Sizzle - Spring 2012

what are your feelings about art and nature? jb: I love the aesthetics of plating because there is no fun in it if it’s not beautiful. You want to give your diners the “wow” factor as a way to express yourself, not to say, “I’m an artist.” You make it beautiful and then it’s gone, but that doesn’t make me angry or sad, it only makes me want to make something else even more beautiful.

As for nature, if I could forage in my backyard, I would. Instead, I have beautiful work foraged by others shipped in. There’s a guy called Running Squirrel out of Oregon who forages nettles and Miner’s lettuce and wood sorrel. My purveyor will call me up and say, “Running Squirrel has fresh spruce tips, do you want them?” I want everything I can get my hands on. We used his spruce tips in a dish of matsutake mushrooms and uni, toasted barley and grapefruit with a soymilk sauce with spruce oil and spruce vinegar. I’ve also used them in an amuse-bouche of grapefruit sorbet with spruce simple syrup garnished with spruce salt.

I’m a city boy who finds beauty in the idea of being a farmer and picking your food directly. I know if I grew my own food it would make me want to cook better.

describe your seasonal salad with edible “soil.” jb: The soil is a mixture of dehydrated black olives, ground pine nuts, cocoa powder, leek ash, butter, olive oil and salt, all of which is then baked off. The salad has a

quenelle of tomato sorbet, plus baby tomatoes, rolled-up squash, fresh goat’s milk ricotta cheese, eggplant chutney and thinly sliced chargrilled sourdough baguette, so the whole thing has a rustic bread/ tomato/ricotta feel. To make the squash-bloom chip, we put the squash in a Cryovac bag where it becomes infused with glucose and water. Then, we lay it out on a Silpat tray and cook it in the oven at low heat until it crisps. We garnish it with flowering basil and arugula varieties.

what is it like working in an upscale restaurant in these times of economic disparity? jb: Cooking is a blue-collar job. There is such a gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. I think it sucks. As a cook, you’re in the 99 percent. But for me, I also get the people who come to the restaurant for Valentine’s Day or for their engagement. When someone tells the wait staff that they’re a cook, I know they have saved up for three weeks or a month for this meal, and I definitely want to go all out for them and give them something amazing.

I am happy with what I do. I am not hungry for money. I’m hungry for what I don’t know. I want my own little 25- to 30-seat restaurant someday, where, day in and day out, I will be cooking beautiful food that can stand the test of time.

Ethel Hammer is a writer, lecturer and cartoonist based in Chicago.

take his advice It wasn’t long ago that Justin Bogle, executive chef at Gilt in New York, was in culinary school himself. Here’s his advice for students today: “Keep your head down, your knives sharp, your mouth shut, pay attention and read cookbooks,” he says.