Entries associated with the tag "Homaro Cantu":

Steve Rhodes, of the Beachwood Reporter, weighs in on D.T. Max's excellent New Yorker profile of Grant Achatz and his battle with tongue cancer:

The story also says something about Chicago and, perhaps, its bumbled rush to be seen as sophisticated and worthy. "Chicago prides itself on being a city with more daring restaurants than Manhattan," [Max writes]. "The city also has Moto, an Asian-inflected outpost of molecular gastronomy--and the home-town response was unequivocal. The Tribune exalted the very dishes that the Times suggested were contrived or showy, declaring the P. B. & J. opener 'comfort food fit for the Museum of Contemporary Art.'" Which suggests the locals didn't have the guts to say the whole thing is ridiculous for fear of coming off like hayseeds. But whatever. (To be fair, Gourmet did name Alinea the best restaurant in America in 1997.)

OR it suggests that Rhodes, like blinkered Second City sufferers across our fair city, automatically believes in the inherent authority of Frank Bruni and the New York Times over anything anyone in his "hayseed" town might argue. Never mind Bruni's well-documented bias toward the rustic and Italian (not that there's anything wrong with that!). And never mind that New York is hardly a stranger to the mysteries of sous-vide and nitrogen griddles. But most especially, never mind that "Chicago " is not the one in a "bumbled rush to be seen as sophisticated and worldly." "Chicago" did not force Food and Wine, Saveur, Gourmet, or any of the other national food rags to turn their attention to its exploding, innovative dining scene. The international food media has been falling all over itself for the last two years to cover Chicago--a fact easily obtainable, had Rhodes bothered to do any research--thanks to the ahead-of-the-pack convergence here of the two biggest trends of the 'aughts: locavorism and molecular gastronomy--or whatever you want to call it.

(Also, uh, Steve, Alinea wasn't open in 1997, as the NY'er makes clear. The Gourmet accolade came in 2006.)

Elsewhere in the piece Rhodes argues that high-end dining is "decadent and even immoral" given a global food crisis. This hardy perennial of a topic is more interesting, and one that, quite honestly, I'm all over the map on on any given day. (With reason: it might be noted, for example, that Moto's Homaro Cantu firmly believes that molecular gastronomy  can feed the world--in the form of nutrient-enhanced paper and whatnot. Check out this 2006 Fast Company profile for more on that.) But I do think that condemnations of fine dining on "moral" grounds spring from the same sort of reductive romanticization of cultural authenticity that valorizes the Waco Brothers over Beethoven or hip-hop over ballet. That the cultural product in question is food just makes it more complicated, because starving kids don't need music to survive--the closest analogy is actually probably to the fashion industry, which critics routinely disdain as frivolous and amoral (though those critics may well be clad in $12.99 sweatshop-spun Target tees . . . but I digress). The idea that food is a primary need and art and music are secondary luxuries--isn't that what defenders of school arts programs have been fighting against for years? In a diverse, cosmopolitan society isn't there room for both high and low culture, "dehydrated bacon wrapped in apple leather" and hot dogs? Would Rhodes have us seize the CSO's budget to fund the expansionist ambitions of the Empty Bottle?

I often find the excesses of the restaurant industry depressing and disturbing, but temples of mindless conspicuous consumption like Il Mulino are far scarier than a place like Alinea. Achatz is a visionary and an obsessive determined to explore the far frontiers of his chosen medium. If he was a painter, would anyone find that morally offensive?

Last week we received the press release about Joe DeVito, Adriana Carrasco, and Homaro Cantu's new restaurant Otom, the "moderately priced," baby brother to Moto, due to open in July. It said:

“While the name otom is a mirror image of moto, the food is not going to feature edible menus or liquid nitrogen,” says DeVito.  “No matter where you sit in the restaurant ­ at the bar or in the main dining room ­ there are no rules.  You get what you want!” 

I know. What in the wide world of Wylie Dufresne does that mean? Well, the publicist was kind enough to forward the menu, electronically, not lasered onto a tortilla or anything. So here it is. 

 
APPETIZERS

Braised trio of chicken leg, pork shoulder and beef short rib on a brioche  12
 
Hot wings, blue cheese and celery root puree                                               8
 
Vanilla prawn salad, creamy lemon dressing                                                     9
 
Romaine and goat cheese, white truffle vinaigrette                                     8
Seared hanger steak, hearts of palm and lime-soy vinaigrette                       9

Chicken soup, glass noodles and sweet Asian vegetables                       6
Aged Wisconsin cheddar grilled cheese with heirloom tomato                6

Seasonal fruits and cheese plate                                                                 15
 
 
ENTREES
 
Monk fish ravioli, wilted greens and brown butter                                            18
 
Whipped cream risotto with crab and basil                                                        20
 
Olive oil-poached salmon, fried noodles, blue foot mushrooms                    16
 
Seared snapper, leek confit and coconut rice                                                 16
 
Macaroni and cheese lasagna, smoked bacon and leeks                             14
 
Grilled New York strip and baby Yukon gold baked potatoes                   20
 
Lamb pot pie with cucumber yogurt                                                               14
 
Braised pork shoulder, beer-battered onion rings                                       20
 
Marinated chicken, sweet corn cream, home-style mashed potatoes        16
 
Braised beef short rib, cauliflower puree and baby carrots                        18

He may not be named Tramonto, Cantu, or Bowles, but Orlando Serrano, head decorator at Roeser's Bakery in in Humboldt Park, is the lastest local food pro to turn up on the Food Network schedule.

And, speaking of Cantu, apparently he's going to be on Ellen tonight. ???

Sunday night, 8 PM: it's the long-awaited TV showdown between Iron Chef Morimoto and Moto's Homaro Cantu.  And Cantu is victorious!--though you'd never know it from the loser's edit he was getting right up till the bitter end. Here's the recap:

After the requisite overblown pomp and silliness of the intro, Cantu steps onto the set, looking delightfully nerdy with his headset and a little LED sign hanging around his neck. Special-effects fog swirls around as the secret ingredient is announced: beets, presented on a bed of dry ice and green marbles.

Beet-snatching frenzy ensues.

Cantu and his two sous chefs, who look all of 24, are outfitted in matching green outfits, complete with green clogs (I think). They're all wearing headsets; the LEDs pinned to their lapels scroll "Courage + humility + respect" in an endless loop. Not clear to me what the advantage of this system over, say, some nametags and Magic Markers is, but whatever. They've brought with them a Class 4 laser, a printer loaded with edible ink, a digital camera, cellulose packing peanuts, a variety of syringes and pipettes, and a cooler of liquid nitrogen.

Over the next 40 minutes, Team Cantu creates a six-course meal that kicks off with a maki roll of beets, rice, and nori, wrapped in edible paper printed with photos of sushi and topped with one of Cantu's notorious copyright notices. This is served with "synthetic champagne" that the judges have to mix up themselves by adding stuff from a syringe to a flute of . . . some other stuff. They pronounce it good. Next up is a hot and cold soup wth three kinds of egg (cooked, raw, and some kind of frozen egg-and-beet nuggets) and oodles of bacon. Next is surf and turf--Hawaiian sea bass and beef tenderloin--prepared tableside in his trademark polymer box and served with noodles dressed with the leftover liquid. This also pronounced delicious, though judge Melissa Clark does ask, "Where's the beet?" I guess somebody had to say it.

Next comes a frozen sphere of beet--made by injecting a balloon with liquified beet, freezing it with the liquid nitrogen, and burning the balloon off with a baby blowtorch--over yogurt with a spike of yuzu. This appears to be an across-the-board winner. Host Alton Brown, who spends most of the show maying snarky comments about "science-fair" cooking and referring to the Cantu kitchen as "Planet Cantu," is practically apoplexic. (When Cantu whipped out the sea bass he exclaimed, with barely concealed scorn, "Finally, something I recognize as food!")

The first dessert is a smear of mascarpone topped with beets and served with squeezy tubes of vanilla bean, Mexican chocolate, and citrus to be squirted into directly into the mouth. This is followed by chocolate pudding topped with julienned beets and served with caramelized wonton (caramelized with the damn laser) and flavored packing peanuts in a spoon whose handle has been wrapped with a sprig of rosemary. This all comes with a photo of the three chefs toasting each other with some horchata-citrus cocktail that's printed on horchata-flavored paper. Judge Jeffrey Steingarten says he wants to market this as horchata chips. Best line of the evening, when asked what his inspiration is, Cantu replies, "Our inspiration is USB cables and personal computers. And the naturalness of beets."

Morimoto also works some serious magic with his beets--his colors are supersaturated and he has a leg up with his ingredients, which include fatty tuna, salmon, wagyu beef, and mackerel. (Because, really, no matter how you flavor them, cellulose packing peanuts are just nasty. And, yes, I have tried them.) Given this, his impressive knife-fu (turning the tuna into mousse in short order), and some gorgeous classical plating involving lots of shallow little wooden boxes, he seems like a shoo-in to me. Plus, Morimoto tips his hat just enough to the future--using liquid nitrogen himself to put a crunchy crust on scoops of gold beet ice cream and tie-dying his napkins with beet juice--that the whole thing isn't the test of purity and tradition versus crazy gadgetry it's been cast as. By halftime I'm sure Morimoto has it in the bag. Shows what I know.

I can only imagine that the Iron Chef effect has to be comparable to, if not worse than, the Check, Please! effect. Make your Moto reservations now.

* Another of Alton Brown's witticisms.