The Young&Foodish year ended on a high note, with my signing on with Phaidon, the prestigious publisher of books by Massimo Bottura, Ferran Adrià and René Redzepi, to compile a guide to the world’s best pizzerias.

This happy development should not come as too much of surprise if you’ve been following my posts here or on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 2 of my top 5 posts of 2014 were about pizza. In the past year I posted 5 videos about Neapolitan pizza on my YouTube channel.

This preoccupation with pizza did not come at the expense of my burger obsession. Burgers, like pizza, claimed two slots among my top 5 posts of the year. Since early October I’ve working on a major Young&Foodish event for early 2015 that’s to be all about burgers – real burgers. The Real Burger Challenge launches in London on January 18th.

Best wishes to you for a Happy New Year and a deliciously foodish 2015.

Top Young&Foodish Posts of 2014

5. Why Pizza in Naples has to be Soft

Naples shared its love of pizza and dry pasta with the world many years ago but something got lost in translation. Rather than eat pasta al dente and pizza soft, in the Neapolitan way, foreigners learned to do the opposite.

Non-Italians at last discovered the pleasures of al dente pasta in the late 20th Century. But only recently have hardcore devotees in the pizza diaspora acquired a soft spot for pizza with a light, pliable crust.

In my video above the master pizzaiolo Enzo Coccia of Pizzaria La Notizia explains why Neapolitan pizza must be so soft and light.

READ MORE>>>

4. Meet the Burgers #LBBfinal

[slider_pro id=”58″]

3. Pizza Pilgrims Think out of Box & Into Pan

“I have something for you,” said Londoner James Elliot, one of the Pizza Pilgrims behind the pizza van and insanely popular pizzeria of that name. “I’d like to you take it home and test it.”

I assumed the white pizza box Elliot handed me contained a pizza, albeit a rather heavy one. But when I opened the lid I saw a chemistry set where the pizza ought to have been. Plastic containers containing various elements were slotted into the round openings in a square sheet of green cardboard.
I slid the box over to Elliot for an explanation of its contents. The printed text under the lid contained the step-by-step instructions (see their recipe) for the Pizza Pilgrims Neapolitan Frying Pan Pizza.

READ MORE>>>

2. My Salad Cream Days in the UK

Assimilating the young and foodish me into British life has proven more frustrating than expected. I assumed it would be easy for me to adapt to the London foodscape, given I was educated in New Yorkese, a language with vast similarities to English, and was already acquainted with orange marmalade.

Turns out there was more to mastering the British food curriculum than distinguishing crisps from chips, aubergines from eggplants, tomatoes from tomatoes. 10 years into my London education I discovered I hadn’t even heard of, much less tried, a beloved British condiment, Heinz Salad Cream.

READ MORE>>>

1. Bleecker Street Triumphs with Blood & Guts at London Burger Bash Final

photo by Ian Sargent

Zan Kaufman of Bleecker St Burger won the Final of the London Burger Bash on April 5th at Borough Market with a combination of blood and guts.

The blood refers not to the oozy redness of her aged beef patties, cooked south of medium rare, but to the dried blood in the Clonakilty beef black pudding she added to her #LBBfinal entry – the Bleecker Black.

The guts alludes not to any beef innards in that Irish black pudding, however essential they may be, but rather to the audacity of using an ingredient that could repulse a thick slice of the voting pool.

READ MORE>>>

Redzepi was being modest, naturally, but he was also speaking to the subjectivity of taste and to the somewhat esoteric appeal of his foraging for culinary inspiration. Did he mind all the needling about, well, his pine needle garnishes, tree bark reductions and the like?

“It’s fine, it doesn’t bother me”, he replied. “People will disagree. There is no absolute truth.”

Three weeks shy of 30 and three months from running his own kitchen for the first time at autumn arrival Elliot’s Borough Market the Glaswegian has already held positions at Tom Aikens and The Ledbury in London, Marque in Sydney, Momofuku Ssam Bar in New York and, most opportunely, Noma in Copenhagen, named World’s Best Restaurant in April.

I am nevertheless impressed by McHale’s fleeting experiences abroad, first of all because he’s so up front about their laughably limited scope but, more significantly, from the multiple ways in which he’s been stimulated by them.

Only when you examine the timelines does McHale’s luminous work history begin to lose wattage. His spell at Noma under Rene Redzepi lasted only 3 weeks; his tutelage in the shadow of Momofuko’s David Chang, all of one day. Furthermore, his duties at those acclaimed restaurants were hardly challenging. When he wasn’t prepping cauliflower at Noma he was inside the refrigerator, scraping granita. Ah, the glamorous life of the kitchen temp.

It’s an oddity of apprenticeships: one protégé can spend 20 years working closely with a maestro and then accomplish little on his own, whereas another can stick around just long enough for a cup of coffee yet be nudged onto the path of true greatness. I think of the short but momentous few months Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi worked as an assistant in the Paris studio of Roumanian Constantin Brancusi.

McHale took stock of his backstage glimpse of Noma, even if he himself didn’t prepare any. He pushed himself to the front of the kitchen to help dress plates and marvelled at the organic, casual and deceptively simple look of dishes painstakingly composed to Redzepi’s exacting templates. He observed how the kitchen learned the nationality of every guest and sent out a chef who could explain various dishes to each diner in his native language. He felt the full force of Redzepi’s fervor for local sourcing and foraging. Out of faith, opportunism or a combination of both he now practices a religion where non-indigenous mangoes and coconuts are the forbidden fruits.

Normal people pull out their mobiles to show you recent snaps of their baby. McHale hands you his HTC Legend do show you up-to-date snaps of his baby radishes. A seed geek keen to revive vanished varieties of British heritage vegetables and fruit, McHale and Elliot’s have forged a partnership with Chegworth Valley Farm in Kent. That award-winning juice company will cultivate rarely harvested seeds for McHale and he’ll use their yield at Elliot’s, which is to source directly from Borough Market traders such as Chegworth. At the Pavilion pop-up he buried Chegworth radishes in an edible compost of black sesame seeds, a homage to or theft from –  take your pick – Noma and its signature Radiser amuse of radishes in a pot of soil.

Momofuko reinforced McHale’s appreciation for exceptional dining without the comforts traditionally associated with it. Not content just to have a casual restaurant with topless tables (no naperie) on both levels McHale wants the six seats and bar that will face Elliot’s open-kitchen downstairs to be set at the precisely the right heights to promote easy interaction between cooks and diners. He scouted the restaurants of New York with a tape measure in his pocket and regards the height of the chairs at Momofuko as a trade secret nearly as valuable as its recipe for fried chicken.

photo by Brian Jones

So will Isaac McHale be the next big thing? Hard to say. He cooked alongside Brett Graham at The Ledbury for 5 years and says it took that enormously talented chef almost as long to advance from cooking in the style of what he calls “London chefs doing French food” to one all his own. McHale will have to prove he can do the same, progressing from Noma themes, Ledbury riffs or Momofuko melodies. He must also learn to circumvent inevitable kitchen disasters such as the one last Friday that led to a main course of Old Spot pork shoulder as dry and tough as any in London.

photo by Brian Jones

Still I would not dare miss one of his Friday pop-up dinners, which are nearly sold out for the entire summer. The setting is spectacular; the wines are well chosen and much of the food, from chicken oysters in pine salt to Cornish mackeral with celtic mustard, is exquisitely conceived and prepared. Besides, if McHale does make it big you will want to be able to tell your grandchildren that you knew his beautiful radishes, carrots, spring onions and cucumbers back when they were still babies.
< 

With New York placing 6 of its restaurants in the top 50 and Paris 5, proud locals who were calling London the number one restaurant city only yesterday may have been having second thoughts this morning. I too found myself reassessing my position on the matter, only from the opposite perspective: last night was the first time since moving to London 5 years ago I felt inclined to place it above Paris and New York, my prior cities of residence, as the world’s gastronomic capital.

Could this be the reversal of a starstruck food obsessive gone gooey after breathing the same heady air as celebrated chefs René Redzepi and Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal? Potentially, yes. Did I maybe drink one too many mugs of smoke-breathing Guildhall Punch chilled with dry ice at the Awards after party? Not that I remember.

Mostly I was moved by the great hospitality of London, not merely to this international gathering of elite chefs but, more significantly, to their ideas, their accomplishments, their influence.

After the awards I followed Adrià around, snapping photos and waiting for a moment alone with the master. When I got it I asked him through an interpreter what was required of the diner, what made a world’s best restaurant diner?

“They should enjoy themselves and,” replied Adrià, pausing for emphasis, “they must be open-minded”.

That, I thought afterwards, was London: unburdened by traditions set in soil and wide open to discovery, innovation and foreign influence. In the UK, unlike in France, gastronomic chauvinism, justified or not, is rooted in the freedom to look overseas and find what’s best, a glorious task the nation’s food enthusiasts share with the organisers and judges of the 50 Best. The bias for the new over the old is manifest.

Blumenthal denied this had been a rough night for the UK before revealing how delighted he was to see so many of his foreign chef friends, perhaps including a few selected at the expense of his overlooked British colleagues. The best thing about the awards, he said, was their expanding global reach. In his eyes the rankings, for all their subjectivity, were an accurate reflection of modern gastronomy and a new spirit of international exchange.

“15 to 20 years ago the great chefs of France would accuse each other of stealing ideas,” said Blumental. “They were very competitive.” Now if he wants to nick an idea he calls the chef behind it on the phone, as he did with Massimiliano Alajmo, a fellow top 20 chef (from Le Calandre in Padua) also inclined to do strange things like filling a syringe with ragu. (Remember the spag bol from In Search of Perfection on the BBC?)

End of the day, The S. Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants 2010 is, as Achatz of Alinea, the highest-ranking US restaurant says, “a list”. What could executive chef Daniel Boulud have possibly done in the space of a year for his Daniel to climb from 41st best to 8th best restaurant in the world (apart from garnering a 3rd Michelin star)? Are there really 31 dining destinations on the planet superior to The French Laundry?

“You can’t put too much into it,” said Achatz, as if to warn himself not to get too high – or low. “You can’t hit yourself over the head about it.”

It was heartwarming to see Redzepi accepting his award with 7 members of his kitchen brigade, all of them wearing t-shirts bearing a photo of an 8th – Ali, a Gambian dishwasher who couldn’t get a visa and was left behind in Copenhagen.

“The statement is, we miss him,” said Redzepi, “It is a team. If you surround yourself with people you love anything is possible.”

Does this spirit of teamwork, I asked the unassuming heir to Adrià and Blumenthal, signal the downfall of the tyrant chef?

“I can be angry sometimes,” he replied. “It lasts 5 minutes. Nothing is worth putting yourself through that type of crazy fighting. This isn’t the Nobel Prize.”

Still, he conceded, winning the World’s Best Restaurant prize “wasn’t all that bad”.