Best Food Writing 2013 by Holly Hughes Read Free Book Online

in fact just for show. The harsh last-minute smoke did lend an urban flavor—as if the fish had come off a New York trash fire. Another server clamped a meat grinder to the side of the table and put into it a long, fat, bright-orange carrot with bright greens attached by a tightly wound yellow elastic band. He tried to deny that the ponytail of greens had been re-attached until he admitted that the carrot, which went through the grinder with suspicious ease, had been simmered with olive oil and salt. This was a version of the steak tartare that, his rehearsed patter informed us with sweeping inaccuracy, every New York steakhouse in the 50s and 60s like Delmonico’s (which closed in 1923) and the Four Seasons (which opened in 1959) would serve when you came through the door. He put the bright, insipid gratings onto a wooden plate with a dozen or so shallow indentations filled with seasonings for you to mix in at will—aninferior mash-up of the famous Noma egg you fry and stir yourself, and the long fat Noma ash-roasted 24-hour carrot that comes to the table looking like a revolting stick of charcoal but reveals a marvelously sweet, custard-like texture and flavor.
    The servers had no sense of whimsy or humor about a menu that depends on humor: they almost ran away when we asked for a wine list, and generally seemed terrorized at being overly garrulous, as the estimable restaurant critic Pete Wells had accused them of being in a New York Times “Critic’s Notebook” that ran immediately after the menu change. You need to like them, and your guests, to endure the meal: we arrived at 1:00 and were not served our last course until a bit before 5:30. At 4:00, a server disconcertingly began visiting every empty table with a white steam iron, to smooth the tablecloths, and by the time we had paid the check, at 6:00, the tables had begun to fill for dinner.
    Worse than bad—which most courses weren’t, really—the meal was tedious. Certainly, surprise and delight and originality shouldn’t be banished. But in meals this long and ambitious you hope to see the soul of the chef—as you do with Keller and Achatz. In only two of the many courses at Eleven Madison Park did I think I saw Humm’s: a seafood stew with bits of bay scallop and apple in a sea urchin and squid custard, subtle, simple, and silken; and an elaborately presented, many-days’-process roast duck served with a dish of fantastically clear and intense consommé, both of them strictly bourgeois and rooted in French technique. Both were food to dream of eating again, food that only someone with Humm’s training, background, and staff can produce. True, if chefs don’t continually re-invent themselves, their food—especially if they traffic in trendy technology—threatens to look as dated as Trotter’s nouvelle cuisine. But as one chef or another seizes the international culinary imagination, Humm seems to be re-inventing himself to chase trends, something he’s too talented to do.
    The trouble is, chefs don’t look to be re-inventing themselves as people willing to cede any control to their customers. Young chefs everywhere are adopting the tasting menu as a way to show off and control costs at the same time—and to signify their ambitions. Fewfollow the one laudable exception I know: that of Dan Barber, the visionary chef-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an experimental farm and research center on the lavish Rockefeller estate in Westchester. Some years ago he changed to a tasting menu because, he recently told me, “our menu is dictated by what comes in from the farm in the morning. I don’t think people realize that not having a menu here isn’t a gimmick. Farmers aren’t responding to my menu requests. They’re leading the dance. Always.”
    And fewer still have the talent or artistic vision to sustain a long tasting menu. Trying a diner’s patience, though,