Lamb Flatbread

My sister Leah visited last week from Albuquerque, and we spent an evening we wandering up and down the length of the Greenway and along the waterfront path. Boston looked beautiful, especially compared to the elevated highway that the gardens replaced. Then we joined family for dinner at Trade.

Bon Appetit mag just named Trade one of the best new restaurants in the US. When I first ate lunch at a pre-opening tasting, I remember wondering a little about Trade. With its eclectic small plates menu and its coolly urban vibe and high-decibel noise level, Trade didn’t call to me the same way Rialto, Jody Adams’s flagship restaurant, does. And the food was tasty, but a little all over the place, I thought.  Another early visit still left me slightly unc.

But all good restaurants need a little time to grow into themselves, even when the guiding chef is as genius as Jody Adams. And last week’s visit won me over. Trade and its food have gone from coltish and a little awkward to sleek, smooth and pretty marvelous.

Gazing out Trade’s floor-to-ceiling windows while eating fantastic roasted clams with tiny slices of  pickled okra and chunks of cornbread, lamb flatbread with eggplant and Manchego, and a truly delicious cold corn soup with shreds of smoked bluefish, well, all this and more made the evening more magical. (I didn’t get to taste the burger because my son wasn’t sharing). The young chef Andrew Hebert came out to say hello, looking tired, and the place was jumping — lots of tables of businesspeople, couples, young and old, a well-dressed and lively crowd. They were happy to be there, and so was I. The Bon App award was no surprise.

Julia Child in Cambridge kitchen

On what would have been her 100th birthday, Julia Child is remembered for her remarkable mastery of cooking, her bravery, her wit. But what I remember about her is her unfailing curiosity.

By the time I met Julia, her TV days were past, and she was feted as a legend, a sort of culinary fairy godmother. Though I had helped cover her 80th birthday party and had been to her house in Cambridge, I wasn’t  in her inner circle. But after her 9oth birthday, when Julia was moving back to California for the last time, packing up her Cambridge kitchen for the Smithsonian, Sheryl Julian, my editor at the Boston Globe,  invited me along on a last lunch with Julia.

The food at that lunch was unremarkable, though I do recall Julia’s pointed, if polite, comment when iced tea in a can was placed before her . “What, you don’t brew it here?” she asked with slightly raised eyebrows. And I also remember the conversation. Julia asked me all about my growing up, as intently interested in my rural, almost communal, upbringing in Kansas as I was fascinated about her storied career. She was engaged, funny, and observant. One couldn’t have had a better dining companion.

No wonder everyone loved her, I remember thinking. Yes, Julia irrevocably changed Americans’ idea of food. But her way of connecting vibrantly with almost everyone she met  made her a star.

The list of Food & Wine Best New Chefs 2012 was announced recently. There’s the usual smattering of New York chefs and West Coast chefs from Los Angeles to Seattle. And the obligatory Southern winners. Several women were included, which has been unusual in the last couple of years.

But no one from Boston — or even New England. Oh, yes, William Kovel (Catalyst) got a Regional People’s Choice, which is nice but not quite star status. Neither he, nor Jason Bond (Bondir), or a half-dozen more I could name rated the big-time. Even Jamie Bissonnette,(Coppa, Toro) who was last year’s People Choice and is on the James Beard finalist list for New England region, made it.

Boston is enjoying a raging hot restaurant scene and the depth of talent is strong. Why no love from the national stage? Maybe traveling to Boston to sample is not as exciting as Portland — or Dallas? Or even Nashville? Was this really a thorough vetting of the nation’s best, or somewhat more random?

Charlie Trotter

Charlie Trotter has just announced that his 25-year-old testament to obsessive restaurateurship is closing next August.  In recent years, even he admitted business was off a little, but  his reasons are to pursue other interests — a philosophy degree among them. His decision makes one remember both how very famous he was (and is) and what it means to be a chef.

In an era of quickly-minted TV reality show “celebrity chefs,” it can be hard to recall that chefs used to really cook — and to remember that cooking is doing the same movements, the same recipes, the same preparation and clean-up over and over and over. It’s not winning a contest or being the loudest in the room,  but instead perserverance, and as he once told me “just showing up.”

I looked up a piece I wrote on Trotter for The Boston Globe in 1999, when Charlie Trotter’s was a slip of 12 years old, and  the chef came to Boston for a cookbook event (remember when cookbook publishing was important?). He agreed to talk to me, but it had to be at 11 p.m. because he was cooking with Rene Michelena who had worked for him, in La Bettola, a tiny South End restaurant where Petit Robert Columbus is now. That meant that Chef Trotter, then one of the two or three best-known chefs in the US, was hoisting pans and cutting garnishes in a kitchen the size of a closet.

When we talked in the basement office, Trotter’s first words were about the valet service at the restaurant the night before. No one greeted him when he got out of the car, and he thought that was disgraceful. We talked for over an hour, and despite the lateness and the fact that Trotter had been cooking all evening, and would leave for Chicago early the next morning, he could not have been more engaged, thoughtful, and passionate. He’ll take those attributes into his next career. And his example, if not his style of restaurant, should be the plan to follow for the chefs of tomorrow.

We ate last night at Bondir, the tiny jewel of a Cambridge restaurant

Mangalista pig

by Chef Jason Bond. His is a short menu but so deliberate and carefully thought-out that it’s a little scary. All the newest, the most cutting-edge, the best-for-you ingredients are there: a bread with seaweed and dried shrimp, handmade burrata, teff polenta, periwinkles, burdock root, sassafras sorbet, triticale wheat berries. You almost need a glossary.

But luckily Bond is not only creative with his ingredients, but a really, really good cook. Lovely, pale green sorrel vichyssoise was velvety on the tongue with just enough hint of bitterness from the leafy vegetable, one of the first in the spring garden. The nutty, dark brown teff polenta provided a good foil for root cellar vegetables, and the morel and mousseron mushroom ragout for little scallops.

The best was an asparagus and calaminth risotto with lobster, mussels, and tiny periwinkles. All lovely, but draped across like a wisp of veil was Mangalista prosciutto, almost all transparent fat. It added a pretty terrific depth to the sea-clean tastes of the seafood, and in a funny way cut through the creaminess of the risotto.

The Mangalista, originally from Hungary and now being grown in the US, doesn’t really look like a porker, more like a sheep. Bond explained, as he talked to us for a few minutes after dinner, that he cured this prosciutto for two years, and that it was almost all fat.

Which was the beauty of it — the flavor is in the fat, and the proof of Bondir’s menu is in the eating.

Last night I dined on magnificent sushi for a cause – Oishii Boston’s benefit to aid the earthquake, tsunami, and radiation victims in Japan. Ting San joined with other chefs, including Dante deMagistris of Dante and Il Casale, Anthony Caturano of Prezza, Michael Serpa of Neptune Oyster, and Luis Morales of Tico, to raise funds for relief efforts.

Oishii sushi

The place was more than packed — a sold out house — and the food fantastic. Spicy pork meatballs with fonduta sauce from Dante;  oysters from Neptune, a spicy Asian-style taco from Tico, and pristine sushi from True World Foods, which supplies many of the sushi restaurants around town. But we found ourselves hanging around Oishii’s sushi bar where chefs, including this very young rockstar sushi chef (below), were putting out tray after tray of simple and irresistible sushi.

Sushi chef at Oishii

(By the way, we gladly paid the $100 each for the benefit — a belated and treasured Valentine’s Day gift to each other).

A display of cheeses

The food(ie) controversy du jour is the New York Times article last Sunday about USDA support and money spent surreptiously to encourage Americans to eat more cheese. Aaargh! Will cheese suddenly become as dangerous as high fructose corn syrup? Will there be a rush to de-cheese our diets? Or to push low-fat or diet cheese, one of the abominations of the dieters’ world.

Or, like so many other puzzle pieces in the American love/hate affair with food, is there an alternate view? As Walter Willett of HarvardPublic Health, the healthy food oracle for our times, says, cheese eaten in sensible amounts can be part of a good diet. However, when Domino’s Pizza and other chains are doubling down — cheese in the crust, more cheese on top, cheese hidden — we get the familiar American scenario. Instead of food as a life force and as a social joy, we seem determined to view food as an obsession or as a danger. 

If those of us who love cheese — definitely count me among them — can agree that cheese is not a diet food and should be eaten in moderation, couldn’t we join the French,  known for eating a lot of cheese, but not known for obesity? Enjoy cheese, really good cheese  – on your cheeseboard, in fondue, even on a pizza. But know what you’re eating. Cheese, glorious cheese!!

Roasted garlic and Spanish anchovy pizza, Spaghetti with cracklings and hot peppers

Before you tell me I should know the answer, I do know the answer. Umami is the reason that I can’t get enough of anchovies. The flavor is part of it. The saltiness has a key role, and the crunch of barely remembered bones plays into my texture mania. But even so there’s just….something about them. And I guess it’s umami.

Last night, I ate a Roasted Garlic and Spanish Anchovy pizza at Scampo’s bar. I’d been craving pizza, and this one was just what I wanted — nothing wimpy about this pizza. Oh, it was nothing to look at, not a pretty thing like tomato and mozzarella or one with zucchini blossoms and figs. This one included some potato slices and red onion but it was basically a chunky mass with distinct curves of anchovy on a crackly, puffy edged crust. (To her credit, Lydia Shire is never afraid to let flavor trump everything.) And it was sooo good.

In fact, there’s a cold slice left over in my refrigerator that’s calling to me. Will I be able to resist?

Food truck at Boston Festival

Food trucks are big news in the culinary world. Food cultists may think New York, LA, or even lately  Boston, have the trend covered. But last week, I stopped by the sparlingly clean truck parked in a shopping center lot in Dodge City, Kan. It’s there every day, and has been for years, selling tacos, tortas, and a few other specialties. No monster burritos, no orange cheese, no Americanized fast-food tcochkes.

The temperature was about 96 at 7 p.m. as I went up to the window. A teenager took my order for three tacos — al pastor, barbacoa and lengua. And, yes, they had tongue, he said, a little confused that I had to ask. “Do you want everything on it,” he inquired. That turned out to be onions and cilantro. Then he told me he’d bring it to me in the car. In Kansas, people seldom emerge from their cars in the heat, so I probably seemed deluded.

Two older men in cowboy hats and boots were talking in back of the truck, but I seemed to be the only customer. Up the street is a new Wendy’s, one of a string of fast-food places where there was a line of cars at the takeout window.

In a few minutes, the teen was back with my order, on a heavy paper plate, carefully wrapped with foil. The small tacos, each in several fresh corn tortillas, were beautiful, plenty of tender meat, adorned only with sprigs of fresh cilantro and chopped onions. The bill was $3.75. I gave him a $5 and told him to keep the rest. (And the tacos, with a little bottled salsa added, were delicious when I ate them later).

Amazed by this, he was even more dumbfounded when I told him that food trucks were the craze on the East Coast. “You’d be a hit in Boston,” I told him, as he walked away, shaking his head at the craziness.

Listening to Anthony Bourdain last night on Tom Ashbrook’s show, you would have thought that restaurant food had been in a steep decline until Top Chef, the Food Network, and of course, his road trip docudramas “No Reservations” came into being. All good, according to Bourdain, who seemed to have been defanged for the occasion. Isn’t nastiness his appeal? He sounded like he was chatting about new trends in Episcopalian religious services.

Now that regular folk have seen chefs vying to cook weird things in trumphed-up contests, everyone understands the finer points of cuisine, he seemed to believe.

This made me think of Patricia Yeo, chef of Ginger Park, telling me recently that she thinks food TV contests are ruining the work ethic of beginning chefs. They all think they do a short stint, get on TV, and make Bourdain’s bucks (he went on and on about the cushy, travel-filled life he leads). “Showing up for work,” Yeo says, isn’t on the agendas of this would-be stars.