The Reach of a Chef (35 page)

Bruni has short, straight dark hair, dark eyes, and a lively, engaged manner, hyper-alert to nuance and detail. He’s apparently lost quite a bit of weight since his days as a political reporter—photos from the
Columbia Journalism Review
show a man with a healthy appetite. He’s quite trim now, and young-looking. Born in 1964, he could still pass for an eager-eyed grad-school student. Bruni seemed to me on the two occasions I’d met him to be very smart, and also very thoughtful, even sweet (which I mention because it contrasts the jaundiced, snarky, one-upsmanship common in New York media circles, not to mention the arrogance that can result when a reporter becomes overly accustomed to the power conveyed by
The New York Times
). Bruni never reveals how many times he visits a restaurant, though surely it varies depending on what he feels he needs in order to review a place properly. I asked him about Ruth Reichl’s recent book about her career reviewing for the
Times,
which is loosely structured on the various costumes she’s used to conceal her identity, and he seemed slightly annoyed by the pressure of expectation that might put on him. He doesn’t wear wigs and doesn’t intend to. Mimi Sheraton, a former
Times
restaurant critic, also had a recent memoir out and felt strongly that anonymity was critical to reviewing restaurants well. Other critics take the stance that a kitchen can either cook or it can’t, and if it can’t there’s very little that a restaurant can do to change that fact, whether they know the
Times
is in the house or not. Reichl agrees with this, but she also makes an excellent case for the former position with her well-known review taking away one of Le Cirque’s four stars for shabby treatment when she was disguised as a helpless nobody and star treatment when she went as
The New York Times
Restaurant Critic.

The job cannot be an easy one. Reichl notes that she was physically ill in the days leading up to the publication of her Le Cirque review, so nervous was she about potential uncaught errors and general fallout. It’s among the most visible posts in New York journalism. Bruni seemed to be unnerved by the Web site devoted to making fun of him (who wouldn’t be unnerved by an anonymous amateur taking potshots at your prose style?).

Russ Parsons, at the
Los Angeles Times,
furthermore noted how hard life seems to be
after
you turn in your guns of Navarone and stop being the critic for
The New York Times:
“It’s amazing how that one job seems to be a dead end for so many talented people: Craig Claiborne, John Hess, Mimi Sheraton, Bryan Miller. Ruth is the only one so far who has been able to enjoy a strong second act. It remains to be seen what Bill Grimes [Bruni’s predecessor] will do, though the book-review job sounds pretty sweet.”

They all surely are aware of the power of their review and so write with considerable care. How does Bruni award stars? (Always a contentious subject among critics, that is—to use stars or not?) Ultimately, he said, what you need is “a solid impression in your gut—what is this restaurant?…How happy am I?”

For Keller the wait was nerve-racking. It’s one thing to feel the anticipation of the review at each Bruni sighting. It’s another emotion when the fact-checkers call and the photography department requests a photo shoot. Keller tried to downplay the importance of the review. He kept saying to himself and to the staff, according to Cunningham: “A newspaper doesn’t define us, doesn’t define who we are.” But he was obviously bracing himself for a disappointment. Four stars matter to him. He put stars on the main stove hood above the pass at the French Laundry, where everyone who entered the kitchen would see it, a symbol the servers faced when they picked up food at the pass. He wanted that constant reminder to maintain four-star standards. How could he possibly ask his chefs and his servers to maintain four-star standards at Per Se if the paper of record deemed them worthy of three, or fewer. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, one of Manhattan’s most cutting-edge chefs, chef-owner of the four-star Jean Georges, opened a high-end steak house on the opposite end of the fourth floor from Per Se, and Bruni had a month earlier given the restaurant a single humiliating star. And simply because your restaurant was ultra-expensive high-haute French with great pedigree and refinement didn’t grant it automatic four-star status, either. Bruni was soon to remove the fourth star from Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, opened by the chef famed for his Michelin stars. You couldn’t know what Bruni might think of Per Se.

Keller made plane reservations to arrive September 7, the day before the review would appear. It was an especially influential Wednesday because it was the first day after Labor Day, when all of New York City returns from summer vacationing and gets back to the work of living in New York City. A big review was warranted to open the fall season, a review of the most hyped, the most ambitious, the most written-about restaurant in the controversial Time Warner Center.

Keller had wanted to be there when the news actually arrived. But by the time he walked in the back of the kitchen, the review was on the Internet and a copy had been printed out and was handed to him immediately. The headline read, “The Magic of Napa With Urban Polish,” and the piece concluded, “But this restaurant shoots straight for the stars. And it soars high—and often—enough to grab four of them.”

Was the decision to give the restaurant four stars even close? Apparently not. Nearly a year later, Bruni confessed: “I was really, really bummed when I knew it was my last meal at Per Se.”

Keller and Cunningham and their staff had done it. Keller had returned to Manhattan and had earned four stars from the
Times.
He now led four-star restaurants on both coasts.

Per Se was the first new four-star restaurant in Manhattan since Alain Ducasse at the Essex House received its ranking from William Grimes in 2001, three years earlier, bringing the total to five. Amazingly, New York’s next new four-star restaurant was named just a few months later. Notably, it was not French, or French-based, as all the others were; it was Japanese and specialized in sushi, the first Japanese restaurant to earn four stars in more than twenty years. But perhaps most amazing of all, this restaurant, Masa, was right next door to Per Se, its equal in ranking but its antithesis in spirit. In a city of thousands of full-service restaurants—
Zagat
surveys nearly 2,000 of them, and says 174 “note-worthy” restaurants
opened
that year—two of New York’s four-stars were side by side, four stories and three escalator rides from the street in a retail mall.

Regardless of place—this unusual mall situation—just the idea of this particular restaurant, Masa, was controversial. It was rumored to be the most expensive in the United States—you had to fork over four bills just to sit down at the bar. The place demanding this sum was not Alain Ducasse or Le Bernardin or Per Se, promising the elaborate preparations and expensive ingredients haute French cuisine was famous for, but rather raw fish and sauces often no more elaborate than a really good soy or a squeeze of a limelike fruit called
sudachi.
Moreover, the chef-owner, Masayoshi Takayama, had been in the States more than twenty years, but his English was limited, and so it was hard for the public to get to know him—profiles and interviews of the man were hardly revealing of why his skills as a chef were worth the astonishing prices. The two restaurants where he’d made his reputation in Los Angeles sat ten people at the bar (and twelve more at three tables), so his business was physically restrictive in addition to being financially exclusionary. And last, the chef didn’t
want
to be known outside his restaurant, shunned attention, couldn’t care less about reviews. In the age of the celebrity chef, Masa Takayama, age fifty, was an anomaly.

Solidifying the controversy over this chef and restaurant in the mall was, as it happened, the most controversial of the food writers at the
Times,
Amanda Hesser. In her final column as an interim reviewer before Bruni took over, a tumultuous term marked by infuriated restaurateurs and chefs and one “Editor’s Note,” Hesser did not give any stars to Masa. Instead, she, and the
Times,
did the unprecedented: She gave the restaurant four question marks. This was a surprising thing to read on Wednesday morning in the conservative and fiercely edited
New York Times.
In much the same way that Reichl had said that Le Cirque was two different restaurants depending on who you were, Hesser explained that Masa was two different experiences depending on where you sat. If you sat at the bar to be served by Masa himself, it was four stars. If you sat away from the bar at one of the four tables to Masa’s left, it was three stars. She would not commit to either, and left it to Mr. Bruni to be decisive in the paper of record.

At the end of the year, he was:

Concluding not lightly but seriously, he wrote: “Masa is divine.”

You enter Masa off the polished marble floors of the mall, pass through a dark curtain into a small black vestibule, and through a large wood door, a huge rough piece of cedar, twenty-five hundred years old, and feel immediately that it is an alternate universe from the one you’ve just left.

The restaurant is boxy and small, its walls painted black, but it does not feel claustrophobic; instead, it feels open and comfortable. The long, thick slab of
hinoki
—the bar, a soft, pale, fragrant cypress wood—seems to glow in the spotlights, and runs almost the length of the main room. Beside this room, separated by small bamboo curtains, are four tables seating four each. With ten seats at the bar, one night’s capacity seating is twenty-six. Across the bar are some low cases that will hold fish during service, but not much, and they are not so tall as to block the view of Masa’s workstation. Masa has a large round, shaved head, a solid athletic build, and an easy smile. He always wears a loose Japanese shirt, loose cotton pants beneath his long apron, and on his feet he wears either clogs or sandals. Behind Masa’s station is a large floral arrangement he creates with seasonal plants—viburnum, forsythia, pussy willow, maple—and scattered bamboo in a pot in a shallow pool of water just inches deep. The sound of trickling water is distinct and peaceful. On each side of where Masa stands for service are stations that will be worked by Keinosuke Kawakami, age thirty-two, and Nick Kim, twenty-nine. Nick is from Korea but grew up in Los Angeles. Kei is from Fukuoka, Japan, and has been in the States for eight years, four of them with Masa, his only chef’s job. Nick and Kei do most of the prepping and will also cut and serve sushi during busy services. There is a small grill behind them, called
okudo-san,
burning wood charcoal, for beef and mushrooms and for toasting the Ariake seaweed. There are two gas burners there for cooking as well. And in the far corner a discreet grill station, now manned by Ryan Becze, twenty-nine. Ryan, from Iowa, attended the New England Culinary Institute, but his compulsion to learn Japanese cuisine was kindled during two years in Japan in a kaiseki restaurant, where he was allowed only to wash dishes at first and where he lived off fish heads and daikon tops.

And that’s the core kitchen staff at what may be the most expensive restaurant in the United States.

I put on a kitchen jacket and brought knives, should I need them, but this was obviously a kitchen where I’d be allowed to wash dishes, maybe. I was, however, welcome to hang out and watch. Jacob Silver, a banquet chef in Honolulu and a friend of Nick’s, had asked to trail, or stage, for a few days while he was in town. I asked Jacob if he was learning a lot and he said, “I’m not learning a lot—I’m
seeing
a lot.” There was so much to see and to observe.

Fortunately, Nick and Kei were forthcoming and helpful in describing verbally everything they did, even as they were continually moving and working. Nick opens the long, narrow kitchen around nine, works steadily till opening, then participates in service, then cleans, and can usually leave shortly after midnight, six days a week. He says, “I try not to take a break, otherwise I might not get up.”

There were several other cooks in the kitchen who worked for Bar Masa, on the other side, an informal Japanese restaurant that Masa also runs. (The Masa space is U-shaped, the kitchen being the bottom of the U.) But it was Kei and Nick who did the majority of butchering fish, peeling wasabi root, preparing the sauces, and making the rice for Masa.

Nick cooked the rice every night. He has a gentle, thoughtful disposition, and physically is like a smaller version of Masa himself. It was instructive simply to watch Nick scrubbing the rice, in a large steel bowl, using a gentle circular motion. He washed the rice and changed the water, washed it and washed it again, strained it into a colander. Finally, he submerged the colander in a large bowl of water and agitated it so that chunks and shards of broken rice fell through the mesh. These, he explained, could make the rice pasty. Cooking the rice is his daily job, and it’s both an honor and a source of anxiety.

“Until Taisho puts his hand in the rice warmer, I’m not comfortable,” he says, calling Masa by the Japanese word for “boss” (in the time of the samurai,
taisho
was the term for the leader of the samurai going in to fight, so the nuance of the term is apt). They’ve been getting in a different crop of sushi rice, and it hasn’t behaved the same. Also, he ran out of Evian water and so had to use their filtered tap water to cook the rice.

Nick’s been with Masa for less than two years, and even he thinks he’s too young and too green to be doing what he’s doing. “I shouldn’t be making sushi rice, I shouldn’t be cutting fish,” he says, adding, “Masa’s a great teacher and he’s been pushing me.”

When they cut fish, they typically do it on large oblong boards, single pieces of wood with rough edges cut straight from the ginkgo tree. They set this board over a sink, start a stream of cold water running over it, and begin cutting.

Often little needs to be done to a fish, but other times subtle manipulations are made. For the
aji
mackerel, which has a strong flavor, Nick removed the upper layer of skin but left the silver-blue sheen on the flesh. He removed the pinbones and laid the fillets, six of them, on a circular rack. He salted the fillets evenly and put them in the walk-in cooler, setting his timer. After twenty minutes, he retrieved the mackerel, rinsed and patted dry each fillet, all very delicately. He then dipped the fillets in rice vinegar, which will flavor the meat. “I find that after an hour or so,” he said, “it becomes more rounded, and when you cut it, it looks more natural.”

Nick next showed his friend Jacob how they prep the live lobster for the lobster risotto at Bar Masa, quickly removing the tail and claws from the body, halving the head, taking out the gills, wasting almost nothing. Nick moved the green tomalley, or liver, to a section of the board and quickly chopped the liquidy gland to a smooth paste, reserving this too. He’ll add a little salt (“to get rid of the nasty flavor”), then add some soy to season it. This would be used as the sauce for lobster sashimi.

Meanwhile, Kei prepped the
hamo,
a pike eel, Masa called it, shaped like an eel but different in taste and texture, then
kawahagi,
“like a triggerfish,” Kei said, wincing to think of an adequate translation. Most fish here is flown in from Japan. He then scraped the skin off a dozen wasabi roots, as Nick trimmed what he called a flounder. Kei said, “Fluke,” made the shape of the fish with his towel on the cutting board, and pointed to where the eyes were on a flounder versus a fluke.

Nick nodded and Kei moved on to the orange clams, opening a dozen, cleaning and trimming them, then putting them into a steel bowl. He brought some sake to a simmer and dumped it over the clams, sloshed them around to get the strong ocean taste out of them, then transferred them to an ice bath. He cut a piece for me, washed it in a sweet vinegar, gave it a drop of soy, and put it on a bit of rice. It was sweet and tasted of fresh ocean, and it made me smile.

Sauces truly were often as simple as that. Masa did make a few sauces based on soy, sake, and mirin.
Nikiri
soy might be reduced with sake or mirin and seaweed. White soy would be used in summer, as would a sauce flavored by red
shiso
leaf. Another sauce was vinegar flavored with
tade,
a spicy green leaf. In winter, he would use sauces based on dark soy. The eel got a special sauce called
tsume
—eel bones were grilled and cooked in sake, mirin, and soy. The sauce was never made from scratch but instead was continually replenished. Nick said the
tsume
sauce had been used for twenty years at the previous restaurants but was lost in transit to New York when the container broke.

Lunch service at Bar Masa, a conventional restaurant serving a broader Japanese menu, bustled around Nick and Kei as they moved through their day. To their right a couple of chefs cut and sent out sushi for the lunch crowd. To their left, two cooks worked a hot line.

Masa occasionally does some of the prep but mainly sticks to service and running the business. He’ll prepare the
toro,
spending twenty minutes scraping it from the membrane (he’ll save the membrane to grill and eat for family meal later), transforming it into a kind of rich tuna mush that he’ll serve with a huge heap of osetra caviar before he begins the sushi service.

Recently he’s been getting the caviar from Per Se. Jonathan Benno, chef de cuisine there, had dinner at Masa the other night and had brought three 500-gram tins of Iranian osetra to the Masa kitchen himself.

Masa was at work at a board, removing the meat from the legs of a hairy crab by rolling them with a wood pestle, squeezing the flesh out through either end. Benno thanked Masa for the meal the other night.

“Did you enjoy?” Masa asked.

“It was a real inspiration to watch you,” Benno said.

To which Masa more or less grunted. Benno thanked him again, promised two more tins of caviar on Friday, then departed.

Other chefs accord Masa extraordinary respect of the kind Benno showed, every bit as much as they do Keller. So it was perhaps the only way to get Masa to move across the country and into a mall—a request from Keller.

According to Masa, he was working a chef’s event in Atlanta and so was Keller. The two got to talking. Keller told Masa what he was doing, opening a restaurant in New York in a building to be called the AOL Time Warner Center. Masa should open a restaurant there, too, Keller said. How about it?