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Haute cuisine
WBN09 - Dine - Haute cuisine
Haute cuisine
More than just fine food
A fine meal is more than just food. Every element of the experience, from the murmur of conversation and clink of glasses to the play of your fingertips across fine linen, plays its part in creating a feast for all the senses. And the cumulative effect should be overwhelming, say haute cuisine chefs. Many of them think of what they do as theatre, designed to whisk their guests away to a fantasy realm from the moment they set foot in the restaurant.
Visitors to Café Martinique, located in Marina Village on Paradise Island, enter the bar and dining area from a vintage bird-cage elevator to be met by live piano music and exotic floral arrangements (changed Wednesday, refreshed every Saturday).
Every aspect of the meal is calculated to foster a sense of luxury from a bygone age. The chairs combine the solidity of thrones with the comfort of sofas, the napkins feel as thick as duvets and whenever anyone takes a sip of Bordeaux, it is from a $100 Riedel wineglass. The wines themselves are spectacular, ranging up to a $15,000 Chateaux Margaux. “A great cellar goes without saying for a great restaurant,” says Frederic Demers, Martinique’s Montreal-born chef de cuisine.
Very Manhattan
Fine-dining these days does not have to be old-fashioned, however, or especially sedate. Just off the casino in Atlantis, the self-proclaimed “most expensive Nobu in the world” has its own brand of theatre, which vice-president and general manager of restaurant and bar operations Peter Lahr describes as “almost like a nightclub—an ultra-lounge selling fine food.” The windows are darkened, even though they overlook an impressive marina, and the music—“very Manhattan”—is turned up just high enough to make people speak over it and thus create a buzz. The service is also unique. “The idea is we don’t do courses,” says Lahr. “There’s always movement, something coming or going from the table. It’s like a dance.”
Conch goes ritzy
Where Nobu and Café Martinique are closer is in their philosophy of the food itself. When Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, founder of the Nobu chain, came to Nassau three years ago, he was dismayed to learn that many local ingredients do not lend themselves to classical Japanese cuisine. “It seems that warm-water fish do not make such good sashimi,” says Hisashi Eda, chef at Nobu Atlantis. “They come up too watery.”
Nobu-san experimented furiously until, after sampling a humble conch salad one day, he invented the cold conch shabu shabu, for which thin slices of the mollusc are dipped briefly in hot and then ice-cold water. His determination to create a menu that reflected its environment resulted in a totally unique dish. “It is only served here, and nowhere else in the world,” says Chef Hisashi.
Demers at Café Martinique thinks that this is a hallmark of all the best haute cuisine. “The French have a word that they more usually apply to wines,” he says. “It is terroir, meaning all the aspects of a place that contribute to the flavour of the grape. A meal should also show its terroir.” He uses local ingredients as much as possible and changes his menu four times a year to emphasize the seasonality of Bahamian produce.
The restaurant’s pastry chef, Stuart Tarff, produces a tartly refreshing souffle to illustrate the point, made with the little-known local soursop fruit and served only from late winter through late spring.
“Everything starts with the produce,” says Demers, a sentiment echoed exactly by Greg Curry, owner of Café Matisse on Bank Lane in downtown Nassau. “Often food can be overpresented,” says Curry. “We prefer simple quality, with an emphasis on traditional Milanese and northern Italian dishes.”
Although he experiments occasionally—risottos with red beets and minced lobster have been recent successes—Curry disdains too much originality in fine dining: “There’s no point doing something new just for the sake of doing it.” Demers broadly agrees, although he thinks that a top chef has to keep his eye on culinary fashion.
Organic and healthy
“Right now everything is about being natural, healthy and organic,” Demers says, “which fits well with the approach of the restaurant’s owner, Jean-Georges Vongerichten. He is very enthusiastic about Asian-Pacific flavours and reductions made with vegetables and no cream or butter.”
The craze for applying advanced scientific techniques to food preparation that has swept through European and American kitchens for the last decade leaves Demers less impressed. “It has its place,” he says, “but I’m not going crazy with it.”
A much more passionate convert to so-called “molecular gastronomy” is Joshua Campbell, chef at Graycliff on West Hill Street. The genteel 250-year-old mansion, with its vast, award-winning wine cellar and cigar makers, conceals a kitchen that’s like a laboratory, from which dishes are sometimes, literally, served in test tubes.
Here, among more traditional luxury fare, foams and candy-flosses boasting unexpected flavours share the menu with purees that have been “spherified”—given the shape and pop-on-the-palate texture of caviar. Campbell admits that in the past “people have looked at me like I’m crazy.” He insists, however, that although he will go to great lengths to surprise diners, “the ‘wow’ effect doesn’t come before doing things properly.”
At the opposite pole of haute cuisine, Ronny Deryckere of Sun and... says, “I don’t believe in surprising people anymore.
“If someone wants me to prepare something special, I ask them very carefully what they do and don’t like, so I can be sure to satisfy them.” When Deryckere came to Nassau from his native Belgium in 1966, he was amazed by how much the local flavours reminded him of northern Africa—“and a little of southern France.”
Using these affinities, he was able to bring the techniques of fine French cookery to Bahamian ingredients, developing signature dishes such as a mouthwateringly succulent conch souffle.
Whether serving a simple, perfectly cooked, perfectly fresh grouper, as Deryckere loves to do, or using cutting-edge technology, as Campbell does to turn freshly picked melons into caviar, the finest chefs agree: the best cooking is always rooted in a sense of place … before it jumps off into a world of fantasy.
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