I like to cook. I even consider myself to be a good cook. I have a lot of friends who consider me to be a good cook. They say "You should open a restaurant!" or "You are a great chef." Lexicographic issues aside, I generally just shrug it off or say something about the fact that 85% of restaurants go out of business in their first year. In the back of my mind I do occasionally kick around the idea of throwing everything into the wind and going to culinary school or (after a few cocktails) dream of opening a restaurant - preferably somewhere tropical where I could drink more cocktails and live the easy life. Yeah, right, I don't think I have ever heard the life of a chef being equated with being easy. Inevitably, self doubt rears its head and I return to the real life only to have the thoughts crop up again.
Then I stumble across this brief
review of Momofuku Ko the extensively hyped new restaurant from David Chang. The review is what it claims to be, 'brief'. It does include the following, though: "
The second dish, the superstar of the restaurant, was a coddled egg with caviar, onion soubise, and tiny potato chips". A visit to the photos linked in the review, reveals one additional ingredient, parsley. Not just a sprinkling of parsley as other chefs or a home cook might do for a dash of color and maybe to brighten the taste but mainly just as a garnish, no, this is a pile of parsley. The parsley is clearly a major flavor component of the dish, it changes the whole flavor profile. This rocks my world of culinary dreams. Here you have 4 basic and pure ingredients that most people know the taste of: parsley, egg, caviar, and potato chips with a basic onion and cream sauce and yet it is the "superstar" dish of the hottest restaurant in NYC. Even worse, I, who claim to be a good cook, cannot even imagine what it would taste like. Who can conceive that these five elements combined in the right fashion and in the right ratios will make such a substantial culinary statement? It is this paying homage to ingredients in such a pure and raw fashion, knowing when just five ingredients are sufficient to convey what a chef is all about that makes a restaurant and a cook great. Everyone else is just playing around. This is serious stuff, the stuff that says "do NOT quit your day job."
More than anything it is that pile of parsley that blows my mind. That pile of parsley, an ingredient that likely appears in 50% of restaurant dishes, piled there bringing as much to the party as the caviar. My god, the pile of parsley.
