Kitchen Confidential_ Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - Anthony Bourdain [116]
'I met with him at a coffee shop. He looked at the menu and said, "No vegetarian. That's gotta go." I said, "Fine!" Scott said maybe he'd consult.'
'He came in, started working, changing things, months go by . . . six months! I look at my wife and she looks at me: "Is he consulting? Is he staying?" I kept asking him: "Scott, can we make a deal?" Finally, one day he says, "Well . . . I think I will stay."'
The rest, as they say, is history. Luma got a quick two stars from Ruth Reichl at the New York Times and lots of buzz. Restaurants that change their entire approach midstream never succeed - remember I told you that? Wrong! Restaurants owned by guys in the fuel business don't succeed. I might have said something like that, too. Wrong! Operations that expand into multi-units often dilute the qualities that made them good in the first place. Not this time!
Time passed, Luma did well, and Gino and Scott opened Indigo, on West 10th Street, in a spot so poisonous, so reeking of failure that eight or nine restaurants had come and gone in my memory alone. Remember all that yammer about cancerous locations? Sites so cursed that any and all who seek to follow are doomed? Wrong again, jerk.
Indigo was located only a few blocks away from One Five. I'd been hearing quite enough about Scott Bryan, so when the place opened, I remember trudging over in the middle of a blizzard, sitting at the bar and scarfing up free tastings. I thought it was mind-bogglingly good and I told people so. I dragged my crew over, one by one, to try the mushroom strudel, the Manilla clams. We marvelled at Scott's menu, the perfect my-way-or-the-highway document. All the things that conventional wisdom tells a chef he has to do, all those must-have crowd pleasers that eat up half your menu before you can sneak in the selections you actually love, - they weren't there! There was no soup. No vegetarian plate. No steak! The chicken was not some generic roasted bird with non-threatening seasonings; it was a weird, ballsy, spicy concoction, involving red curry, for chrissakes! And good. The only beef was braised shoulder - a daube provengale so good that my whole crew at One Five now ran over to Indigo after work. Our two kitchens closed at the same time, so we'd phone ahead to say we were coming over, and start cooking that daube - just put it on the bar, for God's sake! Let it get cold, it's okay! The Indigo seafood selections were admirably unpopular fishes - cod and mackerel - and exciting. This was food for cooks. This was food that we got. Simple, straightforward and absolutely pretense-free. Like Scott.
Tucking into that daube of beef, or Scott's sweetbreads, was fun for me and my appreciative crew. What's he doing, we wanted to know, while examining a particular item we hadn't tried yet. How is he dealing with mackerel? Then we'd find out.
Everything on Scott's plates is edible. It's food, first and foremost, to be eaten, not looked at - though his presentations are inspired. Try and imagine the clean, unfussy integrity of Japanese cuisine, with the unrestrained flavors and soul-food heartiness of a well-remembered Grandma's best dish. He was braising economy cuts. He was taking greasy, oily fishes that nobody wanted and making magic. He was presenting it in big bowls in pretty stacks where - if you jammed your fork through all three layers - you got something that combined to actually taste good. He wasn't piling food on top of itself because layer one looked good on top of layer two and three. It tasted good that way. And those big bowls? At Indigo, and at Veritas, when something comes in a big bowl it's because there's gonna be sauce left in the bottom; chances are, you're going to be running a crust of bread around in there and mopping it up when the entree has been eaten.
It's why Scott has three stars and I don't.
It's