When Foodies Unite

[May 19th, 2004] James Beard considered fresh, local foodstuffs a birthright and fundamental to good eating. "The triumph of cooking," he wrote," is to be able to produce the simple things so that they taste as they were meant to."

The big chef might have enjoyed the delicious irony that the celebration in his name takes place in a town where fresh and local usually means Chinese takeout from the place on the corner, and a $500 tasting menu is considered the triumph of cooking. The 2004 James Beard Foundation Awards filled a handful of Manhattan nights with congratulatory talk, well-dressed people, free-flowing Champagne, and, of course, food.

While some of that food might've fallen short of Beard's triumphant standard, it probably wouldn't have kept him from enjoying it. "He loved to eat," Beard's childhood friend Mary Hamblett once told me, "plain food, fancy food, anything as long as it was good."

Well, so do I. I went to New York because I'd been nominated for a food writing award, but I planned some serious eating, too, as the event promised plenty of opportunities to sample the wares of name-brand chefs.

The flavors of Latin America served as the overall theme for all the events, while at the journalism awards dinner the focus was narrowed to the Caribbean. Appetizers included hearts of palm wrapped in ham and coconut-beef carpaccio on crispy fried plantains. Cones of avocado ice cream flavored with chili probably seemed like a good idea, but the taste sent me looking for something to wash the flavor away. A shrimp-and-lobster cocktail with roasted tomato and pickled jalapeño did the trick, and the passionfruit gelée hidden at the bottom was a nice surprise.

Subsequent courses of guava-cured snapper and cumin-rubbed skirt steak were good, but the meringue served for dessert, a strangely tasteless mound of fluff in a chalky red-bean sauce, left me wishing for a banana.

Offering the most promise for cutting-edge food was the Chefs' Night Out party sponsored by Bon Appétit magazine at the new TimeWarner building. High-profile chefs Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Gray Kuntz and Thomas Keller run restaurants in what's basically a very high-priced food court in an equally upscale mall.

Kuntz, whose Cafe Kuntz is still under construction, made an effort with scallop ceviche, foie gras pâté, and Vietnamese-style lettuce-wrapped beef. Keller's Per Se, recently reopened after a nasty kitchen fire, took the clever but easy route with truffled popcorn. Very tasty, but disappointing given the hype.

The chef and restaurant awards gala, often called the "Oscars of the food world," seemed to stretch on at least as long. I slipped away and headed for the ballroom where the food was spread. Ahead of the crowd, I worked the scattered tables representing the work of nearly 40 guest chefs from across the Americas.

I tasted: salt cod pasteles with coconut sofrito, foie gras escabeche with mashed boniato and quince paste, arepa chips with chicken and avocado, yuca rellenos with scallops, Argentinian blood sausage, Brazilian feijoada, Columbia arepas, Oaxacan moles, two variations of Cuban whole roasted pig, Mexican cabrito flavored with achiote seed, and Peruvian potato cakes filled with freshwater prawns. All of this before small-plate gridlock set in.

This was seriously good food, but the best meals I ate in New York weren't part of the Beard festivities. To sample one of the most diverse collections of ethnic restaurants on the planet, I asked my online friends from eGullet, the food discussion website, to set up lunch somewhere in the city.

At Kang Suh, a midtown Korean restaurant, we ate dishes I'd never seen in Portland. Tteokbokki combines different-shaped rice cakes and noodles thick as your finger in a brick-red sauce spiked with the hot red-pepper paste called gochujang. The Korean version of the scallion pancake includes oysters and kim chee, the fiery pickled cabbage; yuke is raw beef mixed with Asian pear and more of the gochujang. We tossed thin slices of short rib on the table's built-in grill, than wrapped them in lettuce leaves with shredded scallion, a fermented bean paste called saemjang, and whole cloves of raw garlic.

I also ate with old friends in a little Brooklyn trattoria, Locanda Vini e Olii, that would fit in here at home. We ate fresh fava beans tossed with cubes of pecorino cheese and olive oil, Venetian-style fresh sardines in saor, and fresh pastas made with chestnut flour or flavored with wild dill. The use of seasonal produce in simple preparations that tasted "as they were meant to" reflected Beard's philosophy more than frozen avocado ever could. I felt like I was back home.