Ishikawa Prefecture Drops in on NYC

Here are a few photos from a beautifully cooked and presented dinner I attended last night at Gramercy Tavern in celebration of one of Japan's most culturally rich areas, Ishikawa Prefecture. Hosts Michael Romano, president of culinary development for Union Square Hospitality Group and  GT executive chef  Michael Anthony presided over the event, held in a private room decked out to the nines by USHG's talented in-house floral designer Roberta Bendavid.

Before guests arrive,  ChefAnthony decides to preserve the moment.

Paying homage to the foods of Ishikawa, which is located on the more picturesque side of the country, the Sea of Japan coast, nine courses showcased oysters, lobster, crab and kinmedai (golden sea bream) among other delicacies. We sat down to a first course of sea urchin, creamy Hakurei turnips and apples dressed in miso and pumpkin seeds. A teepee-like wooden construction stood over each dish, an allusion to the yukitsuri rope coverings used to protect wintering trees in Japan, and in Ishikawa's Kenrokuen park.

Two of Ishikawa most famous exports (besides Chairman Kaga of Iron Chef  fame) are Kutani ceramics and Wajima lacquerware, both of which were represented at the table. I was so taken with this Wajimaware bowl, but the matsutake mushroom and crab soup inside it was equally refined. Chefs Romano and Anthony were assisted by a surprise guest, chef Shinichiro Takagi of Zeniya restaurant in Kanazawa, the capital of Ishikawa Prefecture. (Orchestrating the dinner behind the scenes was Gohan Society founder and Korin Japanese Trading Corp. President Saori Kawano.) Later, Anthony noted that the one word he took away from the kitchen lessons of the evening was "restraint;" this clear soup exemplified that value.

Romano, who has been given the honorary title of "Ambassador of Culture and Fine Dining" by the governor of Ishikawa Prefecture, enthusiastically discussed his Ishikawa culinary finds, especially koji, the mold-innoculated rice that is enjoying its moment in Japan, especially mixed with salt to form a kind of super-seasoning, and ishiri, an Ishikawa-made super-powered fish sauce containing pickled and fermented squid intestines. In what must have been catnip to the roomful of chefs, Romano evoked those moments "when you just need a little something to round out a dish, fill in the middle." A squirt of ishiri, he marveled, "fills up a whole flavor spectrum on your palate." 

Ivan Ramen Pops Up at Momofuku Noodle Bar

Yesterday was a red letter Japanese noodle day for me. First, I had a perfect summer bowl of cold sansai (mountain vegetable) soba at Cocoron  on the Lower East Side, preceded by a plate of petite, silky pork and okara* croquettes on a bed of watercress with a tonkatsu-type dipping sauce.

Corocon, located on a gritty stretch of Delancey Street, is authentically Japanese in that it is un-airconditioned, cramped, with bar seating and a few tables. Servers are quick and attentive, spiriting over a spouted-lacquer pot filled with soba-yu to mix with the leftover savory broth at the bottom of your bowl for a warming cup of soup.

As if that weren't noodle enough for one day, things got even better that evening, when I stopped by Momofuku Noodle Bar on First Avenue, where the American ramen master Ivan Orkin had taken over the kitchen for one evening to accommodate the overflow of guests shut out of an earlier pop-up appearance. Orkin is a rarity in Japan, a ramen maker who has succeeded amid the teeming competition of the Tokyo noodle universe. His attention to detail has made him a success, even spawning an instant version of his ramen that's been a hit in Japanese convenience stores.

On the menu at Momofuku were Orkin's classic shio ramen made with rye noodles, super-fatty pork belly, boiled egg and fermented bamboo shoots, and some new boundary-stretching varieties that Orkin is planning to serve at his yet-to-open lower-Manhattan restaurant (he's still looking for a venue). He's created dashi that use no meat broth, exploring the vast selection of Japanese dried fish and shellfish. His ago dashi, for example, is made with dried flying fish, shrimp and scallop.

We liked Orkin's Spicy Chili Mazemen, scant on broth and incorporating chipotle chili, eggplant soffrito and scallions, in which the chili adds a backdrop of peppery heat, acting as a supporting player without overpowering the dish. The bits of bacon in the Triple Garlic Mazemen were addictive, though it's important to mix this dish well (think of it as the ramen version of the French salade composée, where each ingredient is prettily mounded atop the noodles) to evenly incorporate the salty powdered dried bonito and shiitake.

Checking out the pop-up were Japanese cookbook author Harris Salat and chef Ryuji Irie, who are getting ready to open their own restaurant, Ganso, in downtown Brooklyn soon. Commiserating with Salat over the layers of city bureaucracy that slow the process down, Orkin said, "In Tokyo, all you need is a stove and a space and you're in business." Hey, New York City Department of Buildings, take a cue from Tokyo and let these guys cook!

*I wrote about okara, the soy bean mash by-product of the tofu-making process in this post on my cooking lesson with Brushstroke chef Mitsuhiro Narita.

Francois Payard Can Dish it up Cold, Too

Who says muggy, ugly weather can't have it's silver lining? Yesterday it was these cute little ice cream sandwiches in the French manner from irrepressible patissier Francois Payard. They are to the soggy chocolate wafer-wrapped specimens of old what the short rib and foie gras burger is to the Big Mac: artisanal sorbets and glaces sandwiched between springy, candy-colored macaron shells. My favorite:the passion fruit (far right), which has a refreshing astringency, though the pistachio-raspberry version gets the silver.

Guests lapped these frozen bonbons up in the bright new outpost of  FBP bakery at Columbus Circle (1775 Broadway at 58th St.), along with champagne and FP's newest brain-freeze wave: haute soft serve ice cream, the vanilla enlivened by three different types of vanilla beans, and the chocolate made with Valrhona. For now, this treat is only available on the Upper West Side (there are also FBP locations in Soho and Battery Park City, and an FP chocolate bar in the Plaza Hotel Food Hall).

The best news, at least to this wary new arrival on the Upper East Side, is the October opening of FP Patisserie, a resurrection of sorts for his former flagship patisserie in ladies-who-lunch territory, on Lexington Avenue between 74th and 75th Streets. It will include Payard's full array of cakes, desserts and chocolates, a dine-in bar for everything from coffee and tea to beer and wine, plus a lunch and brunch menu. "Everyone is going big, but I'm going small," says the master baker, of the 40-seat venue, which has been a hit concept for him in Las Vegas. For once, we can be happy that what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas.

Six Sauces and You're Set: a Preview of "Hiroko's American Kitchen"

                                    

There's no end to the protean imagination and adaptability of the Japanese cook, and last night I was witness to yet another example of this fact. This fall, cookbook author, chef-consultant and popularizer of  Japanese cooking techniques Hiroko Shimbo will launch her third cookbook, Hiroko's American Kitchen. To give it a test run, she gathered a  group of journalists at her sprawling loft apartment near Union Square to sample some of its dishes.

Shimbo's smart idea is to offer the home cook six basic mother sauces, which can be made in large quantities and frozen, ready to pull out to create deeply-flavored dishes ranging from Japanese comfort foods like omuraisu (fried rice wrapped in an omelet) and okonomiyaki (a savory pancake stuffed with cabbage, noodles, seafood or meat) to hybrid dishes such as miso-braised lamb and a version of  an Italian-style white bean soup flavored with sausage and dashi (dried skipjack tuna and kelp) stock.

This dish, made with mushrooms and poached eggs, was inspired by her visit to a Madrid restaurant specializing in mushrooms, El Cisne Azul. There, a mix of local and exotic mushroom was sauteed in garlic-infused olive oil and topped with runny, sunny-side-up eggs. Shimbo's adaptation pairs a mix of sauteed button, portobello and shiitake mushrooms with her mildly sweet-sour white sumiso sauce and konbu (kelp) stock for a double dose of umami.


The chef noted that one of the icons of Japanese cooking, Yoshihiro Murata of the Kyoto restaurant Kikunoi, has divined the optimal temperature at which to extract the utmost umami from konbu stock: 140 degrees Fahrenheit. In her "chef's method" for making the stock, you wipe a 1-ounce square of konbu off with a moist, clean kitchen towel and immerse it in a large pot of water over medium heat. When it reaches 140 degrees, adjust the heat carefully to maintain that temperature and cook it for an hour. 

There were many other delicious dishes: a dashi-based soup filled with cornstarch-coated, fried wedges of avocado and salmon, infused with grated daikon radish and garnished with dill; thick, creamy eggplant rounds sauteed then steamed and topped with Shimbo's spicy miso sauce, and thin slices of  tempura-style fried beets, squash blossoms, and okra. The chef's two secrets for super-crispy tempura are to  slice vegetables very thinly (unlike in Japan, where thicker slices are the rule), and if you don't have tempura flour, use a blend of 80 percent cake flour and 20 percent cornstarch.

One of my favorites dishes was a whole branzino simmered in a mix of water, sake, mirin, and Shimbo's "super sauce," (a blend of soy, mirin, konbu and dried skipjack tuna flakes) garnished with shredded ginger. She removes impurities by blanching the fish in boiling water for 30 seconds then dipping it in ice water before steaming it. This typically Japanese process of removing impurities (she'll brown short ribs or spare ribs and then pour boiling water over them) can cause consternation among Americans, who fear the loss of flavor, but Shimbo likes the cleaner flavors that result. I recalled that at Brushstroke, chefs either pre-salt fish and then wash it off with water or sake to remove impurities, or will even pre-saute the fish.

You might even see some of Shimbo's six sauces--kelp stock, dashi stock, white sumiso sauce, spicy miso sauce, best basting and cooking sauce (BBC, a sweet soy and sake sauce), and super sauce-- on the shelves of your grocery store one day; she's exploring ways to bottle and sell them commercially.  

How I Learned to Cook Fish with Hiroki Murashima

Professor Murashima and Mr. Muto

Last week I attended a most informative class on cooking fish Japanese style from Hiroki Murashima, an assistant professor of Japanese cooking at the Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka, Japan. The evening was part of a series put on at the Bouley Test Kitchen, Chef David Bouley's Tribeca laboratory for culinary brainstorming and experimentation.

Before the learning started: Sesame tofu with uni, and some plum wine.

It's a smart idea: Bouley is capitalizing on the presence of a highly-trained team of Japanese chefs, in town now to staff his kaiseki restaurant Brushstroke. Murashima-sensei was humble, relying on his impressive cooking skills to do the talking. Translator and Bouley Japan liaison, Japanese journalist Yoshiharu Muto, supplied patter, jokes and additional tips, hints and arcana.They managed to pack a lot of information into a two-hour class, and turned out more delicious food than any of us were anticipating. 

Before you even get started on cooking the fish we learned there are a few must-do steps: 

• Never use fish as is from the fish monger. First wash it, then treat it to a fine shower of sea salt--not for flavoring, but to remove its fishy smell and seal its juices in. 
• Leave it for about 30-40 minutes, or an hour for more oily fish. 
• Wipe or wash off the salt with either water or sake, then blot it dry with paper towels
• Score the skin side of the fish to let the marinade or seasonings penetrate its surface.

Yuzu-marinated Spanish mackerel.

Murashima sensei guided us through various preparations, for a yuzu-marinated Spanish mackerel, sake lees-marinated grilled salmon, miso-marinated black cod, simmered black cod, steamed tilefish with scallions, and a lightly vinegared fish salad.

The Spanish mackerel was done Yuan-yaki style, teriyaki-like flavoring that dates back to its inventor, an 18th-century monk and tea master. First, Murashima-sensei marinated the fish in a mix of sake, mirin, and koikuchi (dark) soy sauce spiked with yuzu and lime. Mr. Muto, who threw in interesting nuggets of information of his own, informed us that the darker soy sauce is actually is actually less salty than usukuchi (light) soy sauce. Since it tends to darken the fish, Kyoto cooks prefer the lighter-colored style.

I loved how Murashima-sensei improvised with his accompaniments on this dish. Since the traditional seasonal fresh bamboo shoots and kinome (pepper leaf) were not availalabe here, he substituted hearts of palm, fresh basil and a light mustard sauce. To drink, there was Hakkaisan Junmai Ginjo from Niigata.

Steamed tilefish with egg white and black truffle

One of my favorite dishes was the simmered black cod dredged in cake flour, fried, then simmered in a hot pot with burdock root, green asparagus and grated daikon in a soy, sugar and mirin sauce. But perhaps the most refined was this bowl of tilefish, scallops and wakame, which Murashima-sensei capped with whipped egg white and bits of black truffle before oven steaming and then topping with julienned shin shoga, the prized fresh young ginger shoot.  

Charcuterie at Epicerie Boulud

One of the Manhattan places I most wish I lived next door to is Épicerie Boulud, the Upper West Side shop that, like my favorite Vancouver patisserie/chocolaterie/ café , Thierry, transports the visitor to Paris immediately upon entrance. Épicerie, as its name implies, is even broader in scope than Thierry, offering a full line of take-out food and catering for anything from a  picnic in Central Park to a swanky penthouse party. Among the highlights of the shop's offering are the amazing creations of master charcutier Gilles Vérot.


Vérot and his boss, chef Daniel Boulud, were on hand today to introduce their spring "collection" (the aspirational term for runway-worthy edibles) of charcuterie. Among them is a springtime Rillette Provençal with pork jarret (knuckle), tomato, zucchini, eggplant and basil. (Quick primer: pâtés are mechanically ground and sometime wrapped in a rich pastry to make them en brioche; terrines are coarser, featuring hand-ground meats, while the rillette contains meat that has been cubed or chopped and is usually cooked slowly in fat.)


To make his spring rillette lighter than its winter counterpart, instead of cooking the meat in its own fat, Vérot replaces the pork fat with a mix of juices from the meat and olive oil. He suggests pairing a slice of the  Rillette Provençal with a mesclun or other green salad and eating it as a main course instead of as the first course of a heavier wintertime meal.

A third-generation charcutier, Vérot also runs two Paris charcuterie boutiques with his wife Catherine, supplying individual customers and a select group of restaurants, including the very popular wine shop-restaurant Le Verre Volé. He and Catherine have a cookbook coming out in the fall, too, both in French and English. When I left l'Épicerie, Vérot was holding forth on how to make fromage de tête, or head cheese, of which he has been named the French champion maker. So if this is next on your DIY list, queue up and look for his book come fall!


Épicerie Boulud
1900 Broadway at 64th St.
New York, NY 
212 595 9606

Brustroke Kaiseki, Chef's Pass at Bouley

Two nights ago, I had the chance to visit Brushstroke, the very Japanese Tribeca kaiseki restaurant from chef David Bouley, in collaboration with the Tsuji Cooking Academy in Osaka, Japan. The joint effort goes back 18 years, when Bouley first met Tsuji presidentYoshiki Tsuji, whose father founded the school and authored the seminal Japanese cookbook Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. In order to bring the spirit of Japanese cuisine to New York, professors from the academy, kitchen equipment, ingredients and ideas have wended their way from Japan to Tribeca, making Brushstroke possibly the most authentic Japanese dining experience you can have in New York City at the moment.

Bouley says the collaboration is an extension of the way he’s always thought about cooking. The Japanese like him, he noted, because he’s a farmer at heart and he’s been doing seasonally driven kaiseki-style dinners since 1985, when he served 12- and 15-course small plate dinners on  custom-made Limoges china.

The Brushstroke space (formerly Danube), designed by the Japanese firm Super Potato and its lead designer Takashi Sugimoto, is a honeyed, mellow space, one wall of which is composed of the page-ends of 2,500 books stacked in criss-cross patterns and tinted to mimic the natural striations of wood. Chef Isao Yamada and mixologist Gen Yamamoto are creating exciting dishes and drinks that feel cutting edge modern but with the fanatic attention to detail and technique of the best Japanese restaurants. Among the dishes we sampled: “stinky” and creamy fermented tofu; truffled chawan-mushi (savory egg custard) with sea urchin; lobster claw tempura with two kinds of salt, curry and green tea, and a selection of pristinely fresh sushi. 

The clean, clear flavors extend to Brushstroke's cocktail menu as well, where heirloom tomatoes, grapefruit, ginger and green peas have all found their way into Yamamoto’s inspired cocktails. My grape tomato concoction was a beautiful shade of pink-red, subtle and delicious.

Chef's Pass, photo by Nicole Bartelme

Back at Bouley, I got a peek at a room called the “Chef’s Pass.” In the process of expanding his kitchen space, the chef created a wondrous, salon-like room decorated with the kinds of gorgeous antique, artisanal and one-of-a-kind finds that he seems to amass in his sleep (he and chef Jody Williams are alike that way). The novelty is the 65-inch flat screen TV, where private dining groups can partake of their dinner while conversing, via Skype, with the purveyors who supply Bouley: master saké brewers in Japan, vintners and cheese makers in France and farmers in the Catskills or the Berkshires. Tours cheese maker Rodolphe Le Meunier, Meilleur Ouvrier de France (the highest honor awarded artisans in France), is such a good sport he’ll get up at 4 a.m. to chat with Bouley diners and explain his methods.

Chef's Pass allows Bouley to educate his patrons while feeding them in style, to introduce the hard-working farmers and craftspeople who make his kind of restaurant possible. Yet the chef takes a jaundiced view of the current “farm-to-table” movement, saying, “it’s what farmers have been doing for ten generations where I grew up in New England." While this "reinvention" of age old practices is nothing new, "it's a good thing," he adds, because it brings home the message that "people should not underestimate the value of the farmer."

The Sushi Wizard of Vancouver: Hidekazu Tojo

Every time my family and I visit Vancouver a stop at Tojo's restaurant is a must. I first met chef Hidekazu Tojo probably 20 years ago when I was on assignment in Vancouver for a People magazine story. I sat at the bar and he plied me with one of his signature dishes, jewel-like cubes of raw tuna bathed in a perfectly balanced soy vinagrette. Tojo-san's fish is always the freshest, and his sushi and western-style plates are among the most inventive I've ever come across, in the U.S., Canada or Japan. By the end of the evening I was fast friends with the trio of Japanese visitors sitting next to me, as can only happen at the bar of a sushi restaurant where the chef acts as convivial host, quietly slipping fresh delights across the bar, keeping the drinks flowing and the conversation purring.

Tojo-san provided the sushi for my wedding rehearsal dinner a few years later, and on different trips back it was good to see his restaurant thriving. One year there was a complete redecoration and we sat on the fabulous outdoor rooftop dining area, where we enjoyed a "baseball" of different kinds of small-diced raw tuna and the best una-kyu (eel and cucumber) hand rolls I've ever tasted. On this last trip, Tojo-san had moved down the street to a much larger, airier space with soaring ceilings and a ocean-blue color scheme. When his landlord at the former site hit him with a huge rent increase (some things are the same whether you're in Manhattan or Vancouver), a loyal patron came through and found him his new site, Tojo-san told us.

Here is Tojo-san's Great Pacific Roll, an inside out roll made with wild Pacific salmon, avocado and even more salmon on top:

And here's a western-style salmon preparation, part of the chef's tasting menu, with winter vegetables, several kinds of mushrooms, garnished with slivered yuzu and ribbons of daikon.

 
Like many things in Vancouver, I wish Tojo's were around the corner from my Manhattan apartment!

Tasting Table Expands Its Reach

Last night afforded me a glimpse into one configuration of the new food media landscape. The event was the cocktail party launch of Tasting Table's new test kitchen and dining room, a sleek brick-walled, fabulously outfitted loft space on the second floor of a non-descript Broome Street building

Guaranteed to evoke kitchen envy in all New Yorkers, the Eric Cheong and Loren Daye-designed space signals the eating and drinking e-mail list's entry into the big time. Plans include major content generation, master classes, recipe development, partnerships with large-name business (Williams-Sonoma, MasterCard and Jenn-Air, which supplied the appliances for the new space), and the beefing up of big city bureaus. They're moves that make MTV founder Bob Pittman's investment in the site look as canny as his Daily Candy buy and sell.

The site is no Yelp or (the recently purchased) Zagat, explains Kai Mathey TT's director of communications, because it relies on the judgement of seasoned critics. It's no Urban Daddy, because its not about being first to broadcast the latest arrivals on the scene. In fact, in content and scope, it sounds a lot like the old fashioned magazine. The difference, of course, it that the old three to six months' lead times are gone, and as with online news, the cycle is 24-hour and non-stop.

TT has brought on as its executive chef Brendan McHale, formerly of Jack's Luxury Oyster Bar and Barbara Lynch's The Butcher Shop in Boston, who is excited about a series of "artisan access" dinner he's designing that include cheesemonger Anne Saxelby and the purveyors of heirloom grains Anson Mills.

The pace of TT's growth and the scope of its plans are dizzying, although the source of my vertigo could have been the influence of  mixologist Franky Marshall's (The Clover Club) dreamy Royal Sparkler (a pretty concoction of St. Germain vodka, champagne, simple syrup, lime, English cucumber and raspberry), and McHale's addictive pork belly croquettes.

These are big plans backed by big money, but I hope there is still room for the quality independents in the field, such as the meticulously curated Cravings, where yours truly is a contributor.

Chef Kevin Adey's Carrot-Top Pesto

Chef Kevin Adey's carrot salad dressed with carrot-top pesto

Not too long ago, I wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal on resourceful New York-area chefs who practice “top-to-tail” vegetable cooking. They love their farmer’s market produce, in other words, and don’t want to waste a scrap of it.

My inspiration for the article was chef Kevin Adey of the Bushwick restaurant Northeast Kingdom. Farmer Ben Flanner of Brooklyn Grange, the rooftop organic farm in Long Island City, Queens, tipped me off to Adey’s carrot top pesto, an ingenious way to use every part of Brooklyn Grange’s lovely specimens. So I hopped on the L train and took the trip to Bushwick, where Adey gave me a demo of his dish.

The chef had just received a sack full of carrots from Brooklyn Grange in the wee hours of that morning, so they were super fresh. Because the rooftop placement of Brooklyn Grange means a fairly shallow soil bed, its carrots, while packed with flavor, are petite, each no more than five inches or so in length. 

Pesto building blocks

 The first thing I noticed was how much salt Adey tossed into the stockpot full of boil water for blanching the carrots. Aggressive salting is one of the traits that separates the home from the restaurant cook, Adey acknowledged as he tossed in carrots that ranged in color from golden to orange to persimmon colored into the pot. “You don’t want to cook them, just to set the flavor,” he explained.

Adey and his raw ingredients

 Next, he blanched the carrot tops in the same pot, then shocked them in cold water to set their bright green color and squeezed the water out. (Freshness is key in using carrot tops; other chefs told me they don’t use them because they tend to turn bitter fairly quickly.) Adey loves using cashews instead of pine nuts or walnuts in his pesto, he said, for their great flavor and mouth feel.

Processing....

 Adey then piled all the ingredients in his Robot Coupe and whizzed them. He uses basil as a foil to the slightly more bitter carrot tops, and notes that a pesto “has to have chunk.” That means don’t overdo the olive oil, so that instead of coating pasta or vegetables like gluey paste, your pesto will coat them, jewel like. 

Note chunkiness of pesto!

Finally, it was just a matter of quickly plating the gorgeous carrots and some greens, also from Brooklyn Grange, and drizzling them with the thinned-out pesto. The result was an explosion of flavor and crispiness, with the fieriness of the garlic and the unctuousness of the olive oil offset by the sweet and bitter accents of the basil and carrot tops and the umami of the grated Parmesan.

Carrot Top Pesto

2 ounces roasted cashews

1-1/2 ounces grated Parmesan cheese

1 ounce garlic cloves

2-1/2 ounces extra-virgin olive oil

3 ounces clean carrot tops (blanched and shocked)

3 ounces basil leaves

salt

fresh black pepper

In bowl of a food processor, place the cashews, garlic, carrot tops, and basil. Start to process, and drizzle in oil, continuing to process until desired texture is reached. Stir in Parmesan, and season generously with pepper and salt to taste.

To use as a dressing for a blanched green market carrot salad, thin pesto with olive oil and drizzle over salad. Or use to dress cooked pasta.

Yield: 1 pint, enough for 8 people 

Chef Bill Telepan and Friends Cook for Tohoku

Telepan, center, and event volunteers.
Photos courtesy of  Bill Telepan

I happened to speak with Chef Bill Telepan yesterday, who was full of news about his recent trip to Japan. He was one of eight New York chefs who traveled to Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture, one of the areas most devastated by the March 11 Greater Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The team's mission was to cook a heartwarming Fourth of July weekend lunch for an estimated 1,000 people in this city.

“It was an amazing event, and it went perfectly,” said the chef, whose eponymous Upper West Side restaurant is known for its artful presentation of seasonal and local ingredients. “The day before, we were told that only 400 people might show up, and we felt really bad for the people who had organized the event,” he said. In fact, the visiting chef delegation, which cooked their version of Japanese and Western comfort foods, ended up serving between 2,000 and 2,500 guests.

The plan for the dinner was first hatched in May, when two businessmen, one from XCoal Energy & Resources and one from Nippon Steel, were dining at restaurant Daniel. XCoal, explains Telepan, provides coal to Nippon Steel, which has longstanding ties in Kamaishi. When chef Daniel Boulud stopped by to chat, the men discussed the trials residents of the quake- and tsunami-wasted area were still facing and decided that this goodwill gesture would not only lift the spirits of a community that has suffered much, but also show off the safety and quality of Japanese ingredients.

The all-star chef team

Boulud rounded up his all-star team of chefs, which, besides himself and Telepan, included David Bouley, Floyd Cardoz, Craig Koketsu, Tadashi Ono, François Payard, and Michael Romano. Telepan recalled one woman at the event who came up to him and told him that she had not been able to afford a cake for her daughter’s birthday; this lunch was their celebratory meal. Another guest told Telepan that the event provided the first reason for her to put on make-up since the disaster. About 20 percent of community residents are still homeless, the group, which also toured the area to witness the damage first-hand, learned.

The chefs sourced their ingredients with the help of chef Patrice Martineau, a Boulud alumnus who now cooks at the Peter restaurant at Tokyo’s Peninsula Hotel. “I made miso stir-fried vegetables and a miso- and kasu (lees that result from the production of sake)-marinated hamachi and tuna that we seared,” reported Telepan. “It was fun, because I haven’t cooked Japanese food since I was at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America).” Telepan, who graduated from the CIA in 1987, figured out the recipe beforehand, tested it in New York, and also consulted with another chef on the trip, restaurant Matsuri’s Ono.

Patiently waiting in line.

“The truth was, we weren't going to serve a high-end dish, we wanted comfort food with a twist,” Telepan explained. Pastry chef Payard brought 3,000 macarons with him (a favorite of Japanese diners), sourced some “incredible peaches,” for a peach tart, and baked an equally awe-inducing chocolate roulade made with tofu. Another dish that Telepan liked was one made by Chef Craig Koketsu of The Hurricane Club, a fresh summer salad of tomatoes cucumbers and corn. Except for the macarons, the food was all from Japan, Telepan added; “Part of the deal is that we were there to let people know that Japanese ingredients are still good.” For local residents, still reeling from the loss of family, friends and property, the meal must have been a soothing balm to their psychic wounds.

The t-shirt to prove it really happened.

Telepan was amazed by the Japanese guests’ famously rule-abiding natures. The community facility where the event was held was the size of a football field, he says, “where I was about midfield, and the line went around the track. It stayed that way for about half an hour, and at one point people thought there was not going to be enough food. So they told everyone they were only allowed one dish. It was insane,” (here he let out a bemused laugh) “because they listened, and nobody complained. I had a lot [of food] so I kept telling them, it’s okay, you can have whatever you want from me. But they were reluctant.” 

How to make Bar Basque Chef Yuhi Fujinaga's Crispy Farm Egg

Crispy Egg and proud inventor of dish.

Recently I wrote an item for the Cravings website on the amazing Crispy Farm Egg that Bar Basque chef Yuhi Fujinaga created for his mod restaurant at the Eventi Hotel on Sixth Avenue. Chef Yuhi was nice enough to reduce the recipe to a scale the home cook can manage, and to do a little demo of the dish for me.

Here it is, with my step-by-step photo instructions. It's a very chefy, dish, meaning lots of steps, none of which are too difficult in and of themselves, but which all add up to a bit of a production. But if you're feeling adventurous, give it a go! If you can't find the mildly smoked Spanish raw sheep's milk cheese Chef Fujinaga uses, manchego would be the next best thing, though not quite the same sans smokiness.


Crispy Farm Egg
6 organic brown eggs (Chef Yuhi prefers farmer's market eggs)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs (regular white is fine), whipped, for egg wash
1-1/2 cups panko bread crumbs
2 Yukon gold potatoes (3 oz. each), peeled, quartered, steamed until fork crushable
2 red bell peppers, roasted, peeled, julienned and stewed lightly in their own juices
4 oz. Idiazabal cheese, grated
1 cup half-and-half
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons flat-leaf Italian parsley, washed, picked and rough chopped
2 tablespoons sweet butter, 83% fat
12 sliced serrano ham, sliced paper thin
1 quart canola oil, preheated in a stainless steel pot to 350 degrees (home cooks, you can get away with less)
1 teaspoon Maldon sea salt
1/2 teaspoon Espelette pepper
watercress or arugula for garnish

Procedure:
In a non-reactive stainless steel pot, bring water to a boil with a little bit of salt. Boil enough water to cover all of the eggs.Once the water comes to a boil, drop the organic eggs in the pot for 5 minutes. Immediately remove them from the boiling water, and chill them in an ice water bath. At Bar Basque, cooks boil and chill the eggs in advance.

Here's your panko-dusted egg, no bald spots!

When the eggs are chilled, carefully peel the shells off, and start your breading procedure: Dust the eggs in all-purpose flour, followed by a dip in the egg wash. Coat the eggs with the panko bread crumbs, making sure that there are no bald spots.

Preheat canola oil to 350 degrees. Deep-fry the breaded eggs until golden brown. Season the eggs after with espelette pepper and sea salt. Chef Fujinaga recommends a good dose of sea salt, so that when the egg is broken open, the salt mixes with the yolk and seasons the entire egg.

Once the potatoes are steam cooked, combine the olive oil, sea salt, parsley and butter in a non-reactive stainless steel bowl, and crush the potatoes with a fork or whisk, incorporating all the ingredients together.

 In a separate stainless steel pot, bring the half-and-half to a boil. Meanwhile, place the grated cheese in a blender. Once the half-and-half has come to a boil, pour into blender. Run on high speed to emulsify. This, too, can be made in advance and reheated.

Plating:
In a bowl, spoon one scoop of crushed potato in the center of the bowl.

Top off the potato mixture with the roasted peppers.

Place the fried egg on top of the roasted peppers.
Wrap the tower of potato, peppers, and egg with the thinly sliced serrano ham.

Pour 2 ounces of the cheese broth around the wrapped tower.

Garnish with watercress or arugula. Attack with gusto.

Rick Bishop on the challenges of growing the perfect strawberry

Rick Bishop, left, and one of his many fans, chef Dan Kluger, whose ABC Kitchen just took home the best new restaurant James Beard Foundation award

Although the term “farm to table” has become a cliché, what it stands for has not. Sophisticated, big-city dining has put the small organic farmer at the center of its universe. In the competition for the first, best and most rarified crops of the season, a good relationship with growers is crucial to chefs.

One of my favorite recent interviews was with Rick Bishop, the extremely talented farmer behind Mountain Sweet Berry Farm in Roscoe, NY. As I detail in this Edible Manhattan story, Rick is beloved by Manhattan's best chefs because he's passionate, engaging, and highly knowledgeable about farming. Most importantly, he can deliver the goods.

Among Rick's most prized crops are his Tri-Star strawberries, a small, delicate and extremely flavorful hybrid that was first introduced by Federal agriculture department breeders in 1981. It doesn't require long sunlight hours like most strawberries, so it can grow over three seasons, from May through October. The Tri-Star thrives in cool climates, perfect for the Catskills, where Rick's farm is located.

To hear Rick talk about what it takes to grow a crop like this is to get a tiny glimpse into the challenges of the small farmer that we hear about, but don't understand on a gut level.

One of the biggest challenges of this berry, for example, is its small fruit size, which means pickers have to pick 45 to 52 berries per pint, compared to only 12 to 15 of the California behemoths were used to buying in grocery stores. More berries, more work.

Second, the Tri-Star has no real forage capacity. Instead of sending roots out far and wide to gather nutrients, as a wild berry would, plants have to be placed in raised beds lined with black plastic and watered with overhead irrigation. Because the Tri-Star is a very dense berry, though, with high soluble solids and sugar content, they also mold easily. (These, by the way are exactly the qualities that allow the berry to pickle up so well, which is what the chefs at Momofuku and Corton like to do with them.) To prevent mold, Rick has to be fanatic about cleaning out all dead or rotting berries, pruning off all runners, and laying down straw between rows to make sure no dirt splashes back onto the fruit. His field has to be meticulously maintained, in other words. 

"If disease breaks out in week two," he notes, you're done. "To get this berry to come in, when done correctly, it's a treasure." The Tri-Stars are also, he says, "a roller coaster. They can come in and do very well, but they can also take away. Two years ago, the strawberry season was soup, it rained all through."

How did he get through? "I have a day job," he says succinctly (his "more-than full-time" day job is as marketing director of Hudson Valley Foie Gras). "If I just did beans and potatoes, it wouldn't be so bad, but strawberries are like this," he says, his hand describing the up-and-down movement of a roller coaster. "It's ski vacation in Colorado, beans and rice, ski vacation, beans and rice."

When well-heeled customers at fancy chef dinners say to Rick, "Well, if you were smart....." and give him business advice, his answer is, "Being smart isn't always going to help you if this is the weather. If all of a sudden your quarterly reports were 700 percent under last year, what would you do? You'd fold! But not a farmer. It's like Vegas, it's crazy! And you learn to just go with it."

Please bring back your wine cake, Rozanne Gold!

 No visit to Rozanne Gold’s grand, bohemian brownstone in Park Slope would be complete without a slice or two of her Venetian Wine Cake. Once sold locally through a bakery in the ’70s, it is one among the thousands of smart, delicious dishes Rozanne's created throughout her career. It’s also the only recipe that she does not give out. Instead, the cake has a permanent home in her airy kitchen, ensconced in a worn green cake tin on an iron stand next to the window.

So when I showed up one morning to interview Rozanne for a profile in this month's Eat, Drink, Local issue of Edible Manhattan, naturally she cut me several slices of her cake and brewed me a cup of coffee. “I had something vaguely like it in Venice,” she said of her creation, “very simple. I came home and kept on experimenting.” It was her husband Michael Whiteman’s idea to add rosemary, which Rozanne points out is more Tuscan, and typical of the Renaissance style of coupling the sweet and the savory. Her family and their guests go through at least a cake a week, and for the past 15 years, her housekeeper Irene has started her weekly visit off with coffee and a slice of wine cake.

In the picture above, you can see the cake on the right, and behind Rozanne, the beautiful collection of china serving platters that Michael has collected throughout his long career as an international restaurant consultant. 

 Rozanne’s done so many things well in her life, that it’s difficult to sum her up. In a way, her wine cake does it best. The author of the best-selling “1-2-3” three-ingredient cookbooks used little more than olive oil, sugar flour and rosemary for this toothsome torta, I guessed, yet there is a keen palate, a knowledge of culinary and cultural history, an entrepreneurial streak, and a poetic sense of refinement at play here.

Although she’s written 12 cookbooks and wrote a column on simplified entertaining for Bon Appétit for five years, the author candidly confessed as she prepared our coffee, that, let’s face it, entertaining on any scale takes some attention and effort. Being in awe of Rozanne from the outset, this came as something of a relief to me, a little as if Martha Stewart had just confided that she struggles to conquer a secret, messy, room in her home.

Our hours-long interview was fascinating because Rozanne’s life has been a string of adventures and achievements, and because she blazed her own unique trail through the Manhattan culinary world of the late '70s and '80s, when women often didn't get the get the respect and credit that they deserved. But the taste memory of her wonderful cake will probably be the most lasting for me. Let’s hope she brings it back on the market soon.

David Bouley's apple foyer

In pursuit of another story recently, I had the chance to sit down with David Bouley, the brilliantly creative chef who has staked out a corner of Tribeca as his own laboratory for refined French fare, pretty patisserie products, Austrian explorations and authentic Japanese food. His downtown empire is constantly in a state of flux, so the tiny space that used to be called “Upstairs” will become Bouley Studio and the former French-Italian hybrid Secession (in an even older incarnation, it was the Austro-Hungarian Danube)  will soon open as Brushstroke, a kaiseki and sushi restaurant done in collaboration with Japan’s Tsuji Culinary Institute in Osaka.

The chef had just returned from Japan and was raving about the fantastic vegetables he encountered in Kyoto: turnips, carrots, daikon, cabbages and round eggplants. “Kyoto eggplants are the best,” he told me, “you can eat them like an apple.” Of course he brought back seeds and will try to grow them here in New York. We shared a moment of worry about the Tohoku earthquake, and the chef reckoned that the record closeness of the moon to the earth at the time could have been a factor in that natural disaster.

Walking through the Brushstroke as it was being readied to open felt like being in a  Japanese woodworker’s atelier: the long, narrow room was filled with rough-hewn wood set at asymmetrical angles, glowing light and busy Japanese workers. The artisans and many of the materials for the restaurant are from Japan, and the room (like the food, I hope) promises to be stunning.

But what I really wanted to show you was the famous foyer to the flagship Bouley. In the restaurant’s first incarnation of the late ’80s, a dreamy country-French maison filled with flowers, the chef placed crates of apples in the entrance. According to Bouley, they, like so much of what he does, harked back to his childhood in Connecticut. Bouley explains, “The apples and quinces smelled so good at my grandmother’s farm. My brothers and my sister and I used to hide among the quinces, and my mother and my grandmother both put quinces in with the sheets and towels. We grew up with that, and having a real connection to what was happening outdoors.”

The tradition of always having fresh apples in his restaurant foyer, however, actually began as a mistake. The chef had gone to the theater and in his haste, left some crates of apples there. When he returned, the scent was so magical that they became a fixture. At the current Bouley—more sumptuously attired in rich silks and velvets, and hung with vibrant paintings of the southern French countryside—the foyer presentation, too, has undergone a makeover. Bouley had high-tech stainless steel shelving constructed for his apples, 3,900 in all. But it is the foyer during the fall Concord grape season that really makes people stop in their tracks, says Bouley, as they take in the rich, musky scent with amazement. “They step in, they stop, and they just look around,” he says. That alone is worth a trip come October.