Toqueland

December 30, 2014

That’s a Wrap!

As the Kitchen Closes for 2014, a Look Back at Our Favorite Posts

Dear Toqueland readers,

I’m writing to you from a rented house on the outskirts of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where my family and I are winding down the year. Before the ball drops, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading this site — whether you are a regular subscriber, occasional visitor, or found your way here once or twice thanks to some love from one of the major food blogs or via social media. However you came to Toqueland, I’m grateful for your attention and hope something of value greeted you whenever you’ve dropped by.

Running a site like this is mostly a blessing, but also a curse: One wants to post all the time, but contracted (i.e., paid) work and personal commitments must come first. So I find myself constantly wishing I were able to share something every day, if not several times a day. The result is often dissatisfaction, sometimes even anxiety. But I recently glanced over the last twelve months’ worth of posts and find that it’s actually been a rather productive year on Toqueland. With that in mind, I wanted to briefly consolidate my favorite posts in one place; I thought it might be a good way for causal readers to catch up on anything you might have missed and for regulars to have one last look at a piece or two before they fade into the past. (I’d also shamelessly suggest that if you have friends you’d like to turn on to Toqueland, this post would be a good way to do it.)

With that, and with my thanks for your readership, here are the highlights of our 2014:

Anthony Bourdain: The Toqueland Interview

“I wrote an article wanting to sell it for $100 to the New York Press.”…

December 19, 2014

TALKING SHOP: Scott Bryan, The Milling Room, NYC

Veteran Chef Scott Bryan chats about The Milling Room, the Upper West Side, and the Nexus of Art and Cooking

Scott Bryan, The Milling Room. December 2014. (Photo by Evan Sung)

Scott Bryan at The Milling Room’s Tavern oven. December 2014. (Photo by Evan Sung)

[Editor’s Note: My great thanks to good friend, photographer Evan Sung, who recently and graciously offered to help me class up the joint with photographs to accompany some interviews and articles on Toqueland. This marks our first collaboration here. -AF]

Chef Scott Bryan has been a fixture in the New York dining scene for a few decades, most prominently at Veritas, where he was the opening chef and earned three stars from the New York Times, and then at Apiary, where he cooked for the past five years. He was a Food & Wine Magazine Best New Chef in 1996, and has honchoed kitchens at restaurants such as Alison on Dominick Street, Luma, and Indigo. A native of Boston, Scott trained under Bob Kinkead, and worked in many great New York kitchens early in his career, including Bouley, Le Bernardin, and Gotham Bar and Grill, as well as at Joyce Goldstein’s Square One in San Francisco. Earlier this year, he was briefly the chef at Bacchanal, then joined forces with restaurateur Luis Gonzalez at The Milling Room on the Upper West Side in September. The restaurant is divided into a Tavern room and bar up front, and an enormous dining room in the back (some may remember it as the former home of Main Street, then Calle Ocho, before it became Corvo Bianco). Scott and I sat down recently to discuss how he got here, his plans for the restaurant, and related issues.

FRIEDMAN: It’s been a pretty active year for you; you left Apiary then did Bacchanal and now you’re here. How did this come about?

BRYAN: This came about because I basically worked on Bacchanal for, like, two years, talking about doing that venture … I never signed off on the kitchen there which was tiny, way too small. And so I knew it wasn’t going to work once I was there. After about a month there I called Maestro, Alfred Erlich, and I said, “This isn’t going to work; do you know anyone looking for a chef?” And he goes, “Well, this place uptown, the old Corvo Bianco space. The guy Luis [Gonzalez] is looking. They’re going to close. The chef they hired didn’t work out.” So I met with him a few times and we decided to go from there … I was sort of hesitant about taking the job up here because I never worked on the Upper West Side and I know it’s a tough place … but I said, “Fuck it. Why not?”

FRIEDMAN: What’s the reputation of this neighborhood among chefs?

BRYAN: Upper West Side is considered a wasteland….

November 25, 2014

Dispatches: Growing Chefs

American Food Pioneer Larry Forgione Schools a New Generation at the Culinary Institute of America

Larry Forgione in St. Helena, California. (photo courtesy Culinary Institute of America)

Thanksgiving, one of the most American of holidays, seems the perfect time to share a story I’ve been sitting on for a little while, about what American food pioneer Larry Forgione has been up to the past couple of years.

Historically speaking, Larry’s a titan. But he’s been without a restaurant in a major city for quite some time, so isn’t as well known to younger chefs and culinary enthusiasts as he once was, or should be. But if you care about food, especially American food, you really ought to know about the man, because he belongs on the same pedestal as contemporaries Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Jonathan Waxman, Jeremiah Tower, and the rest of the gang he came up with in the 1970s and 1980s.

Larry was the first prominent chef to emerge from Buzzy O’Keefe’s The River Café (which later provided a runway for Charles Palmer and David Burke, among others), before opening his own restaurant, An American Place, in Manhattan in 1983. During his heyday, Larry made several essential, abiding contributions to our national restaurant landscape. Foremost among these was the development of a repertoire that was achieved in part by mining under-appreciated regional dishes from across the USA, at times actually working in tandem with James Beard. (On occasion, the two would leaf through books together in the library at Beard’s house on West 12th Street.) At a time when journalists categorized a wide range of styles under the umbrella “New American Cuisine,” Larry was actually cooking American food, elevating it with world-class technique.

His other crowning legacy was establishing a network of purveyors that was sorely lacking on the East Coast in the mid-to-late 1970s, when he returned from cooking at London’s Connaught Hotel and began plying his trade in New York City, first at Regine’s, then at River Café; the lengths to which he went to procure superlative ingredients would floor today’s chefs, for whom any edible esoterica is just mouse-click away. (The victory lap was his menu, which–as Gael Greene once wrote–included “farm, ranch and geographical credits for every periwinkle and prawn.”) He simply couldn’t understand why a chef in New York City didn’t have access to the same great ingredients he’d cooked with in London, and which his grandmother grew on her farm in Eastern Long Island, which he visited on weekends and summers in his youth.

Here’s a snippet of Larry back in the day; if you think “farm-to-table” is a newish concept, pay close attention to his comments, uttered three decades ago, starting at the one-minute mark:…

November 19, 2014

Ruminations: Secret Handshake

On the Occasion of Spoon and Stable’s Opening, Some Thoughts on the Fellowship of Chefs

Thomas Keller–attired in his preferred civilian ensemble of black turtleneck, sport coat, and jeans–entered the open kitchen at Spoon and Stable, Gavin Kaysen’s brand new Minneapolis restaurant, during a pre-opening party last Thursday night, and shook hands with every cook on the line. To casual observers, if they noticed at all, it probably didn’t seem like much — a friendly, supportive greeting from one of Gavin’s mentors, who also happens to be one of the most acclaimed chefs in the world.

But to anybody familiar with kitchens of a certain caliber, and their history, those handshakes had great significance. At Keller’s restaurants, chefs, cooks, and commis “shake in” and “shake out” with each other every day. It’s such an ingrained aspect of life within the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group that former French Laundry chef de cuisine Timothy Hollingsworth once told me that if a member of his brigade failed to make the rounds at night’s end, he’d phone that person up the next morning to ask if he or she was upset about something.

This is not unique to Keller’s restaurants–the ritual of shaking hands with one’s colleagues is a sign of mutual respect, and respect for the work at hand, that is observed at great restaurants all over the world, including Cafe Boulud, where Gavin was executive chef before decamping for Minneapolis back in the spring. And shaking hands in another chef’s kitchen … well, that’s a special sign of respect and solidarity all its own. I don’t know Thomas’s inspiration for doing it, and I was trying not to bug people with journalistic questions the other night, but one of his heroes, the great French chef Paul Bocuse, famously did just that, frequently making a beeline for the kitchen when visiting a restaurant, even sometimes entering via the service entrance rather than the front door. Many who cooked at Le Cirque in the 1980s vividly recall Bocuse’s frequent visits decades back, and the thrill of shaking hands with him.

…

November 18, 2014

Depictions: Prune

Gabrielle Hamilton Has Written a Masterpiece. Here’s Hoping Everybody Learns from It.

Gabrielle Hamilton’s new Prune is a cookbook that doubles as a Joycean depiction of life in a professional kitchen.

I returned home from a trip last week to find a copy of Gabrielle Hamilton’s Prune waiting for me, sent along by an editor we have in common. I was wiped from traveling and took a cursory glance at it.

My initial reaction was confusion and disappointment. There was no flap or cover copy to explain the concept; no foreword by one of the author’s pals; no introduction by Gabrielle herself. After the title page and table of contents, I was suddenly, jarringly, looking at the first recipe, a recipe that had no headnote and was rendered in nondescript type art directed to look like a sparse notebook page. I leafed ahead. None of the recipes had headnotes. And the third recipe had no method (i.e., instructions), just a roster of ingredients. There were notes and corrections hand-scrawled around the margins and between the lines, binder holes “punched” down toward the spine’s crevice (not really, but the images look impressively real), and facsimiles of Post-Its, mostly indicating how to scale a recipe up or down, on some of the pages. It seemed a little crazy and unthought-out to me. I shook my head, set it aside, and went on with my night.

Saturday morning, I found myself alone with the book and a cup of coffee at my dining room table. During that meditative early-morning time, I decided to give it another look. It wasn’t long before I realized that my initial reaction could not have been further off the mark. As far as I’m concerned, Prune is a masterwork. More than that, it’s the book, or a version of the book, a great many of us–independent authors, chef-authors and their collaborators alike–wish we could write, but which most editors would never buy into. If they did, their publishers would probably override them. If that didn’t kill it, well, there’s always the sales and marketing crew to squelch the impulse to break the mold. The reason is simple: there’s a deep-seated belief in American publishing that a cookbook must adhere to certain conventions or readers will not be able to use it. Put another way, there’s an assumption that many people who cook in this country are culinary imbeciles, incapable of figuring anything out for themselves, and in need of every teaspoon, temperature, time, and taste-cue to be explicitly spelled out for them. …

November 5, 2014

Milestones: The Easterner

Jeremiah Tower Discusses His New Role as Chef of Tavern on the Green and Personal and Professional History with New York City

Jeremiah Tower, far from NYC in Playa del Carmen, 2009 (photo courtesy Jeremiah Tower)

The Big News in Gotham this week is that Jeremiah Tower, the legendary chef behind Stars, and onetime Chez Panisse toque, has taken over the kitchen at Tavern on the Green, following Katy Sparks’ unfortunate departure in September, on the heels of no-star reviews from both the New York Times and New York Magazine. Tower, who hasn’t been a regular presence in a major American restaurant since departing Stars in 1999, has been living in Mexico for nearly a decade, but has nevertheless remained in the news: Most recently, he was a featured speaker at the MAD conference, and Anthony Bourdain and Zero Point Zero are currently producing a documentary about him. As I’ve been in regular touch with him in connection with my forthcoming book about the American chefs of the 1970s and 1980s, I caught wind of this development shortly before he and Tavern owners Jim Caiola and David Salama announced their new collaboration, and am pleased to be able to share this interview:

Friedman: Obviously, most people connect you and your career with California. You also, though, have a long history with New York City, having started life on the East Coast, even though you never cooked here professionally. Can you take us through that a little bit?

Tower: When I first saw New York it was eating at wonderful restaurants like the old Luchow’s and ‘21’ and stuff like that where my parents would go. And then, when I was in college, they lived in Brooklyn Heights in General Livingston’s old farmhouse, so Gage and Tollner and that kind of New York restaurant was what I remembered. And then all through college they lived there and in graduate school they lived there, and then back to Connecticut. So, I’m a New Englander. All my family is from New England. I was seen as a Californian, but between Boston and New York, I always felt like an Easterner, as some people in Berkeley would be happy to tell you. (laughs)

Friedman: You made some legendary visits to New York City in the 1980s, these nights when you would go on dine‑arounds. What was a typical visit to the city like for you during that time?

Tower: A visit to the city was usually around some special event, especially CityMeals on Wheels at Rockefeller Center. And I would always bring four people and about two thousand pounds of luggage so that we could make a huge display of ourselves. And then we’d get a limo and go and visit ten of the hot new restaurants, spending twenty minutes in each one, so that we would go back to San Francisco exhausted but inspired. New York was the inspiration….

August 15, 2014

Farm Boy

Ryan Tate, formerly of Savoy and Le Restaurant, May Have Found Finally the Perfect Home at Blenheim

Ryan Tate, in the kitchen at Blenheim (photo © Table 12 Productions, Inc.)

NEW YORK CITY — Chefs’ professional fates can turn in an instant. A restaurant’s shuttering can leave them scrounging for work; a sudden opening or bit of serendipity can prove the first step in a new chapter.

Case in point: Ryan Tate, who honchoed the kitchen at the recently departed Le Restaurant in Tribeca, where he served a daily set tasting menu and garnered stars (one from Michelin, two from the New York Times), experienced both ends of that equation. Le Restaurant’s demise was of the slow, painful variety: Perched on the fringe of Tribeca, despite critical attention (among others, Gael Greene also found much to like there), Tate and owner Kyle Wittels (the two also collaborated on the restaurant’s adjacent sister business, the marketplace and cafe All Good Things), never quite found the customer mass required to keep the joint open. And so, as June crawled to a close, they made the painful decision to shut it down, and Tate was soon to be a gun for hire … but before he’d served his last meal, another door had opened.

Maybe it was karma: Tate had been committed to cook at Pig Mountain–the upstate “pig roast and veggie fest”–later this month, but with no benefactor, he would have had to go out of pocket for ingredients and transportation, and wasn’t in a position to shell out the necessary coin. So he did the responsible thing and called producer Heather Carlucci to explain the situation as soon as possible. The call set off a domino effect: Carlucci told him that the chef of Blenheim had just left two days earlier, at which point Tate called former colleague Jonathan Russell, who happened to be the beverage director at the West Village establishment. (Talk about quick twists of fate: original chef Justin Hilbert was out of Blenheim in a New York minute, owing to what the owners termed “irreconcilable differences.” The shift forced the restaurant to temporarily close after less than a month in business.)

Within hours, Tate was on the phone with Blenheim co-owner Morten Sohlberg, who also owns Blenheim Hill Farm, which supplies the restaurant with a steady flow of fresh ingredients, and Smörgås Chef restaurants with his wife and partner Min Ye. Continuing the real life fast forward, Sohlberg and Ye dined at Le Restaurant that very night. It was the second to last service, with a scant six souls in the dining room, two in the kitchen, and a solitary server soldiering back and forth between them. But the couple were able to see past the funereal setting and were blissed out by the food. …

June 27, 2014

Labor of Love

David Waltuck Just Wants to Cook. Five Years After Chanterelle Closed, He’s Back in the Kitchen at Élan.

[Note: This is our monthly sister post to my Kitchen Time Machine series on Eater. Click over there to read part 1 of my interview with David Waltuck, joined by wife and Chanterelle partner Karen. – A.F.]

David Waltuck. (photo by Michael Harlan Turkel, courtesy élan)

David Waltuck. (photo by Michael Harlan Turkell, courtesy élan)

NEW YORK CITY — Once upon a time, there was a little boy named David. He grew up in the Bronx, on Eastern European home cooking, but had a fascination with French food and restaurants. On the weekends, he would experiment in the kitchen, at first with elemental preparations like mayonnaise, and then with more ambitious projects such as terrines.

This was back in the mid-1970s and that boy grew up to marry his high school sweetheart, Karen, and together the couple, the Waltucks, opened one of the landmark restaurants of its era in the United States: Chanterelle. On Monday, without Karen (but in partnership with former Chanterelle GM George Stinson), David will launch the new restaurant élan, on East 20th Street in Manhattan.

The thing that’s always fascinated me about David (with whom I collaborated on Chanterelle’s cookbook), is that as much as any chef I’ve ever met, all he’s ever really wanted to do was cook, but that’s easier for a little boy in the Bronx as a hobby than it is for a grown professional in New York City, especially these days when real estate costs are driving even the likes of Union Square Cafe to new digs.

But love is a powerful thing, even the love of cooking, and it can drive a man to stay the course until he’s back with his beloved. Like Daniel Day Lewis’ Hawkeye screaming, “No matter what occurs, I WILL FIND YOU!” in Last of the Mohicans, David has always found his way back to cooking, back to a situation that has allowed him to cook his food, even though, most recently, it’s taken years….

June 24, 2014

Bitters … Sweet!

How a New York City Actor-Waiter-Bartender Turned into a Budding Entrepreneur

Tobin Ludwig. Upright Brew House, Hudson Street. June 2014.

NEW YORK CITY — Presidents issue pardons, tennis tournaments hand out wildcards, restaurants hold tables for VIPs … so call this the blogger equivalent: On this, my birthday, I’m invoking personal privilege and profiling an honorary family member who, though he’s been intermittently involved in the restaurant trade, isn’t a chef.

Tobin Ludwig, one of the trio of young entrepreneurs behind the relatively new brand Hella Bitters, is something of an adopted son, or at least baby brother, to me and my wife, Caitlin, here in New York City. Tobin’s mother Josette, was a dear friend to my late mother in-law, Joan, and when he came to New York to spend a year here before college, we worked our network to help him secure a job, landing him a gig as a barista at The Harrison, which was about to open in Tribeca.

The timing of Tobin’s arrival seems comical now, but wasn’t at the time: September 9, 2001.

Two days later, on September 11, he was woken by his roommate at the 92nd Street Y. The guy’s girlfriend had called from Israel, alarmed about the attack on the city that was in progress. Tobin shuffled out onto Lexington Avenue and saw the smoldering towers way down south….

June 19, 2014

A Tale of Two Chefs

At Home, and in the Kitchen, with San Francisco’s Sean and Reneé Baker

Sean and Renee Baker, outside Omnivore Books. San Francisco, California. February 2014 (photo copyright 2014 Table 12 Productions, Inc.)

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in San Francisco over the past year, researching the chefs of the 70s and 80s. But I’ve also been very much in the present, in part thanks to Sean and Reneé Baker, who have graciously hosted me in the guest room of their Noe Valley home on my last few visits.

As Toqueland readers may know, Sean is a partner in both Gather restaurant in Berkeley, and Verbena, which opened on Polk Street in December, and where he is the chef. Reneé is a private chef who works for a Bay Area family, cooking for them at home and on the road when they travel.

I first met Sean and Reneé during the Chef’s Holidays program at The Ahwahnee in Yosemite National Park two years ago. Over a beer in the pub, we talked about the pluses and minuses of being a two-chef couple. They met in the kitchen at Millennium restaurant in 2004, then cooked together at Google before their professional paths diverged, Reneé finding her current gig when a desired change of pace led her to perusing the possibilities on Craig’s List.

My assumption was that living in a two-toque household must have helped their relationship endure because chefs’ spouses (they were married in 2011) often feel that they come in a distant second to their partner’s work.

Reneé concurred: “If I wasn’t in the industry, I might not understand why he isn’t home for fifteen hours every day,” she said. “Women not in the industry might not get it, or stick around.”…

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