ANTICIPATING VESPERTINE

Vespertine, Los Angeles. Still from trailer on the restaurant's website, vespertine.la.

I read about it. I went to the website. I watched the trailer four times. When the ticketing system finally went live, I made a reservation.

It’s hard for a restaurant to live up to a lot of pre-opening hype. In this case, the hype is for savoring all by itself. It is, at least, by thrill-seeking aesthetes like me.

From the restaurant’s website and advance press, here's my summary of the concept: Vanguard chef Jordan Kahn, whose previous ventures in Los Angeles include Red Medicine and Destroyer, intends to create an ultra-fine-dining experience that departs from today's mainstay of locavore rhetoric and aesthetics radically. He wants diners to feel transported beyond any known place. To banish signs of Earth, he has marshaled a cadre of kindred designers. The website credits Eric Owen Moss for the architecture, musicians This Will Destroy You for the "score," Ryota Aoki for "ceramics," and Jona Sees for "textiles and garments." Kahn's total theater--buzz-killers say, of the absurd--will take diners through many courses and several spaces in the building. Each space will have its own sonic ambiance. Kahn has kept the style of his food semi-veiled. What I've glimpsed seems so alien among existing forms that even a sharp photo of a dish doesn't clarify what it is. No shapes on the "plates" resemble known edibles. Hints of Vespertine's food appear sparingly in press and the trailer.

Oh, the trailer. It's the restaurant’s tone poem. The main mood is part early Alinea, where Kahn once worked, a study in luxury grays, and part otherworldly Björk, whose 2001 album is named Vespertine. It conjures an ambient music video on another planet, where a simple walk along the hills turns up transparent spiny things and geometric white flora. I think these are foretastes of Kahn's cuisine. Scenes follow a wandering waif, half hidden under a hood, who periodically fondles dirt and strange plants. Shots of the restaurant’s building, a wavy postmodern grid in dark glass and red metal, splice in toward the end, suggesting the waif’s destination. Because we never see the ground that it stands on, the structure looks like a floating world.

The branding is novel, and so I’m seduced. I have Vespertine day dreams. In one, I am swaddled in gray felt, placed by a glass wall, and allowed to marvel at sculptures they call food brought by servers in silent slippers. I imagine not moving my own body, but being transported from one room and soundscape to another as the courses of the meal progress.

My cossetting fantasy is no accident. Leading up to the opening, Vespertine has promised a kind of escape. The illusion of placelessness is temporarily unburdening. It suggests relief from a nagging conscience about exploiting Earth's creatures just when other restaurants in Vespertine's class have intensified it. Even today’s most extravagant places remind diners of food shortages and inhumane practices by citing their sustainable methods and virtuous sourcing.

The Vespertine aesthetic also removes the onus of considering labor just as the troubles of restaurant work have confronted diners via new tipping policies and surcharges for employee healthcare. In her GQ preview of Vespertine (June 7, 2017), Marian Bull reported that Kahn trained his servers to seem invisible and charged designer Aoki with making their shoes inaudible.

As long as Kahn’s labor practices really are fair, I don’t think self-effacing service is bad. On the contrary, the commitment to hospitality and fidelity to theatrical concept is admirable and consistent with good craft. Still, there’s no denying that, in Kahn’s dining drama, labor--at least of the physical kind--is a background actor.

Even the chef’s culinary aesthetic, as tentatively revealed, avoids signs of handicraft. You won't find the plate-scattered look of so much contemporary high cuisine, which at least vaguely shows evidence of handling. The glimpses I’ve gotten of Vespertine’s food suggest architectonic objects by way of CAD and the 3-D printer. Here, labor seems purely conceptual.

As with all earnest and ambitious attempts at total theater, Vespertine’s will be vulnerable to parody, camp, and unwitting pops of the proverbial balloon. I don’t see how it’s possible to avoid some glitch in the matrix—like catching the Ronald McDonald you hired for a kid’s birthday taking a cigarette break. There’s bound to be something like a dropped glass or passing glimpse of routine Earth life out the window.

But I respect the extent and courage of Kahn’s imagination, and his willingness to take the financial risk of bringing a grand fiction to life. In recent memory, I've seen no offering like it in Los Angeles--really, and that's saying a lot. The aesthete and the contrarian in me want Kahn to pull this off.

Phase one of my Vespertine experience--making the reservation--has ended. Reserving through a ticketing website is nothing new for venues with high-end tasting menus. But never before have I been asked, as I was in the final screen of the process, if anyone in my party has extreme fear of heights. A message warned that part of the evening will involve traveling to the top of the tower. (I thought I read “tower.” I was in a hurry to fill out the form before the impatient Tock system could boot me out, rescinding my hard-won reservation slot, for a second time.) Yes, I mused, take me to the tower! 

Maybe, like the spaceship I have in mind, it’ll take flight. If not, I'll always remember how good was the hype.

BIG MENU, SMALL MENU

Photo: Umami Burger menu June 24, 2009.

In the book Sirio: The Story of My Life and Le Cirque (2004), the renowned restaurateur Sirio Maccioni remembers insisting on offering his Le Cirque clients an extensive menu of at least fifty-five items. The ability to offer so much and be so versatile, he believed, was the sign of a great kitchen. In addition, Maccioni prided himself on Le Cirque's ability to produce whatever his guests wanted that wasn't on the menu. Extensive menus meant that the customer would have no need to go elsewhere. While Maccioni was an innovator in many respects, this was not one of them. 

In an era of micro-niche marketing, today what's big is the menu that's small. I can't remember precisely when this trend arose, but I subjectively date it back to the Seinfeld episode featuring the "Soup Nazi." The Soup Nazi did only soup--very, very well. So well, in fact, that the lines outside his food stand, and the fact that he got away with abusing customers because his soup was so sought after, made for the drama's main MacGuffin. 

While the big menu still exists today, the small menu has gained distinction. Restaurants like the Oinkster in Eagle Rock, Umami Burger and Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, and Momofuku in New York thrive on this model. Umami Burger changes its menu frequently, but it will present on its menu only approximately eight burgers at a time. Gordon Ramsay, the chef celebrity host of the BBC's Nightmare Kitchens, is often recommending, when he rehabilitates a failing restaurant, that the owners make their menus more focused, more specialized. Smaller. 

Granted, Ramsay suggests this to restaurateurs with much less experience than he has, and especially for small-scale operations. This makes economic sense. There is greater turnover of ingredients and abbreviations to the menu are manageable for the less seasoned restaurateur. 

But there is more to this trend than the sheer practicality of businesses slimming down to niches they can handle. Focus and specialization have become words of praise.  To me, they sound like the virtues of a culture of expertise. This one is a culture that grafts the aims of graduate school onto romantic ideals of food production, as in "We make only goat cheese on our family farm. It's the best in the world." So, the small, "focused" menu suggests depth of knowledge while simultaneously conjuring associations with the "artisanal." The latter is cultivated by farmers markets and everything related to Slow Foodism, wherein big--industrial-scale--food is deemed bad, and small--family-scale--food is good. 

Small menus stoke appetites, yes, but also intellectualism and a dose of primitivism. Small, of course.

Copyright 2009. Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

MENU MINIMALISM

Did it begin in the 1990s or as recently as this decade? Perhaps you remember the first time you noticed that some restaurant menus had taken to describing dishes with the disjunctive brevity of concrete poetry. On one Los Angeles evening in August 2008, in the trend-conscious, casual shoebox Animal, a couple of lines from the mains section read:

niman flat iron, bordelaise, creamed leaks, potato, corn, sweetbreads

quail fry, anson mills grits, long cooked greens, slab bacon.

The more formal and far more expensive gastronomic destination, Alinea, in Chicago, offered a twenty-five-course "tasting tour" in December 2008 with a program of dishes described with a similar syntax. It began:

TROUT ROE parsnip, licorice, ginger

LEMONGRASS oyster, sesame, yuzu

CAULIFLOWER five coatings, three gels, cider.

Meals at Animal and Alinea differ wildly in cost. For the former, for one person, with wine, before tip, dinner might amount to $50-60. For the latter, the "tasting tour" for one with wine pairings, pre-tip, came out to--how could I forget--$466. So the similarity in the style of menu language is not strongly tied to cost. It is, however, a style I have seen only in restaurants with gourmet ambition. Would you agree?

Not all gourmet-forward restaurants, however, do what I'll call menu minimalism. More often one sees the longer-lived syntax of dishes described with conjunctions. In August 2008, a starter on the lunch menu of Los Angeles institution Lucques was described as "slow-roasted king salmon salad with avocado and green goddess dressing," and a main as "ricotta gnocchi with braised beef shortrib, cherry tomatoes and feta salsa verde." The special-occasion tour-de-force Ortolan, also in Los Angeles, offered for dinner in the same period, among other things,

Marinated Hamachi with Blood Orange

Osetra Caviar, Red Bell Pepper, and Ginger.

(In menu quotes, I've represented any distinctions of display type that may impact perceptions of syntax. I've reproduced lower-case, bolded, and capitalized words and words on separate lines.)

I conclude that menu minimalism is a recent sub-trend in the gourmet restaurant world. But it is an identifiable trend, a pronounced style. What are its elements? What are its effects? And, finally, what are their implications? Some brief thoughts for discussion:

The elimination of conjunctions suggests an anti-hierarchical attitude. All components of a dish are accorded equal status. This contrasts with the more traditional style of prioritizing elements of a dish, which conjunctions such as "and" and "with" facilitate. The linguistic reductionism of menu minimalists also projects straightforwardness.

The aesthetic features of menu minimalism have a precedent in 1960s Minimalism in art. Three-dimensional art moved away from the tendency of traditional figurative sculpture to prioritize a particular angle of view, as in the authoritarian form of monuments. Monumentality in art parallels the more traditional menu's linguistic emphasis on the meat or other most luxurious ingredient. Just as the sculpture tradition depended on the unification of body parts essential to likeness of the human figure, which has a top and bottom, so the use of conjunctions in menus upholds a hierarchy with which a diner apprehends the components of a dish.

When the Minimalists challenged hierarchy in sculpture, they severed conjunctions. No longer welding parts, they produced modular, nonfigurative "structures," and displayed them detached, side by side. The menu minimalists have done the same, producing blunt sequences of separated ingredients--taking a similarly modular, and thus arguably anti-hierarchical, approach to describing cuisine.

But are anti-hierarchy and bluntness actual functions of the new minimalistic menus within the total context of the dining experience?

Listing a dish by ingredients alone, a practice broken only occasionally when a poetic note must rescue a mundane-sounding ingredient (e.g., "long cooked greens"), conceals the methods of ingredients' preparation, and avoids reference to the cooks' labor. So this style is not straightforward but rather mystifying. It contributes to the diner's sense of surprise as the diner, when finally presented with the dish, finds ingredients transformed in unanticipated ways. Menu minimalism is thus a dramatic device that depends on, rather than debunks, obfuscation.

Understood this way, it makes sense that menu minimalism has emerged in the gourmet sector. There, the most complex and skilled transformations of ingredients, and the greatest need to wow the diner with such skill, may be found.

Describing a dish by ingredients alone also calls attention to the nature of the ingredients themselves, and the art of their combination. In the hyper-competitive arena of chefs and restaurants, the use of novel ingredients and the novel use of ingredients in unlikely combinations have become marks of distinction. The chef's skills as a creative and worldly consumer, not just producer, of foods are highlighted in the menu-minimalist style.

As reductive as that style is, there has been plenty of room for name-dropping prized producers--e.g., "niman flat iron," "anson mills grits"--showing off the chef's savvy or social conscience in sourcing fine, politically correct, or novel ingredients.

The laundry-listing of ingredients also draws diners' attention to the chef's ability to steer clear of overused ingredient combinations, a skill increasingly impressive, and his or her inclusion of items even well-traveled diners don't yet know of. Togarachi, anyone?

So menu minimalism may have undermined the older hierarchy of ingredients, but has introduced new markers of status: obscurantism, novelty, and derivation from designer sources. Meanwhile, this style, while withholding information for dramatic impact, is anything but straightforward.

Copyright Alison Pearlman 2009. All rights reserved.