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| AVN Photo Lab |
Across the street from the Westin is a McDonald’s with a salad bar. For the fast food front-runner, accustomed to precision portion control and pre-packaged McEverything, a salad bar is a radical departure. Consider, also, corporate McDonald’s contention that it always leads, never follows: that when it rolls out a product, says corporate, it is new, the first kid on the block with it. Not so, the salad bar. Even wizards occasionally lapse.
At Jams in New York, Chef Jonathan Waxman prepares french fries from scratch. Fast food restaurants nearby offer french fries not prepared from scratch. What’s the difference? Are Waxman’s fries that much better?
Name your favorite restaurant. It prepares everything from scratch. You marvel at the chef’s culinary skills. From goat cheese to gelato, everything on the menu is fresh, trendy, and fashionable. Fresh pasta comes with fresh pesto. Pâtés and consommés are crafted lovingly and carefully. Everything is great; and everything is prepared from scratch. You are sure of that. That’s what you think.
Everything Viktor Baker prepares tastes great, too. No mean chef, himself, Baker turned around The 95th Restaurant atop the Hancock Building, Chicago (before leaving it last year) with an American menu that dazzled the jaded. Recently, he astounded some of the shrewdest chefs in the country (some of them jaded) with a grand feast. “Astounded,” because it wasn’t until the feast was over that Baker told them that everything they had eaten—from appetizers to desserts—had been pre-cooked, sealed in vacuum pouches, then reconstituted à la minute (well, sort of à la minute) for the feast. He called it sous vide. Most of the chefs had never heard that term before.
Heed well, Craig Claiborne. In a column, “Culinary America . . .”, Claiborne, the New York Times food writer, wrote, “I am persuaded that we will see an enormous increase in sophisticated foods that are ingeniously packaged so that they retain their just-cooked freshness while being easy to prepare: just heat and serve…”
The fascination with fresh foods, either prepared from scratch or prepared way ahead of time, has captured the imagination of everyone in foodservice, including McDonald’s (see above). Just as absorbing, however, is the ripple effect it has had. Quite simply, manufacturers of prepared foods—be they canned, frozen, or pouched—have refined their products so that they are as tasty as fresh. Just ask Viktor Baker.
What’s going on? Are we so obsessed with fresh that everything we purchase must be just-plucked or picked? Prepared foods? Why bother?
Where fresh is a must, you have no options. For example, some fast food restaurants still peddle a pre-packaged, carefully portioned salad. It’s fresh, all right, but it’s not perceived that way. But a salad bar is, even if the lettuce is slightly brown around the edges. Furthermore, fast food restaurants that offer pre-packaged salads instead of salad bars are perceived as skinflints, trying to pull over something on you. When that perception persists, it warps the price-value equation. On the other hand (enter: irony), a fine restaurant can menu an assortment of salads, all arriving at the loading dock pre-packaged and fresh. Not to worry, though: customers have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes. There, your line cooks open packages, arrange their contents ever so neatly on the plate—garnished and dressed to order—and send them out to guests. Fringe benefit: no more mis en place for salad prep.
A kitchen supercharged with culinary brilliance doesn’t need much of anything pre-prepared. A kitchen wallowing in mediocrity, finding itself seriously outflanked by veteran competitors who create “outlandishes” that have critics and customers searching for superlatives to describe them, needs help, not just to prepare menued items, but—when the time comes and the demands exist—to augment the menu with courses it hasn’t the foggiest notion how to fix. For instance, without skilled cooks accustomed to preparing ethnic foods, a restaurant is challenged to properly prepare say, an Oriental, Italian, or Mexican dish without having to fake it. To prep and cook any of these foods authentically requires the expertise to prep and cook them faultlessly. With prepared foods, no such worry.
A bottomless pantry of prepared goodies is available now. A restaurateur, wondering how to beef up a puny menu, confused as to how to implement menu changes because of labor intensive concerns or lack of skilled talent, would be wise to look at prepared foods to find out what’s available, edible, and suitable.
Improvements in prepared products have been nothing short of phenomenal. Phenomenal, too, is their consistency, ease of preparation, and variety. They can rescue lousy kitchens from trivial pursuits, help others augment their menus with selections they have neither the time nor the brains to develop. If you choose to menu some or all of your dishes from prepared products, you do understand—don’t you?—that missing from your kitchen will be the joy of craftsmanship and the challenge of creating signature dishes. Missing too? A few cooks. But, better to be passionate about someone else’s creativity, than fanatical about your shortcomings.
Keep in mind: the perception of fresh is always one of quality. However, heed this: regardless of freshness and its presumed quality, a lousy cook will invariably screw up everything. It may be great and fresh coming off the truck, but how it’s handled in the kitchen and what winds up on the plate that goes out to the guest may not be so great, fresh or edible. Fresh in, fresh out? Not always. Sometimes, fresh in, garbage out.
