THENASTYBITS (6 page)

I found, I think, my perfect metaphor, had my final Vegas epiphany on my last day in town, as I hurtled face-down at accelerating speed toward the surface of the earth, free-falling from two miles above the desert, a Flying Elvis strapped to my back.

When you jump out of a plane for the first time, the first thousand feet are pure adrenaline-pumping, endorphin-juiced thrill. Straight down, head first, your mouth stretched into a silent scream. Then you level off a bit, as Elvis taps your shoulder and you stretch your arms out, legs back, into the "banana position."

For a few long moments more, you actually sail through the sky. All your childhood dreams come true, as for second after glorious second you are—before the chute opens and yanks you back to reality—almost convinced you can fly. When you feel something touch your outstretched fingers, you almost believe that
one
of the spangled, ducktailed figures on either side of you, connected in formation as you fall through space, could actually be Elvis.

Maybe that's what it's all about. What Vegas has come to mean for chefs, for cooks, for gamblers, diners, for all of us who go there: While we may be rushing inexorably toward the hard realities of the ground, surely and inevitably arriving in the same place (unless our chute fails to deploy or we crap out, in which case we end up there sooner rather than later), for a few moments, or hours, or even days, Vegas convinces us we can stay aloft—forever.

ARE
YOU
A
CRIP
OR
A
BLOOD?

i
just finished reading
Canadian author Timothy Taylor's
Stanley Park,
a brilliant, if irritating, novel with a chef as hero. Taylor's protagonist breaks down the world of chefs into two camps: the Crips—transnationalists, for whom ingredients from faraway lands are an asset, people who cook without borders or limitations, constantly seeking innovative ways to combine the old with the new—and the Bloods, for whom
terroir
and a solid, rigorous connection to the immediate region and its seasons are an overriding concern. "Crips" would describe chefs like Norman Van Aken, Nobu Matsuhisa, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, guys who want the ingredient, at its best, wherever it might come from and however long it might have traveled, practitioners of "fusion." The Crip relies on his own talent, vision, and ability to wrestle ingredients into cooperation, hopefully breaking ground, revealing something new about ingredients that we may take for granted by pairing them with the exotic and unfamiliar. We have seen what the Crips are capable of at their best, and also what they can do at their worst, the terrible sameness of some of-the-moment Pacific Rim, Pan-Asian, and Nuevo Latino menus, in which chefs misuse Asian or South American ingredients with the single-minded enthusiasm of golden retrievers in heat, humping blindly and unproductively at your leg.

The earliest and most notable example of a Blood would be Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse in Berkeley remains the cradle of the "slow food" revolution, a restaurant whose ingredients

almost exclusively represent the bounty of northern California and the Pacific Northwest of America. Fergus Henderson is a Blood, his food a proud expression of both nation and culture. It's a compelling argument, to say I will cook what's available in season. I will cook what is here. It recognizes the incomparable joys of eating wild strawberries or white asparagus in France, fresh baby eels in Portugal, tomatoes in Italy. The Bloods, in my experience, rooted as they are to place and time, are more likely than not to cook with real, heartfelt soulfulness and integrity, seeking to nurture, sooth, comfort, and evoke, rather than dazzle.

I always liked to think of myself as a Blood. Having recently traveled the world, often to very poor countries where being a Crip is not an option, I was enchanted again and again by cooks making fresh, vibrant, hearty, and soulful meals, often with very little in the way of resources. Like with the early culinary pioneers of France and Italy, the engine driving great cooking in Vietnam and Mexico, for instance, seems to be the grim necessity of dealing with what's available
when
it's available— and making the most of it. I've yammered endlessly, tiresomely, on the desirability of food coming from somewhere, that the sort of regional, seasonal fare that so many French and Italians grew up with is what is missing from much of American and British culinary culture.

But now I don't know.

There is more than a whiff of dogma in the Blood argument. The French "Group of Eight" chefs who decried the introduction of "foreign" spices and ingredients into haute cuisine strike me as the same crowd who want every movie to be a bloated, government-funded costume drama starring the inevitable Gerard Depardieu. I once heard a Parisian chef, while watching a comrade from Alsace make
choucroute garnis,
comment, "Thees is not French." An element of jingoism hangs in the air when some chefs decry "outside" and "foreign" influences on cooking—a scary overlap between those decrying foreign-influenced food and those decrying foreigners. And the organics mob, so fervent in their recitations of the dangers of pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and genetic manipulation, often sound as if their agendas are driven by concerns far from taste or pleasure. The "slow food" lobby, arguing for sustainable sources of food, organic and free-range products, cruelty-free meat, and a return to a photogenic but never-to-be-realized agrarian wonderland, seem to overlook the fact that the stuff is expensive, and that much of the world goes to bed hungry at night—that most of us can't hop in the SUV with Sting and drive down to the organic greenmarket to pay twice the going rate.

Don't get me wrong. I like free-range; it's almost always better tasting. Wild salmon is better than farmed salmon, and yes, the farmed stuff is a threat to overall quality. Free-range chickens taste better, and are less likely to contain E. coli bacteria. Free-range is no doubt nicer as well; whenever possible we should, by all means, let Bambi run free (before slitting his throat and yanking out his entrails). Since I serve mostly neurotic rich people in my restaurant, I can often afford to buy free-range and organic. I can respond to the seasons to a great extent. But at the end of the day, if I can find a genetically manipulated, irradiated tomato from the other side of the country that tastes better than an Italian vine-ripened one from Granny's backyard (not likely, but just suppose), even if it causes the occasional tumor in lab rats, I'll probably serve it. It's how it tastes that counts.

For instance: I like grain-fed beef. When talking about beef, I don't want some muscular, over-exercised animal with delusions of liberty providing the steaks. I want a docile, corn- and grain-fed jailhouse fatboy who has spent the latter part of his life standing in a lot doing nothing but eating, all that nice fat marbling rippling through the lean. If, as in the case of Kobe beef, some nice cattleman wants to give my steer regular rub-downs with sake (and the occasional hand job), all the better. The grass-fed Argentine stuff, shipped in a cryovac bag full of water and blood, tastes like monkey meat by comparison.

"Does the product
taste
good?" should probably be the chef's primary concern. To insist, to
demand,
that all food be regional, seasonal, directly connected to time and place can—in the case of some of the more fervent advocates—invite the kind of return-to-the-soil thinking evocative of the Khmer Rouge.

Not long ago, watching perhaps the greatest of the Blood chefs (a man with only the faintest and best-intentioned Crip tendencies), Thomas Keller, yanking fresh garlic and baby leeks out of the ground at a nearby farm in the Napa Valley, I felt a powerful, bittersweet frisson, a yearning for how things might, in the best of all possible worlds, be. On the other hand, standing in Tokyo's Tsukiji market, gaping at the daily spoils of Japan's relentless rape of the world's oceans, I thought: "Jesus! Look at all this incredible fish! Damn, that toro looks good! That monkfish liver is amazing! I want some." Fully conscious of the evil that men do in the name of food, I have a very hard time caring when confronted with an impeccably fresh piece of codfish.

So I guess I won't be stocking my restaurant's larder with exclusively Hudson Valley products anytime soon. When my customers want strawberries, I'll have them flown in from warmer climes. Though I use the New York foie gras for pan-seared, I will continue to order the French for terrine. My Arborio rice will come from Italy, my beans for cassoulet from Tarbes. Because they're better. When those cute little baby eels from Portugal are available again, I'll be ordering them; who cares if there'll be none left for the Portuguese? I will continue to occasionally drink caipirinhas with my sashimi at Sushi Samba in New York—and I'll try to not feel silly about it.

Perhaps the best thing chefs can do is to cook, whenever possible, with heart. Where poorer nations have a tradition of cooking well because they
have
to, we have choices. If we can take something lasting from the Blood cause, it is that it is always better to make the most of what's available, to cook well. If a chef's unique vision and identity is associated closely with a particular area or local culture, great. He's doing God's work. If there is good, local skate available, then there is no reason to fly in the endangered, mushy, and oft-frozen Chilean sea bass. A good chef imports an ingredient from the other side of the globe because it makes sense—not for its novelty value or its rarity. Why bother to make Mexican food in London if the end result is nothing but soulless sour-tasting caulking compound? Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a fashionable ersatz dim-sum emporium and then bleed out all the happy sloppy informality that makes the dim-sum experience so much fun?

However horrifying it might be to see some young, fresh-out-of-culinary-school novice bombarding his guests with dende oil, Thai basil, yuzu, and chipotles, it's nice to know that others for whom those ingredients are more familiar can find them at will.

But I'm not giving up my white Italian truffles until the last one is gone. Show me a bootleg ortolan and I'm there, crunching bones with only a minimum of guilt. I'll just be sure to not overcook it.

VIVA
MEXICO!
VIVA
ECUADOR!

let's be honest, let's
be really, painfully honest: Who is cooking?

Who is the backbone of the American restaurant business? Whose sudden departure could shut down nearly every good restaurant, nightclub, and banquet facility in every major city in the country? Whose sweat and toil allows annoyingly well-known white-boy chefs like me to go around the country flogging books, appearing on TV, writing obnoxious magazine articles, and baiting their peers? Who, pound for pound, are the best French and Italian cooks in New York?

If you're a chef, manager, or owner, you know the answer: Mexicans. Ecuadorans. Salvadoran guys (and women) from south of the border, many of them with green cards they bought on Queens Boulevard for thirty dollars. Ex-dishwashers with no formal training, minimal education; people who have often never
eaten
in restaurants as good as the ones they cook in. Manuel, the brilliant saucier at your two-star restaurant, puts on his best suit, combs his hair, dresses up his family in their Sunday best, and tries to get a table at the one-star place across the street. The aspiring actor/model/part-time maitre d' will break out in a flop sweat, trying to figure out where to hide him—if "La Migra" hasn't already grabbed him on the way to dinner.

There is no deception more hypocritical, more nauseating, more willfully self-deluding than the industry-approved image of "the chef." We all know who is doing the heavy lifting, who's