Category Archives: Contemporary Food Culture

The End of the World! What’s on Your Plate?

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

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end of the worldHere we go again. Bible beaters are proclaiming September 23rd to be the end of time as foretold in the book of Revelations. They do this periodically. They’re never right. Evaluation of evidence is not their strong suit.

But Master Somm Tim Gaiser used the occasion to post his menu of the meal he would want to eat if he knew ahead of time that the end times were upon us. Which got me thinking what my menu would be.

So here it is. What’s on your plate?

Appetizer:  Oysters on the half shell

6 Kumamotos with just a spritz of a simple mignonette.

Wine Pairing: Bollinger Brut Cuvee, with at least 5 years on the lees for structure

Pasta Course: My Macaroni and Cheese

Very traditional, baked in a bechamel with sharp cheddar and fontina, prepared with sodium citrate to prevent curdling. My innovation is to add apples that give the dish a sweet note.

Wine Pairing: A Riesling such as a 10 yr. old  Dönnhoff Nahe Niederhäuser Hermannshöhle Spätlese   to bring out the sweetness of the apples.

Fish course: Fresh Grilled Anchovies dressed with lemon, parsley, and a few olives

ala Portugal, Greece, or Sicily, a light refresher after the heavy mac and cheese

Wine Pairing: A Condrieu Viognier from Michel Ogier, on the light side for Viognier but very crisp and perfumy.

 

Meat Course: Bistecca Alla Fiorentina

A simple preparation of tenderloin steak with lemon and olive oil. It’s heavenly with a high quality olive oil

Wine Pairing: Haut Brion  Pessac 2009  I’m cellaring a few bottles I intend to sell. But under the circumstances, drink up.

 

Vegetable Course: A salad of heirloom tomatoes and assorted olives

Need a break from wine at this point

 

Cheese Course: Eppoise for stink, Rennards 10 yr. aged cheddar for concentrated flavor, an aged Gouda for nutty complexity

Wine Pairing: La Tache   By reputation the best Pinot Noir from Bourgogne.  I’ve never had it. This is my last chance.

 

Dessert: Bread Pudding

Preferably shipped in from Commander’s Palace, New Orleans

Wine Pairing: Domaine de Durban Muscat Beaumes de Venise   Not a classic pairing but I just adore Beaumes de Venise

 

Chou!

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In Wine and Food There’s No Such Thing as Flyover Country

06 Wednesday Sep 2017

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I have no historical attachment to the Midwest, but the term “flyover country” has always struck me as insulting. It not only ignores the Midwest’s great natural beauty but fails to acknowledge the cultural mix that enlivens these communities. In fact, when it comes to food and wine, there are experiences to be had in the Midwest that cannot be found elsewhere. The population of many Midwestern states is an amalgam of German, Scandinavian, and Irish ancestry among others, and they all had to marry their cuisines to the local ingredients creating unique food traditions that survive today. There is a reason why lefse, the Scandinavian flatbread, is popular in North Dakota and Minnesota, while beer and brats make Wisconsinites proud of their German heritage.

Truth be told some of these dishes are lovely only to the people who grew up with them; others deserve wider recognition. Nevertheless, they survive not as pillars of aesthetic beauty but as ceremonial icons richly evocative of the past, reinforcing attachments to one’s home but also as markers of distinctiveness, as a kind of resistance to the colonization of the global food culture.

I’ve spent several weeks in the upper Midwest, mostly in Wisconsin but with forays into North Dakota and Minnesota. Wisconsin will get a post of it’s own, but here are some of the regional dishes that distinguish North Dakota and Minnesota.

Lefse

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This is apparently a closely guarded secret—I haven’t seen Lefse in the rest of the U.S. This potato-based flatbread is so good only an intentional strategy of silence would explain their lack of prominence. Lefse is of Norwegian origin and is made by ricing potatoes or using leftover mashed potatoes. Lefse looks like a flour tortilla but has  a more delicate, sweeter flavor and a lighter, thinner, more supple texture. They are typically served with melted butter dusted with sugar and cinnamon. Fargo North Dakota has its very own Lefse supplier where you can get a dozen for about $5. But don’t just buy one bag—they are addicting.

 

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Knoephla Soup

This is a thick soup of German origins made with chicken broth, potatoes and dumplings.  It has the flavor of the sauce in a chicken pot pie; the thickness of the sauce will vary according to personal taste. It is satisfying comfort food available at the iconic Kroll’s Diner in Bismarck. It’s rich and satisfying, worth seeking out on a cold winter night.

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This is bound and seasoned ground beef wrapped in a deep fried, thinly layered, turnover crust. Served with gravy and mashed potatoes at Kroll’s in Bismarck, this is another dish of German origin worth seeking out if you’re hankering for fried food. With the thin, layered, crispy crust, It’s head and shoulders more tasty than the pasties found in Montana, Wisconsin and Michigan.

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Hot dish

Minnesota and North Dakota loves them some hot dish. The basic idea is a one dish, inexpensive casserole containing meat, a starch, and a canned vegetable all held together with mushroom soup, perfect for reunions, church suppers, and potluck meals. Since the 1950’s, the hot dish has been covered with tater tots. Yes. You heard that right. That greasy, salty staple of the school lunch cafeteria is now a delicacy. In Minnesota they have competitions to decide the best amalgam of cheap meat, canned soup, overcooked vegetables, and tater tots. Go figure. In the U.S. we like to compete for “Top Tacky”. But truth be told, the hot dish is pretty good—you can’t go wrong with salt and fat. I tracked down an authentic version at The Mason Jar near Minneapolis.

One current trend is to update the hot dish. At Fargo’s The Boiler Room, the vegetable was caramelized onions, with lightly breaded sweet potato fingers in the shape of “tater tots” playing the role of starch, all bound together with sausage gravy, bacon and some quality cheddar cheese. I’m sure the traditionalists disapprove but this was a casserole I can get behind. It’s still a homogeneous mass of salt and fat but this one had lots of bright flavor with the sweet potato providing the anchor.

Walleye

When you’re a thousand miles from an ocean, you don’t expect seafood to be a regional specialty, but Minnesota has lots of lakes which at one time were teeming with Walleye, a member of the Pike family and Minnesota’s state fish. It has become so popular and overfished that the state has outlawed commercial fishing of walleye although private anglers can still legally fish for it if they don’t sell it. Most of the restaurant walleye comes from Canada. At any rate, you can hardly find a restaurant serving American cuisine in Minnesota or North Dakota that does not serve walleye. It has a mild, slightly sweet flavor with some earth notes, lean and moist but will firm up when deep fried. It’s best served with sauces that are not too assertive.

 

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The Jucy Lucy

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No discussion of Minnesota food should be without the contribution Minneapolis makes to burger lore. That would be the Jucy Lucy from Matt’s Bar and Grill. Back in 1954 one Matt Bristol had the brilliant idea of placing American cheese inside two burger patties, and sealing the edges–the Jucy Lucy was born. (the misspelling was a mistake carried forward intentionally) Matt’s bar is still there, a shabby little building in one of Minneapolis’s older neighborhoods. It was packed on a Thursday evening serving as many burgers as would fit on a tiny griddle at the end of the bar. It’s just burger meat but the melted cheese is piping hot and flows like lava when you bite into it. It’s an experience burger hounds should not miss.

Rhubarb Wine

I’ll have more to say about Minnesota grape wines in a future post. But in our brief stay near Fargo I couldn’t resist venturing into North Dakota’s wine country. We visited 4 Elements winery, a relatively new operation making wine from cold hardy grape varietals that will survive the frigid temperatures here. While we enjoyed their lineup of grape wines, especially an aromatic La Crescent, I was particularly enamored with their rhubarb wine, of which they make both a dry and sweet version. The aroma is flinty and slightly herbacious. On the palate its crisp with round rhubarb notes and citrus accents, with balanced acidity. Exotic fruit wines have left the root cellar at the farm and are being made by serious, professional winemakers. They can be quite delicious.

Missoula, Montana: Meat, Mead and Mountain Wine

28 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Restaurant Reviews, Travel, Wine Culture, Wine Reviews

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The vineyards at Ten Spoon Vineyard and Winery

Can they grow wine grapes in Montana? There are some hardy souls who try. Excessive cold, meaning sustained temperatures below –10 degrees, will damage the wood on all vitis vinifera varietals, the species of grape that includes the familiar varietals such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. For some varietals such as Merlot or Syrah 5 degrees above zero is risky territory. There are a few growers who persist with vinifera in Montana’s unforgiving winter climate but the consensus is it’s a losing proposition. So most growers are planting the cold hardy grapes—French-American hybrids and native varietals that are bred to survive deep freezes. Most wine drinkers have never heard of these grapes; many probably never will. The quality level of wines made from these grapes is, shall we say, improving. But you have to go to war with the grapes you have, and the allure of winemaking is so strong, many are willing to endure years when severe crop losses effect even the cold-hardy varietals.

Andy Sponseller, co-owner of Ten Spoon Winery in Missoula, went so far as to bring in helicopters twice in one season to blow frost off his vineyards, an expensive proposition for a marginal business. He started growing Pinot Noir in 2003 but has since abandoned it using fruit from Oregon to satisfy Pinot lovers and planting the cold hardy grapes for those seeking local flavors. It was actually cherry wine that got Andy and his wife Connie through the lean years; now since 2014 he is showing a profit making a satisfying St. Pepin (a aromatic white wine with a plump palate) and a field blend of 5 cold-hardy grapes called Range Rider that features a big, spicy nose and full body. And that Flathead Cherry wine? It’s delicious. Making wine in Montana is not for the feint of heart but with the right grapes and some non-grape wine to fill in the gaps it can be done successfully.

Ken Schultz of Hidden Legend Winery had a different solution. He was an amateur winemaker when he moved to Montana from Ohio in 1979, long before the more recently developed cold hardy grapes were available. But one thing Montana has in abundance—bees. And so Ken started to make honey wine, aka mead. You might think mead would be sweet and heavy, like honey. But not in the hands of a master mead maker. After all, mead is wine, you can ferment it dry where it becomes light and refreshing, age it in oak so it picks up caramel and coffee notes, ferment it with elderberry or chokecherry to add complexity, add carbonation for sparkling mead, or blend it with maple syrup which can be warmed and served for breakfast. He makes a line of traditional, i.e. sweeter, meads from clover honey and a line of contemporary meads, lighter and drier, from wildflower honey.

Like wine grapes, mead’s flavor will depend on local characteristics, not the soil obviously, but the type of flower that the bees are pollinating. I lack the experience with mead that would enable me to distinguish Missoula mead from any other, but tasting through Hidden Legend’s lineup was eye-opening with regard to the savory complexity and multiple expressions of this ancient beverage.

Ken has not forsaken grape wine. He makes several Montana-grown, cold hardy varietals such as a scintillating St. Pepin, as well as Marquette and Marechal Foch. But the most surprising taste sensation was his crisp, light-bodied dandelion wine showing delicate herbal notes.  In a blind tasting I probably would have guessed Pinot Grigio.

There are only a handful of wineries in Montana but their definition of “wine” is as expansive as their Big Sky.

What does grow well in Montana is bison, elk and other game, which can often be found on local menus. Buffalo burgers have become a staple of some menus in the U.S. But what you’re actually eating is bison.  Buffalo as in “water buffalo” or “African buffalo” are native to Africa and Asia and are part of the same bovine subfamily as bison but are a different species. Early explorers in America called bison “buffalo” because of their resemblance and the name stuck.

Although “buffalo burgers” are reasonably common, I seldom see bison steaks on menus but in Montana it’s relatively easy to find. I found a bison tenderloin at The Red Bird, Missoula’s fine dining restaurant.   It’s leaner than beef with a milder flavor and a dense, yet delicate texture, but the accompanying shell filled with molten roquefort cheese to be lavished over the tenderloin was a bit much conquering the subtleties of the meat.

Another dish that Montana can claim as its own are elk meatballs, especially when served with a sauce made of huckleberries, a fruit grown in abundance here. Blue Canyon’s elk meatballs were slightly gamy, reminding me of ground lamb, but with a softly crumby texture like good sausage. The huckleberry sauce was perfectly balanced, slightly tangy with bright berry flavor.

montana-1And finally, Montana’s traditional comfort food is a dish they share with the rest of the upper midwest—a meat pie called a pasty (rhymes with nasty, although it’s not). Legend has it that pasties came to the U.S. via Cornish immigrant miners who needed a portable, hand-held lunch. They consist of cubed or ground beef, potatoes, and sometimes onion (in Wisconsin they add rutabaga) wrapped in a shortcrust and baked. Montanans, at least at Lisa’s Pastry Pantry, serve them with brown gravy. I’m sure if you grew up eating pasties it’s the bee’s knees but I find them a bit dry and uninteresting, a good vehicle for gravy but not something I would voluntarily seek out. However, I will be in the upper Midwest for the next several weeks and I feel duty bound to investigate pasties further.

Of course, when visiting Montana, even the most finely-honed food and wine obsession will be subordinate by the unsurpassed natural beauty of this place. My quest for the perfect Pinot seems trivial.montana-4

Basque’n in Boise

21 Monday Aug 2017

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boisebasque-5Like most wine regions, Idaho’s Snake River Valley has a growing food scene anchored by the city of Boise. They boast several highly recommended restaurants serving contemporary American cuisine, but when visiting a region I always look for something unique that is hard to find elsewhere. In Boise that would be finger steaks. Finger steaks are finger-sized pieces of steak, breaded, deep fried and served with a classic cocktail sauce for dipping. It’s only bar food but it’s a thing here in Boise. To be honest, I didn’t have high expectations. I imagined tough, gristly, overcooked meat with greasy breading. But at Lindy’s, the widely acknowledged masters of finger steaks, they take this dish seriously. The thick, crunchy batter was crisp and the meat, medium rare and very tender. I can’t claim to be a connoisseur of bar food but these were damn good.boise basque 4

However, Boise has a lot more to contribute to the food revolution than bar food. They feature a long-established Basque community that brings plenty of Iberian flavor to the Mountain West.

I’ve written about American Basque cooking before—one of my favorite  things to do (on second thought, the only thing to do) in Bakersfield, California is to dig into a plate of pickled beef tongue accompanied by cabbage soup, pinto beans and salsa served at the many Basque restaurants there. Washed down with glasses of picon punch, it’s all a set up for a plate of oxtail stew or roast lamb. This rustic, family-style, amalgam of American comfort food and traditional Basque cooking traces its origin to Southern French Basque immigrants from the French side of the Pyrenees who were drawn to California by the gold rush in the mid-19th Century. When that didn’t “pan” out their traditional skills at sheepherding came in handy in the ranchlands of Southern California.

By contrast, the Boise Basque community hails from the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, along Biscay Bay, via the 19th century silver mines of Northern Nevada. And their cooking reflects their Spanish roots. Paella, pintxos (small tapas-like dishes), Spanish chorizo and croquettes are ubiquitous. This cooking is refined, includes lots of seafood, and features pimenton as a prominent flavor ingredient. Close your eyes and you might think you’re in San Sebastian.

The most prominent Boise Basque restaurant is Epi’s, a quaint, homey spot with a remarkably welcoming staff. You will be greeted by Chris the owner like you’re part of the family. It’s comfort food—lamb stew, tongue in pepper and tomato sauce, a scrumptious bean soup, fried chicken—but all prepared to perfection.

For a more casual experience, Bar Gernika downtown has outstanding croquetas and solomo (a pork loin and pimento sandwich) with a good beer list as well. The croquetas are addictive, bite-sized balls made from a stiff Bechamel, rolled in bread crumbs, and then deep fried. Soft and pillowy on the inside, crunchy on the outside, and sometimes stuffed with ham, if I had to choose between croquetas and finger steaks for consummate bar food—I would just order both.

The Spanish meat balls in a brown sauce at Leku Ona, another downtown Basque restaurant, were good although I can’t recommend their service.

boise basque1But the best overall Basque food experience can be found at the Basque market for Wednesday or Friday lunch. At 11:00 they put various pintxos on display—Banderillas, marinated olives, glidas, jamon and toast w/ tomato jam, etc.

Then at noon the seafood paella (pictured above), cooked outdoors in the (updated) traditional paella pan, is ready to be served until they run out. The flavors were spot on, the seafood perfectly cooked, and the rice firm but tender. Unfortunately, the formation of socorrat (the crunchy crust at the bottom of the pan) was incompatible with serving the paella on time, so the experience was not utter perfection. But short of a trip to Madrid it’s the best paella I’ve had in the U.S.

I wouldn’t quite call Boise a foodie destination yet, but with a burgeoning wine region and fascinating Basque cooking, its well on its way.

The Food Revolution Cannot be Co-opted

17 Thursday Aug 2017

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applebeesOrdinarily I wouldn’t be much concerned about the closing of chain restaurants but this story caught my eye because of the clueless reasoning behind it.

Applebee’s announced this month that more than 130 of its restaurants will close by the end of the year.

The casual dining chain rebranded itself in the past few years as a modern bar and grill.

Applebee’s executive John Cywinski recently told investors that the company had hoped the effort would attract a new kind of customer.

The chain aimed to lure “a more youthful and affluent demographic with a more independent or even sophisticated dining mindset, including a clear pendulum swing towards millennials,” he said.

Applebee’s wanted to lure millennials with dishes like barbecue shrimp in a sriracha-lime sauce; chicken wonton tacos; and a pork, ham and bacon sandwich.

But that triple pork bonanza — and the rest of the company’s makeover — didn’t seem to catch on with customers. Sales at Applebee’s dropped more than 6 percent from last year.

The interesting part of this is the aim to attract “a more youthful and affluent demographic with a more independent or even sophisticated dining mindset,”

So young people with an “independent” mind set who are also “sophisticated” about dining are going to frequent a chain restaurant because chain restaurants just scream “independence” and “sophistication”. Because, of course, anyone who is independent and sophisticated immediately salivates when sriracha or pork-3-ways appears on the menu.

The intellectual standards for CEO’s must be dropping. People who are independent and sophisticated will avoid chain restaurants because chain restaurants by their very nature are homogeneous and cater to conventional tastes. It doesn’t help that Applebee’s was latching onto trends that are at least a decade old.

I “sympathize” with the plight of chain restaurants who want to capitalize on the food revolution. You can’t package and market authenticity and difference because, once packaged and marketed, it’s no longer authentic or different. I suppose they have to try to stay relevant in order to mollify shareholders, but it’s a losing proposition.

Which is why I argued in American Foodie that the food revolution might actually survive attempts to co-opt it.

You’ll Be Hearing More Stories Like This

10 Thursday Aug 2017

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rotting cropsI’ve been predicting problems at grape harvest this year as our country’s insane immigration policies will discourage migrant labor from showing up to pick fruit. The brunt of the grape harvest is still many weeks away but stories of crops rotting in the fields are already beginning to appear.

Vegetable prices may be going up soon, as a shortage of migrant workers is resulting in lost crops in California.

Farmers say they’re having trouble hiring enough people to work during harvest season, causing some crops to rot before they can be picked. Already, the situation has triggered losses of more than $13 million in two California counties alone, according to NBC News.

It’s tempting to say this was an entirely avoidable problem. But that would presuppose it is possible to overcome bigotry with facts, apparently an unwarranted assumption in America today.

Fake Wine, Fake Food, Fake You

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

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our brains are sickAs I noted in previous posts, our hi- tech overlords are busy trying to invent fake wine and fake food. Now they’ve turned their attention to inventing a fake you.

Instead of drinking lots of wine to find out what you like and using your wine knowledge and sense of adventure to expand your palate, a company called Helix will analyze your DNA via saliva samples to discover what you should like.

Silicon Valley is always trying to one up itself in helping us improve our daily lives. This time, with the launch of Helix, the tech geniuses believe they can enable us to make better choices – including better wine choices – if we have a better handle on our own DNA.

Wine Explorer by the Healdsburg, California-based Vinome, which currently costs $29.99, is currently Helix’s only wine-focused app partner….When you go to the Vinome site, there’s a basic survey that new customers can do online, discussing if they enjoy blackberries or black coffee and that results in an initial taste profile. It is reinforced by the all-powerful saliva test, which should be able to skillfully delineate which of eight flavor profiles will work for each consumer.

According to CEO Ronnie Andrews, if you like black coffee you will like big, red wines.

Swing and miss, strike one. I love coffee. I’m not crazy about big, red wines. If you like sweets you’ll like Gewurztraminer and Viognier, according to Andrews. Swing and miss again. I love a good Gewurz or Viognier. I’m not crazy about candy.

Of course, their business model is to tell you what you should like and then sell you the wines that conform to their prediction. That’s a pretty good racket. If they develop a personality test for science envy they can predict which consumers will fall for this scam.

We are a Strange Species

03 Thursday Aug 2017

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snorting chocolateApparently snortable chocolate is a thing in Europe:

“I found myself in Antwerp at this wonderful place called The Chocolate Line, and they invented snorting chocolate. I bought a whole bunch and brought it home as I wanted people to snort chocolate in my candy store,” she said.

The practice originated in Belgium and was developed by Dominique Persoone, master chocolatier at The Chocolate Line, when he was asked to produce something original for a birthday party held for Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones. What Mr Persoone came up with was a device, the ‘Chocolate Shooter’, where consumers would catapult powdered chocolate up their nose.

WTF? There are people who would rather snort chocolate than eat it? What is wrong with them?

According to his website, The Chocolate Shooter, it gives “a blast of chocolate pleasure”, arguing that “recent research has shown how important our nose is to us when tasting food.”

So why not just eat it dummy?

And it is now available in the U.S. This company advertises the “euphoric energy” one gets from snorting it but doctors question these claims as well as noting the risks.

Of course the Stones would be behind this. If you snort chocolate rather than eat it, no wonder you can’t get no satisfaction.

Mick. Pull your guys back from the brink.

Fusion Cuisine: Marriage or Mashup?

02 Wednesday Aug 2017

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5 Fusion’s Beef Bourguignon Be-Bim-Bop

We recently spent a few days in Bend, Oregon which seemed like a good place to do some hiking and think about fusion cuisine. The food scene in Portland Oregon has found its way to Bend, so there is lots of self-consciously creative cooking here and many restaurants advertising their fusion bona fides.

Three distinct types of cooking are commonly referred to as “fusion”.

The first is a restaurant that serves an eclectic mix of dishes from various cuisines. For instance, the fast-casual restaurant Spork served a standard Lomo Saltado (Peruvian Stir Fry) but had Pozole Rojo or a Grilled Vegetable Green Curry on the menu as well. The flavors of the Green Curry were spot-on Thai. For apps the Burmese Fried Cheese or Fried Green Tomato Salad were enticing.  Although a meal might consist of mixing and matching dishes from various cultures,  the dishes themselves consisted of traditional ingredients (to the degree they can be found using local suppliers) with traditional flavor profiles. There was no attempt to meld flavors not typically found together. This is a fusion of cultural horizons I suppose, disconcerting if you’re looking for a simulated culturally immersive experience. But Spork is really more of a celebration of multi-culturalism than a genuine fusion.

The second is a restaurant that serves dishes clearly situated within a food tradition but with highlights and flourishes imported from other traditions. This approach to fusion was well represented by Barrio, a tapas-style restaurant serving mostly Latin American or Spanish themed dishes with influences from all over the world. Green Chile Caesar salad with cotija cheese, Falafel with poblano harissa, Lamb-stuffed Piquillo Pepper with chile rajas, corn nuts, tzatziki, or Patatas Bravas with chili-infused aioli, and smoked poblano crema were among the more fusion-type dishes we sampled.  What struck me about all of these dishes was how familiar they tasted. The imported flavors were nuances that never overwhelmed the main thrust of the dish.

If this is a genuine fusion, it’s the sort of fusion that has been going on since time immemorial. Humans have always been nomadic and had to use whatever ingredients were available where they set up camp without compromising the familiarity of their food. Immigrant cooking is always more or less fusion cuisine. And food traditions have long been porous incorporating new influences while striving to preserve the taste of home.

Finally there is cooking that intentionally seeks unusual flavor and texture combinations from two or more cultures and brings them together in a single dish. Sometimes this innovation is done carelessly. Who can forget the wasabi mashed potatoes trend or “Burmese” crab Rangoon (wontons filled with crab meat and cream cheese) These are more mashup than marriage, interesting perhaps but not something to try twice.

Only in the hands of a chef concerned to find bridge flavors and to be very precise with regard to finding the right balance between flavors does this kind of cooking succeed.

5 Fusion, featuring James Beard Award semi-finalist Joe Kim, is Bend’s contribution to creative, crave-worthy fusion cuisine. Toro with Italian truffle, Unagi (eel)/ oatmeal cookie nigiri, Sweet and Sour Tortilla Soup made with tonkatsu bone broth,  Raman Carbonara with tonkatsu broth, pork belly and a quail egg, Seared Foie Gras with raisin puree and granola, and Beef Bourguignon Be-Bim-Bap were among the highlights. Amazingly it all worked although the unagi/oatmeal cookie pairing was genuinely weird. The tasting menu included some familiar flavors to allow your palate to rest, such as this Halibut in yazu vapor, bend-2 but the fusion dishes were striving for something else—to de-familiarize the ingredients, show them in an utterly new context, yet allow them to harmonize. Genuine fusion should not be too comfortable, should challenge the diner, yet not taste like an arbitrary juxtaposition with no communication among flavors.

So fusion cuisine is not new. All cuisine is a fusion because cultures have always collided, sometimes peacefully sometimes not, and so cooks had to innovate. The difference today is that intentional creativity and innovation combined with the speed of global communications  have replaced the slow succumbing to necessity and conservative celebration of tradition that marked fusions of the past.

A Skirmish in the Battle for Millennials

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

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say no to beerWell this is interesting. Wineries have been fretting for years about the competition from craft beer especially with respect to millennials. But, as reported by CNBC, the investment firm Goldman-Sachs has downgraded Boston Beer Company and Constellation Brands because millenials aren’t buying what they’re selling.

“We view the shift in penetration and consumption trends as driven by a shift in preferences in the younger cohorts,” added Zhuo. “The youngest demographic (<35 year olds) overall penetration rates are not increasing. The 35-44 year old cohort shows a shift away from Beer to Wine & Spirits.”

I wonder why? Might it be because craft beer increasingly tends to taste like grapefruit juice? (Sorry IPA fans but let’s be honest.)

But another reason might be the one I wrote about on Monday. Industry consolidation is putting pressure on the craft beer market. With 5 companies tallying 80% of the beer sales in the U.S., and trying to market their swill as craft beer, the whole craft beer movement is losing its credibility and cachet.

If there is a single thing millennials want it’s authenticity—a real connection with the people who produce their consumables and a real distinction between products that is more than marketing hype. They’re not getting that from “big beer” so they find something else to drink.

Of course, the wine industry is suffering from consolidation and homogenization as well but apparently the  roughly 9000 wineries in the U.S. that are not controlled by “big wine” are having some success persuading consumers there is something distinctive about their product.

For those of us partial to small, independent wineries that is good news.