Mouthing Off

First, the bad news about the supercool French food festival Omnivore, which brings its Young Cuisine world tour to New York City on June 9th: The master class series on Friday, June 10th—highlighting New York City’s Carlo Mirarchi (an F&W Best New Chef 2011, hurray!) and John Fraser (What Happens When); Paris's Giovanni Passerini (Rino) and Jean-François Piège (Thoumieux); and Copenhagen's Mads Refslunch (MR)—is for food professionals only. Now the good news: I hear that Omnivore is giving away a few, just a few, Master Class tickets: write to reservation@omnivore.fr and use the code 'young cuisine.'

And, more Omnivore good news: you can actually taste food from these incredible chefs at Omnivore’s The F**** Dinners, at What Happens When, from June 9-11, by going here.

You’ve got to love a book party that features the Ace Hotel’s DJ Huggy Bear (his card says, “I accept hugs, not requests”). So Phaidon’s fall preview party, at its Soho store, had excellent music. And following the success of Noma by René Redzepi, it's no surprise that they have a terrific fall cookbook lineup as well. That includes a new edition of the best-selling Silver Spoon book and The Art of French Baking, with adorable illustrations by Chocolate & Zucchini blogger Clotilde Dusoulier. Best of all, in my world, is The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adrià. The book will feature 31 staff meals from Spain’s El Bulli (Meal 7: Waldorf Salad, Noodle Soup with Mussels and Melon Soup with Pink Grapefruit). I plan to cook my way through all of them, especially because these meals average out to about $5 per person (which is about one-tenth of the cost of a cab ride to El Bulli from the nearest town). I’ve especially got my eye on Meal 4, wherein I’ll learn the secrets to Adrià’s Caesar salad and cheeseburger with potato crisps.

When American Craft Beer Week concludes on May 22, events will have taken place in every state for the first time in the celebration’s six-year history. No one understands the rise of local beer better than Garrett Oliver. The Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster and award-winning author of The Brewmaster’s Table (2005) is finishing up his latest feat as editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Beer. Considering the honor attached to a first edition in the food reference series, it's funny to hear Oliver's take on the publisher's pitch three years ago. "I went quickly sprinting in the opposite direction. The project seemed so overwhelmingly huge, and obviously I already have a job over here as brewmaster," he remembers. With the encouragement of friends who knew he'd regret the lost opportunity, Oliver embarked on the work over a year ago with a preliminary list of 500 topics;1,120 references and 160 additional writers later, the tome will drop in October. Here, Oliver reveals some of the groundbreaking subjects that will be covered and what he thinks you should be drinking (and eating) now.

What convinced you to sign on? There are a lot of subjects that we in the craft-brewing community might use every day that are literally not written down. So if you want to know about, say, dry-hopping—adding hops after fermentation for extra flavor and aroma, which is done by 80 to 95 percent of all the breweries in the United States—there is precisely nothing to read.

What other categories are you breaking ground in? Sour beers. Barrel aging:There's a huge movement all over the world now interested in deriving flavors from wooden barrels. You will read about Amarillo, a hop variety: where it comes from, how it developed, what its genetic parents are, how it grows in a field, and how people tend to use it. But then, right before that, you'd read [an entry called] Ale House, about the history of the ale house from Roman times to its development into the modern pub. So it really covers not only things scientific and technical, but also cultural and historic things.

What's the most surprising country making beer? Of course when we think of Italy, we think of wine. But Italy has 350 breweries, and Italian brewers are really excited, creative and using a lot of their background in food to inform what they do on the beer side. Scandinavia is also a big story. We might think of one or two beers, like Carlsberg, but there are many dozens of breweries in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, etc.

Do you cover foods to eat with beer? What's your favorite pairing? There are sections on food-and-beer pairing. I've done about 700 beer dinners in 12 countries, and I wrote a 360-page book on beer-and-food pairings. But this time of year, for example, I love saison, which is a Belgian-style wheat beer. [At Brooklyn Brewery] we have a new one coming out called Sorachi Ace, based on a particular hop variety of that name, and I think it's really great with grilled salmon and shrimp dishes—lighter dishes you might grill in summertime.

How much has beer culture evolved in the last decade? It's really pretty incredible. When I first started traveling, I would go overseas and say, "Oh, I'm an American brewer," and people would just be dripping with disdain: "Oh, yes, we have heard of your American beer." Because they were thinking about just the mass-market beer. We now have over 1,700 breweries in the United States, and we have the most vibrant beer culture in the world, bar none. What's amazing is that now, we go to Germany and Belgium and Italy and, to a large extent, brewers all over the world look up to the United States. Twenty years ago it was exactly the opposite.

Last night's supersonic "Chefs Cook for Japan" fundraising dinner in NYC raised an astonishing $100,000 for the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund. The dinner's highlight featured participating chefs—like Jonathan Waxman, Marcus Samuelsson and Paul Bartolotta—jumping on stage during the live auction. Spontaneous auction packages included Jose Garces and Masaharu Morimoto’s Iron Chef dinner (the two Iron Chefs will cook for a dinner party using a themed ingredient) and  Daniel Boulud and Morimoto creating a package that starts with sushi, sashimi and saki from Morimoto at DBGB followed by burgers, bangers and beer before going out to what will surely be a ridiculous night of karaoke with Boulud and Morimoto. Bonus highlight: Morimoto's karaoke preview of What a Wonderful World for the crowd.

Designers Signe Bindslev Henriksen and Peter Bundgaard Rützou are the darlings of Copenhagen’s star chefs. The duo behind the firm Space Architecture & Interior Design has designed nearly every restaurant of note in the city, from René Redzepi’s famous Noma to Bocuse d’Or winner Rasmus Kofoed’s Geranium. While in NYC for International Contemporary Furniture Fair they dropped by to tell me about their most recent project, star chef Bo Bech’s newly opened restaurant, Geist.
 
“We work very closely with every chef,” says Rützou. “Geranium feels very James Bondish, and we reinvent Noma each summer, but it always reflects René’s vision of staying true to Denmark and local roots. With Geist, the design is a bit wild and flamboyant.” Geist is divided into two rooms, one with lounge chairs and tables, the other all bar stools. “Designing a bar stool comfortable enough to sit on for an entire meal was a challenge,” says Henriksen. The resulting stool is part of the new Spine Collection that SPACE debuted last month at Salone del Mobile in Milan; it will soon be available in the US here. The Spine lounge was used in Noma and the Spine high chair (above) in Geist. My favorite piece is the new double bar stool that seats two. “Bar eating always lacked that intimacy, so this is like our take on the dating chair for the bar,” says Henriksen.

 

In the F&W Test Kitchen right now, we’re testing Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto’s sushi, and we wish he were here to taste it. But Morimoto is busy right now: He’s gearing up for a big gala charity dinner on Wednesday, May 18, called Chefs Cook for Japan, to raise money for The Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund. And when they say ‘Chefs’ they mean an A-list group that includes (drumroll...) Daniel Boulud, Marcus Samuelsson, Ken Oringer, Anita Lo, Jonathan Waxman, Jose Garces and, coming all the way from Las Vegas, Paul Bartolotta. Two of NYC’s top mixologists—Julie Reiner of the Clover Club and Katie Stipe of Vandaag—are mixing cocktails.
 
Now is the time to buy tickets: They're at chefscookforjapan.com.

I think I must have been dazed by an overdose of Montrachet (a statement that will get me little sympathy from anyone), because it's taken me several days to get a handle on this wrapup post for the big event at Pebble Beach a week or so ago, Pebble Beach Food & Wine. As in years past, several thousand wine lovers converged on this idyllic spot for three days of rampant wine tasting. Highlights for me were the various tastings I helped host:

 (1) an eight-vintage retrospective of Bordeaux's Château Palmer (deal alert: 2008 Alter Ego de Palmer, a thrilling wine that, at about $50, costs a fifth of what Château Palmer itself costs).

 (2) a tasting of 2005 and 1999 Montrachets from Drouhin, Bouchard, Marc Colin, and Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (really non-deal alert: 2005 DRC Montrachet. Pretty much nectar of the gods but it does run a cool $4500 a bottle or so...)

 (3) a tasting of the wines of the Rhône's Château Beaucastel with Marc Perrin, one of the family members who own the estate. Beaucastel is arguably the benchmark Châteauneuf-du-Pape-the wines were unsurprisingly wonderful. I particularly like the aromatic, garrigue-y 2001.

 Finally, my other highlight event was the dinner we hosted—along with the good folks at Robert Mondavi Winery—to celebrate our top sommeliers of 2011 (click through for the article). Good wines, well-deserved applause for the somms, and fantastic food from some of Napa Valleys star chefs: Richard Reddington, Ken Frank, Tyler Florence, Jeff Mosher, and Masaharu Morimoto (who came out and sang, accapella, a traditional Japanese fisherman's song).

Anyway, the event is over for this year but it will be back next year. If you're in the Bay Area and you like wine, you'd be crazy not to go.

So, were they waiting till after the wedding to make this announcement? According to England's The Daily Mail, the royal family is going to start producing sparkling wine from one of its estates, Windsor Great Park. Apparently they'll plant more than 16,000 grapevines there in the next couple of weeks. Sparkling would be appropriate, of course—Pol Roger Brut Champagne was served at the recent royal wedding reception (much to my chagrin, as I'd predicted it might be Bollinger when I was on the Today show the Wednesday before the wedding).

If you've checked Eater or Grub Street recently, you've probably seen the preview clip of Kimchi Chronicles (featuring a Hugh Jackman cameo). But if you haven't seen it, and this is the first you're hearing of KC, here’s some background. Marja Vongerichten premieres her amazing new TV show this weekend, which follows her as she travels around Korea (she’s half Korean and was born there) with her husband, the illustrious chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. You’ll see them in a big food market in Seoul, and in Sokcho, a port that’s very, very close to North Korea.

You’ll also see them making bibimbop, the excellent stone pot rice dish made with meat, vegetables, you name it (Marja loves it as a way to use leftover side dishes). And you’ll also see them back at home in New York cooking with their good friends and upstairs neighbors Hugh Jackman and his wife, Deborra (they often have dinner parties together, but I’m not sure if they’re always group cooking like this).
 
Kimchi Chronicles premieres on Sunday, May 8 in NYC on WNET (channel 13) at 4 pm EST.

Boy, is the James Beard Foundation on fire with their 27 days of pop-up dinners. Last week, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo from LA’s Animal got me addicted to foie-gras biscuits. And last night, Iñaki Aizpitarte, the chef of Paris’s ultra-cool Le Chateaubriand, and Christina Tosi, with her exceptional team from NYC’s Momofuku Milk Bar, stepped up and cooked. On the menu: Tosi’s chicken and lime soup dumplings and brilliant seven-minute rhubarb with black-pepper gravy (that was dessert; seven minutes is the length of time the rhubarb spent in the microwave after being cooked sous-vide with cherry puree).

It helps to eat this kind of ingenious meal with two chefs who have cooked at Copenhagen's singular Noma: If you wonder out loud where the parmesan is that’s part of Inaki’s white asparagus with finger lime, mozzarella and sorrel, they’ll say, pretty much in unison: “Granita; parmesan granita.” Likewise they can identify all the mystery pickles on Iñaki’s lamb with burnt eggplant puree (for the record, apple, turnip and and squash).