CHECKING OUT THE CELEBRITY CHEFS:
GRANT ACHATZ'S ALINEA AND
DAVID CHANG'S MOMOFUKU KO
By John A. Curtas

 

Grant Achatz (center) at Alinea, Chicago

    In the past decade, restaurant going has become a sport, and the prize is bragging rights. Like Big Game hunting, it doesn't take much skill to pursue this hobby, just money.
    Most restaurant hunters focus on the biggest game—the most exclusive, hard to get to, hard to get into, restaurants on the planet. The wholly obtuse “50 Best Restaurants” is their Field & Stream, and the salons of social media are where the hides are hung.  As with all trophy seekers, innate pleasure is secondary to tangible achievement.  In this arena, there is no such thing as the private, visceral enjoyment of a sensual pleasure. If you didn't get a picture of it, did it really happen?
       Once, only the Michelin Guide had that kind of clout; now it is the fodder of the internet.  But the rise of social media, starting around 2009, when most grownups discovered Facebook, and a phenomenon known as FOMO (fear of missing out) fueled the current mania. Once a well-heeled show-off learned that there was social currency in being able to boast about where and what you were eating, the game was on. Suddenly, thousands of foodies around the globe started putting restaurants on a pedestal far out of proportion to what was actually happening in them.

    Chicago’s Grant Achatz was perfectly situated to capitalize on this  phenomenon when he opened Alinea (left) in 2005, and his timing couldn't have been better.  Between the hagiographic slobbering the media was doing over Ferran Adria’s molecular cuisine in Spain and similar praise for Thomas Keller for his endless tasting menus at French Laundry and Per Se, it was time to turn up their ideas by introducing to the Midwest the glories of marathon meals composed of unrecognizable food.
    It was the height of the economic boom—which  was about to go bust—and for several years Achatz and his restaurant were the media darlings of foodie America. The Chicago media treated him like a saint no one dare criticize. 
    Alinea’s ten-year anniversary called for a re-boot, so the restaurant now  boasts a downstairs main room and an upstairs salon with a slightly shorter menu. Dinner is now more like fifteen courses than twenty-five, though it's still a three-and-a-half-hour slog, and the price is still a hefty car payment, exclusive of tax or tip. There is no bar. Indeed, there is barely a storefront (above), only an address on a building.
    My meal at Alinea 2.0 began with Achatz’s signature black truffle "oreo” (below)—a dish that is supposed to dazzle with its ability to intensify and combine the flavors of two iconic ingredients, Parmesan cheese and truffles, but for me managed to taste of neither. It looks like one thing and tastes like something else. And that's about all it tastes like, thus setting the tone for most of your meal.
       There are all sorts of gee-gaws (19th century cocktail shakers, candy bar balloons, molecular disguises) put in place to elicit oohs and ahs, but what is missing is flavor—the taste of things as they are supposed to be, not what they've been manipulated into. Thus, a spear of rhubarb with avocado and coriander barely hints at any of those;  continue directly to a "Pea, Parmesan, Meyer Lemon Swirl/Apple Lemon Balm Yuzu" that was an odd soup, attended to by a mass of acid with some powdered something beside it. (Do people still think reducing food to dust is über-cool? In Chicago, apparently yes.)
    To Achatz’s credit, his Thai coconut with black bass actually tasted of those ingredients, but I'm still trying to figure out what was going on with a barely there “Rouille Nori Paper” in a small bowl of olive oil-slicked broth. The words "langoustine" and "Bouillabaisse" appeared in the title but never arrived on the palate. Likewise, a pork belly with curry mango could've come from anywhere, and (to keep the clichés coming) the short rib was loaded with smoke. As with most of the menu, the advertised flavors (e.g., hamachi, blueberry, lapsang souchong, morel steam, rosemary, kombu) never rang out, perhaps because there were so many of them per dish that they canceled each other out.
         Whether you like the Impressionist painting mess they call dessert here (left) pretty much depends on your capacity to suspend your disbelief in how something so convoluted could be so much less than the sum of its parts.
    Alinea surely had its place in bringing such consumable convolution to the Midwest a decade ago, but these days it's little more than chefs doing cartwheels in the kitchen and pirouettes on the plate, and not very well at that. Respect for ingredients isn't the watchword here—the ability to manipulate them is all that matters.  Did Achatz lose his palate or did this restaurant lose its mojo?  Belt-notching gastronomads don't care, but anyone with all their taste buds ought to.
    Life is too short to be confused by your food.

    It’s hard not to admire what Chef David Chang has done with Momofuku (“Lucky Peach” in Korean). What began as an eight-seat eatery in lower Manhattan in 2004 has spawned an empire that now stretches from Soho, New York, to Sydney, Australia.  It’s also not hard, after eating your way through Momofuku, to sometimes wonder what all the shouting is about—shouting from the rooftops being what the influential New York food media has done almost from the day Chang opened. Once they laid the groundwork, social media took over, and for well over a decade foodies the world over have been inundated with tales of Chang’s influence and ground-breaking cuisine.
    When other chefs and restaurants went into recession hibernation in 2008, Chang (right) kicked his expansion into high gear, opening noodle bars, Vietnamese restaurants and impossible-to-get-into joints in NYC, expanding his brand while taking full advantage of the rise of the Millennials and their need to have something tasty (and Instagram-worthy) to eat. There are now five Momofukus in the world, more are planned, and to the delight of his fans, Las Vegas finally has one.
      In the beginning, the entire Chang oeuvre consisted of barely a handful of items. Because of its small size, the original Momofuku Noodle Bar in lower Manhattan featured a few bowls of ramen, a couple of appetizers and some stuffed bao buns and that was it. On such bare bones was a food empire born.
    The genius of what Chang did was in upgrading those noodles, enriching the broth, and loading smoky bacon onto classic Korean and Japanese items that, until he came along, most Americans wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot chopstick.  He also cooked and seasoned the Korean fried chicken like a real chef and made a big deal about using better ingredients. No bottom bin ham for him. He used real Virginia country ham, Kurobuta pork, and the fluffiest bao he could find. He cured his own pickles too (a big deal in 2004) and made sure everyone in the food media knew about it.
    Most of all, though, Momofuku became all about umami—the word for the intense, savory quality that only the densest, saltiest, most amino-acid rich foods (like steak, cheese, smoked meats and soy sauce) possess.  In the Chang universe (then and now), it’s all about overwhelming your palate with this fifth taste (after sweet, sour, salty, and bitter). His food does this at the expense of delicacy and refinement, but his audience doesn’t seem to care one bit—subtlety being as important to a David Chang meal as dialogue is in a Vin Diesel movie. Thus will most of your meal be so umami-drenched that your palate will be screaming for mercy after several plates, each overloaded with whatever miso-shoyu-smoky-kombu concoction Chang can’t help incorporating into every bite.
    If smoke is your thing, you’ll be in smoked hog heaven. By all means then, don’t miss the pork meatballs swimming in (you guessed it) plenty of smoked black-eyed peas.  Is Momofuku’s pork ramen soup good? Yes, but it’s also so smoky that three sips in you will want to run up the white flag. Ditto the oysters Momofuku, whose seafood essence is obliterated by smoky bacon bits. There’s also a smoked pork chop and roasted mussels on the menu, with the mussels being festooned with (wait for it) plenty of smoked Benton’s bacon! The food is so smoky it ought to be sponsored by Marlboro.
    When Chang and his troops are through pouring on the smoke, they find many other ways to up the umami ante. Sichuan rice cakes are thick stubby rice noodles smothered with pork sausage, while chilled spicy noodles get a heap of sausages and cashews to effectively overwhelm the interesting starches and spices beneath them—pork sausage and cashews being the belt and suspenders of the umami-overload universe.
    After three trips around this menu, I threw in the towel. There are some good things to eat here—the spicy cod hotpot using quality fish, well-treated; the katsu chicken with an old-fashioned mushroom cream sauce—but by the time you get to them, you will have been drowned by a tsunami of umami.
    By all means get the pork belly buns (the ones that made Chang famous), but skip the chicken karaage version, which is sadly stringy. The vaunted rotisserie chicken comes with deep-fried bones (some edible, some not), and is not as good as it sounds.
    What is good is the seating. You may have trouble getting one, but that’s only because every under-40 in Vegas seems to be beating a path to this second floor location in The Cosmopolitan these days. What they find is a large restaurant fronted by a long bar that itself is five times the length of the original operation. Beside that bar are a number of high top tables for waiting, drinking or overflow dining, and beyond them a huge open kitchen that looks like it could feed an army base. For its size, the room is remarkably comfortable, the tables well spaced, and the noise level relatively civilized. Service is also top notch, with management and waiters who are well versed in the food.
  The wine list is sinfully overpriced, and the sake/sochu list woefully sparse.
    David Chang deserves a lot of credit. He made this food safe for aspirational foodies and non-Asians alike—folks with limited resources who wanted to hop on the foodie bandwagon and expand their knowledge of chewy noodles, miso broth and various edible esoterica. All of this was a treat when you were ducking into a teeny tiny noodle emporium for a quick fix of soup and a bao bun. To put an entire meal together from this food, however, after your taste buds have been bludgeoned into one-dimensional submission,  is a big-box experience of a different order. If you still use “party” as a verb, and don’t mind that everything on your table tastes the same, you might feel right at home amongst all the umami. Nothing about Momofuku is as good as its reputation, but in this day and age, that’s enough.

    Since cutting back a bit on my out-of- town travel and my impulse to check out every new restaurant in NYC, I’ve been able on occasion to go back to favorite places I’d almost forgotten about, like Salinas, which seven years ago I put on my list of Best New Restaurants in America. So when an opportunity to dine with a German hotelier came along, I thought he’d enjoy something as unusual and imaginative as this colorful modern Spanish restaurant on Ninth Avenue and 18th Street.   
     I said modern, not modernist, for while owner Luis Bollo is one of the most highly creative Spanish chefs around, he has never gone over the edge of concocting molecular fantasy food in the tradition of Ferran Adrià and his acolytes. Bollo knows all those tricks but uses only his more traditional culinary skills to create dishes where everything is quite beautiful, sometimes complex but always tasting of the primary ingredient on the plate.
    For instance: I do not like fishy seafood, too often the result of an ingredient not of the best or freshest quality. But Bollo knows how to treat seafood which of its very nature has a strong flavor, so, in the case of his dish of fresh white anchovies, he marinates the little slivers of fish in cava sparkling wine, whose acid, he said, cuts the fishiness. He then serves it on crunchy multi-grain toast with pomegranate caviar, and a sweet Bell pepper vinaigrette ($12). The result is as fascinating as it is delicious. Anyone who has ever eschewed anchovies should taste this dish (right).

     One of the most wonderful dishes at Salinas is the coca de morcilla y