Afterthoughts: Upscale Madness, Phase Two

Uh . . .cooking ice cream with liquid nitrogen.

So, now, it’s not the 2 Mousseketeers, it’s Ferran Adria (El Bulli restaurant, Rosas, Spain) and copycats like him and something called, “molecular gastronomy,” the latest version of “upscale madness.” It is “madness” because MG (molecular gastronomy), not unlike nouvelle in the early stages of its trendiness, has spawned dozens—perhaps hundreds (no one knows for sure)—of prevaricator chefs test-tube-testing outrageous mixtures and blends that upstage the work of the legitimate few (often working in locations hidden from view) who are capable of dishing up food, tastings and degustations gastronomes and devotees of MG swoon over. 

In a freelance Q&A piece I wrote some time ago for Restaurant Hospitality, I asked Nick Nicholas, chef-owner of a brand new restaurant, Nick’s Fishmarket of Hawaii (Boca Raton, Florida), what he thought of contemporary trends in the restaurant business. He said, “There are no rules. You can cook anyway you want: serve any way you want, design any way you want.

“I’m sorry, I cannot get excited about foam [left] and everything else that foam is about. Just give me some food and quit screwing around with it. It’s a chemistry lab out there. I still think that when people go out to eat they want food that’s delicious served by a knowledgeable staff: they don’t want to have to figure out what it is they’re eating or why it’s so important or politically correct.”

And in our cover story, January 1991, on Julia Child, “Child’s Play: The Joys of Julia,” this brilliantly gifted woman (no one since has followed—dared to follow?—in her footsteps) anticipating the faddish future of experimental cuisine, told me, “From what I can see, I think the chefs in America are being just a bit too creative.”

In an article I wrote for Premier, UNLV’s hotel school’s magazine, I wrote, “What in the name of everything that’s sane is molecular gastronomy? In an article in Saveur magazine Bill Rice (former food writer for the Chicago Tribune) tries to explain what it’s all about; his prose is direct and informative. I like Bill, but he loses (and I might add, worries) me when he writes approvingly of a chef who locks himself (and his recipes) in some sort of culinary laboratory in the basement of his restaurant while he messes with inventions that, apparently, to those who practice this cheerless form of cuisine-art make a lot of sense . . .”

A bonus “Afterthoughts,” this one about Green, The Trend and Sustainable, The Fad. Both are sub species of  this new wave of upscale madness.

Green and sustainable are wholesome whims. Each worthy of our interest, but neither so perfect, so absent of boundaries to have earned, free from disclaimers, the uncompromising praise food writers, bloggers and environmentalists have showered on them. There are options, but the Greens won’t hear of them. There are, options, but the Sustainables refuse to admit they exist.

Here we go.

Green, The Trend: If, in building your restaurant, you build it with discarded beer cans, cardboard boxes, and God only knows what else—the detritus of rubbish (anything you can find digging through residential, preferably upscale, Dumpsters)—and design your restaurant’s interior so that it has all the charm of a lean-to, then you are thought to be Green Trendy, allowed to join the self-absorbed of all things hip.

Sustainable, The Fad: If, in the kitchen of your Green Trendy restaurant, you cook with local, fresh and backyard-grown produce and slaughter your own free range fowl, cow, pig; or, if you find PETA cuddly and lovable and are a vegan dive, cultivate your own garden that is either behind, around, or on top of your restaurant and abstain from cooking any life form that has more than a single cell, then you are thought to be worthy of praise, suitable—no questions asked—for acceptance into the Extreme Sustainables Hall of Fame, eligible for canonization by associations (so many of them) eager to sacrifice a PETA-approved fatted calf at your Temple of Enlightened Cuisine.

There is no such organization as Extreme Sustainables Hall of Fame. But, just you wait: it is only a matter of time.

Cooking ice cream: Kondor 83; foam: Shawn Hempel

(For more on this—a satirical slant, perhaps—see April 1988: Praise the Lard: The Saga of Restaurant Nouvelle)