Sunday, August 25, 2013

gastroLab Dinner with Chef Jeremiah

There's a difference between "clever" and "smart."[1] Clever may make you giggle. Smart makes you think. The difference is sometimes overlooked in what was called "molecular gastronomy" five years ago, then was redubbed "modernist cuisine" a couple years back, and now, according to ponderous dipshit shnorrer John Mariani, is already passé. Some of the criticism is fair: in manipulating form and texture, and disregarding flavor, some chefs were more clever than smart. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something - in particular, it doesn't mean it tastes better.


Going back to one of our first Cobaya events, I've enjoyed several dinners with Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog (perhaps better known as the pilot of the gastroPod food truck) over the years. His latest "gastroLab" dinner was the smartest meal I've had with him - one where everything on the plate had purpose and focus, one where the thought behind each item translated into flavor.

(You can see all my pictures from this meal in this gastroLab flickr set).


The site for the dinner was the new location of GAB Studio Art Gallery in Wynwood, and Jeremiah pulled the gastroPod right inside to serve as the kitchen.



The meal started with a procession of snacks, served communally on a big wooden plank. Crispy chicken foot chicharrones used the skin from deboned chicken feet - someone must have doing a lot of chicken toenail trimming. Toast squares were topped with a creamy, rich duck liver mousse. And morcilla and eggs - something of a recurring theme with Chef Jeremiah - came with the blood sausage in two forms - in puffy, chicharrone-like morcilla-tapioca crisps, and more traditionally in the meaty, creamy, loose sausage that filled them, dabbed with a rich egg yolk jam.


Borscht has always seemed like something of an oxymoron to me - a cold, refreshing soup, but also a hearty meat stew. Jeremiah's "Watermelon Borscht" played off both those angles but focused mostly on the former. Cubed watermelon was compressed with beet juice to yield a cool, juicy bite with an undertone of the earthy root vegetable, as well as a stunning ruby hue. Meanwhile a ribbon of whipped bone marrow and a "rare beef jus" (rare because the beef was cooked sous vide to keep its color) dropped the meaty bass note onto the plate, with strands of pickled cabbage and dehydrated beet "streusel tied into the theme too. A multitude of textures instead of a simple puréed soup, but with the same happy interplay of flavors. (More complete explanations of several dishes are on Jeremiah's blog - the watermelon borscht is here).


Next, the South meets the Tropics with fried green carambola. We've all heard of fried green tomatoes. Well, unlike the rest of the country, summer isn't tomato season in South Florida. But we do still get carambola a/k/a starfruit, and often they're less than perfectly ripe.[2] So Jeremiah took the unripe carambola and treated it like a green tomato - compressed them with ricotta whey, coated them with semolina and fried them, yielding a similar texture and tartness to the classic southern staple. This was paired with house-made goat's milk ricotta (wherefrom the ricotta whey), Georgia peaches pickled in rice wine vinegar and then charred, and a radish green for a little zing. Entirely unexpected - entirely successful, the kind of dish that sounds unlikely until you taste it.

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Thursday, August 1, 2013

Spiceonomics - Navigating Miami Spice, 2013 Edition


With August upon us, it's that time once again: Miami Spice. Now in its twelfth year, Miami Spice remains something of a culinary version of Russian Roulette: you might have a very good meal that's a great value at a restaurant that's excited to offer it to you; or you might have a mediocre meal that's not very different from the restaurant's regular prices, served by a resentful and begrudging waitstaff who are not impressed by your 15% tip on a $33 per person tab.

How to tell the difference? Over the years I've repeatedly proposed and refined three basic rules by which to approach Miami Spice:

(1) there's no reason to bother with restaurants where the Spice menu is not a meaningful discount from their regular prices (though, by all means, go to them if you like them; just don't do so because they're offering a Miami Spice menu);

(2) the infamous chicken breast / farmed salmon / churrasco (or substitute short rib) "trifecta" is usually a tell that a restaurant doesn't have its heart in it; and

(3) look for food that actually interests you. If a restaurant doesn't excite you the other ten months of the year, it is unlikely there's going to be something really inspiring on their Spice menu.

To those three basic rules I would add a couple corollaries:

(a) Tip on the value of the meal, not the price. If you're dining at a place where the Spice menu is a meaningful discount from their usual going rate - i.e., if your $33 meal would normally cost $50 - be a sport and drop a $10 tip. The servers are working just as hard as ever.

(b) There's no rule that everyone at the table has to order the Spice menu. (Well, except at some places like Pubbelly where they assume everyone is sharing and offer multiple small plates) Consider it an opportunity to do a little splurging and dollar-cost averaging at the same time, so you can eat at a high-end place without completely breaking the bank.

Last year, rather than just say "Here are 10 places to go for Miami Spice," I plotted out a "Week of Spice" - seven actual lunches and dinners that I'd want to eat from the universe of Miami Spice menus. Even though I didn't actually eat all those meals, I still like the format, and will do it again here. Once again, these are not the complete menus of any of the places listed, only the things I thought sounded most interesting. And once again, I've not actually tried any of these menus yet, so caveat emptor, etc. (though for the most part these are restaurants I know and would generally trust).

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Monday, July 29, 2013

DB Cobaya Moderne

Some of our Cobaya events come together on the fly: a chef says they want to do one, we find a spot, and before you know it, dinner is served. Others require more legwork. Our recent dinner at DB Bistro Moderne in downtown Miami fell into the latter category, with Chowfather in particular working for months to make it happen. The reality is, Daniel Boulud is not just a chef - he's a brand - and DB Bistro is not just a restaurant - it's an outpost of a culinary empire, with fourteen venues spread out among eight different cities in five countries.


It's a little different from our usual modus operandi, but it was also a chance to do a dinner at what I regard as one of Miami's top restaurants. Other than maybe Michelle Bernstein at Michy's, or Kevin Cory at Naoe (really a different beast entirely), I don't think there's another kitchen in town that executes with such consistent precision. So we pushed forward, as I knew it would be a good meal, and wanted to see what executive chef Matthieu Godard (who took over the helm for Jarrod Verbiak about a year ago) would do given the Cobaya format (which is really nothing more than "cook whatever you want that gets you really excited and that you don't regularly get to do").

(You can see all my pictures in this DB Cobaya Moderne flickr set.)


I've said before that I think DB's charcuterie is the best that can be found in Miami - and, indeed, some of the best I've had anywhere. So I was happy to see the dinner start with a board of it: a couple different salumi, a few different pâtés, ruby-hued slices of cured ham, a half-moon of lush, silky foie grass mousse, an assortment of pickled cornichons and onions, and maybe the showstopper of the platter, crackling-crisp nuggets of pork rillons, like croutons of pure pork belly.


Soon another platter landed on the table, described as "Flavors of the Mediterranean." It was loaded with spanikopita, lamb kibbe, mussels in a spicy tomato sauce, mackerel escabeche, slices of chorizo and manchego cheese, a little "fritto misto" of smelts and calamari, marinated olives and marcona almonds, and ramekins of roasted eggplant baba ghanoush, red pepper hummus and tzatziki.

Aside from offering such a copious selection of treats, the communal presentation of these first courses on the boards was a nice ice-breaker. We always have a mix of newcomers and veteran guinea pigs at these dinners, and this was a good way to get strangers passing dishes around - and eventually, prompt some good-natured fighting over the last spanikopita.

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Monday, July 8, 2013

The Dutch - Miami Beach

I'll confess, I didn't really understand The Dutch at first. Here was a French-trained chef with an Italian-sounding last name, with a menu that seemed like a hodge-podge of American comfort foods, but with things like kimchi and jerk chicken making random appearances  - and it was called "The Dutch"?[1]


Andrew Carmellini is a protege of Daniel Boulud whose first big gig was as chef de cuisine at New York's Café Boulud. When he went out on his own, he made a name for himself with Italian restaurants, first A Voce and then Locanda Verde. But when he opened the Dutch in Soho in 2011, it was something different: oyster platters, steaks and chops shared space with smoked white fish chowder, rabbit pot pie and "barrio tripe." And when he brought a second iteration of the Dutch to Miami the next year, in the W Hotel South Beach, it had the same kind of eclectic mix, but with a South Florida twist - think ceviches of local fish and salted lime pie.

After getting Carmellini's cookbook, "American Flavor," it started to make some more sense. From Southern style biscuits to pozole inspired by Puebla-born dishwashers to steak with the flavors of Flushing's Korean BBQ joints, the book is an extended love note to "American" food in all its traditional and modern polyglot guises. It is one that Carmellini seems simultaneously overqualified and underqualified to write - you might just as easily ask "Why is a chef who worked with Gray Kunz, Alain Passard, and Daniel Boulud wasting his time making fried chicken?" as "What does that fancy-pants chef possibly know about fried chicken?"

The answer perhaps lies in something Albert Adrià was recently quoted as saying: "There are only two kinds of cuisine. Good and bad." Carmellini? He makes the good kind.

After going there many times over the past year and a half since it opened, the Dutch strikes me as a sort of restaurant incarnation of "American Flavor." You can dine much as you might have a hundred years ago, getting a dozen freshly shucked oysters and a dry-aged, bone-in steak. Or you can get yellowtail crudo with spicy watermelon, followed by a pork chop "al pastor." Either way, you'll eat well.

(You can see all my pictures in this The Dutch flickr set).


There is no better way to start a meal at the Dutch than with the "Little Oyster Sandwiches" that head up the "Snacks." The oysters are rolled in cornmeal with a dash of cayenne and pimentón, fried just enough to crisp the exterior without hammering them, then tucked into a soft sesame seed flecked brioche bun that's been smeared with a pickled okra tartar sauce, a sheet of iceberg lettuce providing some delicate cool crunch. It is a perfectly designed and crafted bite, showing a lot of attention paid to a small package.

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Sunday, June 2, 2013

Turns of Phrase - June 2, 2013

Another small measure of appreciation for the work of that increasingly rare creature: the gainfully employed, artfully perceptive food critic:
"The art of the possible is on display."
- Phil Vettel on Next (Vegan) in Chicago Tribune
"But when you pull your car into the parking lot of Lucy’s 24-hour laundromat/wateria, and you make your way up to the truck, you will find that the woman behind the counter is slightly unclear on the concept of tlayudas, but rather firm on the unavailability of carnitas, which sold out almost before it turned dark. You can leave, or you can settle for tacos made with trompas, which is to say a kind of carnitas made with the pig’s snout. You take a step back toward your car. But then you notice that the tacos are made not just with fresh tortillas but with tortillas made to order from little balls of fresh masa, and that the red-chile salsa seems to be hot enough to flush the neck of the tattooed dude who was a couple of places ahead of you in line."
- Jonathan Gold on La Tehuana in L.A. Times
"At first this prim choreography seems tongue-in-cheek, then earnest, and finally almost silly — and all the more charming for it, like much of the orchestrated seduction that is a night at Maison Premiere."
- Ligaya Mishan on Maison Premiere in New York Times
"The food is impressionistic, best appreciated as a series of lovely, fleeting moments rather than the sustained arc that typically constitutes a meal."
- Ligaya Mishan again

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