The United States of Arugula (51 page)

One day, Iris Bailin, the food editor of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, asked the Joneses if, since they were selling zucchinis, they would sell her zucchini blossoms. “I was nineteen years old, wet behind the ears, and I was embarrassed at this lady’s stupidity,” Lee says. “But she kept bugging me every week for these zucchini blooms, and I finally brought ’em down one week. I sort of sheepishly had them hidden underneath the counter and wanted her to kind of quietly come around to the back, ’cause I didn’t want any other
farmers to accuse me of being, you know, a flower-pushing farmer. So I got her to come around, and, well, what does she do? She starts screaming in the middle of this farmers’ market,
‘Oh, my God! I haven’t seen these since Paris, France! Do you realize what these are?! I’ve gotta introduce you to a chef!’
Next thing you know, there’s about eight people swarmed around her, and I am beet-red embarrassed.”

Like a hunky Iowa rube come east to pose for a Calvin Klein underwear ad, the Joneses thought the city folks’ requests to be bizarre and against their better judgment, but they needed the money. “The other farmers at the market were more established and comfortable,” Lee says, “but we were willing to do things like pick lettuces when they were just three inches high because we were desperate to survive.” Eventually, in the late eighties, the Joneses realized they could make a go of selling
exclusively
to chefs. Lee made the rounds, signing up Trotter, Jean-Louis Palladin, Daniel Boulud, and the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain as customers.

“We had sent Mr. Trotter some samples and things, and he challenged us,” Lee Jones says. “He said, ‘Here’s what you can do for me: I am
over
mesclun. Everybody in the country’s doing it. You can even get it in grocery stores and delis now. I want something that is so over the top, so sexy and original, that nobody in the country is going to have seen it before.’ Well, three months earlier I’d tried picking some really tiny greens and gotten laughed at by the local chefs, who said, ‘Why don’t you let it grow up?’ But I restarted it, and Mr. Trotter sent some of his team out, and they had some suggestions. Microgreens were basically invented right there. I think it was bull’s-blood beet leaves, mizuna, tatsoi, and some tiny spinach and arugula.”

AS FOR THOMAS KELLER
,
the French Laundry was his second attempt at forging his own personal cuisine. Rakel, which opened in 1986, was “kind of that almost grand café type of high-energy meets downtown meets finedining” place, he says, the sprawl of his description explaining why the
restaurant never quite clicked. Although some of his French Laundry ideas were already in place, such as his technique of butter-poaching lobster out of its shell, resulting in meat with a tender, almost erotically glossy mouth feel, Rakel fell victim to the stock-market crash, poor design, and Keller’s own less than even temperament at the time; Colicchio says he was ousted by Keller in a “You can’t fire me, I quit!” situation, even though the two were good friends.

Chastened by Rakel’s failure and brought back to reality by an unhappy stopgap stint in LA, Keller was alerted by Jonathan Waxman that the French Laundry, already a lovely country restaurant in Napa Valley, run by Don and Sally Schmidtt, was up for sale. Keller moved to get the deal done, and set about making his Fernand Point fantasies come alive. “The vision was simple,” he says. “A three-star Michelin French country restaurant.”

Except that all of Keller’s years of training, and the palpable relief he felt at working in this cheery, vine-smothered, wood-frame house on a quiet street in wine country, allowed him to dream up weirder, kookier ideas than he had before—borderline lysergic food visions that somehow never tipped over into gimmickry. He used pop-culture reference points to inspire him, coming up with a “macaroni and cheese” of butter-poached lobster and mascarpone-enriched orzo, a “bacon and eggs” that was really a soft-poached quail egg served on a spoon with crumbles of bacon on top, a “peas and carrots” of lobster pancakes with a pea-shoot salad and a ginger-carrot emulsion, a “surf and turf” that’s a cylinder of monkfish medallion on top of braised oxtail, and a “coffee and doughnuts” dessert that’s really a cappuccino semifreddo accompanied by little cinnamon-sugar fry cakes.

“I mean, as children in America, we all grew up with those things,” Keller says, alluding to the quotation-marks descriptors. “So, if you create a different reference point for somebody but still accomplish the same flavor profile, what have you done? You’ve made somebody think differently about it.”

The strange thing about all this playfulness and subversive fiddling with perception is that Keller is not a barrel of laughs to be around, not a garrulous
glad-hander in the manner of many a famous American chef. He’s reserved and perpetually furrowed of brow, like he’s trying to figure out the next stage of his perverse experiment on humanity. Famously, he has said that the tasting menu at the French Laundry is constructed on the basis of “the law of diminishing returns,” the idea being that after one or two bites, the sensory pleasure of tasting something starts to diminish precipitously. “What I want is that initial shock, that jolt, that surprise to be the only thing you experience,” he wrote in his
French Laundry Cookbook.
“So I serve five to ten courses”—often, it’s many more than that, even—“each meant to satisfy your appetite and pique your curiosity. I want you to say, ‘God, I wish I had just one more bite of that.’”

In Keller, the New American concept, brightened by California-fresh ingredients and executed with the rigor of the old
grande cuisine
, reached its apotheosis. With the service and the location more than measuring up to the food, it was, at last, really happening: America’s own analogue to Monsieur Point’s La Pyramide. Ruth Reichl, perfectly positioned, as ever, on the front lines of U.S. gastronomy—she ascended to a national pulpit as
The New York Times
restaurant critic just a year before the French Laundry opened—concluded in 1998 that “American restaurants have, finally, come of age. The cocky young chefs who strutted onto the stage in the 1970s and eighties have evolved out of the stupid-food stage. No longer fresh out of school, these American chefs have traveled widely. They have tasted and learned, and they now have enough experience to produce signature food without showing off. Heading into middle age, the best of them display both creativity and restraint.” A year earlier, Keller, headed into middle age at forty-one, had been named the Outstanding Chef in America at the James Beard Awards.

THE CONFLUENCE OF
events in 2004 was too striking and poignant for anyone in the food world not to notice. Just as Keller was celebrating his return to New York with his new restaurant, Per Se, the first among equals in a suite
of expensive and expensively constructed ultra-dining restaurants at the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, three of the last remaining links to the Henri Soulé era, La Caravelle, Lutèce, and La Côte Basque, served their final meals. (Jean-Jacques Rachou, La Côte Basque’s owner, was keeping his space but reconfiguring it as a brasserie.) “The winds that blew La Côte Basque onto the reef are far more volatile than mere actuarial statistics,” wrote Bryan Miller in
The New York Observer.
“Some of Mr. Rachou’s contemporaries, including several of his protégés, venture that his sclerotic devotion to the verities of Escoffier-style cooking are about as voguish today as a dickey.” The current generation of fine-dining enthusiasts, Miller said, “frequent places that serve lighter, cross-cultural cuisine in a casual, often raucous and visually stimulating setting.”

The Time Warner restaurants weren’t necessarily raucous, but they otherwise fit Miller’s description. Keller’s Per Se more or less duplicated the French Laundry’s culinary adventurism in a modernist, Adam Tihany–designed dining room that looked like the private waiting lounge of the world’s most exclusive businessmen’s airline, while Café Gray, the return to action of Gray Kunz, the French-Asian fusionist behind Lespinasse, one of the most acclaimed New York restaurants of the nineties, was a chocolate-brown brasserie whose look was conceived by Tihany’s chief rival in high-stakes restaurant design, David Rockwell. In addition, there was Masa, the $350-a-head sushi restaurant run by Masa Takayama, who closed his tiny, superexpensive Los Angeles place, Ginza Sushiko, to relocate east, and V Steakhouse by the unstoppable Jean-Georges Vongerichten, with bordellochic decor by Jacques Garcia, the designer also responsible for the sumptuous, Gustav Klimt–referencing decor of David Bouley’s second fine-dining restaurant, the Austrian-themed Danube.
*

Another conspicuous feature of the Time Warner restaurants—
audaciously billed as “The Restaurant Collection” by the center’s retail developer, Kenneth A. Himmel, as if they were part of a rewards package formulated especially for holders of the American Express Centurion black card—was that its chefs were all established stars, sought out precisely because of their fame and accomplishment. It was a curious economic model, in which an expensive new shopping center and luxury office-condo complex hoped to attract customers on the basis of chef prestige and restaurant traffic. For Drew Nieporent, who forayed into New York’s then dead Tribeca neighborhood in the mid-eighties because the real estate was cheap, the Time Warner Center is a step too far—not the coming-of-age of American restaurants, as Reichl had it a few years ago, or a cluster of American analogues to Europe’s Michelin three-star pleasure palaces, as Keller would have it, but “restaurants on steroids.” Nieporent has dined at Masa and reveled in the multicourse majesty of Takayama’s preparations (which received a four-star rating from
The New York Times’
Frank Bruni), but even though he liked the food, he dismisses the overall concept as “elitist bullshit.”

“It’s blown up to something that is almost illegal, if you think about it,” Nieporent says. “Because what’s screwed up this country is all this inflated real estate. It affects everything—food cost, operating cost, the price of your check. Suddenly we all discovered raw fish and rice? I mean, at
$250
it’s not right; maybe even at $150 it’s not. I mean, Masa, you’re in the fuckin’ Time Warner building, motherfucker! Before it was in the goddamn strip mall in LA! Which was more fitting?”

These words are especially provocative coming from Nieporent, who, with Robert De Niro, plucked Nobu Matsuhisa from a strip mall in LA (or at least a strip-mall-like stretch of La Cienega Boulevard) and, in 1994, set him up with an elaborate David Rockwell–designed dining room in Tribeca, the site of the first Nobu, home of Manhattan’s most desired raw fish and rice. Nobu has since cloned itself ten times over, in locations as far-flung as London, Tokyo, Miami, and Milan, effectively becoming the leading global brand for high-end “New Style Japanese” cuisine, as Matsuhisa himself calls it.

Nieporent admits to being troubled by this willy-nilly expansion. “I’m not about cookie-cutting this stuff,” he says. But he argues that, at least, the Nobus rein themselves in with realistic pricing and unpretentious food, unlike the rash of newer, design-aggressive,
Blade Runner
avant-Japanese restaurants that “try to out-Nobu Nobu” and rationalize charging $15 even for edamame—the traditionally cheapo premeal snack of salted fresh green soybeans—by serving the beans still attached to the branch.

ANDRÉ SOLTNER AND
Jean-Georges Vongerichten were both born and raised in Alsace, but they’re upheld as polar opposites, representations of the old and new paths of the fine-dining chef in America. Soltner was the man of unstinting dedication to his one kitchen, allegedly absent from it only five times in the thirty-four years that he ran Lutèce. (He sold the restaurant in 1994 to the Ark Restaurants group.) He is rumpled and paunchy, as an old French chef should be, and ran Lutèce as a glorified mom-and-pop operation with his wife, Simone, who greeted guests in the front of the house.

Vongerichten is the guy who earned four stars before his thirtieth birthday at the Lafayette; bolted in 1991 to open his own place, Jo Jo, a town-house bistro that served enlivened (and lightened) French food flavored with Asian-style broths and juices; followed up Jo Jo just a year later with another New York restaurant, Vong, in which his Asian influences came to the foreground; scaled the dizzy heights of gastronomy in 1997 with Jean Georges, his ultimate fine-dining restaurant; and then, having achieved all that, went on an entrepreneurial rampage in the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century—expanding the Vong brand to other cities across the globe, duplicating Jean Georges in Shanghai, opening a steak house in Vegas, and dabbling in mid-priced restaurants devoted to Puck-style eclecticism (right down to serving tuna-wasabi pizza) and specific Asian idioms (Chinese food, Southeast Asian street food). Streamlined, physically fit, and robotic in appearance—he resembles a member of Kraftwerk, the German
synthesizer band—Vongerichten staffs his restaurants with beautiful, icy hostesses, one of whom, an aspiring actress named Marja Allen, became his second wife in 2004.

Alan Richman,
GQ
’s esteemed, long-serving food writer and an early champion of Vongerichten’s, contrasted the younger chef unfavorably with Soltner in a scathing broadside published in 2004 entitled “Stick a Fork in Jean-Georges.” Throughout the nineties, Richman celebrated the rise of Vongerichten and other entrepreneurial chefs, among them Boulud, Batali, and Lagasse, but he argues now that “the franchising of the fine-dining restaurant is the worst thing that’s happened to these guys. I think things peaked in the early nineties, before they all started opening multiple restaurants”—a sentiment echoed by John Mariani, Richman’s longtime counterpart at
Esquire
, who has been even more vituperative on the subject, actively campaigning against the scourge of the absentee celebrity chef.

In the
GQ
article, Richman noted Vongerichten had become a partner in fifteen restaurants and wrote, “Certainly, such upward mobility is an inspiration to cooks who toil in Gulag-type working conditions, stirring stocks long into the night. To those of us who are devoted to dining, it is a disaster. Perhaps I could regard the new entrepreneurial Vongerichten more favorably were he instilling his genius in the chefs who work for him, but this is not taking place.” Richman visited several of the restaurants in Vongerichten’s portfolio and declared each one to be disappointing, either operating on autopilot or downright shoddy. He portrayed Vongerichten as a fallen hero in the grips of some kind of pathological promiscuity, an unchecked addiction to opening new places: “They say he has little vanity, no ego. They do not know what drives him. They only know he cannot stop.”