A Razor, A Shiny Knife

Saturday morning started for me in a mid priced hotel about a mile from the location of our dinner. It has been said that the best coffee shop in Chicago was right around the corner from us and to this I cannot confirm or deny. Having entered bed well after 3:00 I was slow to rise when my alarm started making robot noises at 9:00. It was when I reached over to quiet the singing machine that I noticed that I had missed a handful of calls and text messages from Daniel who stayed in our host’s condo with some of the rest of our team the night before. It was clear from the series of messages that he was trying to explain to me that there was a flood of biblical proportions at the apartment and I needed to come quickly.

After volley of retaliatory missed calls and text messages, I collected myself and prepared for the day in which I would be cooking in what I could only imagine was waist-deep water. Collecting a couple gallons of coffee from the aforementioned purveyor we dove head first into what could have only been a nightmare.

Upon breaking into the confines of our temporary home, I was relieved to see that there was no standing water and the only real causality for the evening was everyone’s sleep and a rug of Crate and Barrel origin. Since I had not been there I leave it to Mayur Subbarao to recount the evenings happenings to you:

Now it was late. Twenty-four courses of culinary madness served and cleared, no thanks to my own rather comical blunders: Cacao spheres in trays that had miraculously managed to invert 90 degrees onto their sides; a freezer-bowl full of cuit sous vide caramel ice cream base that had shot itself out of the freezer door all over me, my fellow dessert cooks, and the floor.

For the full post with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com. I look forward to your comments.

Upon arriving in Chicago, on Thursday 21 January,  2009, we were a flurry of action, transforming our lovely host’s beautiful condo into a functioning kitchen and dining room. We were again blessed with a painful cold snap, which we used to our benefit by turning what was supposed to be a washer and dryer room into a walk-in freezer by opening the windows. Seems silly but this open and flat cold space was the key to being able to make this apartment a functional space to serve the meal.

After many trips to the supermarket, wine store, fish monger, butcher, cheese monger, Treasure Island and Alinea for vacuum packing, we had gotten ourselves in a good place and were ready to receive our guests for the evening. In a stroke of luck two of our guests for the evening happened to be amazing photographers and provided us some amazing shots of our prep, the dinner and the plating of the courses.

I will save my words for evaluating our success or failures for Friday and leave it to Kyle Ryan from the Onion to give you his opinion.

For the full post with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com. I look forward to your comments.

I departed Chicago a changed man, alive with new ideas, concepts and a much better grasp of what would be necessary to accomplish our next series of dinners in a fashion that would befitting the original hosts.

Our recreation dinners in Chicago would be our first attempts at performing such a high level of haute cuisine away from our home kitchen and became the template for what you could imagine as a monumental logistical nightmare. The meal itself was long and the ingredients fragile, with many preparations that would have to be accomplished in Chicago without the help of a proper work space. We would have to not only bring some of the more intricate prepared foods but we would need to bring a vast amount of specific equipment as well as finding some of the immovable devices locally with friendly or sympathetic owners.

We decided to split the meals into a Friday and Saturday seating of roughly half the number of guests we had served in New York. A more reasonable goal with all of the new challenges we had to overcome to accomplish to serve twenty-five of the most technically difficult dishes in the world.

Our flights were booked for Thursday the 22nd of January so early in the morning it would be offensive to most people who don’t work as long shore men. We travelled light on clothes, as every carry on and checked bag was filled to the teeth with food and equipment (a truncated list of some of the items: sous vide rib cap, dehydrator, silpats, micro-planes, yuba, low and high acyl gellan, veal demi-glace, apple fruit leather, sodium hexametaphosphate, truffle stock, truffle soup -a quart of which was lost in the packing process in New York. That quart of soup cost $125.00 hence why I wasn’t told about it until arrival in Chicago and needed to make our shopping list).

It seemed from the get go that security guards at the airport were going to love us, but it wasn’t until they got to our immersion circulator that the love was really felt. Being wildly expensive we obtained a pelican case for what is one of the most essential pieces of cooking equipment we owned. This steel reinforced case only reinforced the idea that even after x-raying it twice, the TSA needed to poke in and around this case, while I reiterated my explanation of its purpose with the kind of deft tact and skill that can only come with being awake and at an airport before the sun rises. Needless to say it was discovered not to be dangerous and we were on our way.

For the full post with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com. I look forward to your comments.

So with an offhanded comment in a local New York publication inviting me to come and stage (intern in French pronounced like mirage) at his restaurant, I found myself just a few days later speaking with Grant Achatz confirming the details for the few shorts days I would be spending in the kitchen at Alinea. The timing wasn’t the best as he was going to be presenting at Madrid Fusion the same week we were planning our Chicago dinner, so I came out the week prior for a few days of abuse and learning.

After hearing that her conversation had sparked my impending collision with the kitchen at Alinea, Jordana, TONY journalist, asked me if I would be kind enough to write about my experiences and take some photos from the short time I was going to be staging at Alinea. Owing her at least this much I did my best at capitulating all of the details and information I could.

These words were broken into a three part story that was posted on TimeOut NY

Inside Alinea: Part one

As are most things in this world, the slide show for TimeOut NY has been edited and subsequently contains only a select number of the photos that were captured during my short time in the kitchen at Alinea. Therefore, for you enjoyment, please fine below the entire collection.

For the full post with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com. I look forward to your comments.

In the midst of trying to recreate the series of ground breaking dinners that Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz served at their world renowned restaurants, the years of my life ticked over into another decade and with a riotous amount of celebration I became thirty. The week after, the New Year was filled with various celebrations befitting such a monumental accomplishment. My family got together for nice Italian meal on the date of my actual birth and a collection of good friends and I went to Mr. Castaño’s restaurant in midtown the next night for some serious brutality. All of this was wrapped up in a weeklong celebration showered over me by my lovely lady friend. It was a delicious week and I was very grateful for the much need break from the grueling hours of prep, cooking, planning and trying to squeeze in my day job between dinners.

So when Saturday came around I believed it was time to get back to business. We had the first of four test dinners to prepare ourselves for menu changes that Keller and Achatz executed at Alinea and the French Laundry. Being the creative forces that they were they did not just rest on their laurels and serve the same menu at all three restaurants, but they changed about 40% of the menu each meal. This kept us quite busy, writing recipes, researching techniques and then testing everything before our next series of events in Chicago and San Francisco.

We were going to split the menu up into pieces and practice some of the new elements while refining some of the harder elements we had come close to perfecting at our first series of events. Each night we would be serving eight of the twenty-four courses, paired with wine, and as you can see from these photos, a long series of cooking lessons and demonstrations.

Needless to say I was not aware of the fact that on Saturday after our test dinner my lovely lady friend had planned a huge surprise birthday party for me! So as we were cleaning up at the Whisk and Ladle, a steady stream of my friends and loved ones started to roll in carrying presents and copious amount of tasty beverages and treats. The very coy team that had been working with me all night whipped out all of their surprises and converted our dinner from a Keller/Achatz themed evening to a custom made party for me. Resplendent with special treats, fancy cocktails dreamed up by Mayur just for the evening and a very dangerous piñata which severely injured my lovely lady friend.

As luck would have it our good friend Steph Goralnick was there and was able to take some amazing photos of us cooking, the food and just some amazing interactions.

That evening’s menu:
Thomas Keller and Jonathan Benno (chef de cuisine per se):
“Galette” Hudson Valley Moulard Duck Foie Gras, Italian Pistachio “Financier,” Compressed Red Sensation Pear and Garden Mache

Thomas Keller and Cory Lee (chef de cuisine the French Laundry)
Salmon Cornet – Black sesame tuile and red onion crème fraîche
White sturgeon caviar – Lemon verbena gelée, cauliflower

Grant Achatz
Hot Potato-Cold Potato, Chive, Black Truffle
Black Truffle Explosion, Romaine, Parmesan

Prepared with: Jesse Carter, Cathy Erway, Deborah Gorman, Mark Losinger, Akiko Moorman, Andrew Rosenberg, Mayur Subbarao

…and a very special thanks and love my lovely lady friend for throwing me the most amazing thirtieth birthday party (week) ever!

For the full post with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com. I look forward to your comments.

After our first hard fought battle with Keller and Achatz a calm settled over us as we prepared for our next series of dinners in Chicago. The preparation for those events was pushed to the back of our minds and we threw a party with our friends at PhotoJoJo in celebration of the photography of food. All the attendees were invited to bring a camera and get up close and dirty with whatever was created.

Aside from us the lovely ladies from the HAPA Kitchen were there, as well as Ted Allen and Amy Sedaris’s supper club. The whole event was hosted by the Whisk and Ladle with cocktails poured by resident bartender Nick Bennett and virtuoso cocktail artist Mayur Subbarao.

For the full post with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com. I look forward to your comments.

And so it was on the first night of Chanukah in 2008, Jordana Rothman a writer for TimeOut NY came to the first of our Breaking Bread and Boundaries series of dinners. She was skeptical and quiet letting the events unfold as they would, smiling in the corner and chatting among the 25 other guests.

I ask you to follow the link below to her brief review of the event paired with a conversation with the Chef from Alinea, Grant Achatz. After a quick read I have provided the answers to some questions posed, some clarifications and explanations for things brought up and a full exploration of the team with whom this would not have been possible. I encourage you to follow the links in Jordana’s first paragraph to get a better picture and clarification for what we were attempting.

A Razor, A Shiny Knife: Achatz’s take
By Jordana Rothman

“But ARASK’s attempt felt more deferential than presumptuous, particularly when presented by ringleader Mike Cirino, whose jocular trips over French menu descriptions were received warmly by this young, willing crowd.”

It is true I could not then and still struggle over pronouncing mille-feuille and this is even after hours of practice with my very patient fluent French speaking girlfriend, hours of abuse in the kitchen by a couple of the French speaking cooks who were working with us and a couple of hours in the car with a learn how to speak tape.

“we were impressed at the resulting meal, even if some of the more bold presentations didn’t coalesce (that sweet-potato tempura, for example, slid like melted ice cream from its cinnamon stick vessel)”

This was one of the only dishes from the meal that was actually in the Alinea cookbook and it was one that provided us with some of the most difficulty. Convincing gelatinized potato and whiskey puddings not to dissolve when deep fried was a long and tenuous battle which was eventually won by Brian Sullivan on the second night with a collection proper hydration techniques and huge muscles.

“Was it also a good opportunity to see your book put to use?
Ironically, not too many of the dishes in the menu are in the book. Most of the techniques certainly are. They are certainly being creative in their own way. They have budget constraints, plating limitations, equipment and space issues that all force creative solutions. How can you not applaud that?”

I have to admit that this was one of the hardest things to explain when speaking about the dinner to our friends, family and loved ones. It is one thing to cook a 25 course meal of your own creation, it is another to try and emulate what was done by these two brilliant men and their incredible teams. It was an honor to have Chef Achatz so succinctly explain the greatest challenges that we encountered while showing the core reason for our attempt in the first place.

“The Hot Potato is a rock-star effort. Complete with wax bowls even…nicely done! I think he should come and stage at Alinea for a couple days before his next dinner.… I might be able to show him a few tricks.”

And before the next dinner I did take him up on this offer, but more on this to come soon enough…

But first I would like to say thank you to everyone who participated in these first meals in New York and the research and practice that went into making them a reality. Without the intense commitment and dedication given by these lovely people none of this would have been possible.

Daniel Castaño – The two of us came up with this exhausting idea while driving to Boston one rainy afternoon so I blame him for a majority of sleepless nights, long hours testing recipes, fighting with purveyors, booking flights and credit card bills. But without Daniel none of this would have been possible and it was with his guidance and knowledge that allowed us to consistently create such great food.

Eugene Edele – Is a master chef and was able to help break down some of the more intricate flavor profiles and create unique and interesting ideas for the way the dishes might have been served from just a menu.

Matt Franco – Guided the wine selections and pairings based off of the original menus. One of the largest components of the original meals price was the brilliant and rare wines that were paired with the amazingly intricate food. Matt was able to recreate a similar experience with varietal and flavor balance while functioning on a fraction of the budget.

Kristen Hager – helped with logistics and promotions and was instrumental in making sure that the word got out about our meals in every city. Her deft knowledge of wine and service made her to be a key part of our front of house team in NY.

Mark Losinger – Was intricate in the cooking and execution of evening’s menus. Whether butchering beef, lobster or fish, working the sauté station or teaching people about the variety of nonsense they were watching being assembled in front of them.

Kathryn Mahoney – tirelessly supported the entire team throughout the research and development stages of the event in a myriad of ways and led the front of house at the event, creating an atmosphere of comfort and flawless services for the guests who partook in a twenty-five course, five hour meal.

Akiko Moorman – was driven not only to create recipes that were reminiscent to the original per se  meal but also making the ingredients used to cook those the best local and sustainable products. She was critical in not only the execution, but the creation of the recipes which we served and was an invaluable member of team at every meal.

William Oberlin – with Brian Sullivan designed the replicas of Martin Kastner’s beautiful serving pieces and built all of them by hand at his studio in North Brooklyn.

Mayur Subbarao – is a pastry chef extraordinaire amongst his other talents which are many. He was responsible for a majority of the recipe writing and development in the confectionary sections of the menu and was the only team member to have eaten ate all three of the restaurants who’s menus we were recreating. His tireless efforts and creative were instrumental to making this meal happen.

Brian Sullivan – single-handedly took command of writing and testing most of the modern cooking recipes that we executed over the course of these dinners. His passion for cooking and designed drove the creativity in the team and his dedication to perfection created a standard that we all strove to attain with every dish. His input on the service piece design, kitchen equipment set up and his flawless execution at meal time made him a crucial part of every event and without him none of this would have been possible.

For the full article with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com

Time was lost and the minutes that were given to us to accomplish this herculean task seemed to be as inadequate as cocktail umbrellas in a hurricane. Fire was closing in on us from all sides and the pressure of was mounting by the second.

On slightly warmer than desired morning of December 12^th, 2008 we packed up our kitchen and moved it to the sight of the first of our dinners. Until now we had had the foresight to plan our events around the resources available to us: space, time, equipment, etc. In this case these seemingly simple luxuries were not an option.

Our host was gracious and provided us with and amazing amount of space; a beautiful modern kitchen in her amazing brand new north Brooklyn loft. We had access to an incredibly powerful six burner stove with a delicate oven, an unreasonable amount of stainless steel countertops (for this part of the world), a dish washer (which in and of itself was a godsend) and a very adequate sub-zero refrigerator who’s only contents were a few bottles of half imbibed liquor, mixers and some butter and cheese.

To accomplish what Chef Keller and Achatz were able to execute at per se we had to supplement these tools with some of our own equipment. A complete list of items that were packed up and carried across Brooklyn would be mind-numbingly boring but here is a non-exhaustive attempt at giving some idea to what was required, in prose. Two immersion circulators, one set for meat and fish and one for vegetables for the first half of the meal and then reset for warming and holding for the second half. A forty liter tank of liquid nitrogen for turning white truffles into a snow, as we did not have the budget to buy fresh white truffles for the celery root puree. Six additional burners were added and stationed in a neighboring room creating a second line, allowing the simultaneously firing consecutive courses. Add on two blow torches, a laser inferred thermometer, a couple of Kitchen-Aids, a dehydrator and a selection of incredibly specific tableware that would make your head spin. We were finally ready to serve twenty-five courses of the most technically difficult and precise food conceived in this century.

After set-up was complete and we got the whole process rolling, things went as smoothly as you could imagine. With a few exceptions, we did what we thought was an amazingly admirable job with the time and information we had. As the first night came to a very late end, we were in a place of extreme exhaustion, yet happiness. Feeling confident, we ran head-first into the second dinner. Our mobile kitchen had been refined - almost completely eliminating the kinks that had occurred the first night, which only created space for a whole new set to come in and take their place.

For the full article with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com

The days were long and grueling. The mornings were filled with recipe writing and research on ingredients suppliers, purveyors and manufactures. Deliveries would arrive between 1000-1300 and testing would begin about 1600; lasting into the wee hours of the evening, with a rotating cast floating in and out of my apartment with casual regard an energy that was constantly refreshing and inspiring.

About a week out from our first set of events we were pretty sure we had a good idea of what we were going to serve for the dishes outlined on the simple printed menus we had been basing our dinners on. It was at this point that a burgeoning friendship with Nick Kokonas (the owner of Alinea) provided us simultaneously with the most beneficial and detrimental tool in our quest. He was able to get us a very extensive set of photographs that were captured by Lara Kastner at the per se dinner.

This provided us with a conundrum as the photos enabled us to answer all of the questions we had when we were trying to extrapolate the simple menu descriptions but we had already committed hours of practice and testing to the recipes we had written which were no longer relevant to the actual dishes. So in what could have been the worst decision we had made for our sanity we decided to rewrite all of the recipes and try to execute the dishes exactly the way they were served originally.

With 72 hours before service was to being on Friday December 12^th, 2008 we started to prepare and write simultaneously. Working around the clock, while shuffling our day jobs and the fleeting extraneous bits of our lives we pushed forward and into one of the longest dinners ever.

For the full article with photos please visit www.arazorashinyknife.com

When attempting to attack something of this nature, the best thing to do, in my opinion, is just abandon all hope for being casual and relaxed about it. I say spend every waking moment obsessing about every detail and let yourself only be properly satisfied with an unusual amount of desired perfection in the outcome. Setting your goals ridiculously high will easily create a sense of unbridled drive and hopefully this passion will overcome you and push you to new heights, while inspiring others around you to throw in their lot and do the same.

That night in early November, a small group of us sat down to talk, plan, experiment and discover truly what we had signed up to in trying to recreate this meal.

First task was to turn the menu, with its simple and cryptic description, ingredients and quotation marks, into recipes.

I can say now that the first night was one of the most memorable events in my entire life. To watch this assorted group of people fall together behind this quest and in 6 hours go from nothing to having some semblance of a plan. To see people, who had never met each other before bond with dedicated passion over this goal was so strong it fueled my own drive for the long months to come.

While pouring over the various cooks books we could get our hands on we searched and hunted for clues and tips that we could use. In a bit of good fortune some of the dishes were classics and were able to be gleaned directly from the amazing cookbooks these meals were celebrating. But a majority of the courses were new: progressions on thoughts that the chefs had been cultivating over many years, new flashes of inspiration that overtook them in the run up to these glorious events, reinterpretations on dishes and techniques that they had created or perfected and were now able to bend to their creative will.

This first night turned out a few great successes and some amazing failures.
Our first success, were these little puffs of yuzu. Fluffed with Methocellulose F50 in a stand mixer and then piped on to a dry sheet of acetate. Like tiny meringues but instead of being baked with egg whites, these were dehydrated to a crisp. Containing only: yuzu, water, sugar and roughly 1.25% of the total weight of juice of Methocel F50.

This was a reinterpretation of a dish we found in the Alinea cookbook that was originally a spiced foie gras treat. Here it was served as a passed canapé with a smoked salmon pâté and with a caper buried deep in the light and crunchy yuzu puff.

One of the complete failures of the night, and what would become one of the more difficult dishes to decipher, was Chef Achatz’s Lamb, Fennel, Pernod, Coffee-Scented Air. Not having any idea what this would be like we started making wild guesses and decided on trying to make spheres of Pernod sauce and braise lamb necks until they were tender. Turns out we got close with the lamb necks but in the end there were actually a total 3 different cuts of Lamb (loin, neck, sweat bread), three sauces (in varying consistencies: liquid, gel and leather) and the Pernod was actually an airy foam laid on top of the coffee braised lamb neck pudding.

After a long battle of wrestling with recipes we ended up breaking the menu into pieces for everyone to do some research and refinement over the weekend. And with a few more drinks we started stage two of our planning: how to recreate the Alinea display pieces.

The man behind the camera of these pictures W. Oberlin and Brian Sullivan, were captaining the construction and develop of the two critical devices we would need to serve this meal,
1. Parafin wax bowls
2. Squids

A handful of amazing drawings were scribbled out on paper, in blood red ink, crossed out and then redrawn. Little words were written next to big words on digital prints of the actual devices. After a bit of doing we settled on budgets and what we thought were good ideas and then remembered we had one last recipes setting in the fridge.

Even liquid nitrogen wouldn’t get the Pernod gel to set for us to try to encapsulate it with gellan. After about twenty minutes of fighting with this, everyone basically took to blowing into the bowl with the LN2 and making fun little clouds