The burger at Prune is famous. When Gabrielle Hamilton announced that her downtown Manhattan restaurant, known for simple-done-perfect dishes like sardines on Triscuits and monkfish liver on toast, would serve lunch, the burger was the thing to have.
There was just one problem when I went to try it. It comes on an English muffin. I don’t like English muffins. There’s something about the dryness of their texture, the almost-metallic dullness of their taste, and the particular way they both soak up and repel moisture that gets right to the heart of my morbid fear of wet bread. So I asked for it on a roll. “No substitutions.” I kicked myself for even asking.
And then it arrived: a sphere of burger right in the middle of two almost completely flat discs (the photos here are more an artistic interpretation than the real thing, which is impossible to replicate). I didn’t know where to start. Press the ends of the discs together and take the first bite burgerless? Pull the sphere towards the end, which would mean the first bite was full of ground beef and lamb (the not-secret secret) and the last just, ew, soggy bread?
Somehow I got through it. Blissfully, in fact. The English muffin was wet already with butter so the terror of moisture was mitigated by my affection for fat, and the burger flattened out, and then the bacon grabbed onto those little English muffin pockets, and there was just enough room for it on its long wooden platter, and I realized that for all my skepticism, this was a perfectly designed dish.
The first thing you are taught in architecture school, where I ignored my inability to draw or model or conceptualize space and so managed to receive an undergrad degree, is that there are limits. The second thing you are taught is that you should -- lucky for me and my BA! -- circumvent them. And while I survived those late nights in the studio by eating more Fritos and so-garlicky-the-whole-building-recoiled hummus than one might think possible, our professors were always talking about the latest endangered fish they broiled, the meatpacking district restaurant they designed, the dinner parties they threw. It was all very aspirational and glamorous for us students, but what became clear, through my haze of melted plexiglas and tears, was that there is an overlap between people who care about design, and people who care about food.
Today, as a one-time architecture student and current food enthusiast, I'm still intrigued about how the design of a structure or object relates to the design of a dish. In school then and cooking now, I’m always looking for the limits. Program, site, budget, client. Dinner, plate, very small, hungry. So what about someone who has to figure out limits that will work every time? A series of rules to follow even when the limitations are as variable as they are every single night of a New York City restaurant’s life?
Todd Mitgang runs Crave Ceviche Bar, a midtown Manhattan restaurant that has one big limit already very defined: everything is, in some way, ceviche. Which meant, on a recent night, seared tuna and foie gras, island creek oysters, and Chatham Bay cod fish, all carrying a little menu line describing how they were, since we can turn everything into a verb, “ceviche’d.”
The next morning—incidentally and unfortunately just a few days before a massive crane fell on 51st Street and destroyed part of the newly expanded restaurant—I asked Mitgang about his process, how he narrows down the creation of a dish into manageable increments. Turns out it’s much the same as design: program, site, budget, client. First he calls his purveyors to figure out the parts that'll inform his program: the ingredients. “I find out if they’ll be available for the next three or four months,” he explains. “And then the next step is about making sense of it all.”
It’s the sorting through everything that requires the kind of discipline we’re talking about. Mitgang takes a trip down imagination lane. We share a delusion that we have a box of cherries. He asks me what I would do. I say I’d make a cherry bread pudding like my grandmother does. Good. That’s information he can work with. But there’s his artificial limit again—ceviche—and it lessens his possibilities, informs the dish’s design, in terms of both what it will be and what it will look like. “Since I run a ceviche restaurant, what kind of acidity works well with cherries?” he asks, walking me through the minute steps. “I have ruby snapper, cherries, and I want to make this cherry bread pudding.” And then he veers, breaking some of my own limits by suggesting he throw in some thyme, some spring garlic.
Awesome. It’s great. But wait. Budget? “Maybe the ruby snapper isn’t profitable,” he says. “But I’m really passionate about the snapper and I want guests to eat it.” The solution? “Maybe the next course is something that comes off like it’s fancy shmancy but I’m making all my money in it, so I’m spreading the cost throughout a whole tasting menu.” Kind of like how a designer will skimp on the drywall but splurge on the drapes.
Mitgang’s with me on the analogy. “If you’re restricted—if your client says, ‘I want it to have a barnyard feel, or for you to use only wood or only brick,’ that makes it so much more exciting to think outside of the box, ” he adds. “For me, here, I need to make this ceviche as appealing as it can be to so many different people.” That’s why he gets playful, bringing in different textures. It’s also why sometimes he makes choices like putting chocolate-covered popcorn on top of the Chatham cod ceviche. I loved the fish. I didn’t love the popcorn. But that’s okay—the bones can be brilliant and the decoration a bit much. It’s still the foundation that counts. Not to mention the style, the final look. We’re back to the snapper, and Mitgang’s musing about how he wants it to appear on the plate: “I’m thinking we have it carpaccio style, on top of the pudding.” It sounds as bizarre as Prune’s burger, and it’s definitely a design move; information wrapped in a look, surrounded by a style.
So chefs think like designers. Do designers think like chefs? I call Jesse Reiser, an architect who had the (mis)fortune of being my last architecture professor ever. I remember that he was very into food. Still is.
I ask him if there’s an overlap between cooking and design. “They’re very analogous,” he says. “I don’t do these really finicky compositions so much, but it’s kind of a material practice.” Reiser’s architecture, which he does with his wife, Nanako Umemoto, is very techno-savvy and conceptual. Lots of meshes and skins. “It’s very similar in terms of the way you go about thinking about balancing the dish, the complex interactions,” he explains, comparing the processes. “It’s also similar in that you assemble: It’s an assemblage of things, and you’re managing the unfolding of the dish as it develops.”
Reiser talks about cooking an omelette as having the same kind of feedback cycle as a building. “You’re watching very carefully the way in which the eggs are congealing, and trying to regulate the textures and timing,” he says. “It’s very similar to the way we’re thinking about the design process—there’s a loop of what you’re drawing and what’s coming back.”
He also knows the principles he’s rejecting. “There are certain architects who justify their work through the process,” he says. “I prefer to be more like Anthony Bourdain and judge it on the product: If it’s lousy, it’s lousy.” The biggest overlap he sees is in the designer’s and cook’s ability to discern small differences.
And that’s where the aesthetic, the actual design, comes in. There is a small-turned-big difference between a burger that sits in the middle of an English muffin and one that comes right to the edge of a potato bun, and it’s about expectation, surprise, skepticism, and, finally, relief. The way the Prune burger is presented—“this is wrong, this can’t be how it’s supposed to be”—is just another example of Hamilton’s relaxed sense of humor combined with ethereal skill. (My friend who ordered the “egg on a roll” was convinced they were using double-yolked eggs.) Where Hamilton's burger is like a David Rockwell interior (materially focused, overtly scaled, playfully theatrical), someone like Gabriel Kreuther’s perfect Alsatian articulation at his restaurant The Modern—I’m thinking of his veal and goat cheese terrine perfectly offset by its ultra-smooth base of watercress puree on the one side and the playfulness of springy watercress leaves on the other—is like a Renzo Piano building (subtle, detailed, perfect). And Mitgang's ceviche? A Will Alsop project (out there, bizarro-straightforward, always colorful).
It’s
an old saying that there are a hundred ways to cook an egg. But there are a
thousand ways to design one.
