Steal the Menu by Raymond Sokolov

Author:Raymond Sokolov
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307962478
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-13T21:00:00+00:00

At the back, Thomas Keller at La Rive, near Catskill, New York, ca. 1981, with his employers, René and Paulette Macary, and the rest of the staff of this very French country inn (illustration credit 4.1)

Back in New York, he practiced traditional French elegance at La Reserve and then spent time at the city’s main colony of nouvellisme, Raphael. In 1987, Keller, like Bouley, moved downtown, where he showed his radical colors at Rakel, whose menu mixed French technique with native ingredients such as the jalapeño pepper. Rakel closed at the end of the eighties and Keller spent some years in the wilderness before ascending to the summit of the U.S. restaurant world in the undeniably French but thoroughly modern and original French Laundry, in the wine village of Yountville, California, in 1994.

So nouvelle cuisine eventually trickled across the Atlantic. Before long, it was taken for granted by a new generation of American chefs trained by those who had apprenticed in France. They and their customers had gotten the message, but I felt the message itself had never been properly articulated. In my Natural History column and elsewhere, I set out to tell its complex story and to “deconstruct” its essence.

On the technical level, all the original chefs in the movement agreed that flour-thickened sauces were an abomination, but their preference for sauces built around heavily reduced stocks or stocks thickened with cream or egg yolks or hollandaise sauce did not amount to a revolution. Neither did the new emphasis on fresh ingredients, al dente vegetables, and raw fish and meat. lt was this ingredient-centered, health-conscious side of early nouvelle cuisine that understandably misled people into thinking that Guérard, Bocuse et al. were a bunch of health-food enthusiasts with good knife skills. Bocuse encouraged this confusion when he said his innovations were aimed at the new gourmet, a hypothetical diner consumed with a passion for great food but preoccupied as well with staying trim.

This was undoubtedly a shrewd insight into the upscale clientele of three-star restaurants, but even a cursory glance at the ingredients actually served up by Bocuse and the other Young Turks should have convinced us all that the dietary claims blandly proffered in interviews by Bocuse and Alain Senderens, of L’Archestrate in Paris, were a soufflé of rationalization.

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