After rushing across the planet to escape two screaming infants and the Messiah, we sat down to our first meal in the modern section of Lyon, which is fairly charmless and utilitarian. Think downtown Sacramento but with French people, and not the hot Parisian kind. The dumpy-we- love-butter-and-don’t-walk-much kind. (So basically, Americans who speak French.) Modern Lyon is not a tourist destination, unlike the picturesque Vieux Lyon, the Renaissance district, or the Presqu'île, the slender peninsula between the Rhone and Saone Rivers. (Blah, blah, blah. Steve loves history. He read the guide book. Blah, blah. Blah, blah. Look at the train station. It’s soooo super ‘70s.) A few blocks away from the train station, you’ll find Lyon’s primary food market, Les Halles de Lyon - Paul Bocuse. The name almost seems invoked as a defense, as if to say: We, the Lyonnias, may be so paralyzed by our inferiority to the capital that we actually built a miniature Eiffel Tower, but when it comes to matters gastronomique, our fair city reigns supreme. Supporting evidence is available in this very building.[1]
Three blocks from Halles de Lyon is Daniel et Denise, a restaurant that may or may not be a genuine bouchon—its business card claims the status even if that douche tiger Bill Buford demurs. Owned since 2004 by Joseph Viola, a chef with a stellar pedigree and the narrowly defined ambition to refine and interpret – without deconstructing or otherwise destroying – the Lyonnais classics, Daniel et Denise would be the perfect place to test Bill Buford’s incendiary claim that Lyon is, in fact, the food capital of the world.[2]
After 18 hours of travel and grappling with the Wife’s concomitant jet lag, I was afraid disaster had quickly struck. (What he means to say is that I was fucking pissed because I wanted a cute, dark, romantical ristorante, and instead the lighting was positively FLUORESCENT, so, upon entry, I wanted to punch Steve in the face. But that could have been because I thought he could have been more polite. But, yes, the rest of the stuff bugged me, too.) My nonexistent “bonsoir” to the maître d' provoked her irritability (See what I mean? Say “bonsoir.” It won’t kill you.), which quickly became acute when we were seated in the restaurant’s incandescent back dining room. (Did you not hear what I said? Fluorescent, NOT INCANDESCENT. DON’T YOU READ THE NEW YORK TIMES?) For all its traditional décor, the room was as bewitching as an operating room. On a Friday evening, the restaurant’s final service of the week, the restaurant was filled with ordinary people dressed ordinarily, in sweatshirts and the like. It dawned on me that Lyon was not Paris. (Thanks, Genius.)
The Wife’s lingering displeasure proved fleeting once she was served a salad of greens on which the kitchen overlaid haricot verts, then a few creamy pieces of crayfish, and finally a thin wedge of foie gras terrine, all in a row. (I’m easy like that.) This salad and, let’s be honest, this preparation of foie gras still haunts Marisa’s dreams. (Does it? Does it now? Like I fucking sleep long enough to dream? STOP BLOGGING ABOUT WHAT YOU THINK MY DREAMS ARE, STEVE, AND GO CHANGE A DIAPER.) I stayed out of the way, but for a single, ethereal bite of foie gras that was unmatched the entire trip. At our waitress’s recommendation, I ordered the house terrine of God-knows-what; it was one of those sallow, jellied concoctions of different layers of animal parts, artisanal Mystery Meat for all intents and purposes, forced into the shape of a slice of Wonder Bread. I’ll confess that I enjoyed it, but there is no need to order it again. (It was fucking gross. And I say that as someone who walked around covered in my younger daughter’s vomit for an hour today before realizing the smell that was bothering me was coming from my own damn shirt.)
Marisa then struck gold with a Lyonnais classic, quenelles au brochet, sauce Nantua. The sauce is a béchamel plus crayfish, a local staple which provided the requisite fluvial nuance – a grand, seemingly weightless soufflé of pike, molecular cuisine if there ever was one, in which Monsieur Viola tossed in a few mushrooms and yet more crayfish for good measure. [3] (Oh my god, you’re verbose.)
I ordered a personal favorite, Le Boudin noir fait Maison aux Pommes, that is, black pudding with sautéed apples, a perfect autumn dish and accordingly a rara avis in the City of Angels. (Accordingly, this non-chef just had to master Bryan Miller’s straightforward recipe.) Daniel et Denise’s rendition uniquely served the pudding in two small casseroles, dispensing with the formality of encasing the meats. The sweet apples were of course the hoary, necessary counterpoint to the rich boudin noir, its globules of pork held together with delicious blood and fat. Ultimately, Viola’s goal was to prepare a Gallic standard to the best of his considerable abilities and with all due intelligence. I loved it. (Not for me, says the wifely mouse.)
The kitchen brought out two side dishes. The first was a platter of fried discs of potatoes, seasoned just right with salt and torn little shards of basil – just perfect for sopping up the remainder of the Wife’s sauce Nantua. But the heavenly gratin of what amounted to macaroni and cheese stole our hearts. Think the best macaroni and cheese hails from some venerable Memphis soul food house in spitting distance of an old-timey juke joint? Guess again. Crazy Joe Viola is responsible for the best. Creamy and rich and made with cheese from, yes, France, this dish is the very reason that comfort food is so comforting.
Dessert, a “floating island of pink pralines” (Ile flottante aux Pralines de Saint Genix) was in actuality a giant cone of iridescent, pink sugar, the color provided by Lyon’s ubiquitous pink pralines. I remain bewildered by the dessert and frustrated that I didn’t have the presence of mind to order the poached pears au vin rouge. Oh well.
As for the matter of Lyon’s status as the world’s gastronomic capital, why not? Lyonnais allez lyonnais allez lyonnais allez. Even the Wife liked it.
Restaurant Daniel et Denise
156 rue de Créqui
Lyon
Tél. 04 78 60 66 53
www.daniel-et-denise.fr/
[1] Les Halles is the home of the fantastic centenarian, Maison Rousseau, a lunch counter beloved for bringing the best of the Atlantic coast and Mediterranean to the Rhône-Alpes region, including impeccable Belon and Papin-Poget oysters, subtle sea urchins which were much smaller than their Santa Barbara cousins, an absolutely epic fish soup—burgundy in color, smelling of the sea that, depending on one’s perspective and power of persuasion over the spouse, either moots or necessitates a visit to Marseilles—and plenty of personality and personalities, naturally.
[2] Paul Bocuse may be a deity, but his eponymous restaurant, located nine kilometers north of Lyon in Collonges-au-Mont-d'Or, like any house of worship, involves too much entertainment and kitsch, and is prohibitively expensive. Seven years ago, we found Paul Bocuse to be a theme park of itself: Bocuse's image was emblazoned on every wall, plate, and mug. The preparations felt more like the nineteenth century than the mid-twentieth. One example, a plate of Bresse chicken in loads of cream epitomized blandness. Toward the end of that meal, Bocuse found his way to our table to greet us and receive our plaudits. For the Vegas-level mediocrity and showmanship, we had to oblige.
[3]As a matter of course, we’ll order the labor-intensive quenelles when appropriate, which is to say, whenever a restaurant will make them with pike. I ordered quenelles the following night at Café Comptoir Abel, whose chef, Alain Vigneron, is the only practitioner (and holder) of Eugenie Brazier’s original crayfish-less recipe. Ms. Brazier was the first French woman to earn three Michelin stars, over 70 years ago. With such a noble provenance, quenelles would seem the very essence of fancy, fusty French food as stereotyped in both the States and increasingly in France itself. For example, La Grenouille, the New York dinosaur that insists that its patrons wear jackets, sells quenelles to septuagenarians for $36.oo per serving. But in Lyon, the dish is standard fare for regular people. For all of his troubles and for such amazing quality, Joseph Viola charges a mere 15€.
Showing posts with label Steve and Marisa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve and Marisa. Show all posts
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Hey, Umami Burger, I want my calories back.
Marisa, a little over one month ago:
Getting ready for our first trip east with the Belle, we decided that Steve would pick up a quick lunch for us. For the last two weeks, I've been feeding the family a steady diet (as Steve would say, emphasis on "diet") of fresh fish and very, very fresh farmers market produce. (N.B., if you live in Southern California, get thee to a farm stand tout de suite and stock up IMMEDIATELY on fresh asparagus, Harry's Berries strawberries, and some purple ass potatoes. They're all, like, negligible points and beaucoup de delish.) Anyway, we keep hearing about this damn Umami Burger -- from such varied sources as people on Facebook and noted Brentwood potheads. If those bastards know a burger joint in our 'hood before we do, then clearly something strange is afoot at the Circle K. So I dispatched my man-servant to South La Brea while I changed the bird's fifteenth soiled diaper of the day. He returned with burgers, fries, onion rings, and sweet potato chips. The minute they hit the counter in our kitchen, I felt the need to reach for a mop and a bucket o' Lipitor. The waxed paper containing these items could not contain the oil slick within.
Steve and I bit into our burgers with the glee of exhausted new parents who forgot to eat breakfast (oh, wait, that's exactly what we are). I had the So Cal burger (Umami Burger's riff on a basic cheeseburger), while Steve smacked down on a Port Stilton. As we recoiled from our first bites, we looked at each other, perplexed. "Do we like this?" we kept asking ourselves as we ate our lunch, occasionally swapping burgers in the interest of science. Hours later, with the overwhelming fifth taste haunting me with a shimmer of nausea, I think it's safe to say the answer is no.
Steve, present day:
The Umami experience was so traumatic for the Primipara that she cannot countenance eating another hamburger, let alone finishing this blog. Now Marisa is a burger girl at heart and has always loved herself some In-N- Out and Carney’s. So for her to desist from eating burgers, for more than a month after the Umami debacle, is a testament to how bad the place is. Of course, this has made my life difficult, because I do enjoy a burger and have been really into 8 Oz. lately. But the Umami burger was so repugnant that Marisa’s seemingly rash response is, in fact, quite reasonable.
Umami Burger wants to impart the so-called fifth taste into its hamburgers. The question of what “umami” actually is remains outstanding and perplexing. Harris Salat, writing in the Times, tersely defined umami as “the taste of mouthwatering savoriness.” But this definition is less than helpful, since savoriness, even intense, “mouthwatering” savoriness, would seem to have a home in one of the four other “tastes.” (This taste classification system feels as crude as the five Classical elements.) The umami inquiry veers off into peculiarity because of the allegation that the fifth taste was somehow discovered in 1908 by Japanese scientist Dr. Kikunae Ikeda. I would not expect a particular sensory experience to be a candidate for discovery, like some rare species on the Galapagos or an esoteric element with a minuscule half-life on the frontier of the periodic table.
Perhaps Dr. Ikeda actually identified the chemical composition of the so-called umami flavor such that when a given food consists of at least these chemicals, it has the umami flavor. Along these lines, the Umami Information Center, a marketing group, defines the fifth taste as a “pleasant savoury taste imparted by glutamate, a type of amino acid, and ribonucleotides, including inosinate and guanylate, which occur naturally in many foods including meat, fish, vegetables and dairy products.” I’ll concede that salty foods include NaCl, just as--I have long (and geekily) joked-- organic foods contain carbon. But the Center’s description of umami as having glutamate (such as MSG, which Dr. Ikeda invented) and ribonucleotides is too clinical for me. (I’ll concede that a technical definition of umami may be warranted, but it vitiates the romance associated with food.) As a result, describing umami to non-chemists may be akin to Potter Stewart’s famous legal definition of pornography: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . .”
If umami can naturally occur in meat, it certainly does not do so in the Umami burger. Accordingly, the chef saw fit to use tamari sauce, which is a thicker version of soy sauce (itself a flavor-emasculating grotesquerie) and anchovies, normally one my favorite fishes to eat. But it is a mystery, on a Lynchian scale, why anyone would mix a very astringent soy sauce and loads of anchovies with quality ground flap meat, as if it were some perverse East-Meets-West version of Hamburger Helper. Thanks to Umami Burger, my wife may never want to go out for burgers again.
Note:
The wife was so totally disgusted by Umami Burger that she refused to finish her blog AND took forever to edit my own portion of this entry. As a result, we were scooped by our homie TC at Sinosoul. Not only did Umami Burger ruin our lunch, its mere existence silenced our blog for far too long. Umami Burger, you can suck it.
Umami Burger
850 S. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles
(323) 931-3000
www.umamiburger.com
Getting ready for our first trip east with the Belle, we decided that Steve would pick up a quick lunch for us. For the last two weeks, I've been feeding the family a steady diet (as Steve would say, emphasis on "diet") of fresh fish and very, very fresh farmers market produce. (N.B., if you live in Southern California, get thee to a farm stand tout de suite and stock up IMMEDIATELY on fresh asparagus, Harry's Berries strawberries, and some purple ass potatoes. They're all, like, negligible points and beaucoup de delish.) Anyway, we keep hearing about this damn Umami Burger -- from such varied sources as people on Facebook and noted Brentwood potheads. If those bastards know a burger joint in our 'hood before we do, then clearly something strange is afoot at the Circle K. So I dispatched my man-servant to South La Brea while I changed the bird's fifteenth soiled diaper of the day. He returned with burgers, fries, onion rings, and sweet potato chips. The minute they hit the counter in our kitchen, I felt the need to reach for a mop and a bucket o' Lipitor. The waxed paper containing these items could not contain the oil slick within.
Steve and I bit into our burgers with the glee of exhausted new parents who forgot to eat breakfast (oh, wait, that's exactly what we are). I had the So Cal burger (Umami Burger's riff on a basic cheeseburger), while Steve smacked down on a Port Stilton. As we recoiled from our first bites, we looked at each other, perplexed. "Do we like this?" we kept asking ourselves as we ate our lunch, occasionally swapping burgers in the interest of science. Hours later, with the overwhelming fifth taste haunting me with a shimmer of nausea, I think it's safe to say the answer is no.
Steve, present day:
The Umami experience was so traumatic for the Primipara that she cannot countenance eating another hamburger, let alone finishing this blog. Now Marisa is a burger girl at heart and has always loved herself some In-N- Out and Carney’s. So for her to desist from eating burgers, for more than a month after the Umami debacle, is a testament to how bad the place is. Of course, this has made my life difficult, because I do enjoy a burger and have been really into 8 Oz. lately. But the Umami burger was so repugnant that Marisa’s seemingly rash response is, in fact, quite reasonable.
Umami Burger wants to impart the so-called fifth taste into its hamburgers. The question of what “umami” actually is remains outstanding and perplexing. Harris Salat, writing in the Times, tersely defined umami as “the taste of mouthwatering savoriness.” But this definition is less than helpful, since savoriness, even intense, “mouthwatering” savoriness, would seem to have a home in one of the four other “tastes.” (This taste classification system feels as crude as the five Classical elements.) The umami inquiry veers off into peculiarity because of the allegation that the fifth taste was somehow discovered in 1908 by Japanese scientist Dr. Kikunae Ikeda. I would not expect a particular sensory experience to be a candidate for discovery, like some rare species on the Galapagos or an esoteric element with a minuscule half-life on the frontier of the periodic table.
Perhaps Dr. Ikeda actually identified the chemical composition of the so-called umami flavor such that when a given food consists of at least these chemicals, it has the umami flavor. Along these lines, the Umami Information Center, a marketing group, defines the fifth taste as a “pleasant savoury taste imparted by glutamate, a type of amino acid, and ribonucleotides, including inosinate and guanylate, which occur naturally in many foods including meat, fish, vegetables and dairy products.” I’ll concede that salty foods include NaCl, just as--I have long (and geekily) joked-- organic foods contain carbon. But the Center’s description of umami as having glutamate (such as MSG, which Dr. Ikeda invented) and ribonucleotides is too clinical for me. (I’ll concede that a technical definition of umami may be warranted, but it vitiates the romance associated with food.) As a result, describing umami to non-chemists may be akin to Potter Stewart’s famous legal definition of pornography: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . .”
If umami can naturally occur in meat, it certainly does not do so in the Umami burger. Accordingly, the chef saw fit to use tamari sauce, which is a thicker version of soy sauce (itself a flavor-emasculating grotesquerie) and anchovies, normally one my favorite fishes to eat. But it is a mystery, on a Lynchian scale, why anyone would mix a very astringent soy sauce and loads of anchovies with quality ground flap meat, as if it were some perverse East-Meets-West version of Hamburger Helper. Thanks to Umami Burger, my wife may never want to go out for burgers again.
Note:
The wife was so totally disgusted by Umami Burger that she refused to finish her blog AND took forever to edit my own portion of this entry. As a result, we were scooped by our homie TC at Sinosoul. Not only did Umami Burger ruin our lunch, its mere existence silenced our blog for far too long. Umami Burger, you can suck it.
Umami Burger
850 S. La Brea Ave.
Los Angeles
(323) 931-3000
www.umamiburger.com
Sunday, October 26, 2008
KyoChon
With the Ever Sagacious Gravida clamoring for a spicy dinner before the Mad Men finale but not in the mood to leave the house, let alone abide my wishes to go to Park's Barbeque, it was time to give KyoChon a shot for some take-out. KyoChon is the KFC of South Korea where it has over 1,000 locations. It has expanded to the U.S. in recent years with a location in Queens and four in Southern California.
I ordered the whole chicken, half with a sweet hot sauce and half flavored with garlic soy. KyoChon carves the chicken into bite–sized pieces, but leaves the chicken affixed to the hacked up bone. They then fry the chicken pieces twice in a manner that "renders out the fat in the skin" and brush the pieces with the sauces somewhere in the process. Everything is made to order at Kyochon, which led to a 20-minute wait even on a quiet night.
The end result of what must be the most laborious recipe in fast food history is that the chicken fat and skin turn into some of the crispiest and tastiest fried fry around, while the meat remains juicy and tender within. The sweet hot flavor, with its red pepper base, is closer in style to the cayenne-dominated sauce accompanying Buffalo wings, and the garlic soy's flavor is self-explanatory. The dark meat, as always, was better than the white (though the ESG doesn't necessarily agree with that statement), and the hot sauce’s moderate fire was just what we wanted -- though it wasn't enough to put the ESG into labor, as she'd hoped.
The biggest surprise of the night was the moderately spicy chicken fried rice. This was straight-ahead comfort food, consisting of rice, tiny nubs of moist chicken, onions and peppers, bound together with the same delicious spicy sweet sauce from the fried chicken. It made up for the mayorific cabbage slaw that came with our dinner and was too vile to ingest and the alien cubes of white radish pickles floating in an unidentified liquid. But the chicken and rice, followed by a bowl of deliciously sweet grapes from the Hollywood Farmer's Market, made for a perfect pre-baby Sunday night dinner.
KyoChon
3833 West 6th Street
Koreatown
(213) 739-9292
http://kyochon.com/usa/us/la.asp
I ordered the whole chicken, half with a sweet hot sauce and half flavored with garlic soy. KyoChon carves the chicken into bite–sized pieces, but leaves the chicken affixed to the hacked up bone. They then fry the chicken pieces twice in a manner that "renders out the fat in the skin" and brush the pieces with the sauces somewhere in the process. Everything is made to order at Kyochon, which led to a 20-minute wait even on a quiet night.
The end result of what must be the most laborious recipe in fast food history is that the chicken fat and skin turn into some of the crispiest and tastiest fried fry around, while the meat remains juicy and tender within. The sweet hot flavor, with its red pepper base, is closer in style to the cayenne-dominated sauce accompanying Buffalo wings, and the garlic soy's flavor is self-explanatory. The dark meat, as always, was better than the white (though the ESG doesn't necessarily agree with that statement), and the hot sauce’s moderate fire was just what we wanted -- though it wasn't enough to put the ESG into labor, as she'd hoped.
The biggest surprise of the night was the moderately spicy chicken fried rice. This was straight-ahead comfort food, consisting of rice, tiny nubs of moist chicken, onions and peppers, bound together with the same delicious spicy sweet sauce from the fried chicken. It made up for the mayorific cabbage slaw that came with our dinner and was too vile to ingest and the alien cubes of white radish pickles floating in an unidentified liquid. But the chicken and rice, followed by a bowl of deliciously sweet grapes from the Hollywood Farmer's Market, made for a perfect pre-baby Sunday night dinner.
KyoChon
3833 West 6th Street
Koreatown
(213) 739-9292
http://kyochon.com/usa/us/la.asp
Sunday, September 14, 2008
David Foster Wallace: In Memoriam
David Foster Wallace's untimely passing is a great loss. The title of this blog is a Yiddishe trencherman's homage to his magnum opus's title, Infinite Jest (which in turn is taken from Hamlet). As his loyal readers, we have been touched, inspired, entertained, and challenged by his work. He will be missed. So, dear readers, when you sit down to a good meal this week, think of David Foster Wallace and, in addition to considering the lobster, raise your glasses in memory of one of the most important writers of our generation.
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