OT.. The French Learn to Speak Fusion
By WILLIAM GRIMES
ARIS -- There is a dessert in Paris called the wonton kumquat
Nutella. It cannot be found in Escoffier, or anywhere else, for that
matter.
Served at a new Right Bank restaurant called Cafe Mosaic, the kumquat
surprise comes in a bamboo steamer that holds a very undessert-like
display of three soft wonton envelopes, each containing a whole kumquat
and a small puddle of molten Nutella, the commercial chocolate and
hazelnut spread. The thing is awful. But in Paris, it may be the wave of the
future.
In this city of bistros, brasseries and
three-star shrines, a new type of restaurant
seems to be taking hold: ultradesigned, up to
the minute and emphatically un-French in
style and culinary point of view.
The spaces tend to be large and, by French
standards, quite noisy. The waiters and
waitresses, who are very young, ply their
trade with an almost American casualness.
The food is strange.
Fusion has come to France, and it feels
funny. Influences from Asia, America and --
heaven help us -- even England have been
creeping into one of the world's most rigidly
codified cuisines. Like steam opening a
mussel, the cultural pressures of the new
global economy, and the internationalizing of taste, have forced the
inward-looking French to look outward on a peculiar new world.
Classically minded chefs are trying to assimilate concepts like Afro-Thai
cuisine and to accept the idea that patrons care as much about the setting
as they do about the food on the plate. The result is a new culinary
moment in France, one that Gault-Millau magazine is calling "the new
disorder."
All this and the euro, too -- it's a lot to swallow. But Paris seems titillated
by the strange new dances that its chefs are trying out, and the theatrical
spaces in which they perform them. They have mobbed the new Lo Sushi,
designed by Andree Putman, where patrons pick up their sushi plate from
a conveyer belt, and Man Ray, a hip-to-the-hilt Pacific Rim restaurant
whose owners include Johnny Depp and Sean Penn.
The new restaurant wave has attracted a group that Patrick Derderian, the
owner of Zebra Square and Bermuda Onion, recently called "the happy
few" -- about 5,000 young and restless diners who move from address to
address, their ranks swelled by well-to-do young professionals who, like the
scene makers, want more than food from a restaurant.
"It appears that the era of the brasserie is over," said Miguel Cancio, a
restaurateur and the consultant behind Man Ray, Barfly and Buddha Bar.
"People want more -- they want to be transported somewhere else, and to
be entertained."
Asian, barely three weeks old, could stand as an archetype for the new
fussy French fusion restaurant. It is enormous, a 400-seat, two-level affair
that occupies nearly 2,000 square yards of prime real estate on the swank
Avenue George V.
The decor is high-tech teahouse, with an emphasis on dark, exotic woods
that contrast sharply with the polished concrete floor and a Zen garden of
dazzling white sand and bleached rocks that sends out vibrations conducive
to spiritual peace. The sound system broadcasts a third-world mix of weird
animal noises, rain-forest drips and tribal grunts and chants.
The menu makes more stops than a German tour bus. The dim-sum cart
rolls by, followed by mixed plates of Japanese sushi, Vietnamese spring
rolls and a green salad with sesame dressing. Dishes bear names like Ming
beef, chicken Chitchat, Paradise Lost salad, and the intriguingly named
"Delta Brochette Pff, Pff," which turns out to be chunks of chicken thigh
on a stick.
It's a menu to read as much as to eat. Each dish is a statement, a little like
the macaroni and cheese at Spoon, Alain Ducasse's new restaurant with
the cheeky American accent. The dish itself is not as important as the fact
that it's on the menu, like the fish and chips at Alcazar, Terence Conran's
shiny new Left Bank brasserie on the Rue Mazarine.
Alcazar is nothing if not shrewd. Under the direction of Guillaume Lutard,
formerly the senior sous-chef at Taillevent, the kitchen turns out a carefully
calibrated mix of brasserie standards, seafood platters, pan-Mediterranean
fare and the occasional English dish, like bread and butter pudding, or fish
and chips.
It's world food for young diners who move easily from Los Angeles to
New York to Paris to London and who feel most comfortable in casual,
sleekly designed restaurants that buzz and hum.
Alcazar's design is crisp and clean to the point of being antiseptic. The
large open kitchen, with its gleaming white tiles and shiny stainless steel
fixtures, is so pristine it could serve as a hospital operating theater, which
is, in fact, what it looks like.
On the blond-wood tables, the salt and pepper, arranged in neat piles, come
in a precision-tooled rectangular steel ashtray (available for about $15 on
the way out), and the American-style selection of four rolls (plain
sourdough, rye sourdough, black-olive and walnut) is served in what seems
to be an oval Shaker box but on closer inspection turns out to be the lid to a
container of cheese.
Alcazar is cute that way. Every touch has
been thought through with one aim in mind: to
make diners feel that they are the actors in a
first-class production, with all the right props
in place.
It's a set-design approach to dining that was
perfected at Buddha Bar. Some of the heat
has cooled at this first of the
mega-restaurants, but when it opened in late
1996, it created a sensation. It was the
Parisian equivalent of Balthazar or Asia de
Cuba in Manhattan, a highly wrought stage
set that allowed chic young Parisians to put
on a show for themselves.
The scene has since shifted, but the decor
remains. Buddha Bar is a fever dream of tropical elegance, its dense,
opium-inspired interior rich with exotic woods, betasseled chandeliers and
lush fabrics.
Upstairs is a mile-long bar in the form of a dragon ship. Downstairs, there's
the unignorable Buddha, a serene mass of beatitude seated on a square
pedestal large enough to support a Cadillac. Rising nearly 60 feet to the
ceiling, he has the air of a customer waiting patiently for a very big meal.
When it comes, he will want more spice. The lurid sensibility that went into
the decor evaporated mysteriously at the kitchen door. The menu, a
pan-Asian and French smorgasbord, skips blithely from Vietnamese spring
rolls to Korean-style grilled steak to miso-glazed turbot, an Asian package
tour for the timid.
When it comes to the desserts, the exotic mask drops entirely. Except for a
blancmange with coconut milk, the line-up is as French as a cancan.
There's nothing wrong with any of the food, exactly, and the restaurant's
excellent hot sauce, served on the side, works wonders on just about
everything except the blancmange, but on the plate, Asia seems as remote
as Buddha's smile.
In the United States, chefs have embraced the new ingredients and spices
of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean with a sometimes unseemly
passion. They may not always love wisely, but shyness has not been a
problem.
In Paris, however, fusion resolutely refuses to fuse. When it comes to
visual style, and atmosphere, the French cannot be beat. They seem to
have no trouble with the theatrical elements of dining, or the international
design idiom that goes with flashy fusion cuisine from Sydney to Miami.
There are not many New York restaurants, for example, to equal the
drop-dead elegant Telegraphe, recently redone in a blend of Viennese
Secession and Art Nouveau by the design team behind the three-star
Ambroisie.
But the intercultural mingling that energizes American chefs tends to stump
the French, for reasons that are not that hard to figure out. A cooking
tradition as ancient and deeply ingrained as France's presents every chef
with a hundred reasons not to try anything funny.
America, by contrast, has always
been a "why not?" culture, and
the national tendency toward
experimentation has been
powerfully reinforced by an
unending influx of new immigrant
groups and new cuisines.
The example of Jean-Georges
Vongerichten shows that a
French sensibility and Asian
ingredients can produce
spectacular results, but his
brethren here in the old country
appear to be struggling a bit with
their spring rolls and their sesame
vinaigrettes. They either
pussyfoot or, like a teetotaler who
falls off the wagon, they go wild
and shoot up the town.
Cafe Mosaic, the Mad Max of
Paris restaurants, falls into the second category. Deceptively, the interior is
cool and understated, with dark wood blinds covering the windows facing
the busy Avenue George V, and a suave semicircular bar, decorated with
a vase of white orchids, off to one side of the room.
All the more shocking, then, to witness the parade of oddities streaming out
of the kitchen. Anis-steamed crayfish whiz by in a mason jar. The "salade
verte" turns out to be a half-head of iceberg lettuce, sitting on the plate like
a stooge. Then come the kumquat wontons a la Nutella, or even better, the
"orange a l'orange," a glistening orb of citrus fruit, preciously situated in a
large gray bowl, that oozes an orange cream when pierced with a fork.
Some of this is thrilling, like the smoky roast pepper, with a sauce of
anchovies, chickpeas and soy, or the ruby-colored pigeon breast mired in a
gooey plum-peanut sauce and surrounded by kumquats. All of it is
cartoonish.
At table after table, French diners, after a scandalized intake of breath,
were laughing as the plates arrived, and who could blame them? In
retrospect, the two mini-baguettes placed on the table at the beginning of
the meal seem like the last word in irony.
Make it official. French cuisine has entered the postmodern era. |
