French Laundry, Was it Worth It?

I have been struggling with how to best represent my recent meal at The French Laundry. For those who don’t know of the renowned Napa Valley flagship restaurant of Thomas Keller, the cost alone is astronomical enough for many to disregard any positive feedback I might have regarding the experience itself. For those who know it who haven’t yet eaten there, the most common questions are 1.) How did you get a reservation and 2.) Was it worth it? The answer to the first questions is that I can’t take any credit for it. I tried all my connections in the world of food and beverage and try as they might, apparently special favors from this restaurant are rare and I am not on the short list of the lucky people. So my brother’s girlfriend did it the good old fashioned way: she called two months to the day in advance of our desired dinner date and minutes later we had a nine pm seating for four.

The answer to number two is a little more complicated. The short answer is yes. The longer answer involves the why. Why would anyone spend $250 on food alone for the privilege of a four hour experience of one chef’s culinary vision? It’s just food after all.

An outstanding dining experience most certainly involves the food but it is also a sum of the parts. In the case of the French Laundry, it starts with the menu. The occasion of our dinner was to celebrate my brother’s 30th birthday. When we were seated in our upstairs four top, at the top of each menu we received was neatly printed “Happy Birthday Paul!” And as we exited the restaurant at end of the meal we were each handed our own souvenir copy of our night’s menu complete with Paul’s birthday salutations.

Four hours and nine courses (not including amuse bouches and post dessert truffles, candies, and cookies) may seem a bit excessive, but when a chef is devoted to not repeating a single ingredient, save for staples like oil and salt, each course is like a whole new meal. I think a truly great chef will present you with familiar ingredients in unfamiliar but delicious ways and unfamiliar ingredients in recognizable ways that will make you want to eat it again every day of your life. In the case of the latter, the meat-eating contingent of my dining party agreed that by far our best course was the corned veal tongue which had been confited before being cured pastrami style, sliced paper thin and served with cubes of pumpernickel bread done pain perdu (french toast) style along with marinated cherry tomatoes and pickled red onion. I have never eaten veal tongue to my knowledge nor have I ever seen one confited and then corned. But if that dish was available every day of my life I could tell you I would probably eat it.
As far as perfection in the familiar goes, the rib eye cap of Snake River Farms beef was perhaps the single best tasting piece of beef I’ve had in my life. When my brother felt compelled to cut the beef into smaller and smaller pieces just so that the taste wouldn’t end, that might be the sign of a dish well done.

Does the restaurant border on the pompous? The answer is: it does if you let it. Between courses the first bread service arrived and with it came two servers to place brioche rolls on our bread plates and explain not only the bread which had been baked down the street at their Bouchon Bakery but also the two butters, one unsalted and hand churned coming from a local dairy in Petaluma, and the other enriched with fine sea salt from some organic dairy in New England. At that point I may have said (a little too loudly) that I half expected them to tell me that the egg wash on our rolls had been hand painted on by 30 midgets rescued from the circus. Our good natured head server let out a chuckle and from then on I think she realized we weren’t exactly the pretentious table that some of her others might be.

The salt from a 40 million year old mine in Minnesota served with our foie gras course might have been a bit much. And the chocolate truffle service and confection tray served after our dessert course might not have been necessary but when you are paying over $300 a person for dinner, it should be a bit much.

Not everyone I know who has eaten at French Laundry comes out confirming Thomas Keller’s status as the God of nouvelle French American cooking. But it is pretty rare to find someone who denies importance of the restaurant, the unique experience, the quality of the food, the overwhelming service, and finally the conviction that is was money well spent.

Buck, Bok, Kudu

Nearly three weeks since my return from South Africa, I think I have finally digested the experience. In addition to two weeks of hiking, game drives, and wine tastings, I ate. And did I ever eat.

Honestly, aside from wild animals, I didn’t really know what to expect from South Africa particularly when it came to the cuisine. Sure the food of Cape Town has been featured recently in everything from the New York Times Travel section to Bon Appetite, but then again, so has just about every other major metropolitan city. If you look at the travel guides, the food of South Africa doesn’t sounds particularly exciting nor does it seem to have a cohesive identity. Its neighbor to the East, Mozambique, has developed a unique cuisine based around its heritage of Portuguese occupation mixed with local ingredients to produce a unique food culture. South Africa is more of a melting pot than Mozambique having been inhabited by the Dutch, English, French, Germans, Indians who were brought in as slaves and the native population.
Cape Malay cuisine is seemingly the one recognized cuisine that could be considered unique to South Africa. From the heritage of slaves brought from Asian countries such as India and Indonesia, various curries developed in the Western Cape though none of them are particularly strong and heat from chilies is pretty much non-existent.

So as is often the case when you lower your expectations, I was amazed at how delicious most of the food was everywhere I ate in the county. True, aside from a few dishes that repeatedly popped up such as bobotie, a baked casserole made with ground meat and topped with custard, there did not seem to be a unifying style of cooking. However, what made the food of South Africa excel above the level of mediocre was the quality of the ingredients.

In a way, South African cuisine could be compared to what in the United States we call California cuisine. California cuisine was pioneered by chefs such Alice Waters of Chez Panisse who did away with the heavy butter and reduction based sauces of the French and decided to make the ingredients the star of the plate. Creating a menu around farm fresh seasonal ingredients became the California standard that is now followed by chefs all over America.

In much of the country, South Africa has a climate not dissimilar to California making much of the land rich for agriculture. It was the beginning of winter during my South African visit and their tomatoes were sweeter than most California tomatoes are during August. Sweet potatoes were a revelation as unlike orange fleshed yams that most Americans think of as sweet potatoes, the South African sweet potatoes were a dull beige color but were, well, really sweet. And with the varied climates in the country, every fruit was locally grown from the apples which could rival those of Washington to the papayas which tasted as good as any I’ve ever had in Southeast Asia.

And then there was the meat. South Africans love their meat and with good reason, it is some of the best meat I have ever eaten. I joke that I ate five whole antelope during my time there and even if I only ate the volume equivalent of the tiny steenbok, I certainly did my best to east as many kinds of meat cooked in as many different ways as I possibly could. Springbok, a smallish antelope, is certainly one of the most abundant and most delicious. It has a texture similar to lamb but a taste more like venison. Unlike in the US where game must be farm raised for commercial consumption, a certain number of antelope must be killed every year in the wild to control populations and it is those very same springbok you drive past running wild and free that end up on restaurant plates. As that delicious animal has spent its life free from captivity, I found all the game to be lean and packed with flavor in every bite.

In addition to springbok, I ate blesbuck, kudu, ostrich, and warthog, just to name a few. I had springbok in carpaccio, blesbuck shanks braised in sauce, kudu loin grilled, and pretty much all of them in sausages or the ubiquitous jerky snack known as biltong.

When ingredients are so amazingly fresh, and a skilled chef knows how to handle them letting the food do the talking, it almost takes effort to make a bad dish. The worst meal I had was probably the Wimpy burger and Pringles I took down on the long drive to Kruger National Park, and even that, although bad for me, really wasn’t that bad. Even at Umlani, the humble bush camp we stayed at in Kruger, the chef turned out simple and honest dishes that were simply wonderful from pork chops to vegetables au gratin to homemade bread to one of the best crème brulée I’ve ever had.

For not having a unique cuisine, South Africa itself is certainly one-of-a-kind. The landscape is vast and varied, the people are a mix of tribes and cultures, and the food is distinctive in that it is so clearly an extension of that land and the hands that work it. From the smallest sweetest cherry tomato to the majestic horns of the rich and tender kudu, all it takes is a look out a car window to understand just what the cuisine of South Africa is all about.

Little White Boy Peppers

A few weeks ago I had been gorging myself on fine dining, and quite frankly, I was getting burnt out. One can only take so many starched waiters and white linen. After a very generous invitation to a posh private club in La Quinta, California, I was grateful when my host suggested we follow-up the fancy wine tasting with dinner at a very local, very divey Mexican restaurant. Just the thought of gorging myself on chili and lard laden burritos and tacos brought me to a happy place.

Little did I know that this happy place was no ordinary hole-in-the wall Mexican ranchito, for certainly the Southern California desert is full of such establishments. The real draw of El Mexicali Café in Indio, California is an appetizer dish they lovingly call Chilies Gueritos Rellenos de Cameron. Roughly translated by some of my Spanish speaking friends, this means “little white boy fried chilies with shrimp”. “Little white boy chilies” turn out to be mild yellow banana peppers that have been sliced open down the middle and removed of their seed pod but left otherwise intact, including the stem. At that point they are stuffed with a fairly basic mixture of seasoned chopped shrimp and fried, no breading. The real magic happens when the plate is brought to the table: the server sets the plate down, reaches across the table to the usual suspect condiments of Tapito salt and pepper where she grabs, I kid you not, soy sauce. She douses those freshly fried white boy peppers bursting at the seam, literally, with white Mexican ship, in a very healthy smattering of dark, rich soy sauce. At that point we are encouraged to eat the peppers but not before we dip them into a ramekin of (again I kid you not) mayonnaise.

When you are not expecting this dish, which I would never expect until now at any restaurant let alone a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant, it is a thing to behold, and to eat. Now how did this dish come to be? Quite simply, the owner of a small Mexican restaurant in the United States takes a vacation to Mexico where she falls in love with a restaurant dish of shrimp-stuffed banana peppers and vows to bring it back to her restaurant and add it to the menu. Growing up in the American melting pot she has also had a lifetime love of soy sauce. So she decided to combine some of her favorites things and serve it all with a side of mayo because, why not? Everyone loves mayo.

Bizarre, yes, but the flavors are all recognizable. I have had fried peppers without breading at the finest restaurants served alongside aioli, essentially fancy mayonnaise. And peppers, shrimp and soy certainly find their way into any number of Asian dishes. Put them altogether and eat them as a starter to a meal of chili verde, rice and beans, and what could really go wrong?

I have always felt that if you look hard enough there has to be something interesting going on in the food world no matter where you find yourself, even if it is in the middle of the California desert. Today El Mexicali has become so successful that there are now two locations. If you don’t mind having to walk outside to use the bathroom a bit like at a gas station, go to the original. You’ll avoid the gringo crowds at El Mexcali II and you might even get the story of the gueritos rellenos de camaron from the family owners themselves. If you find yourself out that way, or are just getting burnt out on the same old sit-down restaurants, there are apparently nothing quite like shrimp stuffed little white boy peppers doused in soy with side of mayo to get even this jaded fine-diner out of an eating rut.

My Own Personal Golden Arches

Is it odd that a tall, light haired, white girl would feel at home in an area largely made up of small, dark haired, Asians? Sometimes I think that while comfortably wandering the streets of Chinatown. Where the Chinatown is located is not so important. Maybe that is what is great about those neighborhoods in so many of the world’s finest non-Asian cities. The same way we might seek a McDonald’s in Japan after a week of eating fish and rice, we can always feel a connection to somewhere familiar when walking through rows of fluorescent lit restaurant windows framed by swaying Chinese lanterns.

Ever since my first dim sum experience, in Ithaca, New York of all places, I seek out that weekend communal noshing experience when I am in the mood to share dumplings and pass turnip cakes with a bunch of friends. As much as the shared Chinatown experience, I cherish my alone time in those often crazy streets. The produce stalls full of slightly wilted bok choy, the baskets of odiferous dried shrimp, the strange but alluring windows of the medicine shops, all of it a wonderful hodgepodge of interesting, unfamiliar looks, smells, and tastes.

But even the unfamiliar becomes familiar at some point. Which is why halfway through a crazy month of travelling, checked into another new hotel, I found myself hailing the first cab to San Francisco’s Chinatown. After checking in with some Chowhound recommendations, I decided try out what I thought was a Shanghaiese restaurant. It turns out Z and Y Restaurant is more of a Szechuan restaurant but was enough to satisfy my Asian yearning just fine. A hotpot of fresh seafood and tofu with cabbage and bok choy alongside a steamer basket of too many pork and chicken dumplings for this lone diner to consume was just the recipe for my home sickness. Funny how a cuisine so foreign has come to be my own personal golden arches.

I am a Trencherman

The name of this blog, "Trencherman", has been my secret favorite word for several years now. A bit of a word junkie and an addict to cuisine, trencherman, "a person who eats and drinks to excess", or "a dining companion", seemed like a natural fit for a forum in which I could write freely about the art of eating. For this will be not just an outlet for relaying my own adventures in all things food, but can serve as a companion for those wishing to expand their own culinary horizons.

One does not need credentials to be a trencherman but that being said, I have a few. But just because I am qualified to judge foie gras at Daniel or the grilled quail at Vincenti, does not mean that is where I prefer to spend my time. The truth is as much as I love the starchy glare of a white tablecloth, my heart will always lie in the trenches. I love the pomp and circumstance of the newest hottest restaurant, but nothing makes me happier than a steaming bowl of pho on a formica table under flourescent lights in a strip mall in Little Saigon. Heaven.

In the Trencherman Report we will cover restaurants of all hedonistic levels. There might be coverage on the bone marrow at Pizzeria Mozza. We might discuss how the exploding balls of fried ceasar salad soup at Komi in Washington DC were the highlight of a 20 course meal. Or I might send a love letter to my new favorite spot at the Farmer's Market, the pupusa stand.

Eaters tend to also cook so we will cover that end of the dining spectrum as well. I may regale you with the drama of the four hours it took for me to grind the meat, mix, and stuff three pounds of sausage. Or take you day by fermented day through the process of making your own kimchi. Or, I may layout the best way to stir up the best Sazerac cocktail.

This is a sounding board for my food obsession, a table companion to my love of eating. Any good sounding board needs another person to bounce things off of. As such, expect guest blogs from some of my real life trencherman friends such as my brother. Every good eater needs a good companion. Between myself and my friends, you will have a trencherman in your own home whereever this blog finds you.