A Requiem to Good Cooking

Admittedly, I am a demanding restaurant customer. Thanks to adventurous Saturday meals at my father's table and many restaurant visits with him, I grew up expecting more from food than simple nourishment. Above all, I expect TASTE. I am much less keen on shock value, extremely rare ingredients and décor. Give me great food in the simplest environment, even very simple great food (such as roast chicken), and I am happy. Put whipped cream on top of it and Im happier J My most memorable meals have not necessarily been in three Michelin starred restaurants, but sometimes in a tiny shack in an unnamed village where the chef took the orders, cooked and served.

This is why I am profoundly disappointed with the recent trends I'm seeing in American cuisine. After years of working toward making the words "American cuisine" NOT an oxymoron but a culinary statement, I fear we are sliding back, away from the food and toward the accoutrements. A wonderful French chef I knew bemoaned those secondary elements to be one day as I was dining on baby frogs at his restaurant in Greuze. He called these elements that, in his opinion, distracted from the food, the "cloche" (or the tablecloth). He said, bitterly, that his restaurant has not been ranked on the quality of the food alone, but on the ambiance, silverware etc. - the cloche.

I believe that, in our quest for originality, we have gone beyond the "cloche" to the tasteless. Here is an example:

On a recent visit to a celebrated, three star restaurant in a major US city, I found the following: Coriander blooms; amaranth; quail grass; mint blossoms; aquerello; Spanish tarragon; wheat; nasturtium; smoked coconut; white Shoyu; African blue basil; bronze fennel; citrus myrtle; stevia& You get my drift? The stranger and less familiar the ingredient, the better. The taste is secondary. Do you really think that Spanish tarragon is better or meaningfully different from good old fashioned tarragon? I dare say, NO! Same with the African blue basil. Although indeed different from the ordinary basil we know and love, and even from the exotic purple basil, I believe the main reason for its presence on the menu was the exotic value, not the underlying taste.

Similarly, Liat and I dined recently at a place where a large plate containing a miniscule bit of duck was placed on a pillow that was full of spoke, yes, smoke, that slowly wafted out of the pillow to accompany and accent the duck, which was so small that its taste was lost in its size. Now, I'm all for olfactory stimulation, and have always admired Thomas Keller for placing rosemary leaves in a bowl containing yet another bowl full of lamb and pouring hot water on the rosemary tableside so you enjoy its fragrance while dining on the scrumptious lamb infused in its own rosemary. Here, the aroma accompanies the meat perfectly. On the pillow, the aroma was center stage. It was all about the effect, not the taste.

Call me old fashioned, a dinosaur, but to me a dining experience is first and foremost about the food, not the cloche. There are countless ways to enhance the food and the dining experience, including such breakthrough innovations as molecular cuisine, but when the food becomes secondary to the effect, all is lost.