian tastes and
techniques
to American culinary tradition. While
chefs like Paul Prudhomme were re-inventing Cajun cookery with
blackened
redfish and gumbo, and Dean Fearing was sublimating the cooking of
Texas with
tortilla soup, and while Chinese-American, Italian-American, Native
American,
and others were creating marvelous food from within their own culinary
cultures, Tower was still turning out brioche with marrow and lobster
sauce, blanquette de veau with crayfish sauce,
and scrambled eggs with black (French) truffles at his “American
brasserie” in
San Francisco named Stars.
Stars,
which
opened in 1984, was Tower’s major statement, and, sadly, the last thing
he ever
did of any consequence. The place was a
big
hit, the food was good, the decibel level deafening, and the service
pretentious, but despite full houses, the restaurant never seemed to
turn much
of a profit to Tower (the agonies of running a restaurant with other
people’s
money form the most telling sections of the entire book). Nevertheless Tower became the
celebrity chef with the most Frequent
Flyer Miles among many back then who vied for the title, never turning
down a
chance to promote himself. Tower admits
to taking on too many events and too many flights to cook at too many
charity
dinners, yet he still found time to escape to “
By
the
late 1980s, a dissipated Tower, always the dandy, was showing his age
and his
eccentricities in embarrassing ways, as when he changed his will “to
benefit a
home for retired donkeys of
Tower
then quickly skips over the decade of the ‘90s to assess the food
trends of
contemporary American dining, noting along the way every now-famous
chef who
might have once cleaned lettuce leaves in one of his restaurants. He takes Waters to task yet again for not
sufficiently
acknowledging his role at Chez Panisse in her cookbook, contending in
an
interview that “Alice didn’t know a little vegetable from a rotten
one,”
but then
curiously trying to make amends by saying, whatever
it was that Alice did—like her advocacy for farmer’s markets and the
Chez
Panisse Foundation—it had nothing to do with him.
Even
without his telling us again and again, Tower’s contributions are not
difficult
to ascertain, but they were not
merely in his insistence on using the best
ingredients
at a time when other American cooks could not, for the simple reason
they
had no
sources for them. Like it or not, Tower
was part of a style that restaurateur Michael McCarty once
explained
“California
Cuisine” was really about (McCarty
opened Michael’s in Santa Monica in 1979, five years before
Stars, and did a southern Cal style of French nouvelle cuisine): “It wasn’t really about goat cheese and
Sonoma baby lamb,” he once told me in an interview. “It was more
a philosophy. Just as the young chefs in
Tower,
I
think, believes that California Cuisine was all about his own personal
good
taste in food, superior to every one else’s and therefore worth
imitating. By adding his own considerable
personal style
to it, he became an omnipresent, if sometimes tiresome, star. But when
his own admitted
failings drove
him from the spotlight in the mid-‘90s, he turned sanguine and
crotchety even to the
point of sniping in public at the James Beard Foundation that gave him
an award
in 1996 as Outstanding Chef of the Year in California, saying he
wondered why,
since he’d never given anything to the Foundation.
In
the
end, Tower drones on about dinners he cooked for Baronness so-and-so,
Prince
this-and-that, fab fashionistas and fat film directors, and the reader
may well
wonder what all the fuss was about. For
his honesty and keen perceptions of all
that went on in American gastronomy over the past three decades Tower
and his
book are to be applauded; but for his niggling and name-calling, he
betrays
what he once had in such abundance—a standard of refined taste he has
apparently traded for a chance to dish the dirt.
--J.M.
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OUR READERS ROAR. . .
In response to my contention in last week's
newsletter (Sept. 1) about the
"craziness" of the food chef Ferran Adrià (below) has on his menu at El
Bulli in Rosas, Spain, "where shock value too often overrides good
taste," Spanish food and wine authority Gerry Dawes writes:
Photo
by Madrid Fusión
Ferran
Adrià is a genius, and he doesn't do his way-out food for
"shock"
value. Experimentation, innovation, and pushing the envelope to
see to
what a chef with great skill and imagination can achieve, yes, that
Adrià does. He utilizes techniques of his own
invention that are
constantly evolving and for inspiration he draws on a myriad of
elements of different cuisines from around the world. Contrary to
claims I have seen, none of Adrià's food is "inedible." In
fact, many
are truly brilliant. The last time I ate at El Bulli, with the
imminent arrival of the 23rd course of what I call "tapas with
attitude," I had just about reached my limit. That dish was
tripe,
which I don't really like; it was the best tripe I ever remember
eating.
Adrià's food is a part of whole package, a spectrum of dishes
displaying an incredible range of cooking techniques (often his own
inventions), ingredients, flavors, textures, and temperatures.
This
cuisine usually not does translate well when dishes are lifted out of
context, which is the main reason that Adrià does not do guest
cooking
spots outside his own kitchen. It is the reason why those who go
to El
Bulli should experience the whole tasting menu, since many of his
dishes make little sense as a stand-alone appetizer or entree. Most of
El Bulli's degustación portions are unique
21st century tapas and, like traditional tapas, offer a variety of
taste sensations in small portions. (And many traditional Spanish tapas are
pretty exotic to the uninitiated).
I recognize and appreciate how good some of the food of the modern
cuisine stars of Spain, New York and elsewhere can be and defend their
right to be creative,. But right now the foodie world seems
breathlessly enamored with all these goings on, just as the wine geeks
are with over-the-top, Parker-ized Spanish wines, which could just as
well carry the denominación
de origen
Monkton, Maryland on the label. I have championed some of the
Spain's new wave chefs, but I am beginning to have my own doubts and
reservations about some of them, their restaurants and their
styles. And there are many young cooks, both in Spain and here,
who have done their stages in Spain (instead of
France) and some are picking up just enough ideas to be
dangerous. I have seen several instances in Spain and in the US,
in which young chefs have tried to capitalize on Ferran Adrià's
reputation and style by playing up an El Bulli connection. Just
the mention that they did a stage at El Bulli is enough
to throw some restaurant reviewers and food writers into a feeding
frenzy and cause them to bestow laurels (or blame) on dishes that are
often a rather pale imitation of what Adrià does. Many
chefs, both in Spain and here, are pandering to the nuevo gastro-rico
crowd, for whom eating in these places is a status symbol with bragging
rights, just as going to all the Michelin-starred joints in France is,
or was.
As with all things, each chef and restaurant needs to be judged on its
own merits and, in Spain, there are a number of truly great chefs
turning out terrific food, Adrià among them. One may not
understand,
or necessarily like, Adrià's cuisine, but, like no other chef
before
him, he has taken food into another dimension and lifted it onto an
artistic plane unimaginable even ten years ago. Pablo Picasso
and
Salvador Dalí were misunderstood and vilified by many when
their
paintings first came to the attention of the art world. You may
like
their work or you may not, but they are both among the greatest artists
in history. And, make no mistake about it, Ferran Adrià is
a talent of
equal magnitude in the world of gastronomy.
As a food and wine writer, I enjoy a lot of what I get to experience in
the world of modern cuisine. Yet more than any creative cuisine I have
ever eaten, I would still rather share a perfect whole turbot grilled
over wood charcoal outside at Kaia restaurant in Getaria (the Basque
Country), a dish of wild rabbit or black rice with allioli in
Cataluña, incredible roast lamb or pig in Castilla-León,
the best shellfish in Europe in Madrid (yes, Madrid!), and a wonderful
variety of tapas in Andalucía or San Sebastián or
Logroño, to name a few examples. It says a lot that
Adrià's own favorite dish is a simple dish of green asparagus
sautéed in a skillet and sprinkled with olive oil and sea salt
and that
Juan Mari Arzak, the father of modern Spanish cuisine, has a
predilection for fried fresh farmhouse eggs served with roasted red
peppers. But that does not detract from the fact that both chefs are
masters of modern cuisine.
In an interview for the London Telegraph, Ferran Adria said, "The things we do here are for ourselves. Some people are always happy to eat the same cake or whatever. But we don't care. We are doing it for us. For the team, for the chefs, for our clients. El Bulli is crazy. It is the drunkenness of all the new things that can be"--a sentiment that leads him to serve dishes like polenta of frozen, powdered Parmesan cheese, almond ice cream on garlic oil with balsamic vinegar, beet ravioli with pistachios and strawberries, and mushroom jelly served in test tubes. --J.M.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
QUICK BYTES
* On Sept. 15
* On Sept. 16
HD
(Hospitality Design) Magazine
and the Network of Executive Women
in Hospitality will present A Conversation with
Three
Great Designers at Asiate of
the Mandarin Oriental, NYC; Proceeds benefit the
NEWH Greater New York Scholarship Fund. $60 ($50 for NEWH members).
Call
718-291-6809.
*From Sept. 19-21 Bacara Resort &
Spa (8301 Hollister Ave.)
in Santa Barbara, CA, will host an "Avocado festival" with a
reception with guest chefs, cooking classes, seminars and
dining options. For info call 877-422-4245 or visit
www.bacararesort.com .
* On Sept. 20 in
offers a 4-course meal, with each course featuring chilies from
Healdsburg, and an optional beer tasting
menu of brews from
* On Sept. 28 NYC’s Eleven Madison Park (
copyright John Mariani 2003