T   H   E       M   I   D   I       L   I   F   E

Strip away their truffle oil and calamari rings, and Mediterranean restaurants are just glorified pizza parlors. BY PATRIC KUH there was always a knowingly innocent quality about the American appetite. It was like a beautiful girl walking down a Roman street who would at least smile at all the propositions. But she smelled of Ivory soap. At heart she was wholesome. One day a stubbly-faced Mediterranean sailor said the right words to her. "Basil," he whispered. "Sundried," he murmured. They've been inseparable ever since. We took to Mediterranean food because, in a very roundabout way, it was very American. It said what we wanted to say about ourselves. It wasn't what the establishment ate; it was what peasants ate. It meant we were over dishes named after French nobility. It meant we didn't need a maitre d' in a suit leading us to our table, and we didn't want the army of puree-pressing peons that made up a classic French brigade working in the background. Today, the word that one most often hears in Mediterranean restaurants is "wood fired." It has all the allusive connotations that a smattering of French words used to have when they ruled over menus. Dip a toe into the wood-fired world and you find yourself in a rip-tide of high-end merchandising: rustic, Tuscan, Napa, mist on the vines. Looking for an exit? Too late. You're only going to get more. Food stylists love this world. It's fresh and it's colorful. Its only problem is for the young cooks who come out of culinary schools, get their first jobs in these restaurants and think that it's cooking. I once worked at a small hotel in Burgundy which had one of the only 20 or so restaurants in France given a three-star rating by the Michelin Guide. One morning, while we were prepping for the lunch service, a call came down from room service for an order of ham and eggs. This was a rare request — most guests were happy with the continental breakfast that the hotel provided. "Kuh," the chef said from his office, "do them." I was frozen in fear. Ham and eggs, I knew. But not in a Michelin three-star. I started dicing thin triangles of ham. I envisioned it cascading over the eggs. The chef had seen enough. He ran out of the office, cut a thin slice of ham, threw it in a pan and broke two eggs into another. When they were cooked he slid them on the ham and slid the ham on a plate and put it on a waiting tray. "Allez," he said brushing his hands, "done." I got the message loud and clear: In French kitchens technique comes before originality, way before. In the United States there is not that strict tradition. When it comes to cooking techniques we are Home Alone. A young restaurateur giving me a tour of his kitchen once said to me, "Maybe you're the sort of person that keeps cubes of demiglace in your freezer but I'm not." I'm not either, but I should have said something. I should have come to the defense of the demiglace. The faithful standby of every saucier. The slowly reduced and constantly skimmed essence of veal stock that gives backbone to a sauce and character to a reduction. But what could I say to this man? He didn't have sauces in his restaurant. He hardly had stocks. He did have one of the most popular Mediterranean restaurants in the country. I could have been mean. I could have said that flipping radicchio on a grill is not all that different than flipping burgers. But I didn't want to discredit the obvious enthusiasm of the people I could see working at their stations. I had to ask myself if I was just being a culinary snob. The restaurant was booked for weeks. There were cases of baby artichokes for fritto misto lined high in the corridor. One person was cleaning 40 pounds of tuna for the grill. One young man was making a tub of Romesco sauce. Herein lay my objection. Putting all the ingredients of a sauce into an industrial-size blender does not a saucier make. Watching him work I couldn't help thinking of some of the men I'd seen work sauce stations in France. They were proud of the way they browned bones, proud of their stocks, most of all, proud of their touch, and I could only wonder if in a world of Mediterranean restaurants, sauce making, and the subtlety it represents, wasn't a dying art. Next time you're in one of these Mediterranean palaces have a look at the mise en place in front of the pizza makers. It won't look anything like your neighborhood pizza joint, with its buckets of pre-grated cheese and tomato sauce. But they're selling slices and not offering bottles of hundred-dollar wine on their wine list. Here, you will see cooked onions, blanched asparagus tips, smoked salmon, fresh calamari, basil, sage and truffle oil, all ready to go when an order comes in. It's a cooking of assembly, not of synthesis. Sound familiar? That's fast-food philosophy. That's the Big Mac. We've come full circle.

A   R   C   H   I   V   E   S

Bookmark: http://www.salon1999.com/weekly/slash.html