Views from the Summit
At our annual taste trends conference in California, the country's brightest f&b lights learn that familiarity breeds content. And that in a cool economic climate, hospitality thermostats should be kept on high. Janet Fletcher reports.
The top chefs and hotel executives sipping boozy milk punches one morning last spring at The Culinary Institute of America's Napa Valley campus in St. Helena, California, might have looked like they were trying to drown their sorrows. While for some businesses it has indeed been an annus horibilis, these four dozen industry leaders were tasting opportunity.
Tutored by Lally Brennan and Ti Martin, the high-octane cousins who run Commander's Palace in New Orleans, the CIA audience couldn't mistake the message: in difficult times, customers crave history over novelty, authenticity over glitz. They want an experience-a storied cocktail, perhaps-that's rooted in a place.
"I want you to feel you're in New Orleans when you're in my bar," said Lu Brow, bar chef at the Brennan family's Café Adelaide & the Swizzle Stick Bar in that city's Loews hotel.
Getting a grip on what customers want now, as the country emerges from recession, dominated the agenda at this year's Flavor Summit, a two day invitational retreat organized by Food Arts in partnership with the CIA at Greystone. Paradoxically, the design visionaries, tastemakers, and trend spotters who addressed the group-leaders in high-volume, high-quality dining-repeatedly evoked ideas from the past. Words like handmade, heirloom, and heritage resonate with diners now, they said; "vintage" is today's cutting edge.
"There's a vast gulf between the ‘good old' and the ‘same old,'" said Food Arts editor-in-chief and publisher Michael Batterberry, previewing some of the conference themes in his opening comments. "Life in the past lane can be very profitable."
Being hipper-than-thou and icy-cool ignores the prevailing mood, said Michael Whiteman, the eminent international restaurant developer who heads New York City's Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Company. Today's restaurant patrons gravitate to places where they feel among friends, part of a neighborhood or community. Mindful of recent food safety scares and their own diminishing assets, they have lost their appetite for risk. That soup whipped up in the hotel's basement kitchen...who knows what dangers lurk in it?
To bond with skittish diners, operators have to earn their trust, said Whiteman. Making food preparation more transparent can help.
"I believe the hocus-pocus of molecular gastronomy is exactly what people don't want right now," continued Whiteman. Instead, bring your craft into the open. Pull mozzarella tableside. Bake breads in front of guests, as India's Taj hotel chain does. Put a coffee jockey in the lobby, brewing to order. "Bring people close to the point of production," urged Whiteman.
The made-by-hand movement "checks lots of boxes" for diners, said the consultant. That's why so many chefs are curing their own anchovies, making their own kimchi, butchering their own pigs, and why bartenders are making their own bitters and flavorings.
Whiteman's notions about the need to engage a guest's emotions found an echo in Tony Chi's thoughts on design. Chi, whose influential New York City firm, Tony Chi & Associates, works internationally for clients such as the Park Hyatt and Mandarin Oriental, said too many hotel and restaurant interiors leave patrons cold.
"‘Show the money' is the easiest thing to do," says Chi. More challenging is his almost subversive philosophy of "invisible design," an approach that doesn't shout "big budget." Chi says he tasks himself to create environments where his input doesn't show, to "construct neighborhoods" that people perceive as warm and embracing.
Given the economy and the sober national mood, it's time to pull back from the design extremes of the past, suggested Chi. The severe aesthetic that produces "the kind of place you only want to go once" no longer jibes with the zeitgeist.
"The welcome has become less friendly," complained the designer. "Where's the warmth?"
He is now designing more convivial restaurants, like Chicago's Sunda, with an animated waiter's station in the heart of the dining room, and more hotel lobbies with tables for socializing and working, a departure from the sterility of most hotel entries.
"Hotel lobbies shouldn't be about looking cool," said Chi, "but about having a sense of place."
But how do you create that "sense of place" in a world flattened by globalization? Dine in a high-end hotel in Dubai, said Whiteman, and you'll encounter so many rootless dishes, from nowhere in particular, that "your gastronomic GPS can't tell you where in the world you are."
Camellia Panjabi fought against this tidal wave of homogenization when she worked for what became Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, an Indian luxury chain (see Silver Spoon). As a young management employee with a passion for street food, Panjabi persuaded her superiors that each hotel should serve the food of its region-a novel concept at the time that helped distinguish these properties as the chain grew.
"We brought the flavors of the street into carpeted chandeliered restaurants," proclaimed Panjabi, whose family now owns eight Indian restaurants in London, including five, called Masala Zone, specializing in street food.
"Street food is my inspiration because it's an amazing repository of creative ideas," said Panjabi, who spoke at the Greystone retreat. "Vendors invent to make sure customers return."
Street food also inspired one of the conference's most appetizing sessions, a presentation by CIA Latin cuisines specialist Iliana de la Vega on Mexican street food reinterpreted for fine dining. Tacos, seviche, pozole, tamales, even chapulines, or fried grasshoppers, can transition from humble to haute, said de la Vega, who demonstrated the concept with an image of chapulines with-what else?-tortilla foam.
Traditional dishes like caldo de camarón (spicy shrimp soup) and papadzules (tortillas stuffed with hard-cooked eggs and pumpkin seed sauce) can be, and have been, deconstructed and dressed up for the white tablecloth realm. Chef Richard Sandoval, who oversees a dozen modern Mexican restaurants around the world, including Pampano and Maya in New York City, has mined this technique successfully, said de la Vega.
Patricia Quintana, at her restaurant Izote in Mexico City, also uses street snacks as a point of departure. Unable to travel to the conference, which occurred during the peak of Mexico's swine flu epidemic, Quintana sent a recipe for de la Vega to demonstrate: a clever "taco" of shaved jicama stuffed with guacamole and garnished with saffron oil.
As conference attendees heard repeatedly, the little plates trend shows no sign of abating. At 14 year old Betelnut in San Francisco, chef Alexander Ong still packs the house nightly for his Pan-Asian street food, a 50 item, beer-oriented menu he characterizes as "big flavors on small plates." His demonstration of roti, a flaky Indonesian flatbread, and grilled banana leaf-wrapped fish with sambal proved how adaptable these street favorites are to a small plates concept.
At Cucharamama, her acclaimed Hoboken, New Jersey, restaurant, Cuban born Maricel Presilla showcases little plates from Latin America, many of them based on traditional bar foods from Brazil, Peru, and beyond. Empanadas, Brazilian acarajés (black-eyed pea fritters), Colombian arepas (corn cakes), Peruvian seviche, Venezuela cachapas (corn griddle cakes)-every country in South America has a tradition of little dishes, said Presilla.
Some of these street and bar snacks need adapting to make them suitable for a small plate presentation. Her acarajés, for example, were smaller than a Bahian street vendor would make them, and Presilla presented them attractively on a banana leaf. Her seviche, too, was trimmed down from the hefty serving typical in Peru.
"Translating these cuisines, we just need to be more delicate," said Presilla, the author of a forthcoming book on the cuisines of Latin America. "Make them smaller. Use smaller plates. And remember, when you're translating these dishes, that they're usually paired with a beverage." Buttered Cuban toast with café con leche. Empanadas with yerba maté. Tamales with hot chocolate ("a fantastic combination"). Anticuchos (spicy skewered and grilled meat or fish) with beer or the Peruvian corn beer called chicha de jora.
Beverage programs provide an ideal opportunity to create that all-important sense of place.
"Every bar program should have a core of classics, and then you need something to identify you, that says you're at this bar," said Brow. At the Swizzle Stick Bar, which Brow calls "a love letter to the city," the ice is hand chipped, the juices fresh squeezed, and the drinks purebred New Orleans. Most important, emphasized Brow, every Sidecar, Sazerac, and Gin Fizz is carefully measured.
"I want that drink to taste the same whether you get it from me or my staff," said Brow. "Train your bar staff to measure. But they're going to fight you every step of the way."
Brow's insistence on professionalism behind her bar reflects a trend underscored by several presenters: the return of craft. From chefs curing their own salumi to mixologists concocting their own cocktail infusions, restaurant professionals are more detail driven than ever. At Heaven's Dog, Charles Phan's new noodle bar in San Francisco, even the ice cubes have been subjected to scrutiny. Using custom molds, the bar produces extra-long ice that melts more slowly and keeps the cocktails cold longer, reported moderator Jordan Mackay, a San Francisco-based drinks writer.
Customers "love it when people get behind something so seriously," says Mackay, who enumerated a spate of specialized bars opening in San Francisco, such as Bar 888, a grappa bar in the InterContinental Hotel, and a wine shop with bar called Terroir, specializing in organic and biodynamic bottlings.
In between mixology demos and chocolate tastings, attendees confronted a more sobering issue: the impact of the economic downturn on corporate green initiatives. Several of the high-volume enterprises represented by conference participants have launched efforts to operate more sustainably, perhaps by buying more local or organic produce or fish farmed with environmentally friendly practices. With budgets under the microscope, would these programs get the boot?
"We believe sustainability leads to cost reductions," said Sue Morgan, a vice president with InterContinental Hotels and a conference panelist. Morgan estimated that the company's green initiatives will produce 15 to 25 percent savings annually for franchisees.
Presenter Michel Nischan, chef/owner of the Dressing Room in Westport, Connecticut, and a leading advocate for sustainable practices, said his restaurant purchases whole carcasses of grass-fed beef. "We have braises, shanks, burgers, meat loaf, and we run steak only as a special," said Nischan. "We go through about 35,000 pounds of beef a year, and if we only had steak on the menu, we would be responsible for 400 animals. The way we do things, we're responsible for 40, so the difference it makes is huge."
Some hotels and restaurants have offered space to a weekly farmers' market, giving their chefs easy access to local produce. A Sunday morning farmers' market in front of the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sends the hotel's cappuccino sales through the roof, said Gus Schumacher, peripatetic consultant on sustainable agriculture issues.
Ellen Burke Van Slyke, an executive with Loews Hotels who attended the conference, said her company's Adopt-A-Farmer endeavor is in no danger from the economic downturn. Launched last year, the program requires each property in the chain to source product from at least one local farmer-easy in San Diego, an adventure in Las Vegas. Some chefs have designed events around the relationship. At the Loews Royal Pacific Resort in Orlando, staffers pressed fresh citrus juice for punch and served panna cotta with orange marmalade while a local citrus grower discussed his farm with guests.
"They're having a ball with it," said Van Slyke, "and our guest satisfaction score has gone up substantially. "
Greg Drescher, executive director of strategic initiatives at the CIA, said the Flavor Summit targets leaders in the high-volume, high-quality sector, whose concerns can diverge greatly from those of fine dining professionals.
"Clearly, the economy was on everyone's mind," said Drescher after the gathering. "Operators have to sustain their current business, yet they still need to focus on the future-on the sustainability concerns, beverage trends, and growing interest in world cuisines that will define success for them tomorrow."
Janet Fletcher is a Napa Valley-based food and wine writer.
HAIL TO THE COCKTAIL COMMANDER
Hospitality dynasty dynamo Ti Martin salutes co-presenter Lu Brow, her restaurant group's gospel-spreading executive bar chef.
When asked where her love of cocktails and the profession of bartending came from, Lu Brow's typically untypical answer confirmed that she's an original and, like all the greatest bartenders, she can always make you laugh: "I just wanted to be Miss Kitty, on Gunsmoke, running that saloon-she had red hair, was a fancy dresser, and proved a woman could work anywhere."
Lu's main stage rises mid-bar in front of a block of ice for hand chipping at our Café Adelaide & the Swizzle Stick Bar in the Loews New Orleans Hotel. But, as executive bar chef of the Commander's Palace Family of Restaurants, Lu also heads up what she calls Team Cocktail, dividing time between our flagship Commander's Palace in New Orleans' Garden District, Commander's Palace and the On the Rocks Bar in Destin, Florida, and at Brennan's of Houston (set to reopen at the end of this year or early next year, having burned down last September during Hurricane Ike). Her goal is to maintain the premiere and most consistent cocktail programs in each market. To that end, she works in each restaurant with bartenders and management to uphold her philosophy, one as committed to consistently well-made cocktails as it is to hospitality.
Today more and more companies are using beverage consultants to introduce and/or rework their bar programs. Trouble is these programs are often not supported long enough to change the culture of a group of restaurants' management and bartenders. To "get the religion" about serious cocktails, a corporate or executive bar chef will visit each restaurant once a month to hold meetings with the property's management and bar staff, work shifts elbow to elbow with the bartender, set standards for pours and measuring, develop systems for cost and labor control, make buying decisions, and create or approve the cocktail menu. "If you don't get management to buy into a serious cocktail program," admonishes Lu, "your bar sooner or later will revert to its own fiefdom, putting out subpar drinks and wasting your money in countless ways."
Most restaurant managers are happy as long as the drinks come out relatively quickly and the bartender doesn't ask for too many shifts off. "You're leaving your money and your reputation on the table if you allow that an old school bartender is more worried about telling you a joke than crafting a well-made cocktail," says Lu, who aims for both.
Lu continually drums in the essential professional virtues, such as integrity and a strong work ethic. And while mentoring the new breed of young bartenders who thrive on molecular mixology and inventive new drinks, she instills respect for the fundamentals as much as she flames their passion for creativity. Yes, she wants them to be excited about her inventive drinks made with homemade Bewitching Bitters (bolstered with ingredients from a local voodoo shop) but no more than she wants them to spin cocktails' histories.
"We're here to make people happy. Period," she sums up. "Keep your ego in check and serve guests what they want. You can politely try to move them from a Cosmopolitan to a Caipiroska for their second drink. But I'm horrified at the thought of bartenders saying, ‘We don't serve that here.' To me, the chance to change the way people think about cocktails is a gift. To turn people on to classics or one we've invented, like our O! What A Night!-a fantastic concoction of rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, fresh lemon juice, and pomegranate grenadine. Now that's a thrill."
Ti Martin is a co-owner of the Commander's Palace Family of Restaurants with her cousin Lally Brennan. They co-authored In the Land of Cocktails.
