Drawing the line

A recent bone of contention has crept up in my town. A South American chef has opened up a twofold ambitous project, somewhat analogous to Frontera Grill and Topolobampo: an "accessible" Mexican restaurant on the second floor, and a seemingly impossibly far-reaching "gourmet" venture on the ground floor, that purportedly expands the scope of what people expect Mexican food to be...at accordingly higher prices. Somewhat simultaneously, a restaurant opened up that is easily the most ambitous Chinese restaurant that has ever been attempted in this town (well, it's in the accursed suburbs, at least), employing pricy items like diver scallpos and szechwan peppercorns, etc...at again, justifiably higher prices.

People here have their heads wrapped around the fact that these types of cuisine have historically been cheap, reliable, yet tasty modes of gustatory injection (I've been drinkin' wine). It appears that Chicago has this almighty wealth of ethnic fare, dwarfing New Orleans' offerings. Reading everybody's missives on how to spend ten bucks (largely represented by ethnic fare) has me salivating!!! However, where would you draw the line at cost? Would you you balk at spending 15, 20, or MORE dollars on an entree that has been inspired by the traditionally "cheap" Chinese, Mexican, or the "Middle Eastern Umbrella" kitchens? If not, where are the places that push the envelope of said cuisine? And, is it ultimately worth the added expense?

Dear Sal:

Allow me to introduce you to Arun Sampanthavivat and his eatery, the most expensive Thai restaurant in the Western Hemisphere:

http://www.arunsthai.com/chefs_design.htm

Holy Mother of Lemongrass. I didn't need to see that so soon before bed!!!

My Thai meal last night just has become so peripheral......

This is another one of my favorite topics/peeves.

I pretty much detest the idea that any cuisine should be button-holed into a certain price point. There is no reason a Chinese or Thai or Mexican place can not be *as* expensive as any French or Italian or chef-centric kinda place (i.e., Moto). What justifies higher prices are various factors, and to me, none of them have to do with the ethnic orientation of the place.

I think generally, one should pay more for four things:

1. Quality of raw ingredients.

2. Level of service, but also level of comfort that the place provides, in other words, atmosphere.

3. Refined cooking. I do not mean this as diluted cooking. I mean, essentially cooking with effort. Read Thomas Keller's books and see the efforts that go into his dishes, the straining and straining and working through sieves. That's what I mean by refined.

4. Chef creativity. I'm no Chairman Kanga. I do not seek tastes I have never tasted before, but clearly, if there is someone in the kitchen thinking about things, it is worth something.

It would be nice, as I have said before, for some Thai, Chinese, etc. places to break thru into this barrier.

That said, in a couple of attempts around town, I have not found the effort successful, that is worth the money. I think that Pasteur looks great, but fails on most every other ground, and I see no reason to pay its higher prices. Likewise, Arun's (as I have said ad naseum) is no where as good as Spoon or TAC.

Rob

Sal Monilla wrote:Holy Mother of Lemongrass. I didn't need to see that so soon before bed!!!

My Thai meal last night just has become so peripheral......

Yes, but the hype doesn't necessarily live up to the execution. Read this. I'll be posting soon on my two week trip to Kansas City, where they have a Thai restaurant worthy of Arun's goals without all the hype and extra cost associated with it.

My worries of high-price-point ethnic are that the food will suffer for the presentation: a dollop of mole beneath a grilled chicken breast with a frou-frou of shredded fried tortilla and a few sauteed mini veggies doesn't justify a $19.95 price point ever.

Places like Arun, Vong, Topolobompo have shown that ethnic can be taken out of the ghetto. I'm not going to neccessarily agree with the choices of those restaurants, but they've been able to pull in a higher price point (Vong, it should be noted, lowered its prices when it came to Chicago from NY, and then came up with an even cheaper menu after a short period of time).

Mexican *should* be easy to upscale: it's not all tacos and chimichangas (although experience has shown that they'd better have those kinds of items at least in a corner of the menu or the tourists will get all confused). Game items like venison, duck, etc. help upscale, along with complex sauces and generally pulling away from the basic tortilla-centered items with steaks and roasts. Don Juan's in Edison Park is another good example.

Chinese has an image problem because of cheap chop suey -- and frankly much of the finest stuff LTH or Lau Sze Chuan has to offer still has a visual resemblance to that heritage: small-chopped bits of chicken and pork with a glossy sauce. But there are certainly restaurants that regularly break $15 with their entrees, mainly through the use of seafood (whole fish, lobster, soft-shells, mussels, etc.). The lack of steaks and chops in the authentic cuisine is probably what's mostly holding this back. It's going to take a 'fusion' restaurant willing to (cough) sichuan-sear a rib-eye or put a General Tso's glaze on a duck breast (ooh, that doesn't sound too bad) to kick the restaurant into the high end.

I've often thought about this in regards to Indian/Pakistani cooking. Now, we have the obvious upscale, or perhaps higher-scale Indian joints like Tiffin or India Garden. I think they do a pretty good job of elevating service, atmosphere and even cleaning up the presentation. But in the end, I don't think they pull off gastronomic superiority to other joints on the strip.

Part of the problem seems to speak to the original post here. Is Indian, more specifically, the meat and bone-intesive Punjabi or Pakistani even upscalable? If you put a lamb bone with a nice hunk of attached meat and some delicately drizzled shorba (that's been forced through a sieve) on top, as it sits on a perfect cylinder of basmati... you get the point.

I'm not sure that is even appealing - and I certainly don't think you can replace sopping up shorba with nan and sucking marrow out of the bones with your hands by making Indo-Pak fork and knife fare. I guess that's where the visionaries in food come in... I have a hard time seeing certain cuisines transformed into fusion without it flying outside my culinary sensibilities.

Charge more for using free-range chicken and organic sauces, with fresh salads and carefull preparation? Sure, I think that works across the board. But creating a "fusion" (of what, pretension and cuisine?) $30++ a head place ala Arun's (just an example, I have not eaten there) just seems to be less about food and more about write-ups in Gourmet.

Chinese places are sort of an exception to the "cheap" ethnic rule. Most of the larger businesses have a fair number of moderately to very expensive items priced consistent with the work involved (Peking duck eg) or the rarity/prestige of ingredient (abalone, lobster, shark fin, and to Joel's example, Hong Kong steak). Chinese American diners do not seem to mind eating an absurdly expensive banquet in the company of others dining on 5 buck plates of fried rice. This, I think, is a good thing.

To justify the higher prices, chefs do need to elevate simple cuisines through ingredient and technique. Clearly, though, Mexican, Chinese, and Thai are not simple cuisines by any standard. They have traditional, intricate, time consuming and expesive dishes that call for little or no improvement.

To my mind, it is the rustic "colonial" or creole or criollo cuisine that most often needs serious tinkering before a chef can demand high prices. The food of the Caribbean, for me, is the obvious example. Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Hatian, etc foods are great, but there is nearly no "fancy" food in the repertoire. These are places where the indigenous people are gone (as opposed to Mexico and Northern S. America), and the food represents an amalgam of African and European traditions using local ingredients. The fancy, prestigious stuff is and always has been what they eat at the home office. The more luxurious a meal is for a Cuban or Dominican, the more closely it resembles a meal in Spain. (I'm no expert, but a similar phenomenon seems, hitorically, to have been the case in S. LA between Cajun and Creole).

So, the Miami and NYC "Nuevo Latino" guys have filled a fine dining vacuum that does not exist in Mexican (even though "fancy" restaurants in Mexico do/did tend toward the Continental and away from more indigenous foods).

My worries of high-price-point ethnic are that the food will suffer for the presentation: a dollop of mole beneath a grilled chicken breast with a frou-frou of shredded fried tortilla and a few sauteed mini veggies doesn't justify a $19.95 price point ever.

It's justified if it is from a high price organic purveyor like gunthorpe or bellweather farms. Likewise if the mini veg are organic or grown sustainably for a small group of chefs, or the mole is one of the Geno Bahena super complex efforts.

It's tough to make absolutes like this. Whether you actually percieve value on that end, i.e. does this chicken or veg actually taste better is another matter. I tend to think they do when I have compared.

Also, respecting Caribbean fare...just take a look at Norman Vanaken's cuisine. He uses a ton of overt Caribbean influence in his fusion cooking and charges nicely for it.

MJN,

Re Norman. Yeah, he would be among the Miami Nuevo Latino chefs I mentioned.

Good topic.

I generalize, but the people who tend to leave their native country for something better in the U.S. tend to be those for whom price point is not an option. They eat what is affordable. The folks who can eat upscale versions of their native cuisine are probably very comfortable back home, thank you very much. Can one then conceivably see what is possible at the upper end of a particular cuisine by observing what the swells in Thailand, China, Egypt and Belize are eating? This notion always occurs to me when I sit down at a place like Opera and wonder if anyone in Shanghai eats like this.

Or, perhaps like everything else, cuisine just evolves. Look what Thomas Keller did for beef short ribs and other off-cuts that had fed earlier generations of working-class Americans because they were cheap. When a country grows wealthier, like China and India currently, maybe more disposable income creates a market for those expecting more from what they eat without sacrificing the ingredients and preparations of their region.

Thanks for the discourse.

I've got to point out that some of the items we see on ethnic menus here *are* what the upper crust eat, we don't need to wait for the standard of living to increase: Dishes labeled "shahi" in Indian cuisine, Peking Duck are two obvious choices.

I'm not as sure about Thai, but things labeled "evil jungle prince" certainly seem to have an implication of royalty. Pad thai and its like are certainly more of 'street food.'

Someone above mentioned that the Punjabi dishes are meat-heavy... but only at US serving sizes. They ought to be served with lots of rice and vegetables, right? But most Americans won't want to sit down to just a couple of lumps of meat in a red sauce for a whole plate of rice -- even if it is authentic. Stews and braises are making a comeback at the haute cuisine level, so it's possible for the subcontinental cooking to make its way into our wallets and tummies more frequently.

Mexican food in this country is still mostly street food, Rick Bayless' efforts to the contrary. And it's too easy for the Southwest Cuisine to use many of the same ingredients on big cuts of meat to overshadow, without a hint of history (even if it does end up as slow food).

I'm totally ignorant on this, but was it really Thomas Keller who popularized beef short ribs and off cuts in upscale restaurants in this country?

I would expect French influenced places like bistros etc would have been doing this for years in America.

I think Julia Child probably played a large role in exposing america to sweet breads, short ribs, and other offal within this gourmet context.

I think the elevation of cheap cuts--at least at the fine dining level-- is a more recent phenomenon. Julia certainly made offal and cheap cuts more attractive for home cooks, but I'm thinking more along the lines of what Fergus Henderson is doing at St. John in London, and yes, what Keller did at French Laundry with nasty bits. Evidently, there are many more out there, according to this February 2004 article from that arbiter of food trends the Dallas Morning News (tongue firmly in cheek)


"Beef short ribs have long been a classic of rustic home cooking - it was one cut that everyone could afford.

Now top chefs from New York to Napa Valley are embracing the lowly short rib, lending it a panache that would astonish peasant cooks of yore. Famed chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten - whose Manhattan restaurant commands stratospheric prices - features Short Ribs Braised With Citrus in his cookbook Simple to Spectacular (Broadway Books, $45). During this winter's Sundance Film Festival, LA chef Ben Ford (son of actor Harrison Ford) served Braised Short Ribs With Salsa Verde and Winter Vegetables. The trend is making local ripples, too. Timothy Byers, executive chef of Standard 2706 in Deep Ellum, gives braised short ribs a sophisticated turn by shredding the meat, densely compacting it and cutting it into sleek cubes to rest ceremoniously on bare rib bones. .."