Published January 2008
The International Chefs Congress starts out friendly enough, at Geoffrey Zakarian's Gramercy restaurant Country. There are cocktails and hors d'ouevres and chefs, chefs, chefs, most of whom have strolled in from their Manhattan restaurants, taking a break from slinging halibut and drizzling sauces but some of whom have flown in from San Francisco where they're fighting against the locavores and others who are just in from Washington DC or Miami or even Cleveland. It's a who's who of cooks: Noriyuki Sugie from Asiate at the Mandarin Oriental; molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne of WD-50; Gramercy Tavern's Michael White, making his mark in the wake of Tom Colicchio's departure; the irascible--and seemingly everywhere--Will Goldfarb.
The next day they're down to business on the 52nd floor of 7 World Trade Center, maybe an unlikely location but it works because the space is still rough and unfinished and there's room for all the ham legs and bottles of Ferran Adria's powders and PolyScience's reverse flattop griddles and the PacoJet and bottles and bottles of olive oil and whiskey and rainwater collected from the air above Tasmania.
Wandering the floor is one thing – tasting shrimp-pink Filipino salt, untouched by anything but the gatherers' hands and chasing those pure crystals with a slice of ultra-marbled wagyu steak– but the real highlights are the chefs' demonstrations and it's on the test kitchen floor that it's easy to see what's really going on here in between the glad-handing and the cheers.
Wylie Dufresne, who brought a hint of molecular gastronomy to New York when he took over the kitchen at 71 Clinton Fresh Food and brought its full brunt with the opening of WD-50, gives a talk called, simply, "New Developments in the WD-50 Kitchen." It's clear from the crowd that Dufresne doesn't need to offer any more explanation than that – everyone wants to know what Wylie's up to. And he's up to something cool, handing out little plastic boxes with two little round pebbles in them. One tastes of grilled corn, the other of brown butter banana, and they're a mixture of waxy maize and a whole bunch of other starch and reduction and powders and flavors and the texture is somewhere between pop rocks and shortbread. "Sandy," Dufresne says, but it's a good sandy. It is also, it turns out once Joel Robuchon takes the stage, a good idea to give out samples, get the audience on your side, because the French chef won't be playing nice.
Duferesne did end by tying foie gras (and konjack flour and xanthan gum) into a bow, but Robuchon, who has restaurants in Paris and New York and Las Vegas and London and Tokyo and Macao and Monaco really isn't interested in that kind of thing. "Xanthan gum's not going to kill you," Robuchon concedes halfway through his demonstration – on sous vide (which, once upon a time, was just as novel and exciting as odd starch reductions are now). "But, well, maybe it's not necessary." Instead, it seems necessary to take thirty-six hours to cook spinach, starting it sous-vide, then refrigerating it overnight to get the chlorophyll to come out and play (and, it's true, the spinach is an incredible green with the addition of nothing but oil and salt), then sautéing it. Simple? Sort of. Simpler than what Wylie's doing? Definitely.
It's a sign of some tension in the ranks and the disconnect only continues with the cocktail party that offers everything from Bostonian Ken Oringer of Clio's eggshells filled with liquid oyster and Minibar's Jose Andres' olive oil candies – a thin hard shell around a little spurt of olive oil – to Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit's much more straightforward – and straightforwardly delicious – lamb. And then, there's the final awards gala where the chefs serve their ideas of street food, and here Atelier Joel Robuchon's eel-and-foie-gras terrine goes head-to-head with Damon Wise of Craft's pork sandwich (with cracklin'!), and that tension melts into just another reminder of how much people care about food now – and, more importantly, about chefs, our new take-no-prisoners rock stars
