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En route to Paris for another summer sabbatical in my Woody Allen fantasy of a richer life, I arrived in London for a short stay at a sweet little hotel, Dukes in St. James, near Buckingham Palace. Dukes is famous for its James Bond-theme martini bar. The drinks sport names like Miss Moneypenny and the evil Vesper, in honor of Ian Fleming who use to hang out at the bar for his "shaken but not stirred" martinis.
Over a Vesper on arrival night, I read in the International Herald Tribune that Ferran Adrià was closing his fabled El Bulli in Spain, the restaurant that stole gastronomy from the French. Chef Adrià's cocina de vanguardia, commonly known in English as molecular gastronomy, has been a food world game-changer for decades now, and after reading the story, I was, like a plump clove of Spanish ajo, crushed!
That first Vesper -- a mixological masterpiece of mostly gin, some vodka and drops of Lillet, Angostura bitters and lemon zest -- hit me hard, but not as hard as the news. I had lost my opportunity to taste, no, experience Adrià's dishes -- tapas-scaled morphs of "techno-emotional cuisine," as he describes his edgy creations-- that propelled him and his El Bulli to the status of "best in the world." I have sampled molecular cooking at other showcases of the style in San Francisco -- I'll never forget my fried gelatinized chicken bouillon cubes ("fried chicken") at Daniel Patterson's restaurant, Coi, a few years ago -- but I always intended one day to go to El Bulli for the real deal (in situ) and, of course, for cartoon material.
'El Bulli is crazy … It's the drunkenness of all the new things that can be.' -- Ferran Adrià
Wobbling back to my room at Dukes, a second evil Vesper making a hash of my brain, I turned on the TV in time to see a BBC report on a curious mass hysteria in Europe known as "planking" (from the word "plank," a piece of wood wider than a board).
Planking then and now
Old hat to some, planking was, at least in my current condition, big news to me. Somewhere between performance art and stupidity, but closer to the latter, the plankers lay motionless, face down with arms rigidly at their sides, feet extended, at locations either absurd, dangerous, or both -- on top of parked cars, on ledges of sky scrapers, in cross walks. Photos are taken and posted on websites that vie for the most outrageous versions of the phenomenon.
As I planked on my hotel bed, submerged in a Vesper-induced torpidity, I began to conflate the planking craze with gastronomic images passing before my eyes: first, planking animals on wooden carving boards (pigs, chickens, sheep, ducks); then chefs planking on their stoves, counters, tables and, like those Native-American recipes for planked salmon, in their ovens.
I saw Spanish pirates "walking the plank," and then Adrià as a pirate chef a la plancha (the popular Spanish grilling technique) because he had, as the French would put it, trop de pain sur son planche ("too much bread on his plate"). After almost 20 years of serving up avant-garde cuisine at El Bulli, he was, I imagined, exhausted! So was I, and mercifully fell asleep.
Pirate Chef à la Plancha
Nathan Myhrvold waxes 'elBulli-ent'
In the morning over breakfast at Dukes, I doodled all the confabulations from the night before and reflected again on the shocking news about El Bulli. Ironically, I had brought with me from the States a long El Bulli-centric article by Nathan Myhrvold from Gastronomica magazine's spring edition: "The Art in Gastronomy -- A Modernist Perspective." Myhrvold, a huge fan and confederate of Adrià and a billionaire, recently produced and self-published the tour de force, multi-volume $500-plus cookbook, "Modernist Cuisine: the Art and Science of Cooking." A man of many talents, from science and business to photography, cooking and now aesthetic philosophy, Myhrvold is the classic Renaissance man -- in Modernist clothes.
Somewhat recovered now, I read Myhrvold's article, an impressive journey through art and gastronomic history to the long-delayed but almost inevitable arrival, he suggests, of a new avant-garde art cuisine (he quotes poet Ezra Pound's Modernist art imperative, "Make It New!") invented by Adrià. Lets call it Gastronomy with a capital G.
Myhrvold's analysis of Adrià's avant-garde agenda rings true enough: to shatter culinary conventions and expectations, to create dialogue between chef and diner, to apply to cuisine all applicable science and technology (the molecular arsenal of spherification, gelification, emulsification, etc.) and to demystify gastronomy. These are standard avant-garde art strategies applied to cuisine.
But is Modernist Cuisine some sort of late-onset culinary Impressionism, as Myhrvold would have it, with Adrià as cuisine's Edouard Manet, the first Modernist painter?
I felt compelled to recon with the article's bold theoretical merger of art and food, but I had no idea how consumed I'd become. The delights and surprises of El Bulli's food style, as championed by Myhrvold and media superstars like Anthony Bourdain, have always intrigued me, but the whole business of cuisine-as-alchemy has seemed a bit abstruse and over-hyped. Yes, I have enjoyed the molecular cooking style as edible entertainment, but as with opera, I'm good for only one or two performances a year.
Another confession: I'm no Renaissance man. Call me Gothic, a Gothic man. Which means that like the 19th century British Arts and Crafts gurus, the designer and social reformer William Morris is one, I look back for my aesthetic inspiration to a pre-technological Golden Age -- the medieval Gothic was Morris' -- before machine-age "form follows function" Modernism took hold. Morris, and his mentor John Ruskin, characterized one element of their aesthetic philosophy, geared toward architecture, as "truth to materials." Yes, that's me: Give me "base metal" prepared well and served simply, and I'll keep my "gold" in the bank.
From bacon and eggs to coq au vin
I left the land of British spirits and arrived by Chunnel in vino-centric Paris where they don't know from martinis, or planking for that matter. Being vinologically challenged, I never consume enough wine in Paris to get anywhere near as planked as I was in London. But even sober as a church mouse I could not stop agitating over Myhrvold and his article.
There was just something odd in his analysis of how gastronomy and art have commingled, or not, through history. I couldn't seem to figure out what was irritating me until about the 10th reading. And then I got it: Myhrvold's curious definition of art in the article's very first sentence:
Throughout history people have made things that transcend their primary utilitarian purpose and engage our minds in profoundly intellectual and emotional ways. We call such things “art"...
Is this really true? If both the Fine Arts and cuisine (with its “primary utilitarian purpose” of nourishment) have, at their core, utilitarian functions, then they are, Myhrvold suggests, aesthetically equivalent. He makes this more explicit a few paragraphs later:
Food can engage our senses, our minds, and our emotions just as profoundly as carefully chosen words or brush strokes.
Really? What's the last meal that made you weep with sadness or joy, as you might in front of a great painting or at the symphony? And what is a painting's or a novel's "primary utilitarian purpose"? The aesthetic philosophy I've read argues that there is an evolutionary explanation for true art unrelated to utilitarian problem-solving, and it has to do with the deep pleasure associated with human expression.
If chefs really could transcend food's primary utilitarian purpose and express themselves with all the profundity of painters and poets and composers, what would their food taste like? Let's ask the French, who have an opening now, post-El Bulli, to reclaim their hold on Gastronomy with a capital G. For who does avant-garde High Art transcendence better than the French?
Think sauces, soups and braises. The French excel at all things jus. Imagine a French assault on cuisine's primary utilitarian purpose, by-passing the palate and stomach with intravenous injections that create taste via blood and lungs. Rub a cut clove of garlic on the bottoms of your feet and see how garlic works its way through the bloodstream and lungs onto your breath.
At a post-Modernist cuisine gastropub in Paris
Servers could inject diners from a menu of concentrated liquid creations and then send them home to await the arrival of the "meal." Puts a whole new spin on the expression "getting sauced."
Rene Redzepi rides to the rescue
My blood was up! Was I living in Paris, or in Professor Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine mani-feasto? I had forgotten all about my fantasy of being picked up by Woody Allen's horse-drawn carriage from "Midnight in Paris" and transported to the Belle Epoch, my current Golden Age of choice. And I was reasonably sure Myhrvold was not going to pick me up in his private jet (assuming all billionaires have one) and whisk me off to El Bulli for Maestro Adrià's last supper. No, I was stuck in Paris, in the present, obsessed by thorny questions of art and food and art in food. Well, nowhere better than Paris for that.
But clearly I had to move on. Browsing through Chef Magazine, picked up while I was visiting London's wonderful bookshop/cafe, Books for Cooks, I came across an interview with Rene Redzepi, the chef at the two Michelin star Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark. Noma, the top pick in San Pellegrino's World's 50 Best Restaurant Awards for 2011 (and 2010), is the latest "best restaurant in the world" I haven't been to.
You could label Redzepi, in High Art terms, a found object sculptor. As a cook, he's celebrated in the food world as a forager who works with the unusual and impeccable seasonal products found around greater Copenhagen and points beyond. But Redzepi hates that label -- forager -- because, he says, it's only a part of what he does. In terms of Gastronomy with a capital G, how about Rene Redzepi, Environmental Gastronaut?
Whatever his tag, I'm encouraged by what I've read about this heir apparent to Adrià. Redzepi is literally down-to-earth and deeply embedded in a fascinating and challenging terroir: Scandinavia. Perhaps not a Gothic man like me, he's clearly got "truth to materials" running through his veins. When he talks about loving the flavor of raw, still-living shrimp -- you can't get material with more truth than that -- he sounds, in fact, more like a caveman.
I'm almost certain Redzepi would answer Myhrvold's multiple-choice question -- "…whether cooking qualifies as an art, or craft, or something else entirely” -- the same way I do: "All the above." I suspect that Adrià, who Redzepi admires greatly -- the real Adrià outside the coronation ceremony in Gastronomica magazine -- would answer it that way, too. But it's a choice Myhrvold never offers his readers.
Maybe I'll get to eat at Noma before it closes.
Zester Daily contributor L. John Harris is a writer and cartoonist living in Berkeley, California. His book, Foodoodles: From the Museum of Culinary History, featuring over 90 of his cartoons, won a 2011 Bay Area Independent Publisher's Association Award (BAIPA) in the catagory of "Graphic Memoir." Mr. Harris spent the 1970s as a garlic activist after writing The Book of Garlic (1974). In the 1980s Harris operated Aris Books, publishers of cookbooks by Bay Area food writers and chefs. His 1998 film "Divine Food: 100 Years in the Delicatessen Trade," was shown on PBS stations nationally and at Jewish film festivals around the world.
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I did an interview with SouthWest Chef, food genius, Mark Miller (Coyote Cafe, etc) and when asked his favorite restaurant in the world, he answered, "El Bulli". Chef(s)? He said, "Ferran Adria and Nobu". There you have it! But oooooooooooooooo this gorgeous piece! the span and depth!! YUMMM...now THIS is delicious writing!xxxxJudyth