Best Food Writing 2010 (16 page)

But this time, he did not stay in the area. He’d headed west: Knoxville, Tennessee, according to one of my tipsters.

“You’re not going, are you?” my wife asked when I told her one night. We were out at dinner, on one of my appointed rounds: a generically stylish American restaurant with the same menu of rarefied, rustic dishes, it seemed, I had eaten for the last year or more. It was as if the chefs had all attended the same seminar.

“Probably not,” I said.

My wife set down her martini thingie. “Here we go again.”

“What?”

“Probably not means probably yes. You watch. You’ll end up talking yourself into going.”

“I mean, it’s pretty far.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And it’s not like I haven’t ever had his cooking. . . .”

“Enjoy yourself.”

WASHINGTON, ATLANTA, KNOXVILLE . . . and then where? Where would it end?
Would
it end?

Was Chef Chang destined never to find peace, never to find a permanent home, to tramp from town to town, state to state, a culinary mercenary, a tormented loner genius? I wondered if growing up in Hunan Province, he could have imagined a life like this: a cooking vagabond, hopscotching across America and the Deep South—a restless and hungry seeker, Kerouac with a wok. Was this the life he dreamed for himself? Trading one suburban strip mall for another, the places as indistinct as the landscape, homogenized and featureless? Lacing complex dishes with the famed
ma la
peppercorn for Americans who knew nothing of him or his country, who could not tolerate heat and would much rather he concentrated his attention on their General Tso’s chicken?

This was the Chef Chang I had created in my imagination, in lieu of actual knowledge of the actual Chef Chang. A chef with poetry in his soul, a romantic figure who yearned to break free of all that constrained him, including the limits of his own imagination.

It troubled me to think that there might be another Chef Chang, or many other Chef Changs, that I had driven to Atlanta and now hopped a flight to Knoxville to eat the cooking of a man who was on the run from authorities, or who had gotten in deep with the wrong people and who did not pick up and leave because he sought a greater freedom, but who picked up and left because he was interested merely in survival.

Who else, I wondered, was following him?

Maybe he was the one and also the other, a romantic figure on the run. Maybe he was neither, and all the speculation was horribly off base.

I had driven to Atlanta with the idea that eating more of his food would bring me closer to understanding him and whatever compelled him to keep leaving places, but it hadn’t even brought me closer to understanding why I picked up and followed him. I liked to think that I was recreating his own journey westward, tracing his steps in the hope of entering his mind and heart. I liked to think that, because otherwise I would have to come to grips with the idea that I was losing my mind, just a little. Washington, Atlanta, Knoxville. . . . Where would I stop?
Would
it stop?

I HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT the food was addictive—the way you ate more than you intended for no other reason than that the scorching heat set your heart to racing and caused you to sweat and gave you the feeling of release and exhilaration. Now I had to wonder if there was something addictive, too, in the quest itself. I reflected on that very question as I sat at my table at Hong Kong House, surrounded by half a dozen dishes, my heart racing, feeling happier than I had in weeks and maybe months, the simple contentedness that comes of knowing that you are in the right place at the right time.

I had suspected that this meal would be my last, that I was not long for the road, that I couldn’t continue to follow him from city to city. He was the one in exile, not me. Enough. I’d had my adventure.

I said all this to my wife when I returned. She looked at me the way she often looked at me when I made a promise to stain a bookcase or embark on some other project of house beautification:
I’ll believe it when I see it
.

And in truth, I knew when I said it that I had said it simply to have said it, to give the idea a spin, to look good; I was test-driving, I wasn’t buying.

A year later, I learned that Chef Chang had bolted again. He had come east and was cooking in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a place called Taste of China. I was in Richmond, doing research for a book, when I got the news.
An hour away. He hasn’t been this close since he was in D.C.
What came over me, then, was almost chemical, an emotional sensation akin to that triggered by the peppers, an involuntary systemic reaction. I was salivating.

I WAS STANDING OUTSIDE the bathroom at Taste of China with my cellphone pressed to my ear, assuring my wife that I was fine, that the trip had been a smooth one, when I spotted Chef Chang through the narrow window of the double doors and subsequently lost the thread of our conversation. It was the closest I had ever come to seeing him.

“Where are you?”

“Charlottesville.”

“Charlottesville? I thought you were in Richmond.”

“I was.”

“And now you’re in Charlottesville. . . .”

“I finished what I had to do in Richmond and decided to come home by way of Charlottesville and get some dinner,” I said, adding that I was going to be back later than I expected. I was feeling like a cliché.

“Where are you having dinner?” she asked, just as a manager pushed through the double doors of the kitchen, exposing us to the echoing sound of clanging pots and pans and cooks barking instructions at one another. I craned my neck for a better glimpse. Out came two waiters bearing large trays on their shoulders and gesticulating wildly as they bickered in very loud Chinese, presumably about who was responsible for what.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, and I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing admiration or dismay in her tone. Admiration and dismay? “Are you with him there in the kitchen?”

“No, I’m outside, peeking in.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

Talk to him. Such a simple idea. An inevitable idea, an entirely practical idea. Chef Chang and I had never met, but it seemed odd that I would not seek him out now, that I would just sit there at my table like any other customer in the restaurant instead of one who had intimate knowledge of his canon and who had studied his techniques and methods. Besides which, I was a restaurant critic in Washington, not Charlottesville, so what harm could be done in divulging my identity if I so chose? And why, at this point, after all these many trips, after Atlanta and Knoxville, would I not choose?

These were smart, sensible arguments my wife was making, but they were aimed at normalizing what was not normal. To talk to Chef Chang was to make purposeful a trip that had been conceived on a whim and a notion, since an interview could be useful, and might one day form the basis for a piece (I didn’t have an assignment to come down here)—to talk to him, in other words, was to turn what was, in truth, a crazy pursuit of a man and a taste into something that could be spoken about in ordinary conversation without making me look like a loon.

Our bond, such as it was, was through food, through the silent communication of dish and diner, I said to myself. Not through talk; through taste. But this was an attempt at self-justification, an attempt to preserve some semblance of my critical distance, the wall I erected between the moments I described and my ability to be affected by them and, possibly, succumb to them.

What would happen if I went up and introduced myself? Would he bolt in the middle of dinner and never come back? Would he fling the contents of a hot wok in my face for making his life in Washington so difficult? Would he call the cops and accuse me of stalking him? And how would I plead, if he did? What would I say? What could I say? Taste of China was his sixth restaurant in four years. I had been to all of them. Where he went, I went. He cooked, and I wrote about him. I wrote about him, and he left.

Seeking him out was beside the point, I decided, which made what I did next so stupefying, as though I had contrived a passive-aggressive defiance against my own ruling. I ordered nine dishes. Nine dishes, for a table of one. The waiter had turned to walk away after dish four, and I had had to flag him down to return. He attempted to put the brakes on me after dish five, but I persisted. By dish number six he was shaking his head, his tired eyes widened in alarm. By the ninth, and final, dish he looked worried for me, worried for my soul, and I imagined as he turned to head back to the kitchen that he cursed my Western indifference to waste. What was I doing?

The plates gathered around me—scallion bubble pancake, corned beef with cilantro, cleavered whole chicken with finger peppers, cilantro fish rolls, roast fish with green onion—and this time I did not put up a fight when the adjoining table was shoved up against mine. I wanted Chef Chang to come out and see the spectacle in his dining room. I wanted him to come out and see my devotion, the depth of it, wanted him to know that I was no mere customer but a fervent loyalist. A critic, yes, but only by occupation. Our connection now, clearly, transcended those bounds.

He did not come out. It was okay. I understood. Maybe it was better this way.
Not through talk; through taste
. I did not come to Charlottesville for a meeting of the minds. I had come to Charlottesville because his food was a part of my life. His tastes had become my tastes. Where he went, I followed. I dug into a mound of cleavered chicken with peppers. My mouth went numb. Tears rolled down my cheeks.

KILLER FOOD

By Dana Goodyear From
The New Yorker

New Yorker
staff writer (and poet) Dana Goodyear has a knack for profiles that capture the subject’s personality. The real story behind this hip new L.A. restaurant lies in the personalities of its iconoclastic chef-owners.

O
ne Wednesday in mid-February, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo, the Bill and Ted of the Los Angeles culinary scene, finished eating a couple of burritos at a stand in the Farmers Market and headed for the parking lot. Dotolo—five feet six and broody, with glasses, a multicolored sleeve tattoo, and a three-day beard—yawned and stretched, exposing a pale, rusty-haired expanse, before climbing dozily into Shook’s truck. Shook, who is also small, but chatty, with a homemade lexicon, had on shorts and a T-shirt, with purple-and-black argyle socks yanked up above a pair of pull-on leather boots. He was talking about a problem with a line cook at Animal, the restaurant that he and Dotolo opened nearly two years ago.

“Whoa!” Dotolo said suddenly, pointing at a mark on the forehead of a middle-aged woman in a station wagon nearby. “What is that metal plate in her head? Man, is that a tattoo? Jesus Christ! That’s the craziest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever seen.” Shook stared. “Yeah, it looks like it,” he said vaguely, before someone realized it was Ash Wednesday.

“
Oh
, it
is
Ash Wednesday,” Shook said. That meant the next week would be slow: the Lenten slump. “We’re a meat-eccentric restaurant,” he said.

Meat is the main event at Animal. According to Michael Voltaggio, a young chef trained in the cerebral techniques of molecular gastronomy, Animal is distinguished by its “gnarly big plates of food where each dish has three thousand calories.” (Voltaggio, whose menu at the Langham, a hotel in Pasadena, includes “A Study of the Vegetables of the Season,” eats there once a month.) Animal’s staples are outrageous concoctions that might be called whimsical if they weren’t so rich: expertly prepared junk food made from exquisite ingredients. The petit basque, a bubbling crock of sheep’s-milk cheese and thin-sliced chorizo, accompanied by grilled bread, is like a personal pizza; the poutine, with cheddar in place of the customary Montreal curds, has an oxtail topping the texture of chaw, and tastes unmistakably of chili cheese fries. For the restaurant’s version of loco moco—a Hawaiian surfer meal composed of white rice, a hamburger, gravy, a fried egg, and sometimes Spam—Shook and Dotolo serve a heap of artisanal Anson Mills rice, a Niman Ranch beef patty, a quail egg, and a slab of Spam, all drenched with house-made teriyaki sauce. The tamest offerings are a flat-iron steak under a slick of truffle-Parmesan fondue, and a forty-six-ounce rib eye, which requires nearly an hour on the grill.

Animal is in an old Jewish district of Los Angeles, several doors down from Canter’s deli, and next to Schwartz Bakery, whose owner is the restaurant’s landlord. The lease stipulates that Shook and Dotolo cannot advertise as kosher, for competitive reasons, but there is not much chance of that. The restaurant uses three different kinds of bacon, and manages to incorporate pork into just about everything, including the bar of dense dark-chocolate mousse that is its signature dessert, and which customers often order with a glass of milk.

Faithful to its roots as a tubercular colony, Los Angeles is a city of juice fasts, tonics, and brown-rice cleanses; its image of itself depends on rigorous abstinence from comfort food. But there is a countercurrent of roadside stands, drive-ins, and food trucks, which, along with grilled pizza and Cobb salad, arguably constitute the true regional cooking of Southern California. Shook and Dotolo draw on this tradition freely. “You think about L.A. and it’s, like, the junk-food capital—doughnuts, hamburgers,” Shook says. Animal serves both, though it is perhaps the only doughnut place in town that insists on making them “in season,” which is winter. The chefs talk wistfully of opening an old-fashioned sandwich shop, and a second restaurant seems imminent, though they are cagey about their plans.

Animal is small and spare: a single room, with a framed lamb’s skull and an old Muppets lunchbox with a picture of the namesake character providing much of the décor, and a slim panel of sound-proofing overhead, to absorb the music and the conversation, which are pitched loud. The tables are unadorned: no tablecloths, breadbaskets, or bouquets, just knives and forks and paper menus, printed daily, which warn about the chefs’ resistance to requests for any alterations to the food. There are forty-seven seats, which, from the beginning, have been occupied by the city’s hard-core eaters: pretty girls and mangy guys, who seem to be mostly in their thirties, or trying to recapture them. One recent Friday night, at nine o’clock, there was a three-hour wait for a spot at the bar; the hostess took down cell-phone numbers and sent customers across the street to a dive where they could drink in the meantime. Shook and Dotolo cook the kind of food they like to eat, and the willingness with which their tastes have been embraced can still surprise them. “You see a table of, like, four hot chicks, they come in and suck down, like, two poutines, two foies,” Shook says.

Not long ago, Thomas Griese, the sous-chef at Le Cirque in Las Vegas, who is twenty-four, was sitting at the bar, enjoying a meal of barbecued pork-belly sliders and crispy sweetbreads. “To any cook, that’s a Sunday-evening meal,” he said. “It’s what I want to come home and eat after a nice service.” Unlike most restaurants in town, which stop serving at ten o’clock, Animal is open late—till 2 A.M. on Friday and Saturday—and local cooks come by when they get off work.Voltaggio tends to order the biscuits with maple-sausage gravy and foie gras: the ultimate wee-hours, Denny’s-style binge. “It doesn’t sound like it’s O.K., but that’s why everyone wants to eat it,” he said. “And they cook it perfectly.” Akasha Richmond, who used to be the personal chef for Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand, and now has a restaurant catering to health-conscious Angelenos, takes her staff on field trips there. “It’s bad-ass food,” she said. “My line cooks love it.” The charm is not universal, though. Reviewing Animal in 2008, S. Irene Virbila, the restaurant critic for the
L.A. Times
, praised Shook and Dotolo’s technique but accused them of overkill: too much bacon, too much sauce, too much sugar, too much salt, not enough vegetables. “What’s needed are some perspective and discipline,” she wrote. One dish, the biscuits with gravy and foie gras, she deemed “too cloying to live.”

Dotolo is the primary architect of the menu, and he is uncompromising about his food fantasies. When the restaurant first opened, he served a bowl of mulberries with a whole nectarine for dessert, and no knife. He wanted customers to pick up the fruit, bite into it whole, and feel the juice running down their chin. His inspiration often comes from eating; he and Shook claim that one year, early in their career, they spent a hundred and fifty thousand dollars dining out—at a time when they were living in a flophouse in Hollywood.

“I had this weird thing last night,” Dotolo said recently. “I was, like, eating tofu and I was, like, thinking about how much it reminded me of, like, bone marrow and, like, brains and, like, that weird texture—like, soft, a little bit gelatinous. But the flavor of tofu is, like, so
yelchth
. I’ll think about that now for, like, maybe a year before I think about something to do with it. I think it’d be fuckin’ hilarious to do tofu at Animal, just because it throws people off so much.” He thought for a second, and said, “Maybe you do tofu with meat.”

SHOOK, TWENTY-NINE, and Dotolo, thirty, are known at times as the kids or the boys or occasionally the bookends, but always as the dudes. A short-lived reality show they starred in on the Food Network, in 2007, was called “Two Dudes Catering”; their cookbook, which came out the following year, is “Two Dudes, One Pan.” In large part, they are treated indivisibly. When
Food & Wine
came up with a list of the ten best new chefs of 2009, Shook and Dotolo counted as one. A chef friend distinguishes between them by saying that Dotolo spends all his time thinking about his most recent meal, while all Shook thinks about is his next.

The pair exude an air of slovenly innocence, refusing to wear chefs’jackets and shaving irregularly; greasy baseball hats hold back their hair, which they at one time grew to shoulder length. Unkempt self-presentation is part of their appeal. The art dealer Earl McGrath, who met Shook and Dotolo ten years ago and often hires them to cook for parties, describes them with an epigram: “Look so dirty, smell so clean.”

Shook was brought up Jewish in Ormond Beach, Florida (his parents have since become Lubavitchers); Dotolo is from an Italian family in Clearwater. They spent their adolescent years surfing and fishing and working on the margins of the food world. Dotolo was a dishwasher at a barbecue joint; Shook was the stockboy at a grocery store, which he hated, and then got a job washing dishes at a restaurant, which he loved. “They used to feed me,” he says. “My favorite dish was a mashed-potato sandwich, ‘cause they had French bread. That might have been the first time in my life I had French bread and real mashed potatoes.” After that, he worked at an Outback and a mom-and-pop pizzeria, before deciding, when he finished high school, to go to culinary school in Fort Lauderdale. He met Dotolo there, at orientation, in 1999. Shook says, “He was, like, ‘Dude, I just found this dope pizza place right up the road. Want to go check it out?’”

While still in school, Shook and Dotolo worked for Michelle Bernstein, a prominent chef in South Beach, at her restaurant, the Strand, and then went to Vail to cook. In 2001, they made their way to Los Angeles and started as line cooks at Chadwick, an elegant Beverly Hills restaurant owned by the chef Benjamin Ford. Chadwick eventually failed, but Ford kept the two on as caterers and odd-jobs men. Ford’s father and stepmother, the actor Harrison Ford and the screenwriter Melissa Mathison, started hiring them, too. They became part of the family—gardening, babysitting, house-painting, and sometimes, when it was too cold to sleep in their pickup truck, spending the night on Mathison’s couch. “I have this image of Vinny in his shorts,Vans, apron, tattoos, holding a spoon, saying, ‘But should I call her first or should I wait for her to call me?’” she recalled.

In 2002, Shook and Dotolo launched Carmelized Productions, a catering company, and started hustling to get a television show, a demonstration of ambition that other chefs found off-putting and which they now regret. The pair spent a month in New York, painting Mathison’s apartment there—and living in it, without furniture—while pitching executives from MTV and the Food Network. At a meeting with Pam Krauss, an editor at Clarkson Potter, they said they hoped to do a pop-up cookbook. Shook says, “She was, like, ‘Scratch and sniff?’ And we were, like, ‘Oh my god, you get it!’ She was, like, ‘Get out of here, we’ll never work together.’” (Several years later, Krauss edited “Two Dudes, One Pan.”)

Catering a party at the director Brett Ratner’s house, Shook and Dotolo met Benedikt Taschen, the publisher, and his wife, Lauren, who became their new patrons. They started to do parties for the Taschens at the Chemosphere, the futuristic John Lautner house they own off Mulholland Drive. “All our guests always want to hug them,” Benedikt says. “They don’t have an agenda. They have kind of a Forrest Gump approach.”

For a while, Shook and Dotolo ran Carmelized Productions out of the space that now houses Animal. They filmed their show and shot photographs for the cookbook there; the plan was that, if necessary, they would move in and shower at a friend’s house around the corner. But their hope was always to open a place of their own, an aspiration they realized with seed money invested by the Taschens. (Benedikt likes to come in at lunchtime, when Animal is closed, to eat and give them business advice.) Before the restaurant opened, Shook and Dotolo were sitting around with a couple of friends spit-balling names, and struck upon Animal. Dotolo’s girlfriend, Sarah—not his wife—protested vigorously when she found out what they had in mind. “She was, like, ‘No way,’” Shook said, smiling mischievously. That, of course, sealed it.

WHOLE-ANIMAL COOKERY began to find a place in high-end American restaurants about ten years ago. Shook and Dotolo’s cohort of chefs—they call themselves the D.I.Y. generation, because they had restaurants before they had money—embraced it with gusto. Grappling with the product in its least-processed form appealed to them on an aesthetic level; the economics of using every part spoke to their thrift. Nate Appleman, a proponent of offcuts and charcuterie, who by his mid-twenties was part owner of a restaurant in San Francisco, says that the only way he could afford to serve the same meat as the French Laundry was to buy the entire beast and cook it all. Shook and Dotolo have served lamb-tongue ravioli, lamb-heart paprikas, devilled lamb kidneys, veal brains grenobloise. Not long ago, Dotolo told a food blogger for
L.A. Weekly
that he’d been experimenting with veal testicles, and would add them to the menu soon. “What they do at Animal is use the cuts nobody wants,” Appleman says. “They’re really pushing the limits. They had a dish on the menu that was thirty duck hearts in curry. It was hard even for me to get through.” The ethos of this kind of cooking is undeniably macho (though some female chefs are known for it, too). Ford, who serves a variety of domestic hams and a whole-pig dinner at his new place, Ford’s Filling Station, in Culver City, says he always tries to get a woman to read over his menu and make sure it’s not too alienating.