Dear Daniel,

Can you recommend a Michelin-multistarred restaurant in tune with what’s exciting in the world of contemporary gastronomy? The cuisine must be ingenious to the extent it becomes impossible for the servers to recall and recite the elements of every dish. Food that’s also very enjoyable to eat isn’t essential but that would be a plus. Lastly, there must be a set lunch no higher than £35.

Howard H. Higginshauser Jr, Vancouver

Howard

The Ledbury‘s Brett Graham is a singular Australian chef flourishing in a British context.

* * *

Dude,

I love dried salted pig’s liver but most of what you’re served is dry and salty. Whatever. Our group of 16 carnivores wants to eat like a pig – to be specific, one suckling pig – at a British restaurant that does nose-to-tail cooking with guts and passion. Its house-baked sourdough must be as good as the bread we had at Moro the last time we visited London. Any ideas?

Wade, Miami

Wade,

St John wrote the book on nose to tail eating.

* * *

Help Young and Foodish,

If you think Howard H. Higginshauser Jr is demanding wait until you hear about Murray and Dorris. Murray likes nothing better than eating chargrilled beef and pan-roasted duck in vegetarian restaurants. Worldly Southern Mediterranean with Californian accents and chocolate hazelnut brownies is his preferred ethnic food. Doris won’t order anything without seeing it first. Presentation is paramount. Unable to made decisions she ends up ordering one of everything. She’s as flaky as a buttery croissant, lost in a make-believe world of Technicolor salad landscapes and meringue clouds.  Me, I prefer the simple life: Give me orange and fennel poached mackerel with beetroot and honey yoghurt salad and pistachio relish and I’ll marry you.

Sincerely,
Desperate in Seattle

Dez,

Ottolenghi is not so much a restaurant, deli or patisserie as a parallel fantasy universe of beautiful salads and pastries imagined by Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Everyone eats happy in Ottolenghiland.

* * *

From: marty@harrassyourass.com
Re: visit to London
20 July 2012 15:31:50 GMT+01:00
To: info@youngandfoodish.com

I prefer casual restaurants that don’t take their food casually at all, like New York’s Union Square Cafe and San Francisco’s Zuni Cafe. Is there anything like that in London, maybe Spanish, with open-fire roasting and without any fetichism for meat slicers. Its house-baked sourdough must be as good as the bread we had at St John the last time we visited London.

Marty, Philadelphia

Marty,

At one-of-kind Moro chefs Sam and Sam Clark draw inspiration from Spain under Muslim occupation. The wood-roasted meats, chargrilled fish and nearly everything that goes with them are Moorish and moreish.

* * *

Dan,

This will be my first time in London and having heard of your dining renaissance I desire nothing less than a knowing, world-class contemporary British concept restaurant with an outstanding chef, impeccable sourcing and a dessert bar. I expect to see dishes completed table-side, too, in the elegant manner of the Hotel de France in Nantua. Can you recommend five such restaurants?

Sebastien Sansepoir, Nantua

Seb,

At Pollen Street Social the incomparable chef Jason Atherton wants the finishing touches of clever dishes revealed before your eyes. The man is a magician: Who else could charge £29.50 for roasted sea bass yet still call his restaurant a ‘bistro’?

* * *

Dear Daniel Youngandfoodish,

We are oyster-and-caviar sophisticates who covet ‘traditional’ fish pie not made with ye olde fish scraps from a week ago Tuesday. Know of any timelessly stylish fish brasseries in London theatreland?

All the best,
Franz Pesky (no address)

Franz,

The restaurant and oyster bar J Sheekey is never a bad first option.

* * *

Dan the Man,

Gastropubs are all the rage back home but I suspect most if not all are operated by uninformed phonies exploiting the latest trend for financial gain. (I’m sure you don’t have profiteering restaurateurs like that in London.) Can you turn me on to two tried-and-true gastropubs – one near the Tate Modern; the other, close to Covent Garden. If the choice is between quantity and quality I’ll settle for both.

Thank you.
Elmer Tuttle, Los Angeles and San Francisco

Dear Elmer,

Anchor and Hope, near Tate Modern, and Great Queen Street, its West End sibling

* * *

Mr. Foodish,

I won’t bother you with a long wish list. I have but two requirements:

1. I’d like the restaurant be within walking distance of my hotel room at the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge.
2. I’d like my daughter Louise’s visage to be illuminated by porcelain wall sconces in the shape of antique jelly moulds.

Any chef with the stature of a Heston Blumenthal will do, providing his team can produce a great performance as much as a great dinner.  I only hope they don’t try to push salamugundy on us.

Sincerely,
Mrs I. M. Undemanding, Geneva, Cayman and Dubai

Mrs Undemanding,

Would Dinner by Heston suit? Its executive chef is an equal to Heston Blumenthal by any measure. Yes, the set menu does feature salamugundy as a starter, but you can have a ragoo of pigs ears as an alternative.

* * *

Daniel,

The only thing better than eating great cheap eats is waiting for great cheap eats with cool attractive people in a long line. Like I always say to Gino: Gino, why wait for 10 minutes and eat in an hour when you can do the reverse? Is there such a place in London? A BYOB maybe? With Punjabi food?

Mia Maso, Turin

Mia,

At the wildly popular Tayyabs in the Whitechapel district of fashionable East London the queue moves in reverse, like an up escalator going down. You gradually edge further away from the front of the queue the longer you stand in it. Every 17 seconds you are tortured by a server parading yet another sizzling platter of incredibly succulent grilled lamb chops past your nose. The fragrant fumes are so intense it will make your eyes water. And just when they’ve handed you a menu and you’re convinced you finally will be the next to get a table the host admits and seats a group of 40 ahead of you.

One of the great satisfactions of writing the cookbook Made in Marseille was getting to work with Lionel Lévy, who I immediately recognised as one of the most inventive or, rather, re-inventive young chefs in France. The protégé of Alain Ducasse and Gérard Garrigues revisits classic dishes and shakes up their traditional formats. A decade ago he unnerved conservative diners with his salmon crumble, a savoury starter inspired by a classic British dessert, and his tomates farcies (stuffed tomatoes) with caramelised fruits and nuts, a dessert riff on a classic Provençale appetiser. The diners were confused. No one could figure out which end was up.

These days Lévy would upset diners at Une Table, au Sud, his now Michelin-starred restaurant, only by removing from the menu the milk-shake de bouillabaisse, his radical transformation of Marseille’s world-famous fish stew.

As my guest chef at the 23 May BurgerMonday pop-up dinner at the Gray’s Inn greasy spoon Andrew’s Lévy performed cover versions of not one but two American classics, the burger and the BLT sandwich. He merged the two, replacing the customary burger bun with slices of toasted sourdough rubbed with garlic and brushed with olive oil. He had planned to use Poilâne bread from that legendary Parisian bakery’s London outpost until, less than 24 hours prior to the pop-up, our late Sunday supper at the new St John Hotel restaurant altered his thinking. He found the bread superior to Poilâne and wanted it for his burger BLT. I sent an urgent text to St John baker Justin Piers Gellatly, who rounded up 12 sourdough loaves.

Lévy prepared most of his burger accessories in Marseille, vacuum packing them as if for sous-vide cooking and stashing them with ice bags in his hand luggage. He also packed the garlic, ginger and nut topping for the salmon crumble, but sourced British strawberries for a strawberry soup garnished with a lovely lemon curd made by London’s Beas of Bloomsbury. (Starting the menu with a crumble and finishing with a soup was, if not classic, then classic Lévy.) For the burger meat he asked O’Shea’s of Knightsbridge for a coarsely ground mince with a minimum fat content of 30 – yes, three-oh – percent fat. Darragh O’Shea obliged by “enriching” his already fatty beef chuck with plate rib, plate rub fat and rib fat.

Burger BLT Provençale

1. Sourdough
2. Garlic rub
3. Extra virgin olive oil
4. Tapenade
5. Iceberg lettuce in citrus olive oil
6. Beef patty
7. Piment d’Espelette marinade
8. Streaky bacon
9. Pistou
10. Tchoutchouka
11. Slow-roasted tomato

Lévy assembled his burger BLT Provençale with the top slice of toast facing up, revealing bright bands of green and red representing the colours and flavours of the Mediterranean. It was as if this unconventional burger were carrying a Marseille flag, with a slow-roasted tomato as its emblem. Impressive though this literally over-the-top presentation was it resurrected an old Lévy problem: The diners were confused. They couldn’t figure out which end was up. Some conquered their burger by deconstructing it. Others attacked it head-on with a knife and fork. But at nearly every table there was at least one visionary who figured out you could flip your lid and eat the burger BLT in its entirety, with your hands. Lévy’s ingenuity soon became apparent: He and chefs Ludovic Turac and Romain Maunier had left this, the closing touch in the creation of this re-inventive burger, to us.

The billionaire’s burger was made without foie gras, truffles or pickled gold dust. Its great luxury, like that of this massive project, was Myhrvold’s wherewithal to indulge his curiosity and entertain ours. He liberated the chef/scientists Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, both veterans of Heston Blumenthal‘s Fat Duck, to do what we presume techies do in any lab when there’s no adult supervision: tear things apart and put them back together. How else would you get a burger made with shiitake mushrooms freeze-dried for 48 hours, a restructured Emmental cheese slice and a short-rib patty that is first cooked in an unsealed sous-vide bag, then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen and finally deep-fried?

I don’t plan to buy Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and it isn’t only the £395.00/$625.00 list price. I fear that over time I might sag like an Ikea book shelf under the weight of its mass and matter. In particular I am oddly prone to confusion when following recipes in which many components have their own recipes located in another part of another volume, each one requiring equipment I don’t own and ingredients I can’t find. I’m funny that way.

But don’t put me down as an anti-modernist. I am three parts fascinated to only one part unnerved by the new mechanics aligning Myhrvold with kitchen wizards Ferran Adria, Blumenthal, and Grant Achatz. My concern has been that technique can trump creative expression. When I met Myhrvold for tea on Tuesday at London’s new St John Hotel I asked how he and co-authors Young and Bilet reconciled the friction between culinary art and science. The question was irrelevant to someone who views science as serving art, not hindering or displacing it.

“It’s hard to make art if you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Myhrvold responded, reasoning now, as the great American food writer and teacher James Beard famously did decades ago, that the how of a recipe or technique is not of much lasting use to the reader without the why. “Perhaps,” conceded this technical magician eager to reveal his secrets,”we’ve gone a little overboard in explaining the why.”

You’d have to say they’ve gone a little overboard with that burger, too, transforming a test of resourcefulness – how can you make a burger that’s thoroughly juicy pink on the inside yet caramelised crusty but not burnt on the outside? – into one of resources. Whereas a conventional chef working only a grill or flat-top griddle might nevertheless manage to produce a patty that “crumbles in the mouth” – the hallmark, according to Myrhvold, of a succulent burger, he concluded that this challenge dictated multiple means and methods. In a cookery book illustrated with sawed-in-half cooking machines and vessels the logic can seem inverted: Why simplify something when you can make it complicated?

There is one gadget recommended by Myhrvold that is both inexpensive and indispensable: the digital meat thermometer. It may not nullify gravity, but using one will help you turn out a burger that either looks or, if you prefer darker shades of doneness, doesn’t look like the one pictured below. This particular burger, served last week at Hix in London’s Soho, had great meat that passed Myhrvold’s crumble test but was diminished by a cracked, squished bun and streaky bacon I couldn’t manage to cut with my teeth. If only I’d ignored the art vs science nonsense when I had the opportunity to question Myhrvold and instead got down with the billionaire to buns and bacon.