I'm a bad man in a lot of ways, we all know that: vain, shallow, boorish, of questionable character. My role model, both as a writer and as a man, is Kenny Powers. But somehow, slim indeed and furtive, barely twitching at the bottom of the guano heap, is a real streak of honesty. I love my applause lines, like railing on Gorgonzola burgers and Zagat, but only when I believe them.
And I'm not sure I totally believe in my campaign against tweezer food.
I mean, at its most ludicrous extremes, of course tweezer food is laughable, even contemptible. The anal-retentive urge to arrange individual micro-cilantro leaves and nasturtium flowers on a plate is, I believe, a sign of moral and intellectual decay — as is serving over-processed proteins at the center of giant white plates. If you are going to serve somebody a piece of duck breast the size of an Oreo, it ought to be on the saucer it deserves.
But while I would love to portray tweezers as wielded wholly by effete, egotistical dandies, the kind of chefs that forbid iPhone pictures and force people to eat savory desserts, the fact is that most young chefs of spirit these days feel like they need to push the envelope, or at least come up with new things people haven't eaten before. Young chefs struck with an animistic mission to bond with the eternal, in the form of wood and live fire, are the exception, rather than the rule; their quixotic mission can never be the norm. It would be like asking a restaurant in Utica, New York, to only serve foraged foods. Most ambitious chefs want to create dishes that are challenging and novel. Often that means putting a bunch of things together on a plate, things that don't naturally go together, and there is no way to put things where you want using tongs or greasy fingers.
"I'm using tweezers, yeah," Bryan Voltaggio told me when showing me some of dishes at his Maryland restaurant, Volt. "I don't want to hear about it." The former Top Chef finalist, now one of the leading lights of modernism, uses the things, but he insists that doesn't make him a tweezer chef. And he isn't. The food he was cooking was complicated and courageous, and while there were one or two things I hated, the rest of it was spectacular, and even the bad parts were bad in a bold and assertive way, neither twee nor cartoonishly overrefined. I had never heard of anybody glazing morels with a beer-yeast emulsion, and neither had you, but it was fantastic, and the guy needed a way to pick up the things. So: tweezers.
I'm going to Elements tonight, and getting an advance look at Shaun Hergatt's new place next week, and I am eager to see if I was wrong about tweezers as a symbol for everything unnatural and perverse in food, or if Volt is just an exception. To be honest I could go either way on this one. But I will tell you this: no matter where I land on tweezers, I will never, ever, ever, have a good word to say for sous-vide cooking. There are some lines I just won't cross.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57xaimnWWUp7avt46fpqicX5Z%2Fc36Sb2atr5Wax6a%2BjJ%2BmqJxdorylsdGnoKysXZjCqr%2FIp5xmaWVog3SDj21m