A lot of restaurant food in recent years has been artless in the best sense of word — i.e., as a rejoinder to artifice. Here you go, happy diners, local meat and vegetables cooked simply, with care. So, when did meals in beautiful, upscale restaurants start to seem like the contents of a CSA box set on a plate and sent out with a $28 price tag?
Today’s up-and-coming chefs aren’t afraid to show you how well they they can manipulate ingredients. Kevin Ouzts at the Cockentrice cooks with a kind of unbridled joy in his craft. Try his “butcher’s batter” — a kind of fluffy buckwheat dumpling baked in a deep soup plate, then topped with tender pieces of guinea hen, a roulade of the hen’s leg filled with forcemeat, glazed turnips and chestnut cream. It’s a tour de force.
A tiny cooking space doesn’t stop Grain, a new Midtown cocktail bar, from tossing salted caramel corn in billowing liquid nitrogen and showering it with vadouvan curry — a showboat technique that produces the best frozen-crunch bar snack you could imagine.
Next door, at Community Smith, chef Micah Willix gives a master class in precision-cooked meat, whether he’s confiting chicken wings or slow-roasting pork.
Another veteran, Ian Winslade at Pace & Vine in Vinings, shows off his command of technique, new (aerating parmesan cheese for mushroom pasta) and old (cooking Gulf snapper on a steel plancha griddle). The kitchen conversation has tacitly moved from ingredients to skill.
