Chef's Garden

July 21

We really, really did not want Marcel Vigneron to win the cook-off last weekend.
I was in Milan (MY-lun), Ohio at the Chef’s Garden Food & Wine Celebration, the annual fundraiser for Veggie U, a program to teach elementary school kids how to grow vegetables. It’s a great cause, you can’t argue with it at all, and the Jones family, which runs Chef’s Garden, are such nice people that you want to help them. So when they asked me to help judge the cook-off, I said I would.
Of course, they provided transportation and accommodation. And in fact it was transportation on Viking Corporation’s private jet, accommodation at the Cleveland Ritz-Carlton. So it wasn’t a sacrifice.
Veggie U’s a charity, but Chef’s Garden isn’t. It’s a very high-end purveyor of precious little herbs and vegetables. We (six other passengers and I, including two guys from the The Food Network, journalists from Saveur and Food Arts, chef Joël Antunes and my fellow judge, Jody Eddy, who is the brand new editor of Art Culinaire) were picked up by Bob Jones, the family patriarch, who sets the aw-shucks tone of the family.
The entire Jones family persona, you see, is so folksy and down-to-earth that it would be a parody if they weren’t absolutely sincere about it.
Bob said something to the effect of “Hi folks, gosh I’m sure glad you’re here. I’m just a senile old man who’s come here to pick you up. My kids don’t let me out too often, so I hope I don’t mess this up.”
See, Bob Jones is the founder of this multi-million dollar company that has something like 130 employees and charges a king’s ransom for tiny little microgreens and precious little vegetables. And many, maybe most, of the top chefs all over the country gladly pay for it. They use top-of-the-line technology to analyze their soil quality, have designed their own ergonomically sound farm equipment for ease in working the land, and are starting to do DNA testing for dangerous types of salmonella and e. coli.
They have weeding machines that shield their laborers — Mexicans who are paid about $11 an hour, have work visas and are flown by Chef’s Garden to and from Mexico annually — from the sun as they lie on their stomachs inches above the soil and pick weeds as the machines move over the crops. It’s quite cool.
It was Bob’s idea, after his more conventional vegetable crop was wiped out by a hailstorm and he was driven to bankruptcy, to rebuild by growing food to the specifications of chefs.
That’s the story told by Lee Jones, Bob’s son and the face of the company, whom I’ve written about here before. His brother, Bob aka Bobby, does the planting while Lee does the marketing.
Lee seems still to be under the impression that he’s helping to run a small family farm. Again, this would be crazy if he didn’t believe it.
So that’s the Joneses, this was the Veggie U Food & Wine Celebration (held near Chef’s Garden, which is in Huron, Ohio, at the Culinary Vegetable Institute — a sort of chef’s retreat and test kitchen), and Jody and I (and a chef and writer named Fred Mensinga) were judging a cook-off.
Okay, actually, the day before the fundraiser was the Chefs Summit, which is mostly a series of 20-minute cooking demonstrations by chefs, including Will Goldfarb, pictured here with his almost-three-year-old daughter Lulu, who was helping him. So was the local volunteer, pictured on the right. It’s worth noting that nearly all of the chefs who did demonstrations did something with molecular gastronomy. Will did many things with molecular gastronomy, but that’s part of his schtick. He and Lulu made a pomegranate-beet mousse using some of his hydrocolloids, his point being that using great products and the latest techniques are in no way contradictory but in fact go hand-in-hand, and that by using a few grams of powder you can really highlight those products at their most pristine (unless you just eat them raw).
And it’s so easy a three-year-old can do it.
While all of this was going on, I got the chance to get to know Joël Antunes, who recently moved from Atlanta to New York to be the chef at The Oak Room, which is scheduled to reopen later this year.
The picture of Joël, on the left, is an old one that was used in the 2001 profile that my former colleague, the late, great Jack Hayes, wrote of him.
But he looks about the same now.
Joël (his surname is Basque, and is pronounced an-tu-NESS) spent much of his childhood in sub-Saharan Africa, where his father worked for Michelin (the division that makes tires, not guidebooks) and bought rubber. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, he spent about four years in Bangkok, where he worked at The Oriental hotel, at Le Normandie restaurant, in the same position that Jean-Georges Vongerichten held before him. There he raced motorcycles and otherwise enjoyed himself before returning to the West. He’s very cool, and I’m looking forward to The Oak Room opening.
Jody Eddy is very cool, too. She was a cook, and among the places she worked was The Fat Duck, so she has an opinion about molecular gastronomy. She pointed out to me that it could take Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal and his team two years to develop a dish. Other chefs try to rush the process, which is why the results are sometimes so bad.
But she doesn’t seem to take that very seriously, and she has a chef’s stamina for partying, sleep deprivation and salty language. We were engaging in the last of those while much of the cook-off was going on, the one that we (and Fred) didn’t want Marcel Vigneron to win.
Because Top Chef is stupid. Well, okay, maybe not stupid. It’s entertaining enough if you like that sort of thing, but we don’t. It’s the celebrity chef phenomenon at its most banal, its fans seem to care more about personalities than food, so the show (or to be fair, its fans) fosters the sort of celebrity chefdom that degrades and distorts what working in a professional kitchen is all about.
And he was competing against the delightful Celina Tio, who is just now leaving The American Restaurant in Kansas City to open a place of her own in Charlotte, to be called Julia(n), and the well-respected Don Yamauchi of Forte, in Birmingham, Mich.
The three chefs were on stage, frantically cooking, while emcee (and chef) Bob Waggoner, along with co-emcee, tie-breaking judge and local celebrity chef Michael Symon entertained the audience and Jody, Fred and I sat on a dais in back of the audience and chatted. I also nibbled on the cardamom shoots that were one of the ingredients the chefs had to use (the others were black cherry tomatoes — another Chef’s Garden specialty — and the pork tenderloin and grass-fed beef filet provided by the sponsors).
Then we went on stage (that’s a picture of us on stage), tasted the food and commented on it while marking our score cards, hoping to hate Marcel’s food. But what can I say? His food tasted the best, and we’re all judges with integrity, so he won.
Damn it!
The competition followed the fundraising tasting event, which was also a competition of sorts, as the chef that one of the sponsors liked the most was given a free trip to Spain to eat at elBulli.
And the winner was Aaron Deal, the chef of Tristan in Charleston, S.C.! Can you believe it?
Well, sure you can. Aaron’s a good chef and a nice chap. Here he is, on the right with Lee Jones and sous chef Wes Grubbs.
He made Manchester Farms quail with carrot purée, baby carrot, and Benton’s Bacon.
The chef who was cooking next to him at the tasting event, Craig Deihl of Cypress restaurant in Charleston, took the grease from the bacon and used it, instead of oil, to make bacon mayonnaise.
I recommend that you try this at home.

Chefs’ Night Out, 2008

June 7

I really wasn’t in the mood for Chefs’ Night Out on Friday. I’m down on the whole celebrity chef thing these days. The hype, the superstarification of them, the fact that their fame no longer seems to stem from their food … A few years ago I thought the celebrity chef phenomenon was good for the industry, but these days I just think it’s all a bit much. As I wrote in a recent column in Nation’s Restaurant News, Gordon Ramsay, who once had a reputation as a great chef, is now best known because he yells at people (although, to be fair, he has long had a reputation for doing that, too).
Still, I feel like it’s important to go to such things, maybe because I’m afraid I’ll miss something good.
Chefs’ Night Out is the traditional pre-Beard Awards Party, thrown by Bon Appétit magazine. It used to be a see-and-be-seen event. Over the past couple of years it’s been relatively low-key (I didn’t even hear about it last year until the night it was happening, and I ended up going to a party at 60 Thompson instead).
But the formal invitations went out this year, and everyone, everyone was invited. I think I might have gotten two invitations, in fact.
I’d had enough of my office by 7:30 p.m. on Friday, and the party didn’t start until 9, so I wandered in the party’s general direction trying to find away to amuse myself for an hour and a half.
I ended up at Grayz, where I thought I’d stop in for a drink and a snack and ended up with a tasting menu that kept me there until after 10, giving me anxiety that I was missing something, even though I wasn’t in the mood for a party with a bunch of celebrity chefs.
But the thing is, I like celebrity chefs, and even more so I like almost-celebrity chefs and sous chefs and chefs with no fame at all and restaurateurs and cooking instructors and my fellow food writers.
And those were the people with whom I spent most of the evening, except for John Besh and Harold Dieterle, who have both been on TV competition shows, so I guess they’re full-blown celebrity chefs
One of the first people I saw was restaurateur Drew Nieporent, who expressed outrage that he hadn’t seen me at the National Restaurant Show Chicago, when his Tribeca Grill was inducted into NRN’s Fine Dining Hall of Fame.
“Was that when you were going to tell me about your new restaurant?” I asked, because you see he gave that scoop to The New York Times.
He didn’t hear me, though. It was that kind of party. Lots of shouting, lots of polite nods, lots of slaps on the back. But as the party ebbed I met a couple of sous chefs named Matt – one at Oceana and the other at The Oak Room, which reopens this fall. Actually I guess Matt from The Oak Room is chef de cuisine. Nice guy, from Philadelphia. Sleeping on the executive chef’s floor for now, but that will work itself out, I’m sure. I also had a good chat with Ben Pollinger and Jansen Chan, chef and pastry chef of Oceana. Jansen said someone had confused him with Pichet Ong earlier in the evening. They are both ethnic Asian pastry chefs who studied architecture, but they look nothing alike.
Pichet was there, too, and he said he might end up working on a project with Andy Yang, the chef-owner of my favorite Thai restaurant, Rhong-Tiam (541 LaGuardia Pl., between Bleecker and W. 3rd). Interesting.
And I met Brian Canlis, scion of the Canlis family, which owns the restaurant of that name in Seattle. He had been in the Air Force, doing sorties over Afghanistan, but he decided to come home and run the family business. He was hanging out with Will Guidara, general manager of Eleven Madison Park, which I guess the in crowd is calling E.M.P. these days. We talked about the Big Apple Barbecue, which happened today. I said I wasn’t going, because it was going to be in the mid-90s today, and the Beard Awards are on Sunday, and I’m leaving for Colorado on Monday, so I wanted some me-time.
Who else? Oh, Andrew Knowlton, Bon Appétit’s restaurant editor (and a bit of a celebrity, since he was a judge on the TV show The Next Iron Chef). It’s been such a long time since I’d spoken with him that I think his voice has gotten deeper since then. Or maybe he had a cold. He pointed to his wife Christina’s ever-so-slightly poochy abdomen. So I complimented Andrew on his virility and he talked about their looking for a bigger place to live.
Mina Neuman’s expecting a baby too. She’s the chef at the Edison Hotel, where the party was held, but she’s been a chef all over New York. I probably hadn’t seen her in five years, though. She looked well. She expressed some sadness that she couldn’t have a drink at the party.
Lee Jones, baby-vegetable and mini-herb supplier to the celebrity chefs, was there in his trademark outfit (literally, he trademarked it) of a white Oxford shirt, red bow-tie and denim overalls. He talked about the cocktail phenomenon, and I suggested that the one I was drinking – a Margarita derivative, with elderflower liqueur – would benefit from some of his micro-shiso.
Finally I chatted with Sean Brock, whom I didn’t recognize because he was clean-shaven and baby-faced last time I saw him, and now he has a beard (although, come to think of it, so do I, and he knew exactly who I was).
Sean was a bit of a pioneer in molecular gastronomy, and he was doing it in Nashville. Now he’s in Charleston and more into farming, although he still finds a place for methylcellulose from time to time.
I have no idea how the food was at the party, because I was all full from Grayz.

What I ate there:
Mini pork-belly sandwich with guacamole and chipotle
Grilled prawn with kaffir lime rémoulade, served on a heated salt block
Sumac-crusted tuna loin with red pepper paste and micro-cilantro
Weisswurst, a pretzel and a cheese spread whose name I didn’t catch
Oyster Rockefeller, salmon tartare and scallop ceviche
Tapioca-crusted lobster on peaky toe crab with chilled honeydew-cucumber gazpacho
Cheese spaetzel, truffled foie gras and a mache and beet salad with hazelnut-truffle vinaigrette and bacon bits
Soft-shell crab in artichoke-tomato broth with saffron-orange emulsion, topped with artichoke heart chips, olives and capers
Thai bouillabaisse in lobster-coconut milk broth
Duck breast with succotash and tamarind glaze
Fruit salad under a little lychee granite, a mini fruit parfait and two chocolate-covered ice cream balls served over dry ice.

we have a lot to learn about Japanese food

September 20

“Thank you for come, I’m so appreciate!” my friend Shigeko Fuke said as I arrived at Ono last night, forgoing the big restaurant opening of the evening (it might have been BLT Market, I don’t remember because the New York restaurant scene in September is a blur, even as it’s happening) to attend The 2nd Fundraising Event for the Japanese Culinary and Cultural Association of America.
I think I met Shigeko and her husband Miguel Cardona five or six years ago at the relaunching of one of the dusty midsize Midtown hotels that get refurbished every once in awhile and throw a press party about it.
Somehow we’ve been friendly ever since. Because of Shigeko I have judged sushi competitions alongside chefs Daniel Boulud and Gabriel Kreuther, spoken to groups of visiting Japanese restaurateurs about food trends in New York, and appeared in the Japanese version of Playboy.
Playboy spelled my last name Thom instead of Thorn, but they really do look similar. As you would expect, I was not the centerfold, but an interviewee. I was recommending restaurants for visiting Japanese tourists.
So how could I turn down Shigeko’s invitation for dinner, especially as I’ll be moderating a talk on all things Japanese and foodish in LA next weekend.
Having sampled a sparkling sake and then switched to Asahi Select, I found myself in a conversation circle with Peacock Alley chef Cedric Tovar, who was sharing stories about his time in basic training in the French army. After that he cooked for the prime minister, so his year's service wasn’t so bad.
Then Lee Jones from Chefs Garden arrived and railed against those who insisted on using local produce whether it was any good or not. Naturally he would rail against that as his super-high-end produce is shipped nationwide. Lee was in town to talk to the Experimental Cuisine Collective about soil today. I tried to make it, but my job and a misbehaving computer foiled my attempts.
I did have time to speak to chef Andre Christopher of Pops For Champagne in Chicago, but he came to my office, which makes it easier. He showed me some photos of his food, one dish of which was garnished with Chefs Garden's super-expensive Mimo chives. Seeing the chives was like seeing an old friend.
Anyway, Lee and I sat at the same table, but I was between the charming food and travel writer Karen Tina and journalist and Iron Chef judge Akiko Katayama, whom you might recall arranged for me to visit Japan’s Niigata prefecture earlier this year.

What I ate and drank:

First course by Nobuo Fukuda of Sea Saw restaurant
Assorted sashimi plate:
Aji/grapefruit, avocado, ginger, yuzukosho, ponzu oil, white truffle oil
Sockeye salmon gravlax/soy roasted almonds, Pecorino-Romano cheese, basil oil, soy and balsamic reduction
Maguro akami/roasted beet purée and Pinot Noir reduction
Tako-ashi/small heirloom tomatoes, yuzu, shallots, wasabi aïoli, pink peppercorn, mozzarella cheese
Madai/ceviche-style miyoga, taro and shiso
Hirame/kobujima and yuzu
Otokoyama sake (tokubetsu junmaishu)

Second course by Kazuhiko Hashimoto of Ono:
Cold egg custard with sea urchin, nagaimo, white truffle-scented edamame soup, sea grapes and shiso bulb

Third course by Akio Saito of the Conrad Tokyo:
Overnight dried barracuda with pickled Daitokuji natto miso paste with grated radish, black vinegar and black rice
Steamed lobster with akatuchi shimeji mushroom, grilled chestnut, fried ginko and leaf-shaped sweet potato chip
Pine needle shaped fried thin wheat noodles with leaf-shaped ginger
Nanotuki organic junmai ginjo sake

Fourth course by takashi Yagihashi of Takashi Restaurant (which isn’t open yet but will be in Chicago):
Seared Washugyu New York strip and braised short ribs with confit Japanese eggplant and caramelized gobo
Taiheizan Kimoto sake (Junmai Kimoto)

Dessert by Kiyomi Toda-Burke and Sandra Palmer of Three Tarts:
Chocolate Bar/bruléed ganache with sansho caramel
Lychée Gelée with goji berries and tarragon
Black + Blonde/black sesame ice cream sandwich and miso blondie
Hanahato Kijoshu aged sake

Petit-fours by Chika Tillman of ChikaLicious

“You don’t win friends with salad”

August 22

I just finished making the rounds of my work area, a salad plate in hand, fork poised, extolling the virtues of the terrific salad I'm eating. It is, it's terrific.
Remember Lee Jones, the canny marketing guru of Chef's Garden whose marketing materials made me wonder what cagey Paul Liebrandt is up to?
Well, after a brief phone conversation he said he'd send me some corn, which he did, along with about eight pounds of heirloom tomatoes, some tiny tiny root vegetables, multicolored cauliflower, a mixed array of tiny eggplant, a mixture of different types of basil, another package of mixed herbs, tiny corn and pea shoots, a little box of cucamelons (which are cucumbers that resemble very small watermelons, the size of a little chocolate Easter egg), and, I mean, a huge sack, a sack of mixed "Asian" greens.
Take the greens and herbs and shoots, sprinkle with one of the five varieties of pretentious rock salt given to me by Stein Eriksen Lodge (SEL, get it?) executive chef Zane Holmquist and drizzle with some Australian lemon-scented olive oil, and you can just leave the peppermill on the shelf.
The massive shipment was sent to me yesterday and I pleaded with my colleagues to help me eat it. They snatched up the corn pretty quickly, and with steady, relentless effort I was able to hand off the tomatoes (alas, raw tomatoes are the one ingredient that I haven't acquired a taste for), and they nibbled at the rest of it. I was munching on the root vegetables and snacking on herbs all day long, but there was still a lot left over, and I'm leaving for Charlotte tomorrow.
I thought of taking it to Grub Street editor Josh Ozersky's birthday party last night. He dubbed it Meatopia and declared it BYOV (V for vegetables). He was joking about the vegetables because of course he didn't have any interest in anyone eating them at his party (although in fact french fries were served with the hamburgers). I thought bringing the vegetables would be good for a laugh, but I decided it required too much effort.
It was kind of a miserable night for an outdoor party — it was at Water Taxi Beach, on the left bank of the East River. It had finally stopped raining, mostly, but the air was chilly and dank. Still, it was my favorite weather for viewing the Manhattan skyline. The tops of the Midtown skyscrapers were disappearing in fog, giving the island the ominous air of a Tim Burtonesque Gotham City.
And it was a good party, with a congenial crowd, surprisingly few of whom I knew, as well as veal tartare, barbecued suckling pig, salt and pepper Texas Game Hen, open pit-cooked kid goat and whole spit-roasted baby lamb. I met Josh's colleague, Daniel Maurer, who seemed earnest, but not overly so, and nice. I caught up with chef Chris Cheung (we talked about the rash of health scares related to Chinese exports and their possible effect on consumption of Chinese food) Pavia Rosatti of The Daily Candy (the topics were, of all things, Chuck Mangione and vegetarianism) and others. I met baseball writer Jonathan Leshanski, who was there as a friend of the Meatopia contest winner Tania Zamorsky (she rewrites classics for not-so-clever children). We talked about mankind's role in the cosmos. I’m serious; we did. Maybe it was the gloomy weather.
So I'm back in the office today with my vegetables. My boss, Pam Parseghian, is taking the heirloom cauliflower. I convinced my colleague and a capella singer extraordinaire Mark Brandau to have a salad because he overheard me uttering a profanity about it (he said something about Jesus weeping when he heard me talk like that). And I've been shoveling the stuff away, because it really is delicious. I'm telling you. But I’m leaving town tomorrow and I still have Karl and Margaret's zucchini to deal with.
My colleague Lorraine Roman said I should give a shout when I get chocolate.

(the quotation in the title of this blog entry comes from an episode of The Simpsons and is something the family sings in a conga line; it is in quotes, because I’m not completely convincd that it’s true)

Restaurant Liebrandt?

August 14

I got a press packet from my friend Lee Jones of Chef’s Garden in Huron, Ohio, on Lake Erie, about the chefs summit it had this summer at its Culinary Vegetable Institute in Milan, which is just a bit inland from Huron and pronounced MY-lun.
If you’ve had little tiny microgreens or obscure baby vegetables in a very high-end fine dining restaurant somewhere between Chicago and New York, the chances are pretty good that they're from Chef’s Garden — but only if you’re in a very high-end fine dining restaurant as Lee and his brother Bobby were getting up to $140 a pound for some of their herbs a couple of years ago. I have no idea what they get now.
Anyway, among the participants listed was:
“–Chef Paul Liebrandt, of his signature Restaurant Liebrandt, opening Fall 2007, New York City, panel member.”
Obviously, an investigation is underway.
[backgrounder below, as I noticed the above posting is myopic and New York-centric and this blog is for the world (!)]
The New York food world has been wondering what Paul Liebrandt has been up to since he and Gilt parted ways last year. Rumors have been rife that he was going to team up with Drew Nieporent (Tribeca Grill, Nobu, Mai House, Centrico et al), but I haven’t heard anything about that lately.
Mr. Liebrandt caused some culinary shockwaves here in the Big Apple some years ago at the restaurant Atlas, where dishes like fresh water eel with watermelon and cocoa-wine sauce thrilled then-New York Times critic William Grimes and thoroughly irritated Gourmet magazine, which gave it an uncharacteristically harsh review (at the time people cruelly speculated that Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, who was Mr. Grimes’ predecessor at the Times, was striking out at her replacement; that doesn’t ring true to me, but it is fun to repeat).
Mr. Liebrandt and the owners of Atlas had a falling out over something, and though the chef had some other gigs, they were nothing as grand as Atlas, until Gilt opened in late 2005 in the space that once was Le Cirque 2000. It was an important opening, as such things go. But either Mr. Liebrandt or his food didn’t get along well with management, and he was replaced by Christopher Lee, a native New Yorker who won accolades at Striped Bass in Philadelphia.
Mr. Liebrandt (he almost invariably calls me Mr. Thorn and it makes sense to maintain that protocol) hasn’t responded to my e-mail yet.
I did have a nice chat with Lee Jones, but I got no more information about the restaurant.

Beard ’07

May 8

“When is it going to be over?”
“Another 45 minutes.”
“But you said that like 20 minutes ago.”
“I know, I’m sorry. You know what? It’s going to be a long time before it’s over. I honestly can’t say how long.”
Oh wait, that was a conversation I had with my seven-year-old nephew, Harrison Thorn, last weekend at the Bat Mitzvah of cousin Yael Kornfeld (it was long, but really quite excellent; her speech made me cry).
But I could have had it at this year’s James Beard Foundation Awards.
Both the Bat Mitzvah and the awards were just a bit longer than three hours — an hour shorter than last year’s Beard Awards, which is a good start.
This was my ninth year covering the awards and I think I’ve had about enough.
The venue was moved this year from the Marriott Marquis to Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.
Members of the press were given actual seats instead of herded into a roped off section in the back as used to be the case. But they were all up in tier two. I went up to my seat. It was seat #13 in box #13, but I decided not to take that personally.
The ceremony started at 6:50, 20 minutes late, and I was all alone in my box, although I was soon joined by Ben Leventhal.
“May I crash your box?” he asked, which sounds dirty but it’s not. He sneaked a couple of photos and made notes with some sort of electronic device while the ceremony got underway with a speech from Beard Foundation president Susan Ungaro and a video celebrating the Beard Foundation, which is 20 years old.
Much of the video was shot during a recent dinner by Denver-based chef Troy Guard, which I attended (Beard Award attendees who paid attention might have noticed my profile in the background for about a second).
I stayed in my obstructed-view seat while David Chang was named Rising Star chef, and then when the year’s first America’s Classics award was being presented Laren Spirer from Gothamist — who was in the next box over — and I slipped down to the press room, where I spent the rest of the ceremony.
There, for the first time in my life, I felt the need to use the word “scrum.”
Honestly, it wasn’t that bad, as long as you didn’t want to hear the acceptance speeches (most of which were appropriately short and innocuous anyway) or see any of the videos, which they seemed uninterested in showing to the only people even remotely likely to write about them.
It was a very polite and congenial scrum, and the sausages and cheese provided by a high-end restaurant supplier were terrific, although I wonder if it’s really a good idea at the fine-dining world’s biggest shmoozefest to serve the biggest chatterboxes — the media — things that are going to have such a deleterious affect on their breath.
Sometimes you have to cover events just to cover them, and that’s what I do at the Beard Awards. It’s unlikely that anything will happen that you can’t read about in a press release, but you never know. And you have to gauge the mood of the crowd, listen to the chatter afterwards, reconnect with people. It might be tedious, but it’s also important.
This year the bloggers were in attendance in fuller force, so that was interesting, and I got to catch up with my friend Andrew Knowlton from Bon Appétit, whom I never see because he doesn’t go out anymore (he said as much: “I don’t go out anymore,” he said).
I also got to hang with James Oliver Cury, formerly of Time Out New York and now of Epicurious, which is always a treat (he loves loves loves his new job, by the way).
And the award ceremony does come to an end eventually. It has to.
It is followed by a reception.
I whipped out my camera for the picture page that we would likely run in Nation’s Restaurant News and mostly left the food to the paying guests, although I did gratefully accept the foie gras handed to me by former Aureole chef Dante Bocuzzi, who’s in the process of setting up his own restaurant in Cleveland. And when Thomas Keller hands you one of his salmon cornets you can’t leave him hanging. It would be rude. Besides, I wanted to take a picture of him with his chef at French Laundry, Corey Lee.
I chatted with the folks at Gilt, including sommelier Jason Ferris who gushed about how great it was working with chef Christopher Lee — how chefs and sommeliers so often say that they click and get along famously, but that it’s rarely true.
He didn’t say he was glad to see former chef Paul Liebrandt gone, perhaps because I wasn’t indelicate enough to ask.
David Carmichael, Gilt’s new pastry chef, similarly raved about the Palace Hotel’s facilities, so of course I ate his berry sorbet, and so it would have been improper not to eat Chris Lee’s Kobe beef.
I reminded Robert and Mimi Del Grande about the night we dined together some years ago at the Bon Appétit Food & Entertaining awards (it was surreal: there in Daniel’s private dining room were the Del Grande’s, Julia Child, Alice Waters, Jacques and Claudine Pépin, Charlie Trotter, David Bouley, Drew Nieporent — who actually spoke to Bouley for the first time in 16 years — Wolfgang Puck, Anna Wintour to introduce Jeffrey Steingarten, Dean Fearing, other really important food luminaries … and me).
Then it was time for the afterparties, so I stopped by the Parker Meridien, where the only person I knew was a freelance photographer for the Beard Foundation. So I rehydrated with some sparkling water, sipped a glass of wine and then wandered off to Hawaiian Tropic Zone, where I met Sam Hazen of Tao and became reacquainted with his co-executive chef, John Villa, whom you might remember from Pico, Patroon, or a photo spread in Playgirl in which he was called something like the world’s sexiest chef.
David Burke was hosting the party, and I congratulated him on the $88 fried rice at davidburke & donatella, which apparently is selling like hotcakes, or maybe like $4 fried rice.
He immediately leapt to the dish’s defense, although I hadn’t attacked it. Hey, if people want to buy an $88 fried rice, sell it to them.
Then I settled into a conversation with Lee Jones and David Varley. Lee is the marketing guy at Chef’s Garden, which supplies many of the fine dining restaurants in the eastern half of the United States (and apparently Las Vegas) with super-expensive micro greens and baby vegetables. He was in his trademark outfit (literally, he trademarked it) of white dress shirt, red bow tie and denim overalls.
David’s the chef de cuisine of restaurant Bradley Ogden in Las Vegas.

Here’s Lee with Celina Tio, who won the award for best chef in the Midwest.
Lee, David and I headed down to Olives, where the last time I went to a Beard Award afterparty it was awful — third-tier publicists and other hangers on — but it had its groove back this year, and it was a lot of fun. I introduced myself to Jean-Georges pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini, because I’d never met him and I thought it was high time I did.
I hate doing that — introducing yourself to someone at a party as if they’re going to remember you the next day.
But he was nice about it and I kept it brief and let him continue the conversation he was having with the pretty woman. I think she might have been Todd English’s girlfriend, but that’s none of my business.

But who won besides David Chang and Celina Tio, you ask?


By the way, this is David Chang, whom I introduced to Ivy Stark, the executive chef of Amalia in New York, so I could take a picture of them together.

One more thing: You might remember that I made some predictions about who would win the Beard Awards. I got seven right, 12 wrong, which, okay, is a failing grade, but it's nearly twice as good as a monkey throwing darts at random would do.

Schmoozing for a cause

February 28

The annual benefit for C-CAP (Careers through Culinary Arts Program — bad name, terrific organization) is always fun, and a good way to catch up witn many of the big players in the New York restaurant scene. The chefs generally show up themselves rather than sending their lackeys, and the industry moguls spend the $450 or more per person required to attend (ticket prices go up to $1,000), because everyone wants to help underpriveleged kids learn to cook.
The benefit, held last night at Pier 60 on the Hudson River, is one of those tasting events at which many chefs (I think 37 at this event) set up tables and prepare food for all the attendees to sample.
My first stop, after sampling Patricia Yeo’s chicken and black mushroom dumplings, was Aquavit’s table, where I wanted to say hello to Johan Svensson. I hadn’t spoken to Johan since I outed him as Aquavit’s executive chef.
Johan said, as he handed me a small plate of beef cheeks with endive salad and horseradish, that he had his hands full in his new job but had settled in well. I told him that I had been to Aquavit for lunch a couple of weeks ago and he expressed annoyance that I hadn’t told him I was there (this is common practice for chefs; the only one whose annoyance really struck me as genuine was Josh DeChellis, who when seeing me eating with a large party at Sumile a couple of years ago practically stormed into the dining room, uttered a few words as he glared at me, stomped back into the kitchen and sent out free stuff).
Johan’s pictured here flanked by extern Jonas Hederqvist and Jonathan Moreira, a beneficiary of C-CAP’s operations in Boston.
I marveled to Alfred Portale at his 22 years as chef at Gotham Bar and Grill and that he had yet to open a restaurant in Las Vegas or Scottsdale or anyplace else.
“Not yet,” he said, as though that were about to change, giving me something to mull as I ate his artichoke ravioli with wild mushrooms, parmesan and rich squab broth.
To his right here is Philippe Bertineau of Payard Bistro, whose wild mushroom and morel flan with black truffle oil and crème fraîche with wild mushroom broth was the hit of the evening.
Drew Nieporent insisted that I write something for Nation’s Restaurant News about the dust-up between Jeffrey Chodorow and The New York Times (Eater.com is following this topic relentlessly, in case you haven’t been). I told him that my colleagues Paul Frumkin and Peter Romeo had the topic covered and I asked him to tell Chodorow that he now needed to follow up on his promises and actually review some restaurants. Drew was then interrupted by some people for whom he had apparently promised to get reservations at elBulli.
Here’s Drew, on the right, with Michael Lomonoco of Porter House.
I caught up with Andrew Carmelinni, who fed me "My Grandmother’s Meat Ravioli,” which, unlike his grandmother’s ravioli, is made with short ribs and costs $16 at his restaurant, A Voce. I asked him if he was aware that he had a type of bean named after him.
Of course he did: The Carmellini bean was thus dubbed by Lee Jones of Chefs Garden, an Ohio supplier that grows produce to order for high-end chefs. Andrew told me he grew up not far from the Jones' farm and knew them long before they were selling herbs at $140 a pound to Charlie Trotter and many, many other fine dining chefs. When he was at Cafe Boulud, he asked the Joneses to grow small haricots verts for him, which they did, and then named them after him.
Andrew is pictured here with Cameron Levkoff, who he said was his assistant.
C-CAP honors a particular chef or restaurateur every year — this year it was Lidia Bastianich pictured here with her trophy, a sculpture of a sprouted fava bean which, as C-CAP founder Richard Grausman points out, must be cared for and nurtured, just like a young person.
C-CAP also has one of its alumni give a brief speech at the gala. This year, the speaker was Amar Santana, whom I’d met back in 2004 when he was sous chef at Aureole. I was having lunch there with the Charlie Palmer group’s publicist and C-CAP’s publicist, who was having Amar make lunch for me. One of the dishes he made was a tuna tartare with celery pana cotta and celery soda. The soda was made by putting mirin and celery juice into a seltzer bottle and squirting it into a shot glass.
I told him it would make a good "Dish of the Week" in Nation’s Restaurant News. I figured I had a 50-50 chance of one of the two publicists actually following up on that and getting me a decent picture of the dish.
Instead, Amar popped into the kitchen, grabbed a digital camera, took a bunch of nice photos, burned them onto a CD and handed them to me before I had finished my coffee.
Smart kid.
Here he is reading his speech, with Tim Zagat looking on.
Now he’s about to be executive chef of a restaurant that Charlie Palmer plans to open in the Bloomingdale’s in Costa Mesa, Calif., next winter. Cool.
Later, as the evening wound down, I ran into Chris Lee, the chef at Gilt, and his wife Melissa, who is a manager at Gotham Bar and Grill. They are pictured below. Chris marveled at the lack of media attention he has gotten since returning to New York from Philadelphia where, as chef at Striped Bass, he had gained national acclaim.

Chris has been back in New York, where he used to work at Oceana under executive chef Cornelius Gallagher, for months, but his first review only came out today.

Here is Del Posto executive chef Mark Ladner with "Iron Chef" Masaharu Morimoto. They know each other not only because Del Posto is across the street from Morimoto, but also because Mark is Mario Batali's assistant on Iron Chef. After serving me his caviar and baccala crostada, he sent me to the next table, where Felidia chef Fortunato Nicotra was dishing up pickled turnip "ravioli" with shaved branzino, pea sauce and Mediterranean mostarda.
Here’s Fortunato with Felidia pastry chef Lara Brumgnach.






One more picture, because you don’t see many of grill cooks. This is grill cook Jennifer McCullen with her boss, Landmarc executive chef Marc Murphy.