I started hearing about chef Ian Kleinman of O’s restaurant (see review on Page 2D) a couple of years ago.
By the time I read Westword writer Jason Sheehan’s captivating account of a day spent in Kleinman’s kitchen last fall, I was watching him.
Here, in Colorado, was a committed practitioner of molecular gastronomy, that modish form of sci-fi cooking — think sous-vide, guar gum, foam and liquid nitrogen — practiced by global gurus with magical, film-noir names like Heston Blumenthal, Wylie Dufresne, Grant Achatz, Ferran Adriu.
Molecular gastronomy is where the cutting edge of contemporary global haute cuisine lives now: art first, science second, nourishment third. And while haute cuisine in general (and molecular cuisine in particular) will never make sense for everyday eating, it plays as crucial a role in quotidian food culture as the haute couture plays in day- to-day fashion culture.
Haute cuisine, like haute couture, works in two directions: It interprets street-level ideas for high-end consumption (how else to explain the preponderance of cotton candy on fancy American restaurant menus?) while generating its own ideas to send trickling back to the street (truffled fries, anyone?). Haute cuisine, prohibitively expensive and therefore only distantly relevant to most of us, is nonetheless undeniably influential in dictating what we eat.
It matters.
Molecular gastronomy, the current zeitgeist in haute cuisine (earlier haute cuisine movements included nouvelle and fusion) also skims nimbly across the current culinary tide of farm-to-table eating. Not against it, but across it.
Granted, I’m hard-wired to appreciate contrarian artistry and expressive rebellion in general, but this intrigues me.
And so I’ve spent many hours and dollars at restaurants like WD-50 in New York and Alinea in Chicago (although not, yet, at the mountaintop, a.k.a. El Bulli in Spain), eating food that looks like art, or rather, art that tastes like food. I’m fascinated by chanterelle mousses, by carrot foams, by roasted duck served on linen pillows inflated with lavender-scented air, by foie gras meringues.
Such stuff is eagerly dismissed by food purists as too esoteric, precious, fake. But that is missing the point. This kind of food is to be taken as experience, as entertainment, as process, as an evening at the food theater, not as an exercise in belly-filling.
At Alinea, courses were presented on custom-designed dishes, created to, for example, release a hot ball of butter-poached potato into a tiny well of cold potato soup just before I shot it back in one bite. It was an inventive and substantive way to illustrate the striking differences in flavor and texture between hot and cold potatoes.
At Tailor, Sam Mason’s experimental New York eatery, foie gras was paired with peanut butter and miso butterscotch with pork belly, each challenging what I believed I knew about sweet and savory and where each belongs.
Absurd? Sure, if you ate this way every day. But that’s not the point of experimentation, or art. It exists to arrest us, surprise us, shock us into thinking and rethinking what and how we eat, and why.
A subject that, to my mind, bears constant consideration.
