Where Are South Florida's Best New Chefs? - Part 2

Not so long ago, the local press was bemoaning the absence of new young chefs in South Florida. When Food & Wine announced its "Best New Chefs" in the Spring of 2009 and there were no South Florida candidates, New Times instead offered its own alternative list of local "Best Old Chefs 2009." (Of course, they could have noted that two of the chefs honored by F&W, Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook of Los Angeles' Animal, actually do have Miami roots, having cut their teeth with Michelle Bernstein at The Strand). A few months later in August, Lee Klein of New Times posited that the Miami food scene was stalled, and pondered whether or not there was a "farm system" of younger talent that had trained under the chefs like Michael Schwartz, Michelle Bernstein, Norman Van Aken, Dewey LoSasso, Jonathan Eismann, Allen Susser, Kris Wessel, and so on, who were ready to "pick up the torch and start opening personal, passion-fueled places that showcase their own distinctive vision and approach to cooking?"^[*]

A good question, and one that hadn't gone without asking here at FFT. Indeed, almost exactly a year ago when the 2009 James Beard Award semi-finalists were announced, I asked "Not a single Florida nominee for the "Rising Star Chef of the Year" category - what to make of that?" and in April asked again "Where Are South Florida's Best New Chefs?," actually trying to answer the question that New Times raised in response to the F&W announcements.

What a difference a year makes. All of a sudden, it seems you can't lift a fork without poking into a chef whose resume includes a stint with one of the venerable names of South Florida cookery. One of them was even nominated for a James Beard "Best New Chef" award this year: Samuel Gorenstein of BLT Steak is a Chef Michael Schwartz alum, something I probably should have figured out when I tried his porchetta di testa, done in exactly the same fashion as at MGF&D.

But Chef Gorenstein is not alone. Simon Stojanovic, another MGF&D alum, will be heading the kitchen at the reincarnated Altamare. Timon Balloo, chef at the newly opened Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill, was in the kitchen with Michelle Bernstein, Allen Susser (Chef Allen's) and Tim Andriola (Timo) before going out on his own. Frederick Kelley, still another chef listing a stint at MGF&D on his resume, is co-chef with Jeremy Fernandez at the new JB Kitchen and Bar (f/k/a Badrutt's Place). A year ago Alejandro Pinero, who had worked at the Strand with Michelle Bernstein and Talula with Andrea Curto and Frank Randazzo, became chef de cuisine at Fratelli Lyon. Juan and Vani Maza spent a brief time in Michelle Bernstein's kitchen at Michy's before going it on their own at the now-closed Alta Cocina, and now the recently opened 72nd Bar + Grill. Gerdy Rodriguez, who has been everywhere, including at Mundo with Norman Van Aken, now is the chef at MIA at Biscayne. Maria Manso, who cooked the line at Norman Van Aken's A Mano on South Beach, is the executive chef at the Delano. As Michelle Bernstein has opened more venues, she's created more opportunities for younger talent like Berenice de Araujo, the chef de cuisine at Sra. Martinez, and Jason Schaan, who has that position at Michy's. Andrea and Frank are stockpiling some young talent in the kitchen at Talula with sous chef Kyle Foster (highlighted, among other places, in "Sous Chef Kyle's Tapa of the Day"). Edited to add: Norman Van Aken seems to be grooming a real, bona-fide next generation, with son Justin Van Aken working with him on the opening of Norman's 180.

It was interesting to see that in an interview today, Chef Kris Wessel at Red Light, (who himself got started locally with Mark Militello), also mentioned the importance of younger chefs breaking out on their own and spreading their wings. Edited to add: And Sam Gorenstein likewise says many of the same things in an interview which came out just hours after this was first posted.

But the question remains: can the progeny cook? Or perhaps more to the point: do they have the creativity, vision, and drive to create unique, distinctive restaurants that will add something meaningful to our local dining landscape? And - to be fair - will they be given the opportunity?

CSA Week 11 and its uses

Clearly I have fallen out of the habit of doing weekly CSA updates, seeing that Saturday, Week 12 is upon us and I've not even posted on Week 11. Here it is above, working clockwise from the left: new potatoes, spinach, celery, lettuce, grape tomatoes, green pepper, green beans. These particular weekly "what's in the box?" updates seem a bit superfluous, given that the Bee Heaven newsletters are available online and that Redland Rambles provides such nice pictures every week too, a day in advance of the delivery even.

Those potatoes were exciting, if for no other reason than that we hadn't gotten any potatoes yet, and I was torn between doing a Pommes Anna and a Tortilla Española. The tortilla, a Spanish classic which can be found in just about every tapas bar in the country, won out. This recipe is taken from Anya von Bremzen's wonderful cookbook, The New Spanish Table.

The recipe calls for 3 medium-sized potatoes, peeled, sliced thinly (a food processor's slicing blade is recommended), dried on paper towels and rubbed with salt; 1 1/4 cups of olive oil; 1 onion, thinly sliced; 6 large eggs; and 2 tbsp chicken stock.

Heat the oil in a large skillet (it's a lot of oil, use a big pan) over medium-high heat, then bring the heat down to medium-low and add the potatoes. Cook, stirring periodically to keep the potatoes from browning or sticking, for about 7 minutes; they won't be cooked through. Add the onion, stir it in, bring the heat down to low, and cook for another 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Everything should be nice and soft but not browned.

Remove the potatoes and onions from the pan with a slotted spoon, and drain in a colander set over a bowl to catch the oil. Salt the potatoes and onions to taste. Reserve the oil, you'll be using some of it again shortly.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs with the chicken stock and a couple pinches of salt. Once the eggs are scrambled, stir in the potatoes and onions (break up the potatoes a bit with a fork) and let them sit for 10 minutes.

Put an 8" skillet (non-stick is a good idea) over medium-high heat and add a couple tablespoons of the reserved olive oil. When it's hot, add the egg-potato-onion mixture and bring the heat down to medium-low. It will just about fill the pan. Use a thin spatula to pull the edges away and let more egg mixture seep underneath. Cook it this way for about 6-8 minutes, until the top is no longer completely liquid.

Now comes the fun part - you need to flip the tortilla. It's all about confidence: if you think you can do it, it'll work. Run the spatula all around the edges, and as far underneath as you can, to ensure the tortilla won't stick. Put a plate (bigger than the skillet!) over the top of the skillet, then with one hand holding the plate and one holding the skillet, invert the pan (and the tortilla) onto the plate. In an ideal world, you'll now have a tortilla with a still-somewhat gooey bottom on the plate, and an empty pan. Add a little more oil to the pan if needed, reduce the heat to low, then shuffle the tortilla back into the pan, gooey side down, to finish cooking. It should take about another five minutes. The recipe recommended one more flip and trip back into the pan for another minute, this seemed unnecessary to me. Check to see if it's done all the way through by sticking a toothpick in the middle and seeing if it comes out dry.

When it's cooked through, slide it out of the skillet onto a plate and let it cool a bit, then cut into wedges (or however else you might like) to serve.

A couple thoughts. First, I wonder if all that oil is really necessary for cooking the potatoes, though it might well be, since the idea is really to sort of poach them rather than sauté. Second, as you can see in the final photo, mine seemed to separate a bit, with the egg retreating to the exterior of the tortilla and the potatoes layered in the middle, more like an omelette than the homogeneous egg-potato-onion concoction I'm accustomed to at tapas places. Maybe a longer soak for the eggs and potatoes before cooking was in order.

Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill - Midtown Miami

Unlike professional restaurant critics, I'm allowed to admit certain biases. One of these, which I'll readily confess, is that I tend to prefer chef-driven restaurants to concept-driven restaurants. A chef-driven restaurant is one that starts with the chef: the menu, often even the environment, follow from the chef's personal vision, which is more often than not centered on the food. Michy's is a chef-driven restaurant; Naoe is an even more extreme example. Concept-driven restaurants start with an idea: a marketing ploy around which everything else is assembled. The chef, typically, is simply a cog that fits into the wheel of the restaurant's concept, the menu just a piece along with the decoration, the music, the drinks, the scene. China Grill is the prototypical concept-driven restaurant.

No doubt my bias toward chef-driven restaurants is naive and overly romanticized. After all, chefs (and their backers) want to make money just like everyone else. But as someone who cares mostly about the food, I've learned that the odds of finding the best food are improved by going to places where the decisions are made by the person who creates it.

Sugarcane Raw Bar Grill, the new spinoff from the creators of Sushi Samba, is a concept-driven restaurant. But I'm not too proud or stubborn to admit that it's a darn good one, one for which the food is far from a mere afterthought.

Located in Midtown Miami, Sugarcane occupies a long space whose voluminous feeling is multiplied by the two-story high ceilings, with rattan fans turning slowly overhead. There's a large indoor/outdoor bar as you walk in, with most of the main space bisected by a row of red leather-clad banquettes. Off to the right side, backed by a stone wall, is a raw bar with seating around it. Toward the back is the robata station, housing a sizable grill under which they burn Japanese bincho-tan charcoal (which generates high heat without much smoke). Off to the left is still more seating. The decorations have the purposefully haphazard look of a very expensive haircut, with mismatched chairs and partially painted walls throughout. (Some of those mismatched chairs, I will note, are too tall for the tables, leading to a hunched-over seating posture more conducive to hard-nosed contract negotiations than dining).

The "concept," I suppose, must be tapas with a Japanese tilt, though the influences are more global than the Brazilian/Japanese mashup that characterizes Sushi Samba. The Sugarcane menu is pretty much exclusively comprised of the "small plates" that are taking hold on so many local menus lately. It is divided among "snacks," "tapas," "robata grill," and "raw bar," the last of which includes traditional raw bar items, crudos, sushi, sashimi, and rolls. A blackboard features a short list of entreés, including a roasted chicken that has been getting raves all over twitter of late. Food comes from either the raw bar, the robata, or the hot kitchen, and like a tapas bar, items come out as they're prepared. This orchestra is directed by Chef Timon Balloo, whose resume includes stints with some of Miami's big name chefs (Michelle Bernstein, Alan Susser, Tim Andriola) and at Sugarcane's local cousin, Sushi Samba Dromo on Lincoln Road, before he took the helm at the now-closed Domo Japones.

I've not tried that roasted chicken yet, but I have tried most of the rest of the menu during our two visits. Among the snacks, edamame come out steaming hot and generously salted. Even better may be the shishito peppers, their skin blistered, and brightened with a squeeze of lemon and big flakes of (Maldon?) sea salt. From the raw bar, a half dozen Blue Point oysters were presented on one of those impressive seafood tower contraptions with a raised stand and a gigantic bowl of ice. Accompaniments were simple: lemon, cocktail sauce, horseradish, mignonette. The conch salad was light and refreshing, strips of the mollusk matched with orange segments and shreds of lettuce or cabbage.

Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler avec les Cobayes - Cobaya Gras Underground Dinner

Lest anyone think we are latecomers to the New Orleans bandwagon, know this: the "Cobaya Gras" dinner had been months in the conception, even if the final execution of it came about incredibly quickly.

In fact, the origin of the Cobaya underground dinners can be traced back to Chefs Kurtis Jantz and Chad Galiano, when over the summer they reached out to several local food enthusiasts with a unique proposition: "Help us design a new menu." We all spent a good bit of time and effort on it, and sampled a lot of good food; unfortunately, their hotel's management had its own ideas on that front which had little to do with any of our opinions. But one of the best things to come out of that little project was a conversation a few of us had while waiting for the valet to bring around our cars: Why couldn't Miami have an underground dining scene? And if nobody else was doing it, well, why not us?

And so it came to be. The Cobaya - Gourmet Guinea Pigs group now has over 280 members and we've put together several fun dinners and other events, most of which have filled up in only a couple hours. The approach has been a simple one: find creative, talented chefs, and give them a forum to cook what they really want to cook.  That was exactly what we wanted to accomplish when we started talking around year-end with Chefs K and Chad, both of whom have Louisiana ties, about doing a Mardi Gras themed dinner.

Though the idea got everyone jazzed up, I still wasn't entirely sure up until the very moment that it was really going to happen. We had kicked around dates for mid-February, right before Mardi Gras, but then K and Chad got buried at the hotel with preparations for Super Bowl festivities, and communication and planning became difficult. We picked a date - February 12 - and trusted that everything would fall into place.^[1]

I think it all worked out perfectly. The Saints came through and won the Super Bowl last week. The weather, though ominous and stormy earlier in the evening, cleared enough to let us have a relatively dry night. The Guinea Pigs, despite the bad weather, came out in force, with perfect attendance and good spirits. And Kurtis and Chad, with help from their sous Chef Mike Marshall, along with pastry chef Jenny Rissone (who also hosted the event at her house, which has a converted garage containing a completely bad-ass professional pastry kitchen) and chef Chris DeGweck, put out an awesome spread of New Orleans favorites, with their own unique twists.

Su Shin Izakaya - Coral Gables

"HELLO HOW ARE YOU?!?!" Invariably, this is the greeting you will receive when you walk through the doors of Su Shin Izakaya - usually at a decibel level that will make you jump, even when you're fully expecting it. It's the owner's Americanized variation on the Japanese tradition of welcoming customers with a shout of "Irashaimase!"

Su Shin's menu is something of a mix of Americanized and traditional, too. Yes, you'll find your California rolls and salmon and cream cheese "JB rolls"^[1] here. But if you're looking for something more authentic, don't let this dissuade you. The real draw here is not these inexplicably ubiquitous standards, but rather the extensive selection of "izakaya" dishes.

An izakaya is, as I understand it, sort of the Japanese equivalent of a pub: a place to drink beer or sake, often in copious amounts, and which serves food, often in smaller tapas-size portions, to accompany those libations. Hiro's Yakko-San in North Miami Beach is an izakaya style of restaurant which, as I've noted before, always requires explanation to first-time visitors that it is not a sushi restaurant: no nigiri, no maki (though there is sashimi). Su Shin, though, goes both ways, offering both the typical panopoly of sushi and sashimi, teriyaki and tempura, as well more varied fare, both on the regular menu and on a blackboard that stretches across one long wall of the restaurant, typically featuring roughly a dozen or more daily specials of both raw and cooked dishes.

Since I work in Coral Gables, Su Shin is typically a lunch stop for me, when it is typically busy. There are a half-dozen lunch specials featuring miscellaneous permutations of the usual suspects for $8.75, as well as a mysterious additional list, written only in Japanese. During several visits we've asked about or randomly pointed at some of these, but have yet to encounter anything tremendously exotic. Rather, one of my favorite mystery lunch items is buried away in the "Makimono" (cut rolls) section of the menu, under the name "Porque Mt. Fuji" with the description "Not a roll, let us surprise you." Needless to say, as soon as I noticed this I had to try it.

CSA Week 10 and its uses

What's in the box this week? From bottom left: thyme (one of my favorite herbs), arugula, green onions, komatsuna, radishes, cilantro (very boisterously scented), Ponkan tangerines, carambolas, and a canistel.

Some of the green onions went into an omelette this morning, along with last week's avocado (ehhhh...). Little Miss F is making quick work of the Ponkans. We tasted one of the carambolas tonight: beautifully fragrant and juicy, but still just a touch over-sour. And then this afternoon, the thyme, green onions and arugula got me thinking: Zuni roast chicken.

While my last experience at Zuni Cafe was less than ideal, the cookbook remains one of my all time favorites. And one of the best recipes in there is the famous roast chicken. You can find the recipe online and there's plenty of walk-throughs on various blogs as well, so I won't belabor it too much here. Plus I was scampering to get the bird done before the Super Bowl started, and my photos - and my presentation - were not so sharp, so no pix. But you won't need much else outside the CSA box to make it happen - a chicken, some currants and pine nuts, the rest is just pantry staples like olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper - and it's a fantastic recipe that can be made in about an hour. I encourage you to try it.