Virtual Gourmet

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IN THIS ISSUE
MONTAGE KAPALUA
By Misha Mariani

                                                SOME OBSERVATIONS ON OVERNIGHT GENIUSES
                         . . . AND HOW POP CULTURE NOW DEFINES MODERN AMERICAN RESTAURANTS
                                                                             By John Mariani

NEW YORK CORNER
TASCA CHINO
By John Mariani

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MONTAGE KAPALUA
By Misha Mariani

What makes one resort stand out more than the rest amidst a plethora of high-end, luxurious, notable resorts out on Hawaii’s Kapalua Bay? Is it the fine dining restaurants available to their guests, a lavishly designed pool facility, waterfront suites, a state of the art spa program, or is it their 50-room resort that makes you feel as if you have somehow acquired your very own vacation home? It is the culmination of all these luxuries and amenities that make The Montage truly something special.
The Montage was originally intended to be a residential development overseen by the Ritz-Carlton, but, after the changing of hands, it is now in my opinion the premier resort on the island. When my wife and I arrived at the Montage we already had stayed at some very impressive resorts, but the feeling we had when we walked up to check in at the Montage was different than at the others. It was quiet, tranquil, calming, a softer beauty. There was an immediate feeling that we were going to be tended to in a more personal and hospitable fashion. And that was precisely the case.
When we entered our suite for the first time neither of us was short of awe and appreciation. This was one nice suite to say the least: two full bedrooms, two and half baths, washer, dryer, full kitchen with a floating island, living room, dining room table and balcony that exceeded the square footage of some of the other suites we’d stayed in, garnished with a breakfast table for four, lounge chairs and a circular chaise lounge as big as a queen-size bed. And yes, I did wake up at 5:30 every morning so that I could move outside and continue my sleep in the open air as the sun rose and kissed my skin with its warmth.
The first night of our stay we had dinner at the Montage’s Cane & Canoe restaurant (below). Imagine the resort’s layout, a horseshoe-shaped design that gently slopes down towards Kapalua Bay and hugs the resort’s pool facilities. At the center sits the restaurant, open to the Hawaiian air and looking out on the bay. The restaurant is beautiful, elegantly designed with medium-toned woods, cream-colored drapes, soft lights on the tables, ostrich leather chargers, crystal glasses that shimmer in the soft candlelight, and the sprawling overhang of a wooden ceiling framed with exposed beams.
Just as impressive as the design and ambiance is the cuisine coming out from a kitchen overseen by Executive Chef Riko Bartolome. On our visit we indulged in some must-tries, such as diced hamachi, gently marinated and accompanied with potato crisps, avocado, micro-basil and caviar. Ribbons of local squid, sautéed with wilted greens and black sesame seeds, didn’t stand a chance, and opah, pan-roasted to perfection with papaya, lentils and a curry beurre fondue, hit the perfect balance. We complemented our meal with a Le Clos du Caillou, Grénache, Châteauneuf-du-Pâpe 2011, but Cane & Canoe’s wine list has a good bit of diversity, much more so than what we had seen at other restaurants, with offerings from expected French Burgundies to Lebanon’s Château Musar, all fairly reasonably priced.
Other dining options at Montage include the Sunset Patio (left) for more casual fare, private dining options and the Hana Hou Bar.
After a restful sleep, we were still in the need of some further relaxation, so we made our way over to the spa to indulge in a couples treatment that topped all that had come before. We started off in our private areas, separated by gender, where I was able to enjoy the steam room, followed by a cold rainfall shower and to spend a little time in the hot tub loosening the muscles. We then congregated in our own open-aired cabana, where we were made a couples bath in a stone tub, with warm water, Hawaiian sea salts and coconut milk. And don’t forget floating orchids and fresh fruit to nibble on. Finally, we moved onto our massage tables, where we were kneaded for an hour, bringing our bodies back to the state they needed to be. We finished off with a fine lunch and settled back down at the pool for a nap and some sun.
What makes the Montage so special is the decision to limit their capacity. With the square acreage they have, they could double, triple, if not quadruple, the amount of rooms they have, but their philosophy of providing that personal and focused attention has led them to be the premier resort on the Island.

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SOME OBSERVATIONS ON OVERNIGHT GENIUSES
. . . AND HOW POP CULTURE NOW DEFINES MODERN AMERICAN RESTAURANTS

By John Mariani

    Congratulations to Bon Appetit Magazine’s Hot Ten Best New Restaurant in America for 2015 (right)—Al’s Place in San Francisco, whose chef, is described by restaurant writer Andrew Knowlton (below) as the “obsessive, fanatical, and wildly creative Aaron London.”
    “It wasn’t just those fries that left me scratching my head and scribbling notes like `Genius!’ and `Bonkers!’ on my first visit,” raves Knowlton, who seems always to be writing in italics. “It was also the dish of baby lettuces served on crushed avocado, the fregola in a pickled pea broth, the green pea curry with black-lime cod and pickled strawberry, and the clear melon gazpacho. What deal with the culinary devil had chef Aaron London made in exchange for being able to produce such off-the-charts, flavor-rich creations? How was it coming from just three cooks working in a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet?”
    How indeed. I have not eaten at Al’s Place, so I shall withhold any consideration of London’s cuisine, which is overwhelmingly devoted to vegetables, with side dishes of meat and seafood. But it’s difficult for me to swallow knee-jerk kudos like “Genius” (note capital “G”) about a chef who, in an accompanying Bon Appetit video, declares that he hadn’t even thought about what he was going to cook at his new 46-seat restaurant in the Mission District until days before it opened. In the video he wisely contends that creativity alone is useless without discipline and structure, which is as true of cooking as it is of playing the trombone.
    London (right) goes on to describe how he drives 45 minutes north of San Francisco to pick out his vegetables from a farmers' market, then decides what to make of them—a 90 minutes round-trip trek that allows him little time to come up with a menu of the day and none to perfect any dish on it. Unless, of course, he is a certifiable Genius, maybe even Bonkers.

London’s statements are grounded in a long tradition of much misunderstood spur-of-the-moment cooking that began with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse back in 1971. Her methodology, naive at the time, was based on buying the best, freshest, most local ingredients possible and doing very little to them, as Waters had found cooks did in Provence. Except at the very beginning, when Waters admits she realty didn’t know what she was doing, the menus at Chez Panisse were never really off the top of her head or of any of the cooks she hired, like Jeremiah Tower, Jonathan Waxman, and Mark Miller. Everything was based on French Provençal technique, with copies of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking and Richard Olney's The French Menu Cookbook nearby. A dish you might be served tonight at Chez Panisse might have been on the menu since the 1980s, like this week's onion tart with black olives and watercress salad, or lobster and squash blossom risotto with parsley and Meyer lemon. Those dishes were the result of constant trial and error. No good chef would ever toss together his or her ingredients an hour or two before the restaurant door opens and serve them to guests as guinea pigs.

    So many of the restaurants on Bon Appetit’s list share this fascination with extemporaneous “off-the-charts” cooking, when in fact any craft or art needs long-term honing, and new dishes require repeated testing, altering, and—not least—teaching your cooks (all two of them at Al’s Place) how to make it into a wonderful dish by 5 o'clock that afternoon.
    The creation of a restaurant is today an investment of lots of money and time, not least that spent on getting a menu as close to one’s idea of perfection as possible, which is only achieved among one’s staff through repetitive, sometimes agonizing attention to detail. And once a single dish is brought close to where a chef wants it to be, he or she would be mindlessly rash to change it.

Chefs in great French restaurants and bistros do not change their bouillabaisse recipe every night; Italian chefs don’t mess with a pesto sauce once it is utterly and consistently delicious; Chinese chefs don’t toss out a classic recipe for chicken or sea bass because it’s been on the menu for ages. As Thomas Edison observed, “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” The light bulb was not perfected in an afternoon.
Knowlton makes no secret of his preference for storefronts, holes-in-the-walls, and strip mall eateries to high-end restaurants with white tablecloths, fine décor, silverware, stemware, and well-dressed service staff. He wants to ferret out the hipster chefs with the tatts, beards and the buzz cuts (like Aaron London) who do “culinary improv.” Comedians improvise, jazz musicians improvise, chefs shouldn’t unless they’re cooking at home.
And as long as those criteria are part of the package, Knowlton is even willing to admit that a “textbook perfect Escoffier” sole meunière and “flawless technique” can be enticing at Petit Trois, a 22-seat spot set in an L.A. strip mall next to a Yum Yum Donuts and owned by a classically trained, heavily tattooed, bearded French chef, Ludo Lefebvre (below); Knowlton praises Petit Trois chef de cuisine Sydney Hunter’s classic onion soup “with a molten roof of Gruyère and Emmenthal cheeses that is the taste of decadence. . . . There is no trick. It’s ego-less cooking by a chef working with his heart as much as his head.” It’s a refreshing reminder by Knowlton that such things do count beyond their “off-the-charts” novelty. But Petit Trois is the only restaurant of its kind of the Bon Appetit list.

    London has a good résumé: After a troubled youth, he enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, with an externship at Restaurant Daniel, worked at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal as a line cook, then at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, moved to California to work at the vegetarian restaurant Ubuntu (now closed) in Napa Valley, then, while trying to open his own place, he did not cook at all for three years. Then, a week before opening Al’s Place, he began thinking of what kind of restaurant it should be. Now, only months in business, he is hailed as a Genius.
    So I wish him good luck, which he’ll need as he gets bombarded with reservation requests for his 46 seats. I fear his days of 90-minute shopping trips will soon be numbered. But maybe the crush of business will make him focus better on menus better tied to the idea of consistency, especially since the throng of newcomers will expect to taste the exact dishes mentioned in the Bon Appetit article.
        But in a world of pop culture where superlatives are the only words ever used to describe everyone from Miley Cyrus to Donald Trump, why should anyone be surprised that chefs are instant megastars and geniuses? I just hope London has not, as Bon Appetit suggests, made a deal with the devil, who consumes egos as fast as it spits them out.

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NEW YORK CORNER

By John Mariani

TASCA CHINO
245 Park Avenue South (near 20^th Street)
212-335-2220
tascachino.com

    You don’t often hear the term “fusion cuisine” anymore, perhaps because an idea that was once so vague has now become the new normal for so many chefs and restaurants around the world. Asian ingredients are everywhere on French and American menus, and vice versa. Curiously enough, NYC has for decades had a micro food culture of Chinese-Latino diners that originated on the Far West Side near the Lincoln Tunnel that were very popular with truckers and late-night workers.
    Chef-owner Alex Ureña (right) has taken this tiny niche much farther than any others have with Tasca Chino, combining his own Latin background via the Dominican Republic with wide-ranging cooking stints in France, Spain (including El Bulli), New York and the Bahamas. His reputation grew after eclectic stints at the River Café, Blue Hill, JoJo and a seven-year tenure at Bouley.
    The large dining room off Park Avenue South has a dazzling dash to it, from the mosaic-tiled floor, abstract paintings of bulls, Spanish dishware, retro sconces and a huge portrait mural of a benevolent looking Chairman Mao. The room is very loud, especially up front, but if you go on the late side midweek, after 8:30 p.m., it’s much less so.
     The impeccably dressed Salim Aba keeps the dining room staff humming, but by having waiters and busboys wear the same outfit, it’s impossible to tell who does what if you need assistance.
    It’s the kind of place where you’d expect to find a fun cocktail list, overseen by sommelier Aviram Turgeman, and at the bar you may indulge in the Spanish tradition called porrón, whereby guests pour sparkling txakolina wine or villacubera cider from a communal drinking vessel into their friends’ mouths. Dress casual--in something you may need to throw out.
    Everything at Tasca Chino is meant to be shared, as if a tapas bar were conflated with a dim sum parlor, and Ureña packs everything with enormous flavor, even when there are no chilies present (though there likely are). The food is all bright with color, the wine and cold beer flows, and one would have to be manic depressive not to have a terrific time eating with your friends here.
     The menu is long with tapas, dumplings, large plates, vegetables, paellas and charcuterie, so I just asked Ureña to send out whatever he’d like. We cried “no mas!” after two hours of amazing food.
    There was a special that night of crab ravioli with salsa verde and clam sauce ($14) and pastry croquetas filled with salted bacalao mash and a grain mustard aioli ($11).   Next came fried garbanzo bean cake with the wholly simpatico heat of Korean kimchee with ponzu and wasabi mayo ($7). Milder in flavors was the cool black bass ceviche with tomatillo, creamy avocado, tomato, onion and squirt of lime juice ($12), while tuna tartare was spiked with Sichuan pepper aïoli ($14) and crudo (raw) fish was simply dressed with soy sauce and shredded ginger ($12). When it comes to the chicken spring rolls with Napa cabbage, bok choy and grated carrots ($8), no number of plates could ever be enough for a table, so double your order.
    Then it was on to the dumplings cooked in a terracotta casserole, which Ureña somehow keeps from turning to mush. The shrimp, smoked paprika and garlic dumplings ($10) could be found on most Chinese dim sum menus, but chicken and spicy chorizo ($9; right) and wild mushroom and truffle ($10) were delectable novelties.
    We were so enchanted with all these small plates that the large plates almost seemed unnecessary, and, in fact, those we tried were not as exciting as the first items that so tantalized our palates. Pan-roasted Atlantic salmon with cauliflower puree, scallions and grapefruit foam ($27) was fine, if not thrilling, but whole roasted dorade gained subtle and aromatic interest from smoked kale, oyster mushrooms and salsa verde ($32). Slow-roasted half of a duck with pickled vegetables, daikon radish, steamed mantou buns and a tamarind barbecue sauce ($36) tended towards the sweet side of Chinese cookery. Again, all these are easy to share.
    I have never been a huge fan of paellas, but Ureña’s paella de coco with coconut milk, chicken, lamb, soybeans, English peas and yellow curry ($30) could easily be mistaken for a great curry in a first-rate Thai restaurant, while the curiously named paella matador with lobster, pork, chicken, clams, peas, mussels and chorizo ($36) was far more flavorful than similar ones I’ve had in Valencia.
   For dessert have the crispy hot churros fritters with hot chocolate or the “stylized” tres leches with several layers of sweet cake and sweeter creams (all $10).
    There is so much more I’m dying to try at Tasca Chino, where the idea of fusion seems so sensible and so complementary. If I didn’t eat here once a week (after 9 p.m., when the noise dies down) I’d probably do take-out twice a week. Ureña, whose creativity I’ve long admired and applauded when he was at Suba, Ureña and Rayuela, is giving us all his best efforts here, and his rigorous training at the best places here and abroad pays off in the balance and nuance of food that could easily be hot, spicy and tasty, but not this imaginative or good.

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“Just after I accepted the fact that I was in love with a dish called vegan chicharrones locos, a phrase from Freud ran through my head. The phrase was `the return of the repressed,’ and it seemed relevant, somehow, to these fried squares of puffed wheat at El Rey Coffee Bar & Luncheonette on the Lower East Side. . . . Other dishes have more ballast, but nothing will make you feel like an anaconda. . . . Butter and sardines are longtime dance partners, but what sends them trotting off in new directions is the salsa verde of carrot greens.”—Pete Welles, “El Rey,” NY Times (July 28, 2015).

Authorities seized 100,000 tons of meat likely smuggled frozen into China through Vietnam, with some of the product having the original shipping dates going back to the 1970s, and transported up to 12 hours without refrigeration. A customs official told Xinhua the sting operation was nauseating: "It was too smelly! A truck full of it! I almost threw up when the door opened."

MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Editor/Publisher: John Mariani. Editor: Walter Bagley. Contributing Writers: Christopher Mariani, Robert Mariani, Misha Mariani, John A. Curtas, Edward Brivio, Mort Hochstein, Andrew Chalk, Dotty Griffith and Brian Freedman. Contributing Photographers: Galina Dargery, Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.