The Restaurant of the Future?

Two great chefs are experimenting with the restaurant experience. Is this the future? Also, a fast and easy dinner party menu.

Two of America’s best and most ambitious restaurants have hit the road in an attempt to redefine the fine dining experience. In the past couple of weeks I was lucky enough to attend both the Alinea Twentieth Anniversary Tour and Throughline by Singlethread.

Other than being excruciatingly expensive (it costs a lot of money to take your entire staff on tour), the two experiences could not have been more different.

Alinea
When I walked into the dinner (held at Olmstead in Brooklyn) to discover that the first course was a treasure hunt through a library (the clever little amuses bouches were hidden inside books by Murakami, on shelves, behind curtains….), I was immediately reminded of a talk I had with Grant Achatz about 15 years ago. He’d come to New York and was obsessively visiting Sleep No More, trying to figure out how to adapt the unique theatrical ideas for his restaurant.

It was instantly clear that nothing at this dinner was going to be what it seemed to be. This tiny “thin-crust pizza” was basically dust, but the flavors were powerful, filling your head with the memory of every pizza you’ve ever eaten. There were equally deceptive “hot dogs” and “bagels” and as each was discovered and devoured delighted laughter filled the room.

Then we walked through a misty forest filled with huge, beautiful glass flowers; each held a mushroom dish tasting of spring in the woods, of leaves and moss. We walked on to the next room where our adventure continued with a series of courses involving a dizzying swirl of scents, sounds, temperatures and textures.

Caviar? Of course!

We were then whisked to yet another room whose shiny metallic walls glinted and gleamed and the first dish was suspended just above our heads. Some dishes exploded in our mouths, others resembled paintings, many involved an interplay of temperatures. The food was beautiful, delicious, slightly mind-bending.

My favorite dish was this amazing piece of charred char: the fish had been marinated in barrel-cured maple syrup and then charred until the skin was as crisp as nori. It was sweet, savory, soft, crisp and all by itself the most theatrical piece of food I have ever eaten. In the beautiful glass dish underneath: the fish roe.

We moved on, crossing the street to enter a delicious black light dessert circus that ended with music, dancing and everyone eating helium balloons and talking with squeaky voices.

I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun at dinner.

Singlethread

If Grant is exploring how to make dining out more fun, Kyle and Katina Connaughton are doing something entirely different. They are, in their own words, trying to create a “meaningful cinematic dining experience where artistry and storytelling converge.” Each course was accompanied by a film about the people who raise, farm or fish the food we were eating. As we ate we were traveling the world, sailing the sea, meeting the artists who created the plates before us.

The Connaughtons lived in Japan for a while, and the food is informed by the kaiseki tradition. It is seasonal, artisanal, and visually exquisite. That lovely composition above included firefly squid, sayori, sawara and tiny turnips with the most extraordinary mentaiko.

We ate for four hours, drank a great many glasses of extraordinary wine and watched 8 movies, so I couldn’t possibly write about every dish. Here are a few favorites.

The carrot season is coming to an end in Sonoma, and one entire course was centered around carrots. I particularly liked this silken tofu with carrot miso and very intense dashi.

Caviar? Of course there was caviar. This was from Tsar Nicoulai, which has been making California caviar since Mats and Daphne Engstrom created their business in the early eighties.

The abalone and sea urchin came from my friend Stephanie Mutz of Sea Stephanie Fish. As we ate these delicious delicacies we watched Stephanie on her boat. If you’re lucky enough to live on the West Coast you can buy just-caught seafood directly from her website.

A little intermezzo - Singlethread’s nod to sorbet was this lovely sugar snap pea confection.

I’m not a fan of wagyu beef; if you want to know why, read this article that Barry Estabrook wrote for Gourmet. I find these practices horrific and the resulting meat is, to me, unpleasantly rich. But after watching the film about Adam Gordon and Will Densberger who are raising free-range animals at Knights Valley Wagyu I was eager to try this meat. Paired with pickled habanada peppers, it was a dream: not soft and oleaginous, but tender slices you could sink your teeth into that filled your mouth with delightfully beefy flavor.

The last in a series of desserts - and a lovely way to say goodnight.

Both meals were served with a series of extraordinary wines, but this post is getting very long. If you want to see the menus and wine pairings, reach out and I’ll do that next week.

As I was writing about these two dinners I remembered that I once gave a speech to a group of chefs about where I thought American restaurants were headed. This was in 2009; here, for what it’s worth, is what I said.

What I want to do today is talk about my own personal journey from someone who was a restaurant critic reviewing what were basically French restaurants to a person who wanders the world, on television, eating ant eggs and worm excrement in Laos, snails in China, and the strange Brazilian vegetable, jambu, which numbs your mouth. Because in my journey, you begin to understand exactly what has happened in American dining over the past 40 years.

I started out as a restaurant critic in San Francisco in the mid 70s. The first restaurant I reviewed for New West Magazine was called L’Oiseau Bleu in Marin County. It was a very traditional French restaurant, and writing the review I recalled my training as a waitress in an equally classic place.

For the next few years the restaurants I reviewed were pretty much French or Continental. Then California cuisine came in. Everybody’s talked about how Alice Waters changed the game when she began sourcing ingredients locally. God knows we all wrote enough about it. But few of us were aware of the other big thing that Alice did when she decided to build a café upstairs from Chez Panisse and serve pizzas made in a wood-burning oven. Here was a restaurant with a French name serving Italian food. Not just Italian food; Italian street food. Pizza. Made right in front of you, in an open kitchen in a wood-burning oven.

Most people credit Wolfgang Puck for this big innovation, but the truth is that he sent his chef, Mark Peel, to Berkeley to work with Alice at the Café for something like nine months before Spago even opened.

And Spago itself was a kind of accident. Most people assume that Wolf set out to do something radically different, but that’s not really the case. Wolf was a classically trained French chef, working at Ma Maison, wearing a big white toque, when he had the idea of opening a little pizza place on the side. It was going to be like one he had loved in St. Remy de Provence. It wasn’t going to be a big deal. But when he told his boss, Patrick Terrail, what he was up to, Patrick wasn’t pleased and they parted ways. Instead of opening a modest little place Wolf poured his heart and soul into his new restaurant and pretty much changed restaurant history. His wife, Barbara Lazaroff, designed the restaurant to look like nothing else in America. It was expensive, but it was big, brash, noisy, with an open kitchen. And the signature dish was…. pizza.

Meanwhile, there was another game changer off in Louisiana. Paul Prudhomme had been the chef at the posh Commander’s Palace, but when he opened his own restaurant in 1979, K-Paul’s was a casual little place serving his native Cajun food. The food was gutsy and spicy (and his blackened redfish was so popular and so imitated that redfish became an endangered species). But Paul did one more really important thing: he took his restaurant on the road. Sometime during the early 80s he packed up his entire staff, rented a restaurant in San Francisco, and opened what I think was the first major pop up. People went so crazy for it that they stood in line for 12 hours to get in.

Meanwhile back in LA, Wolf was enjoying such huge success that he decided to open a second restaurant. But this was not a replica; it was a Chinese-themed restaurant for people who had never before thought of Chinese food as anything other than Sunday night takeout. I think it’s significant that he gave the place a French name; he didn’t trust that his audience was ready to take Chinese food seriously.

But there was someone else in LA who was rethinking what a Chinese restaurant might be. Philip Chiang grew up in his mother’s Mandarin restaurant, but when he opened his own Mandarette in 1984, he did something completely different. It was modern and minimalist, and the food was much closer to Monterey Park than the Mandarin.

The eighties in LA were amazing. The city was discovering food, and eating dishes created by a group of smart young chefs who were educated, American and open to everything. They wandered the city, going to taco places in East LA, to Koreatown, to little Japanese izakyas. So I was shocked to arrive in New York in the early nineties to discover that people who went to expensive restaurants still considered French food the gold standard. I began exploring the city, looking for what else might be out there.

My second review for the New York Times was a place called Honmura-An. It was a pure, totally authentic soba restaurant where the soba was made by hand. I thought it was nearly perfect and gave it 3 stars. There were howls of protest. My predecessor wrote to my bosses saying that there was loose canon running around Times Square. “Where,” he wanted to know, “does she get off giving 3 stars to a noodle joint! Standards are being lowered.” The horror!

So you can imagine how pleased he must have been a few months later when I reviewed a Korean barbecue place. It still used live coals (I’m sorry to say that it no longer does), and I got to tell people about the joys of banchan. The notion of a New York Times critic writing a serious review of a Koren restaurant was so novel that two Korean newspapers came to interview me about it.

Looking back at the food revolution, I now see that it took place in two phases. Phase one was all about the service and ambiance (cue Danny Meyer). We became a casual society, and we started walking out of restaurants that insisted we wear ties, jackets, elegant dresses. We just didn’t want to do it. And we hated the idea of snooty service. But while we were asking for less formality, the food itself didn’t change all that much. We might have introduced new flavors, we might have looked for organic and locally sourced ingredients, we might even have moved the kitchen into the dining room, but for the longest time our fundamental idea of what a restaurant was did not change.

But now we’re in the second phase, and we’re reexamining the whole idea of restaurants. And that is what is so significant about what I think of as the street food revolution. It is America saying that we want our restaurants to reflect us.

The switch has been rapid and really profound. And it has been driven, very largely, I’d say, by food television which has given us an appetite for more than food. We now want excitement. And if you’re looking for excitement in a world where almost everything is increasingly available to everyone, you have to go beyond flavor.

When I think about where we are in this street food revolution, I can’t help thinking about what my college roommate said to me the first day we met. “I knew right away that you were a rich kid,” she said.

“My family’s not rich, “ I replied, “whatever made you think that?”

“Because you have such bad manners in restaurants,” she said.

I was totally taken aback. “I have bad manners?” I asked. I thought I had pretty good ones. “What do you mean?”

“Oh,” she said, “you just walked right into that room as if you owned it. And then you sat there, completely comfortable, like you’d been in a million restaurants before. You even put your elbows on the table! I’ve been to a restaurant maybe 10 times in my life, and I sit there, with one hand in my lap, terrified that I’m going to do the wrong thing. So in my book, you’re a rich kid.”

That was a long time ago, but when it comes to restaurants today, Americans are all rich kids. We’ve been there before, we’re not intimidated by the waiters or the surroundings. And we know what we want. We want casual food. We want to eat with our hands. We want big flavors. And we want to be thrilled. I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be feeding this new, voracious American appetite.

I just watched Love, Charlie, the film about Charlie Trotter, which is not like most chef films. It made me think about so many things. About the friendship among chefs and the competition between them. About the value of Michelin stars. About how overlooked Chicago has been as a restaurant city. And, of course, about the price of success.

I barely knew Charlie, but when he invited me to his birthday party, he began walking on his hands and I thought - he’s not the guy I thought he was. And that’s exactly what this film says.

We were planning on going out with friends the other night, but at 4 o'clock there were... complications. We had to stay home.  I was working on deadline, but I asked them to come over for dinner instead. I didn’t have much time and there was no food in the house. What to do?

I decided that a tenderloin of beef was the perfect solution. Ran to the butcher, bought one, along with a couple of bunches of  fat, beautiful asparagus, and some lovely little cherry tomatoes that smiled up at me.  Then I sniffed out some mint and rosemary, and found some very pretty, very small potatoes and threw them into the cart as well.  A ripe Robiola caught my eye; how could I resist?   A loaf of bread, a few cherries.... My final purchase was a couple of pounds of apricots. And a bunch of flowers.

I got home and, still in my work clothes threw a quick apricot cobbler into the oven.  Apricots are the best - you don't need to cut or peel them, just pull them apart and put them in the pan, cover them with a crumble of flour, sugar and butter and put them in a hot oven to melt into tenderness.

I scrubbed the potatoes, rubbed the tenderloin with olive oil, garlic and salt and pepper, surrounded it with rosemary and let it sit for a while. I tossed the cherry tomatoes with olive oil and salt as well, and chopped up some mint to mix with it later.  I put the asparagus into the sink to soak and went to set the table.

In my mind, when I envisioned dinner, I suddenly saw hollandaise sauce sitting next to the beef.  It would be good with the asparagus too.  And all of a sudden, I just needed to make some to round out the meal.  I don't know where that came from - I haven't made it in years- but it seemed right.  So I began separating eggs and melting butter.

The meat smelled wonderful, roasting in the oven, and just beneath its round, brown aroma was the gentle scent of the potatoes and the fruity scent of the roasting tomatoes.  The hollandaise came together without a hitch. It was a great meal.  The meat was rare and incredibly tender. The potatoes, roasted in the same pan, were fluffy and tender.  The little tomatoes came alive with the mint (and it was so much easier than washing salad), and the asparagus just lapped up the hollandaise sauce.

Total time from walking into the house to putting dinner on the table: 1 hour 12 minutes. Who says good food has to be time consuming?  (The recipes are almost all from My Kitchen Year.)

For dessert we ate the cobbler, still warm from the oven, with vanilla ice cream melting across the top.