What’s Wrong With Restaurants: Top Chef Teaches a Lesson
I’ve complained previously in these pages about the obsession with inventiveness that infects chefs and restaurants alike. I’ve asked, “What is wrong with executing a classic dish in the classic fashion and doing it really, really well???”
Proper execution of classic dishes is a skill lacking in today’s chefs. I place into evidence last night’s (very entertaining) episode of Top Chef.
The 16 contestants paired off for a head-to-head challenge. Each pair was assigned one of eight classic dishes: crab cakes, duck a l’orange, lasagna, shrimp scampi, eggs Benedict, steak au poivre, chicken piccata and (pity the poor souls) soufflé. The task – outcook your competitor-partner in preparing the dish.
Of the eight dishes, only two, the crab cakes and the lasagna, were executed by both competitors in a semi-recognizable, reasonably competent fashion (although one of the crab cake guys didn’t know the ingredients to make mayonnaise – and he’s a chef???).
One contestant made duck a l’orange with a tangerine-soy glaze. Huh? The word “l’orange” should be a big hint to use orange and no soy (not exactly a staple of French cooking). The guy also scraped the fat from under the skin of the duck before cooking. He should have remembered the old saying – no fat, no flavor.
Another aspiring Top Chef, the one eliminated at the end of the episode, marinated her shrimp scampi in parsley and added so much salt as to render the dish inedible. (She may have overcompensated for undersalting her pizza in an earlier competition.)
An eggs Benedict competitor didn’t use Hollandaise as his sauce.
Neither steak au poivre was classic. One candied the peppercorns and scattered little bits of steak all over the plate. The other went for Mexican flair in a French dish.
The biggest disasters were the chicken piccata and the soufflé. The soufflé was somewhat understandable. It was, by far, the trickiest dish to execute. But why one contestant used mashed potatoes and the other included rice in a dish that’s supposed to be light and airy is beyond me.
The chicken piccata was a real head-scratcher. It seemed as if the contestants had never eaten chicken piccata, let alone cooked it. What’s so hard about a lemon-butter sauce with a touch of garlic and some capers? One piccata cooker decided that she knew better than our culinary forefathers and used an orange sauce. People, use the proper citrus in your dishes!!!
(Complete aside: Is the plural of “chicken piccata” “chicken piccatas” or “chickens piccata”?
But that was nothing compared to the abject cluelessness of San Francisco’s own Ryan Scott, late of Myth Café. He breaded the chicken. That, as one judge pointed out, made it chicken Milanese, not chicken piccata. He completely ignored the lemon-butter sauce, opting instead what can best be described as a creamy chicken thigh reduction. When the judges tried to explain the error of his ways to him, he became fixated on the starch served on the side rather than the problems with the chicken preparation. Hello? Hello? Anybody home, McFly?
Giving a pass to the clueless mayonnaise maker (his crab case was done classically and his competitor told him the ingredients for mayo so he could make some), eight (one duck, one Benedict, both steaks, chickens and soufflés) of the 16 dishes prepared, by my count, were so far from the classic renderings that they were unrecognizable or were so poorly executed that they were inedible.
I previously blamed critics for spawning the creativity trumps fundamentals disease that currently permeates restaurant cooking. But, after watching last night’s Top Chef, I’m beginning to think that culinary schools bear a large share of the responsibility.
All but three of the 16 contestants claim formal culinary education on their bios. All three of them were in the unrecognizable category by my reckoning. So, formal training helps.
However, that means that only eight of the remaining 13 who did go to culinary school passed the classic test. And, folks, 62% ain’t a passing grade in my book.
Young people spend many thousands of dollars and invest years of their lives to attend culinary academies. How can these places let them graduate without first teaching them the fundamentals??? The fundamentals most certainly include preparing classic dishes.
I suspect that some contestants went politician on us, cooking the dish they wanted to cook (maybe something that was recently on their menu so they were very comfortable with it) rather than this dish they were asked to cook. But that doesn’t excuse the educators. People fall back on something familiar when they aren’t confident in their ability to do what’s asked of them. In the case of a chef, who’s supposed to ensure that they have to skills to be confident in their ability to cook the classics? The culinary schools to whom they paid tuition!
But something I saw today gives me hope. A review of Lafayette’s Yankee Pier in the Contra-Costa Times said, “The side dishes and sauces make it clear that nobody's trying to get fancy at Yankee Pier, but they are trying to get everything just right.” That’s EXACTLY what I want – nothing fancy, everything just right.
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