IN THIS ISSUE
IS COOKING REALLY AN ART?    
By John Mariani

NEW YORK CORNER
TBAR
By John Mariani

NOTES FROM THE WINE CELLAR
SPANISH WINES
By Brian Freedman



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IS COOKING REALLY AN ART?    
By John Mariani


Gérard Depardieu in "Vatel" (2000) 

    The package landed with a considerable thud on my desk, a two-volume, 18.2-pound, 932-page production entitled Notes from a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession by photographer Jeff Scott and chef Blake Beshore.  It is a collection of photos, with little text, showing the work of cooks on the line, focusing on 10  American chefs--mostly Sean Brock, along with  George Mendes, Johnny Iuzzini, Emma Hearst, Zak Pelaccio, Michael Laiskonis, Jason Neroni, Matt Gaudet, Joel Harrington and Neal Fraser.
    There are shots of order tickets, menu notes, 23 photos of one chef working out with a punching bag, and nine pages of the inside of a flour mill. But mostly there are hundreds of photos of cooks’ hands putting the final touches on a dish--a periwinkle on tapioca,  a pin dot of sauce on octopus, a blow torch to cactus pads. There are no recipes.
    It is an odd production, to be sure, but you can hardly fault the exuberance of Scott and Beshore in trying to view “chefs as artists who alter our emotional state by psychologically affecting our sense memories,” citing Sean Brock on the reaction of an unidentified food writer who broke down eating his food  [italics his]: “This food writer ate a dish and cried. She came back to the kitchen in tears. It’s crazy when food affects people like that. They get into it so much that it’s too much for them, it’s emotional for them. When grown people start crying that’s insane.” True.
    The book is an extravagance of both scale and scope, especially since a two-volume Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci weighs in at just 294 pages and 1.6 pounds.  More important, Notes from a Kitchen’s publication poses the question, is cooking an art?  
    The new Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives a reasonably cogent definition of art: “The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words.”  It   also gives a fourth definition of an art as “A skill that is attained by study, practice, or observation [e.g.]: the art of negotiation." The fifth definition is “Artful contrivance; cunning.”
        When it comes to cooking, I’d be happy to apply these last two, but not the first, but I might also argue that art, as noted in the first definition, surely doesn’t have to be “beautiful.” There is ugly art (Hieronymus Bosch, right) and troubling art  (Goya’s  “Disasters of War”) and art that is deliberately in your face (Kerouac’s On the Road), disorienting (Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”), even repulsive (the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”).  Cooking, on the other hand, should be none of these things except, perhaps, beautiful to look at on the plate and delicious on the tongue. 
        Creative cooking might well enlighten a person to new possibilities or ways of thinking about a pea shoot, and that is a good thing in a world of fast, frozen, chemically enhanced foods. Cooking can be provocative, but only a fool makes food that is deliberately distasteful or that seeks to outrage people. Cooking is actually much closer to science than art, as the six-volume, 2,438-page, 48-pound book called Modernist Cuisine shows at enormous cost in recipes that come more from a chem lab than an art studio.  As any pastry chef will tell you, there is no less chemistry involved in the making of a croissant than in the glazing of fine china or making pewter.
    Cooking, like the art of negotiation, the art of politics, even the art of war, is clearly a skill attained by study, practice and observation, that is, a craft.  That is what the great 19^th century master chef Carème (below), who codified French haute cuisine, meant when he titled his five-volume encyclopedia L’Art de la Cuisine Française.  Of course, imagination and creativity go into cooking, often at a very high level, at which point it is called “haute” cuisine.  But there is nothing that rises to the level of true art in a craft whose very existence depends on the constant replication of a dish, night after night, week after week.  The replication of stenciled friezes, even if originally designed by Raphael, does not constitute art, and I’m sure Andy Warhol was mumbling all the way to the bank when his work went from replicating Brillo boxes to having assistants replicate his own work.
        “If chefs ate their own food,” said Paul Bocuse, “we’d have a better cuisine,” and the first duty of any cook is to make delicious food, to make his guests happy, sometimes surprising them with a novel idea, sometimes keeping them guessing with a bit of trompe l’oeuil. The French have always recognized this distinction, emphasizing again and again simplicity in cooking, just as did Leonardo da Vinci--who designed both a convection rotisserie oven and a cooling distillation machine--when he said of art and craft, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” whether in a painting, battlements or the kitchen. When a chef goes to deliberate extremes to create dazzle on the plate, he or she is violating the cardinal principle French gastronome Curnonsky insisted on:  “Cuisine is when things taste like themselves.”  In cooking, form follows function, not vice-versa, in the same way the designer of a beautiful airplane has, by necessity, to make sure the wings stay on.
    Line cooks are obsessive about their work simply to keep up when 25 orders come in at once. They try very hard to make the food as good as they have been taught, but too many chefs with their heads in the stars obsess more on their own image, causing fawning media to toss around terms like “artist” and “genius” as if the chef were Cézanne painting apples and pears.  Ever humble Cézanne (right), whose favorite food was potatoes cooked in oil, insisted that,  "When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."
    Surely, using tweezers to place micro-greens just so on top of layers of foie gras and puff pastry does not constitute art at any level.   There is a craft to making good pizza  or a juicy roast chicken but it is not an art form. Extravagance in cuisine, whether it’s the mounting of a 200-course dinner at Versailles, or a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey, is mere cunning artifice, to be applauded for what it is--fun, enticing, beautiful, but it isn’t art.

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    As the Willie Nelson song goes, “Ain’t it funny how time slips away?”  I’ve known restaurateur Tony Fortuna for many years as one of the true gentlemen of the profession, so it was with surprise that upon hearing he owned TBar I realized it’s been seven years since I’d see him.
    TBar has actually been a fixture on the Upper East Side (it used to be The Lenox Room) and is easily one of the handsomest of restaurants in a neighborhood where the creaky old J.G. Melon is the only other stand-out among storefront ethnic eateries. Melon, of course, is a hang-out for burgers and chili, whereas TBar is a full-fledged restaurant, also with burgers on the menu, with an equal number of steaks and chops, apps, salads, pastas, and a good pizza margherita ($19) for the table to share.
     Executive chef Ben Zwicker has spent time in notable kitchens that include Four Seasons, Aureole, and Petrossian, and his aim at TBar is to provide consistency to a clientele that assume their favorite items on the menu to be the same every time they order them.
    The premises are bright with primary colors and soft lighting, emanating from white tablecloths and from overhead lights that bounce off a delightfully whimsical mural. Comfortable banquets and chairs and votive candles on the tables lend the dining room a civilized ambiance without a whit of pretension, and newcomers will feel welcomed warmly at the front, where there is an active bar stocked with all the best labels of booze.
    Our party of four began by sharing one of those crisp, delicious pizzas ($19) as well as nicely peppery “angel” chicken wings with a tangy-sweet tamarind glaze ($18).  Guacamole with vegetable crudités ($27) was good, though it could have used a bit more spiking.
    In a city now wall-to-wall with seared octopus dishes, the variation at TBar, with potatoes, celery and olives ($18), is a real standout, just lightly seared and smoky, very tender and mild in flavor.  Yellowfin tartare with soy, ginger and sesame seeds ($22) was cool and finely seasoned to bring out the freshness of the coarsely chopped fish.
    For our entrees we went with an excellent 40-ounce Black Angus porterhouse (right) for two ($105)--though two people will undoubtedly take some home--with its complimentary choice of Béarnaise, steak or poivre sauce, and a 24-ounce bone-in ribeye ($56) that could just as easily feed two.  A “crispy Long Island Duck” (left) with sweet potato and orange glaze ($38) hearkened back to the days when this dish was on every French and continental menu in NYC but now is rarely to be found on any. TBar’s, though not as crispy as I'd hoped, reminded me how wonderful roast duck with orange sauce can be as an alternative to the endless sliced duck breast dishes now found elsewhere. The orange sauce was not too sweet, the meat was perfectly juicy, the remainder of fattiness in balance with it all.
    Freshly cut French fries were terrific, as were nicely seared and roasted Brussels sprouts.
   The desserts at TBar are gooey wonders, not least a fudge brownie sundae ($18) that made the child in me sigh the way I once would at a Rexall soda fountain--only at TBar the chocolate and the ice cream were of higher quality (right).   There’s also a strawberry sundae and a homage to Master French Chef André Soltner in a reproduction of his chocolate mousse   laced with rum and coffee ($18).  True, these are expensive desserts, but no one person is likely to polish one off, so ask for two or three spoons.
    The wine list at TBar has been carefully built up over the past decade, so there are some fine bargains among older bottlings.
    Tony Fortuna must be very happy that his clientele is so faithful, but he’s happier still when a new face comes to TBar to be cosseted and well fed in a pretty room where people can actually talk with one another.

Open for lunch Monday through Friday, brunch Saturday and Sunday, and every night for dinner.   Email: tony@tbarnyc.com  or manager@tbarnyc.com

 

 

 

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WATCH FOR THE MOVIE! "GODZILLA VS THE MOS BURGER"

MOS Burger, the biggest fast-food chain in Japan after McDonald's, is commemorating the opening of a location in the 1,093-foot Tokyo Tower's food court with the Tokyo Tower Burger, consisting of 14 layers ($7) that includes  Lettuce,  Hot chili sauce,  Chopped onion,  Mayo,  Patty, tomato slice,  Hot chili sauce,  Onion ring,  Ketchup,  chopped onion,  Pastrami bacon, another patty plus bun.