Category Archives: Food

Food and theatre: Gordon Ramsay at the London

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Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen and Harold Pinter’s final play Celebration are both set in restaurants — there must be something about taking meals in public that has the seed of drama. Most recently this drama can be found in the trio of series that Gordon Ramsay hosts on the Fox network: MasterChef, Hell’s Kitchen, and Kitchen Nightmares. Ramsay is an artist of a quite different sort than Wesker and Pinter, but the real indication of his art is in his restaurants rather than his antics as a public figure or television character.

Marilyn and I will be returning to his flagship New York restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at the London, next Tuesday night for a long-anticipated repeat aesthetic experience. The last time we were there was in 2010; that visit I chronicled below. I repost it today to whet my appetite. My apologies in advance for the solemnity of the essay, but it is about important matters. When it comes to the art of dining — the title, by the way, of a 1979 Tina Howe play as well — the proof is in the pudding (to abuse my right to cliche), especially at these prices.

If contemporary theatre criticism looks for performance outside the four walls of the studio space or auditorium, it may be worthwhile to consider dining as performance. The restaurant is a unique site of artifice and, in better restaurants, elegance; if we are now to think of ourselves as “consumers” of an aesthetic experience, then why can’t gustatory consumption provide aesthetic experience as well? Certainly as theatre takes the quotidian elements of experience to render them something unique and meditative, the restaurant serves the necessary food to quell the inescapable appetite.

The restaurant meal as aesthetic experience, then, is as capable of providing a meditative and contemplative experience as theatre. I often mention elegance as a necessary component of the powerful theatre production, and certainly this is as valid in the restaurant experience. My wife Marilyn Nonken and I recently paid our second visit in as many years to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in New York, Gordon Ramsay at the London, and it too provided considerable food for thought. Ramsay is probably best known as the foul-mouthed, violently demanding ex-footballer on shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, and this is how most of his audience sees him. But most of this audience, I’m sure, does not have the opportunity to enter a Gordon Ramsay restaurant themselves (even though his restaurants may be found around the world — there’s even a “Gordon Ramsay Plane Food” restaurant in Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5). It is only there that the true theme of Ramsay’s television shows, and where they differ from Top Chef and Iron Chef, becomes apparent — they are not about Ramsay’s personality (however overpowering that is), but about the discipline, skill, collaboration and talent required to render the dining experience itself an aesthetic product. The dining experience is Ramsay’s true calling — and he is as much an artist here as Giacometti in painting, Howard Barker or Richard Foreman in theatre, and Morton Feldman in music.

Like theatre, there is the playing space (the restaurant itself) and backstage (the kitchen); a fine meal requires a clocklike efficiency between the two arenas. Gordon Ramsay at the London, under the supervision of chef de cuisine Markus Glocker and designed by David Collins in emerald and timber panels, presents a quiet spacious area for relaxation. The waitstaff, attentive but unobtrusive, performs on a thin tightrope between formality and the casual, wearing dark suits but not tuxedoes (the restaurant notes that the dress code for patrons is “smart, with jackets preferred for gentlemen, but not required”). They are personable and friendly, but not familiar, and there is much to be said about the elegance in their gestures themselves: wine is poured and dishes are served with quiet efficiency but a great deal of attention to the angle of the bottle and the way the wrist is turned, the precise ease with which the dishes are placed before the diner. (I know of theatre directors and performers who pay far less attention to the appearance and grace of their bodies as they perform.) It is also interesting to note that, during both my visits to the restaurant, not one cellphone or pager was heard to beep through the entire meal.

Indeed, at Gordon Ramsay at the London, the dining experience is one of intimacy within the high-ceilinged arena; despite the relatively small room, it is arranged so that each table continues to possess a quiet privacy. This is unlike Daniel Boulud’s Daniel, which with its multiple levels and dining areas renders the diners both spectators and spectacle, part of the scenery rather than a private individual (appropriate in a restaurant in which it may be important to see-and-be-seen), or Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50, which offers a more casual, diner-like Lower East Side atmosphere (appropriate for a Lower East Side restaurant).

Dining at a restaurant like Gordon Ramsay at the London is a leisurely experience; serving the seven-course tasting menu takes a little less than three hours. The role of time and rhythm in taking a meal is akin to the role they play in music: nothing rushed or fast, time enough to linger over the taste of a dish (or a sound or sequence of notes), to relish and contemplate it. Time and rhythm in another sense is key to the menu itself and the sequence of dishes and wines. For there is a rhythm to the tasting menu, make no mistake about that: beginning with a light amuse bouche (and a glass of champagne or sparkling wine), the meal progresses from lighter to heavier dishes, and similarly at Gordon Ramsay at the London these are accompanied by wines that progress from lighter whites to fuller reds. A tenderly sauteed slice of fois gras, its creaming density leavened with the provision of a brightly-sliced plum,  is followed by a single scallop accompanied by curried cauliflower, pressed mango and spiced chickpeas, and only then do the main dishes arrive: a turbot (amusingly presented; slicing into the center of the turbot, one is surprised by the right yellow of an organic egg yolk that pours from the fish) and, for me, lamb cooked to the precise definition of “medium,” pink in the center and growing progressively more done as towards the edges. (And here the reds are served.)  And a decrescendo follows in the form of first a pre-dessert in the form of a light lime sorbet and then a final dessert, for me of a light Concord grape cream and yogurt sorbet.

It is essential to note that Ramsay’s form of French cooking partakes of that most generous trait of any good host: entertainment just to the point of satiety and not beyond. There are times at even the best restaurants when you can have too much of a good thing (this was my experience at Daniel and, more especially, at WD-50). What is most poetic about Ramsay’s cooking is its restraint, not only in flavor (which engages and tempts the palate but does not overwhelm it) but in portion servings as well. On both occasions I’ve dined at Ramsay’s restaurant in New York, I wasn’t left wanting more, but on the other hand I didn’t have a feeling of overindulgence either. The key to Ramsay’s sensitivity is in his measure of quiet, modest excellence. Similarly, because eating is as much a visual as gustatory experience, the minimalist plating, with a careful eye to color, space and placement, provides just enough for the eye to see and doesn’t overwhelm the visual sense.

What we eat, and how we choose to eat it, tells us a great deal about our culture — as much as the plays it chooses to see and the music it chooses to listen to. Artists like Gordon Ramsay also can tell us through their creations about the world that presents itself to us: we are inclined and encouraged to be more demanding of our everyday experiences, not to take for granted the pleasures of eating and appetite. They provide, like dramatists, painters, poets and musicians, a new way of looking at the environment around us — and remind us that we cannot take that, either, for granted.

All photos from the Gordon Ramsay Web site here.

Cafe Katja’s triumphant return

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The redesigned Cafe Katja at 79 Orchard Street on New York’s Lower East Side.

It is a delight to report that Cafe Katja‘s reopening at 79 Orchard Street this past Wednesday was such a wonderful pleasure. Owners Erwin Schröttner and Andrew Chase have doubled the restaurant’s space without sacrificing the intimacy of the original; the redesign features attractive lighting fixtures, charming ceramic pieces along the walls, and a less crowded ambiance when at capacity. There’s aromatherapy too, from the new first-floor kitchen openly visible from the bar, wafting the scent of Central European-style food that was a mainstay of the original menu, which will be expanded bit by bit over the coming weeks (to include — finally — schnitzel).

We are very glad indeed that Cafe Katja (especially with its wine list of Austrian whites and reds) has reopened to reveal a thoughtful, relaxing and attractive setting for a comfortable evening out. I originally wrote about Cafe Katja last June in the short essay below; The Lo-Down has more on the restaurant’s history and its expansion.

On those rare occasions when Marilyn and I find ourselves free of the children on a weekday evening, we’re lucky enough to have a wide choice of restaurants on the Lower East Side, but most of the time we end up at Cafe Katja at 79 Orchard Street. Katja is not quite an Austria-style cafe; in his review of the restaurant for The New York Times in 2007, Peter Meehan described it as a buschenschank: “Traditional buschenschanks spring up toward the end of the year in the south of Austria. (Nearer to Vienna they’re called heurigers.) They are places of simple eating and drinking, where farmers can sell as much of anything they’ve grown, raised, fermented, preserved or otherwise wrangled from their land before the government assesses taxes on it.”

Cafe Katja is certainly in the tradition: a neighborhood joint without pretension, with many items on the menu possessed of local origins, and the Austrian-ness of the restaurant is more in its intimacy and conviviality than in any attempt to replicate the setting of a Vienna cafe. It is one of the few bars in the neighborhood that lacks television or a jukebox, and I don’t think it can comfortably seat more than 25, at the bar and at the tables, at any one time. But it is warm, and pleasant, and (unfortunately for those who must stand in line to wait for tables) invites a long alcoholic, conversational stay.

The food is “Austrian-style” rather than an assertive imitation of the cuisine as well. There’s a fine selection of wurst, honestly the best selection I’ve come across outside of any German specialty restaurant, and I am often drawn to the fine cheese-stuffed krainer sausages and the delightful spätzle — neither too chewy or mushy — though on a splurge there are excellent Austrian meatballs as well. On our most recent visit Marilyn and I shared the aufschnitt-teller — cured meats served with crisp toast, with a dollop of liverwurst on the side — and a red cabbage salad large enough for two. The serving sizes and the character of the food were perfect for a warmish late-spring evening.

I am convinced that Central European red wines give Western European reds more than a run for their money, and the Cafe Katja’s wine list offers a magnificent selection of Austrian zweigelts and blaufrankisches and a long, tempting array of liqueurs and schnapps. On occasion there are also excellent Hungarian reds — very hard to come by, and when they appear on the menu, I am tempted to order up the whole case to drag the remainder home.

But the primary reason Marilyn and I keep returning is that it is very much a neighborhood watering hole, and unusually welcoming. The wait staff is, to a person, attentive and good-natured; owners Erwin Schröttner and Andrew Chase (who himself lives on the Lower East Side) can often be found in convivial conversation with patrons. This is what happens when a local business springs up in a local community and remains dedicated to serving it well.

Fortunately they will be able to serve more of it soon; in the next few months the cafe will complete an expansion into the storefront next door, and if all goes well none of the intimacy will be lost in the expansion. There is more about Cafe Katja in a recent issue of the print edition of another fine Lower East Side tradition, The Lo-Down (more about the expansion can be found in this 2011 post). Prost to the restaurant’s continued good health.

Top of the hops

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A view from the beer cave: Top Hops at 94 Orchard Street, Lower East Side

A view from the beer cave: Top Hops at 94 Orchard Street, Lower East Side

Those of us on the Lower East Side of New York for whom “the late Michael Jackson” will always refer to a Beer Hunter and never a Gloved One are enjoying Top Hops, a small beer emporium (there’s really no other word for it) that opened earlier this year  at 94 Orchard Street, just up the street from and a pleasant early stop before dinner at Cafe Katja.

Top Hops is the brainchild of Ted Kenny, a former beer salesman for Anheiser-Busch. The front of the space is a pleasant, dark and airy bar, behind which a large blackboard offers a list of the beers-on-tap for the day (with enough information to satisfy the taste of any beer enthusiast, including the date tapped, the last time the lines were cleaned, the alcohol content of any of the beers — a regularly updated list of beers on tap and in bottles is available here), and past the bar is a cave-like canyon lined on either side with refrigerators that hold hundreds of bottled beers from around the world.

A knowledgable bar staff is at the ready to offer suggestions based on your own preferences, but by and large you’ll be left alone to your private conversation in this comparatively quiet space. A big-screen TV tuned to ESPN is installed above the bar — perhaps an inevitable nod to the times, but not intrusive or invasive for all that. Top Hops is also an enthusiastic supporter of Lower East Side neighborhood businesses, offering a bar menu of appetizers from local purveyors such as the Essex Street Market’s Pain d’Avignon, Heritage Meats, Formaggio Essex, and Saxelby Cheesemongers.

After a few beers (at $6.50 a pint the price is on the high-moderate side, but the care with which the beer menu is chosen, and the attention paid to its proper storage, is worth the money), you’re also welcome to purchase growlers of any of the beers on tap or make up your own six-pack from the hundreds of bottled beers available for purchase.

Like The Lo-Down‘s food critic JP Bowersock, I also used to brew my own beer, learning along the way the secrets of malts and hops and getting something of a taste for the remarkable spectrum of beer styles and flavors. (Early on in my journalistic career I interviewed Michael Jackson himself at a Belgian beer-bar in Philadelphia — a lunchtime appointment that ran for a full six hours, at which we consumed more than enough of those fine beers for either of us.) It’s a pleasure to rediscover this enthusiasm again on the Lower East Side in the company of my wonderful wife and the congenial strangers (who don’t stay strangers long) both behind and in front of the bar.

Top Hops is only a few steps away from the F train’s Delancey Street stop.

Ah, beer — and how it has inspired Austrian avant-garde filmmakers as well. Back at Bard College, when I was taking courses in experimental film, I saw Peter Kubelka‘s 1958 Schwechater for the first time. Kubelka had been commissioned to film a commercial for the Austrian brewer — a commercial which, sadly, never aired. But it’s become a minor classic of avant-garde filmmaking; you can watch it below.

A little bit of Austrian gemütlichkeit on the Lower East Side

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Cafe Katja.

Cafe Katja.

On those rare occasions when Marilyn and I find ourselves free of the children on a weekday evening, we’re lucky enough to have a wide choice of restaurants on the Lower East Side, but most of the time we end up at Cafe Katja at 79 Orchard Street. Katja is not quite an Austria-style cafe; in his review of the restaurant for The New York Times in 2007, Peter Meehan described it as a buschenschank: “Traditional buschenschanks spring up toward the end of the year in the south of Austria. (Nearer to Vienna they’re called heurigers.) They are places of simple eating and drinking, where farmers can sell as much of anything they’ve grown, raised, fermented, preserved or otherwise wrangled from their land before the government assesses taxes on it.”

Cafe Katja is certainly in the tradition: a neighborhood joint without pretension, with many items on the menu possessed of local origins, and the Austrian-ness of the restaurant is more in its intimacy and conviviality than in any attempt to replicate the setting of a Vienna cafe. It is one of the few bars in the neighborhood that lacks television or a jukebox, and I don’t think it can comfortably seat more than 25, at the bar and at the tables, at any one time. But it is warm, and pleasant, and (unfortunately for those who must stand in line to wait for tables) invites a long alcoholic, conversational stay.

The food is “Austrian-style” rather than an assertive imitation of the cuisine as well. There’s a fine selection of wurst, honestly the best selection I’ve come across outside of any German specialty restaurant, and I am often drawn to the fine cheese-stuffed krainer sausages and the delightful spätzle — neither too chewy or mushy — though on a splurge there are excellent Austrian meatballs as well. On our most recent visit Marilyn and I shared the aufschnitt-teller — cured meats served with crisp toast, with a dollop of liverwurst on the side — and a red cabbage salad large enough for two. The serving sizes and the character of the food were perfect for a warmish late-spring evening.

I am convinced that Central European red wines give Western European reds more than a run for their money, and the Cafe Katja’s wine list offers a magnificent selection of Austrian zweigelts and blaufrankisches and a long, tempting array of liqueurs and schnapps. On occasion there are also excellent Hungarian reds — very hard to come by, and when they appear on the menu, I am tempted to order up the whole case to drag the remainder home.

But the primary reason Marilyn and I keep returning is that it is very much a neighborhood watering hole, and unusually welcoming. The wait staff is, to a person, attentive and good-natured; owners Erwin Schröttner and Andrew Chase (who himself lives on the Lower East Side) can often be found in convivial conversation with patrons. This is what happens when a local business springs up in a local community and remains dedicated to serving it well.

Fortunately they will be able to serve more of it soon; in the next few months the cafe will complete an expansion into the storefront next door, and if all goes well none of the intimacy will be lost in the expansion. There is more about Cafe Katja in a recent issue of the print edition of another fine Lower East Side tradition, The Lo-Down (more about the expansion can be found in this 2011 post). Prost to the restaurant’s continued good health.

From the archives: Gordon Ramsay at the London

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In today’s New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes about the restaurant experience as theatre, from the very privileged and expensive perspective of the chef’s table. Now that the second season of Master Chef has run its course (to me, Adrian was robbed — Marilyn was rooting for Christian, but that’s what makes a marriage interesting), I look back at a similar essay I wrote late last year. True, I had to do so from the restaurant itself rather than from the other side of the kitchen door. But it remains of interest. (To be fair, Arnold Wesker was way ahead of us in 1957. The Kitchen will be revived at London’s National Theatre beginning on 31 August.)

If contemporary theatre criticism looks for performance outside the four walls of the studio space or auditorium, it may be worthwhile to consider dining as performance. The restaurant is a unique site of artifice and, in better restaurants, elegance; if we are now to think of ourselves as “consumers” of an aesthetic experience, then why can’t gustatory consumption provide aesthetic experience as well? Certainly as theatre takes the quotidian elements of experience to render them something unique and meditative, the restaurant serves the necessary food to quell the inescapable appetite.

The restaurant meal as aesthetic experience, then, is as capable of providing a meditative and contemplative experience as theatre. I often mention elegance as a necessary component of the powerful theatre production, and certainly this is as valid in the restaurant experience. My wife Marilyn Nonken and I recently paid our second visit in as many years to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in New York, Gordon Ramsay at the London, and it too provided considerable food for thought. Ramsay is probably best known as the foul-mouthed, violently demanding ex-footballer on shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, and this is how most of his audience sees him. But most of this audience, I’m sure, does not have the opportunity to enter a Gordon Ramsay restaurant themselves (even though his restaurants may be found around the world — there’s even a “Gordon Ramsay Plane Food” restaurant in Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5). It is only there that the true theme of Ramsay’s television shows, and where they differ from Top Chef and Iron Chef, becomes apparent — they are not about Ramsay’s personality (however overpowering that is), but about the discipline, skill, collaboration and talent required to render the dining experience itself an aesthetic product. The dining experience is Ramsay’s true calling — and he is as much an artist here as Giacometti in painting, Howard Barker or Richard Foreman in theatre, and Morton Feldman in music.

Like theatre, there is the playing space (the restaurant itself) and backstage (the kitchen); a fine meal requires a clocklike efficiency between the two arenas. Gordon Ramsay at the London, under the supervision of chef de cuisine Markus Glocker and designed by David Collins in emerald and timber panels, presents a quiet spacious area for relaxation. The waitstaff, attentive but unobtrusive, performs on a thin tightrope between formality and the casual, wearing dark suits but not tuxedoes (the restaurant notes that the dress code for patrons is “smart, with jackets preferred for gentlemen, but not required”). They are personable and friendly, but not familiar, and there is much to be said about the elegance in their gestures themselves: wine is poured and dishes are served with quiet efficiency but a great deal of attention to the angle of the bottle and the way the wrist is turned, the precise ease with which the dishes are placed before the diner. (I know of theatre directors and performers who pay far less attention to the appearance and grace of their bodies as they perform.) It is also interesting to note that, during both my visits to the restaurant, not one cellphone or pager was heard to beep through the entire meal.

Indeed, at Gordon Ramsay at the London, the dining experience is one of intimacy within the high-ceilinged arena; despite the relatively small room, it is arranged so that each table continues to possess a quiet privacy. This is unlike Daniel Boulud’s Daniel, which with its multiple levels and dining areas renders the diners both spectators and spectacle, part of the scenery rather than a private individual (appropriate in a restaurant in which it may be important to see-and-be-seen), or Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50, which offers a more casual, diner-like Lower East Side atmosphere (appropriate for a Lower East Side restaurant).

Dining at a restaurant like Gordon Ramsay at the London is a leisurely experience; serving the seven-course tasting menu takes a little less than three hours. The role of time and rhythm in taking a meal is akin to the role they play in music: nothing rushed or fast, time enough to linger over the taste of a dish (or a sound or sequence of notes), to relish and contemplate it. Time and rhythm in another sense is key to the menu itself and the sequence of dishes and wines. For there is a rhythm to the tasting menu, make no mistake about that: beginning with a light amuse bouche (and a glass of champagne or sparkling wine), the meal progresses from lighter to heavier dishes, and similarly at Gordon Ramsay at the London these are accompanied by wines that progress from lighter whites to fuller reds. A tenderly sauteed slice of fois gras, its creaming density leavened with the provision of a brightly-sliced plum,  is followed by a single scallop accompanied by curried cauliflower, pressed mango and spiced chickpeas, and only then do the main dishes arrive: a turbot (amusingly presented; slicing into the center of the turbot, one is surprised by the right yellow of an organic egg yolk that pours from the fish) and, for me, lamb cooked to the precise definition of “medium,” pink in the center and growing progressively more done as towards the edges. (And here the reds are served.)  And a decrescendo follows in the form of first a pre-dessert in the form of a light lime sorbet and then a final dessert, for me of a light Concord grape cream and yogurt sorbet.

It is essential to note that Ramsay’s form of French cooking partakes of that most generous trait of any good host: entertainment just to the point of satiety and not beyond. There are times at even the best restaurants when you can have too much of a good thing (this was my experience at Daniel and, more especially, at WD-50). What is most poetic about Ramsay’s cooking is its restraint, not only in flavor (which engages and tempts the palate but does not excite it to excess) but in portion servings as well. On both occasions I’ve dined at Ramsay’s restaurant in New York, I wasn’t left wanting more, but on the other hand I didn’t have a feeling of overindulgence either. The key to Ramsay’s sensitivity is in his measure of quiet, modest excellence. Similarly, because eating is as much a visual as gustatory experience, the minimalist plating, with a careful eye to color, space and placement, provides just enough for the eye to see and doesn’t overwhelm the visual sense.

What we eat, and how we choose to eat it, tells us a great deal about our culture — as much as the plays it chooses to see and the music it chooses to listen to. Artists like Gordon Ramsay also can tell us through their creations about the world that presents itself to us: we are inclined and encouraged to be more demanding of our everyday experiences, not to take for granted the pleasures of eating and appetite. They provide, like dramatists, painters, poets and musicians, a new way of looking at the environment around us — and remind us that we cannot take that, either, for granted.

All photos from the Gordon Ramsay Web site here.