table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Extreme Dining and Copyrighted Food

(April 5, 2007)  Three years ago we dined at the legendary Roxanne’s, the nation’s most talked - about vegan shrine, in Larkspur. The creation of a dot-com millionaire and his new wife, a glamorous and innovative chef, it was the first elegant “raw foods” restaurant. Nothing at Roxanne’s was heated to more than 118 degrees F. This meant that everything had to be prepared in a way completely different from traditional methods.

It was not, however, some kind of “return to nature” - on the contrary, they used the most sophisticated techniques known: ingredients blended at aerospace speeds, made into froths and pastes, then dried and reconstituted (as sheets of flatbread or tortillas, for example), with ingredients as rare and costly as imported threads of baby coconut sprouts. The owners purchased several hundred thousand dollars of industrial processors and ovens, some of them invented specific to their needs. And there was a large and skilled kitchen staff, because raw food at the highest level is the very definition of “labor intensive.” Highlights from that evening’s menu:

Crab and passion fruit. Photo courtesy of Homaro Cantu, chef/owner of Moto.

GALLERY >

Coconut green curry soup with avocado, and red chili and green curry oils - a magical blend of coconut milk and avocado, the red and deep green swirls contrasting in flavor, color and texture

Daikon radish ravioli with braising greens, shitake and miso vinaigrette - translucent slices of marinated radish with a savory, almost meaty filling

Zucchini cannelloni - the “pasta” of the cannelloni being paper-thin slices of zucchini marinated in saffron oil, filled with spinach, dried tomato and pesto, drizzled with balsamic reduction

Little gem Caesar salad - a stunning version, with a faux-Parmesan cheese made from dried pine nut paste, and fermented seaweed in place of anchovies

While Roxanne’s was certainly an extraordinary experience (it closed the following month, after losing money for three years), it was by no means at the cutting edge of the culinary avant garde. Since the success of The French Laundry in Yountville, the “product-garnish-sauce” hierarchy has been disappearing in many high-end restaurants.

Since the mid ‘90s, El Bulli, in rural Spain, has been experimenting with food technology, and it is regarded by knowledgeable chefs and writers as the world’s best restaurant. Its chef, Ferran Adria, has stated his intention “to provide unexpected contrasts of flavor, temperature and texture. Nothing is what it seems. The idea is to provoke, surprise and delight the diner … Taste is not the only sense that can be stimulated: Touch can also be played with (contrasts of temperatures and textures), as well as smell and sight (colors, shapes, trompe l’oeil, etc.), whereby the five senses become one.”

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE