EATING HISTORY

Heston Blumenthal with Dinner head chef Ashley Palmer Watts. From http://www.dinnerbyheston.com/.

Grant Achatz with chefs Craig Schoettler and Dave Beran--creators of Next restaurant, Chicago. From Facebook.

In Venice, Italy, there's a superb and very old haute-cuisine restaurant, Le Bistrot de Venise, whose specialty is a menu of dishes based on historical Venetian cuisine. The items on this special menu, served in modified form to suit contemporary tastes, are accompanied by the dates of recipes from which they are drawn. Some go back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I thought this restaurant had a fairly unusual concept. Lately, however, historicity is in.

Two recent developments have gotten me wondering about the significance of historicity as an avant-garde food trend. One is the recent opening of Heston Blumenthal's restaurant Dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park in London, a restaurant inspired by historic British gastronomy. Go to the website (www.dinnerbyheston.com) and you will first encounter a brief history lesson in a typeface and layout that vaguely conjures old newspapers: "In the past, the main meal--dinner--was eaten at midday, before it got dark. But affordable candles and, later, gaslight saw dinner shift." Check out the menu on the site and, in the appetizer section alone, you will find the items accompanied by dates that range from "c. 1390" to "c. 1820." Blumenthal and Dinner's head chef Ashley Palmer-Watts don't intend these dishes to be faithful copies of historical dishes. They are "inspired" by them. If not actually historical, the concept of Dinner is saturated with the idea of historicity.

Another case is the almost-opened and fiercely hyped Next restaurant. Chicago's Grant Achatz and his chef team of Craig Schoettler and Dave Beran describe Next as a restaurant designed to represent world cuisines from various great moments in culinary history--and the future. They will present four menus per year, each one dedicated entirely to a specific period and place. Unlike Blumenthal, Achatz intends to present dishes in historically authentic form--true to Paris, 1912, say, or Sicily, 1949. But, of course, like Blumenthal, Achatz can't help but be inventive. One of the options advertised for Next is Hong Kong, 2036. Even these masters of culinary history can't have much evidence to go on for the recreation of this one!

Indeed, Next bubbles over with experimental quirks. Achatz will not sell traditional "reservations" but rather all-inclusive "tickets" for particular, differentially-priced time slots at the restaurant. Though little different from a reservation in actual fact, the ticket's association with film or theater changes the psychological game. In that spirit, Achatz has promoted the restaurant through a film trailer that, like film trailers, encapsulates a narrative (in this case, of time travel) and fills the viewer with a sense of mystery and anticipation.

Why have two of the world's most avant-garde chefs made history the theme of their newest ventures? Why are these ambassadors of the hyper-new looking back?

First, let's acknowledge the fact that Blumenthal's and Achatz's concepts and menus are faithful to the past only to the extent that it "inspires" their creativity. They are launching something new in the process--a new restaurant format or an original interpretation of an historical dish. Is history just the latest frontier to excite an ever-jaded audience for the new?

This may be true, but I think it's not the whole story. I would argue that these chefs' choice to put history in the foreground is really an overdue revelation of their culinary practices so far. Every one of the chefs associated with the so-called "molecular" or "techno-emotional" cuisine, as are Blumenthal and Achatz, when charged with culinary futurism, has insisted on their work's profound connection to memory. They take tried and true dishes and "deconstruct" them. Or they take traditional ingredient combinations and alter their relationships in texture, temperature, proportion, etc. The historical reference is integral. The very intelligibility of these chefs' far-out cuisine depends on their experiments' grounding in tradition. It seems only right, then, that their historical aspect become overt.

Copyright 2011 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

WHOSE TASTE MEMORY, DEAR CHEFS?

Photos by author from 2009 dinner at Saam inside The Bazaar, Los Angeles.

Top: Jose Andres's reinterpretation of a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich.

Center: Andres's homage to Chef Adria, the "Olives Ferran Adria."

Bottom: Andres's reinterpretation of a Buffalo Wing (boneless).

In The New Yorker's latest food issue (23 November 2009), Chef Heston Blumenthal contributed a piece about a taste memory from his childhood experiences of a certain duck a l'orange. He remembers having it when his parents, on rare occasions, took the family out to eat at a "pub-restaurant with flock wallpaper, mock-Regency furniture, and a menu full of exotic-sounding international classics...." Though by his own standards now, he admits, he would not consider the dish much good, he savored the memory of this duck because it was tied to strong feelings about the specialness of the family outings, and the theatricality of the food's presentation, at an impressionable age. He went on to address the phenomenon of taste memory more generally, stating, "I am convinced that the foods we find most delicious are the ones that trigger memories and associations."

Chef Blumenthal's musings about taste memories--those remembrances of things past triggered by particular foods like the Proustian madeleine--have plenty of company among the chefs associated with the cutting edge of so-called molecular cuisine. Ferran Adria, Jose Andres, Grant Achatz, Homaro Cantu, Wylie Dufresne, and Will Goldfarb have, to varying degrees, described certain of their dishes as designed, albeit through surprising new forms, to evoke deep-seated memories. Adria, Blumenthal, and Achatz have been the most explicit and in-depth in their discussions of their food in terms of conjuring aromas and flavors tied to significant memories and emotions.

These chefs are right on the mark in understanding that food is a powerful memory trigger. But, if a chef considers memory their culinary tool, they must be pressed further to examine what they're doing. On whose memories is one playing? One's own? The diners'? In interviews or in essays in their cookbooks, some chefs tend to conflate the two, eliding explanations of their own inspirations for particular dishes and suggestions that they are evoking similar memories in their diners. To what extent do chefs expect memories drawn from their own pasts to be shared by their diners?

I am becoming convinced, as I read The Fat Duck Cookbook, that much of Chef Blumenthal's inspiration from the dime-store candies of his British childhood might be lost on this American diner. And I would like to ask him: would it matter? How important, really, is the conjuring of that taste memory in the diner to his culinary artistry? If chefs are indeed serious about using memory as their tool, then greater consideration of the cultural backgrounds of their diners would be in order. But would such consideration even be feasible, or desirable, after all? Must cuisine be turned into an inexact branch of social science?

If, on the other hand, it is not important for chefs to evoke particular memories in their diners, then perhaps the discourse on taste memory should be clarified. The talk of taste memory functions best as an autobiographical account of the chef's own creative inspiration, but is, frankly, hit-or-miss as culinary communication with diners. For every diner brought to tears by the aroma of charred chestnuts, there are hundreds enjoying the same dish for other reasons.

Chefs, what are your intentions concerning taste memory? Unless we diners share your cultural experiences--your regions' native olives, your grandmothers' pot roast, that gussied-up duck a l'orange--we can't eat your pasts.

Copyright Alison Pearlman 2009. All rights reserved.