Remembering Joel Robuchon

(Ed. note: This article originally appeared, in slightly different form (and with less food pictures) in Desert Companion magazine; you can access that version by clicking here.)

The Death of Taste

Joël Robuchon’s passing isn’t just sad news in itself. It signals the beginning of the end of Strip fine dining as we know it

When Joël Robuchon announced in 2004 that he was coming to the MGM Grand, Ruth Reichl, then editor of Gourmet magazine, called it the most important news in American gastronomy in the past 50 years. He was not a TV chef a la Bobby Flay and Emeril Lagasse, nor was he an old warhorse in the Paul Bocuse mold. Instead, this was a very French chef — the “Chef of the Century” (as designated by one French gastronomic journal) who had retired in 1995 while still at the top of his game — and Las Vegas was where he was going to plant the first flag in his campaign for an international comeback. He was bringing not just the fanciest of French food to town, but something far more important: credibility.

It’s hard to overstate what his arrival meant for Las Vegas’ dining reputation. Our top-down, celebrity-chef culture was starting to garner some criticism by the early 2000s; and even though our dining options had vastly improved under the (absentee) auspices of Michael Mina, Wolfgang Puck, Thomas Keller, and others, it was easy for food snobs to dismiss our restaurants as little more than branding exercises designed to appeal to the reality TV crowd. But Robuchon and his colleagues changed all that. Here was a chef’s chef, a revered master of the culinary arts bringing his technical skills and otherworldly flavors to Sin City, a place whose culinary history had more in common with Elvis impersonators that the haute cuisine of Paris.

All that changed in early 2005. Robuchon was not a household name in America, but gourmands the world over spoke of him with reverential awe. Imagine Yo-Yo Ma showing up in the land of Donnie and Marie, and you get the idea. He arrived not only with a cuisine that had wowed international gastronomes, but also with a radical concept in fine food that remains with us today. What L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon did (first in Paris in 2003 and then in Las Vegas) was to turn the very idea of gourmet dining on its head by presenting the most sophisticated of cuisines in something that looked like a sushi/tapas bar. These days, avid foodies take for granted — indeed, demand — eating finely tuned food in laid-back surroundings. Robuchon, however, did it first and did it best. “C’est une revolution!” the French food press proclaimed, and so it was. And it set the stage for the wave of chef-driven food in informal settings that was to become the signature style of restaurants everywhere for the first two decades of the 21st century.

In gastronomy, as in art, fashion and architecture, the seismic changes often happen from the top down. What is haute couture one year in Milan often shows up three years later on the clearance rack at Macy’s. Robuchon begat this revolution as a reaction to the high pressure (and crippling expense) of chasing Michelin stars. He brought forth his L’Ateliers as a new way to feature the best of French food. Unfortunately, as with many knockoffs of luxury brands, imitators have remixed his ideas into a sweeping casualization of our dining culture — without the attention to detail or chops that Robuchon and his troops brought to the table.

The past 10 years have seen a steady erosion of the many comforts that used to make eating out so delightful. Civilized noise levels, comfortable chairs, and tablecloths are becoming as obsolete as tasseled menus, and one wonders if truly fine dining and its attendant luxuries won’t soon be leaving the stage along with the ghost of Monsieur Robuchon. Our entire dining revolution began with Spago, and gained worldwide attention with the addition of luminaries such as Le Cirque and Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare. These were big-deal meal restaurants, with service and prices to match, but they announced themselves (and Las Vegas) as a food scene to be reckoned with.

No one is making such a splash these days. Bradley Ogden won the Best New Restaurant James Beard Award in 2004; it was replaced with a boring (I’m being kind) Gordon Ramsay Pub. Instead of the Tuscan elegance of Circo, we now have Lago, a restaurant with lots of small plates and all the charm of a bus station. The Strip isn’t trying to make its restaurants world-class anymore; it wants social media “likes” and Instagrammable David Chang clones. For 20 years, Las Vegas’s reputation as an upscale resort town was directly related to the quality of its restaurants. (You can gamble or get a Chanel bag anywhere these days, but where else in the world could you find dozens of superb dining options, from the greatest steaks to haute cuisine palaces, all in a couple of miles of each other?) As we head deeper into this century, it seems our hotels are all too willing to soil that reputation in their quest to dumb down Vegas into another Branson, Missouri — albeit one with drier weather and more day clubs.

The visionaries of Las Vegas recognized that Baby Boomers had money to spend on upscale food and drink — but, beyond that, they recognized great restaurants as an aspirational signifier of the finer things in life. When sitting side-by-side and screaming at each other is the new restaurant normal, it may signal a devolution from which there is no return. If Las Vegas wants to retain its stature as a dining destination for a certain level of affluent traveler, it’s going to have to recapture the spirit that brought Robuchon, José Andres, Guy Savoy and Pierre Gagnaire here, not vapid TV personalities and warmed-over noodle shops.

In the meantime, we still have the virtuosity of his two restaurants in Las Vegas. Whether L’Atelier and Joël Robuchon at the Mansion (his more classically formal dining room) will soldier on remains an open question, but his legacy will be far vaster than whether his restaurants continue to serve the food he made famous. Joël Robuchon taught us how technically precise, and almost perfect, restaurant cooking can be. And for his last act, he taught chefs and diners that elegant, visually stunning plates of food need not be accompanied by stuffiness or pretension. Ruth Reichl was right: Joël Robuchon was the biggest thing ever to happen to American gastronomy — and he was the biggest and best thing ever to happen to restaurants in Las Vegas.

The unforgettables Some quintessentially Robuchon plates:

The world’s best mini-burger

Everyone does sliders/mini-burgers these days, but you’ve never tasted one as good as this.

Tomato gelée with mozzarella

Photo of Joël  Robuchon - Las Vegas, NV, United States. Tomato gelee topped with mozzarella

Robuchon once told me the hardest dish in the world to make was a Caprese salad. “It only has four ingredients, so there’s no place to hide.” Ever the master of simplified sleight-of-hand, he riffs on tomato, olive oil, basil and cheese by disguising the tomato as a clear liquid, and putting the world’s most perfectly formed, teeny tiny, basil-accented, mozzarella balls on top of it.

A simple composed salade

So good it could make a vegetarian out of you.

Le Caille (Quail)

Image result for Joel Robuchon Le Caille

A dish that goes back to Robuchon’s glory days at Jamin (his first 3-star Michelin), the breast of quail is rolled and filled with foie gras and then given a honey-soy glaze. “His philosophy was to treat simplicity with sophistication,” is how Executive Chef Christophe De Lellis describes JR’s cuisine, and nothing says it better than this dish.

La Langoustine “Fritter”

It’s hard to improve on the flavor of a dense, sweet, almost gamy langoustine, but Robuchon figured out that wrapping it in phyllo with a single basil leaf and serving it with a basil-garlic pistou was just the trick. “We were taught not to needlessly add flavors,” says L’Atelier Exec Chef Jimmy Lisnard, “but to amplify the product itself.”

Fin

 

Asian Restaurants Air Grievances, Seek Understanding

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/assets_c/2009/09/20090506kimchee-thumb-625xauto-36756.jpg

ELV note: The following is an article we wrote earlier this week for The Now Report. It’s written in a more standardized, journalistic style than the free-wheeling prose we employ on this web site, but the subject was important enough that we thought we should let our loyal readers know what’s happening with this issue. The Asian restaurant owners we’ve spoken to admit that there’s nothing they can do about the pick-on-the-little-guy coverage of Channel 13’s “Dirty Dining,” but with heightened awareness of various Asian food cultures, they hope the SNHD will stop handing out demerits willy-nilly for things such as week-old kim chee, and failure to change sanitary gloves every time a sushi chef handles a different piece of fish.

More than 50 Asian restaurant owners presented a list of grievances to the Southern Nevada Health District Monday afternoon at Desert Breeze Community Center, outlining what they consider to be continuing discriminatory treatment by health inspectors grading restaurants throughout Clark County.

With County Commissioners Chris Guinchigliani and Marilyn Kirkpatrick in attendance, Sonny Vinuya –President of Asian Chamber of Commerce – spelled out systemic problems within the inspection process that target Asian restaurants serving foods from cultures foreign to inspectors. In the restaurant owners’ minds, this leads to inspectors who harshly judge restaurant kitchens and cuisines without understanding the societies they come from.

“It’s a real problem in this community,” Vinuya said. “Restaurants get a double whammy of getting demerits, paying fines, correcting the problems, and then (they have) a Channel 13 story about them two weeks later. In some cases it has cost them 50-75% of their business.  Some even go out of business.“ (KTNV-TV 13 has run a “Dirty Dining” news segment for years that has been accused of unfairly targeting minority businesses.)

Vinuya said that lack of understanding of ethnic foods and cultures causes many of the problems, as well as having inspectors who don’t speak any Asian languages.  “There’s a lack of communication on both sides, but Asian people, by nature, are quite and polite, and things often get misunderstood.”

Not knowing anything about the recipes themselves has often been the source of such misunderstandings. Vinuya pointed to Korean kim chee (fermented cabbage) as one example:  “The inspectors want cabbage thrown out after a few days as being too old, but it’s only after 6 days that kim chee is starts getting good.”

Multi-lingual inspectors would help, Vinuya believes, as well as diversity training for those doing the job.

Another ongoing problem pointed out to the Commissioners was that of restaurant consultants being pushed upon the restaurants to advise them of how to better pass inspections. William Wong, communications director for the Asian Chamber, mentioned that these consultants can charge up to $165/hour, and health inspectors often pressure the restaurateurs to use them. “It becomes very expensive,” Wong said, “and if you let them go, they (the consultants) threaten you with a bad rating. It’s really like blackmail.”

After the meeting, both Wong and Vinuya expressed appreciation for the opening of a dialogue on these and other issues, as well as a commitment by the Health District and Commissioners to continue to work together to solve some of the problems. “A good place to start is with better communication between the inspectors and the restaurants,” Vinuya added. To that end, the Asian Chamber is looking to present focus groups to the SNHD in hopes of helping inspectors to gain a deeper understanding of the diversity in Asian restaurants, and to work with Clark County to find translators to assist in helping the inspectors.

Vinuya also hopes to get the County to agree to allow the restaurants to fill out a survey with each inspection, rating how well the inspector did their job. “No one wants to do anything to hurt their business,” he said. “We want consistency in what they do just like they want it in restaurants.”

Why is Eater Vegas So Terrible? Blame This Guy

(The dude who hired Susan Stapleton)

Eater Las Vegas has gone from bad to worse. Leaving us to believe that Susan Stapleton —  the absentee hack who runs it — must have some magical powers over her bosses at Vox Media to keep her position. Stapleton literally phones in her “coverage” of the Las Vegas restaurant scene, as you’ll read below.

Our theories are many as to how SS keeps her job, but they’ve centered on several distinct possibilities:

> Stapleton works cheap.

> Stapleton has pictures of Vox Media Editorial Director Lockhart Steele ( pictured above) fondling her. (A revolting proposition admittedly, but hey, it could happen.)

> Stapleton has pictures of the  Vox Media CEO having sex with a goat.

> Stapleton is drinking buddies with the person who pays her $14.11 a week to post her worthless tripe about Las Vegas restaurants.

Stapleton has convinced her editors that the Las Vegas food scene is so paltry, so unsophisticated, and so bereft of talent (both in the kitchen and at the keyboard) that even an out-of-town, know-nothing, booze-hound can report on it.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gEaAmUDEiGo/maxresdefault.jpg(Did Susan catch them in flagrante goat-lecto?)

The only way Eater Vegas would get better would be if there was a concerted effort by chefs, diners, foodies, p.r. types and other assorted interested parties (i.e. people who actually live here) to write to Vox and complain about the terrible job their absentee writer is doing, and what a disservice to our community she is.

(The complaints would start and end with the fact that Stapleton lives in fucking Iowa fer chrissakes and “blogs” about Las Vegas by just re-printing press releases and calling it “content”. They might also include the fact that “Bradley Martin” does not exist, and was invented by Stapleton to make it appear as if she had a staff. How insanely fraudulent and childish is that?)

She wrangled the job 8 years ago and they seem content to pay her a nickel a word and keep the world’s shittiest restaurant blog alive….while thumbing their fat, stupid noses at our community.

These complaints will never happen, of course, because all the big hotels LOVE whatever publicity even a crap website like Eater Vegas provides….and the little, local joints need the exposure. So even if Stapleton is worthless, they’re all afraid of her famous vindictiveness (She loves to write whiny/bitchy letters to anyone who criticizes her or the web site, or threaten them, or block people, or worse.)

Under these circumstances, the very existence of Eater in Las Vegas is a slap in the face to our entire food scene. A number of people have tried to get the gig (remember: Stapleton announced her “retirement” a few years ago), but Vox let her keep the job even after she left town.

It’s all quite pathetic….and a testament to how the internet has pretty much ruined food writing, and how little Vox thinks of food writing.

Don’t believe me? Try this piece of word-smithing  on for size:

The steakhouses of Las Vegas have a new rival with the opening of Bavette’s Steakhouse & Bar at the Monte Carlo. Chicago restaurant group Hogsalt dances onto the scene with this classic with a French flair take on a traditional steakhouse.

Customers can find chilled seafood towers, a peppered duck and goat cheese terrine, and crab cakes to start. The restaurant serves a double-bone Berkshire pork chop, lamb chops and spiced fried chicken.

But the real stars of the show? The steaks. Bavette’s uses USDA Prime with its Chicago cut classic rib-eye steak and dry-aged bone-in New York strip steak aged for 42 days. Vegetarians can order from their own special menu.

One must usually go to a children’s menu (or a ninth grade writing class) to find prose so scintillating.

For the record, yours truly has nothing against Eater National, and even enjoys reading the Eater blogs in other communities. But what is going on here (that has been going on for years now) is beyond the pale. (For those of you who don’t understand our outrage, look at it this way: Imagine a political columnist covering your city who lives four states away, or a sports writer with a nationally-sponsored Dallas Cowboys blog who never sets foot in Texas.)

The solution is simple: hire someone local who knows and cares about the Vegas restaurant scene — not a washed up cow who’s milking the gig. But until that happens….

The very existence of Eater Las Vegas is a continuing insult to our food community.

A pox on you, Vox.

And shame on you, Susan Stapleton. You don’t live here. You don’t work here. You don’t eat here. And you know nothing about what’s really going on in our restaurants. All you do is read this blog, press releases, my social media feeds, and few other outlets, and then aggregate/plagiarize articles into something that feeds your corporate master. You are a sorry excuse for a writer and you know it. You’ve embarrassed my city long enough.

And while I’m at it: Fuck you, Lockhart Steele. Payback’s a bitch, and her stripper name is Karma.