The Omnivorous Fish

Someone asked me, the other day, if I wanted to go to a famous New York City restaurant, famous for its food, certainly, but as famous for its produce and relationship to the farm. You know what? I didn’t.

I’m sure the food is very good. I’m sure most of the dishes challenge the eater and make excellent use of the raw materials, maybe even highlighting them in a way we’re not used to, featuring celery or Jerusalem artichokes as dominant flavors. I haven’t eaten there, but I know some of the players involved, and I know how they operate, and I know they wouldn’t have it any other way.

But you know what? The food is just too damn busy.

What? Too busy? They’re making art on the plate! They’re pushing boundaries! They’re using innovative combinations of flavors to create new tastes in our mouths! We are indebted to them!

Whatever. Chatham Cod In a Crust of Cacciatorini Castelluccio Lentils, Roasted Broccoli Ribbons and Sauteed Cauliflower Lingonberry-Red Wine jus.

No thanks. I am not so bored with the flavor of every dish ever created that I need that kind of excitement. Union Square Café took their first reservation in the age of the dinosaurs, and it’s still impossible to get a reservation. Why? The food is great. Le Bernardin? Yuzu, okey dokey, whatever floats your boat. I’d prefer if it was New York State grown yuzu, but, hey, far be it from me to cast the first coconut.

Country, Felidia, Wallse or Prune, can anyone deny them? Seriously, what bad can you say about the food at these places? None of the menus are boring; in fact, I would say they are all innovative. I mean, lobster with cherries? WTF? But the beauty of the dish is just that: lobster, cherries, butter, fin. In lesser hands, the lobster might have cherries, crones and raisins, in pastry. These restaurants, that is, these chefs, understand innovation with a hand of restraint: we needn’t be hit over the head.

When I was sperm, I had the good fortune to apprentice to a brilliant old-school chef for a very brief period of time. Like everyone at that age, I was convinced that I knew everything and had the most advanced sense of taste to grace the planet. It took a while, but Chef handed me my balls in a little velveteen bag, reducing me to a quivering lump of check-pants-clad goo in his presence.

I would make things, easy things- so I thought- like omelets or crepes for his approval. In the aftermath, I maintained a stiff upper lip until I could get to the bathroom and cry. Little did I know everything that could be wrong with a crepe. You might think that this would discourage me, and make me hate him. Well, you’re wrong on both counts. Armed with the knowledge that a decent-tasting crepe can be offensive to those who cared enough about food to notice, I made them over and over and over again, at the restaurant, at home, at friends’ houses, at the pizzeria where I had a part time job: I ate more crepes at age 17 than most people will eat in a lifetime. And I loved him for it. Today, I can make crepes without a recipe, four pans at a time, without missing a stroke.

You might think that vomiting between projects is a bad way to learn how to cook, but I assure you it is the only way.

When I was a kid, I looked at the menu from that place, and I thought it was old and stodgy. I said ‘Duck with cherries? Lame. Rack of lamb? Lame. Assiette des terrines? BOR-ing.’ Little did I know the quality of the home-dried griotte cherries and the complexity that the Armagnac gave to the sauce. Little did I get the prosciutto skin that cooked with the white beans that made people order the lamb to begin with. Little did I understand the sexual desire of the black truffle in Sauce Perigord. Those three dishes are still on the menu, and with good reason. The duck has other incarnations, but the lamb is unchanged, right from Julia Child, right from Escoffier, right from Careme.

Those white beans, on the other hand? Scandal. Prosciutto skin, you say? From Italy? Incroyable! The armagnac with cherries? Sacre bleu! Zeez are not prunes! And don’t even mention all the Austrian doo-dads that snuck onto the menu.

I guess my point is, innovation isn’t renovation. You don’t need a sledgehammer to do something original.