Slicing, dicing and posting
Drafted for the LATimes/2008
Joel Robuchon recently made news in the food blogosphere by doing what chefs have done since Al Gore invented the internet: complain about food bloggers. Judging by the latest trend, you can expect him to become one any day now.
MarioBatali, after all, went from lambasting to posting in less time than it takes to cure guanciale. These days the erstwhile Food Network celebrity maintains a rather prim blog at seriouseats.com while playing chef-gone-wild-in-Spain on a second one on his own web site, mariobatali.com.
And many other chefs are blazing paths into blogtopia even without trailing grudges. Laurent Gras, an Alain Ducasse protege whose best-known gig might have been at the Fifth Floor in San Francisco, is now blogging almost daily at l2o.typepad.com on the run-up to the opening of his own restaurant, in Chicago. In suburban Philadelphia, Alison Barshak at alisonatbluebell.wordpress.com is essentially producing a cyber-tutorial on designing, equipping and staffing a restaurant (who knew plates and saucers are, like hot dogs and buns, sold in mismatched amounts?)
Michael Laiskonis, the pastry chef at Le Bernardin in New York, started blogging (and phlogging) in January at michaellaiskonis.typepad.com, and his lengthy disquisitions on desserts and how he creates them are windows with photos into a wildly creative and contemplative mind. Then there is Mark Symon of Lola and Lolita in Cleveland, who is sharing his 15 minutes of fame as a “Next Iron Chef” winner by blogging exuberantly (and saltily) at symonsays.typepad.com, where the comments section will almost restore your faith in the food world. (What do readers want? Substance.)
Other chefs have latched onto the apron strings of established web sites — Traci des Jardins of Jardiniere in San Francisco and Rick Bayless of Topolabampo in Chicago both blog at epicurious.com. And untold others are adding blogs to their hyper-designed restaurant web sites, although you might want to get out a big bowl of sea salt before delving into them — the idea that a chef with 20 or more establishments is actually sitting down and typing strains credulity even in a world where “Top Chef” is sold as reality.
The idea of chefs adding a laptop to their kitchen arsenal is not Pacojet- new — Tamara Murphy of Brasa in Seattle made cyberwaves in 2006 by blogging in words and pictures on the short life and noble death of pigs she cooked — but the whole trend is a serious antidote to the flood of online treacle today. Rather than chattering about what they fed their boyfriends last night, or fuzzily photographing their latest batch of heart-shaped cookies, chefs tend to focus on the story behind the food, on the thought process that original cooking entails. And because they are hard-wired to be tool freaks, they treat digital photography as one step up from sous vide — first they master it, then they get competitive. (Laurent Gras proudly says the camera he used to photograph both a new food dehydrator and fresh sea urchin is the latest Leica. Which sells for $5,500 or more.)
Exhibit A on why food blogging will not be left to amateurs forever is ideasinfood.typepad.com, where Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot have built a following since 2004 by writing in detail on their experiments in flavor and composition.
The two have bounced around the country cooking and now work as personal chefs in New York, but they were made for new media, not to mention for molecular gastronomy. Their recent posts describe discoveries as over the top as the unlikely combination of tarragon and screw pine needles and as non-threatening as meat loaf, even when it is baked in a Bundt pan.
Their newly added videos are also prescriptions for curing all that ails so many cooking shows these days. One on how to make pistachio brittle is superb on the technique but also conveys the information that you might want to treat the end result as more than mere candy. And if you don’t lust after a hand-held digital thermometer by the end, you probably should be watching “Dinner Impossible.”
While Kamozawa and Talbot have been evolving, other chefs have been realizing how valuable a blog is to a traditional web site. Repeat traffic is virtual money in the bank to prove interest in a project or, to put it crudely: move product. Certainly it has been a way for Chris Cosentino at offalgood.com to beat the drums for his obsession with the nasty bits — recent posts have discussed “using fish guts” and “tuna spines.”
Among the other new actual blogs, l2o from Laurent Gras offers a little something for both Emeril wannabes and readers who are happy just to eat vicariously — anyone who wants to build an empire may be enthralled by the posts on the equipment he is buying, while anyone who just wants to sit down and virtually dig into a fascinating-sounding carrot-orange dessert will find visual gratification. But his post on brousse, a fresh cheese that can be made from the buttermilk left from churning fresh butter, is nearly at the Elizabeth David level of simultaneously educational and seductive.
Gras, who is married to a relatively well-known food blogger, says he writes and shoots everything himself, although a casual reader might wonder about his fascination with Christian Louboutin pumps the color of flaming red macarons. But Alison Barshak, in Blue Bell, Pa., admits her PR agent is helping her craft her long and smart posts on the search for the ideal chair, the most comfortable sound level, the right china to showcase her cooking, which puts seafood through unexpected paces.
The question of authorship and authenticity is a big one in the blogosphere, but in the chef realm maybe not so much. For the last two decades chefs have been cranking out endless cookbooks with collaborators if not ghostwriters; anyone who still believes Bobby Flay personally rhapsodized about his grandma and her green tomatoes has not been watching Rachael Ray. Presumably the cyber-stars are at least approving what is blogged in their names.
And in some cases, you have to think their genius might be in their personnel management, just as it is in their staffing of kitchens in far-flung restaurants. A blogger for hire who can hurl verbal bombs like Gordon Ramsay could be just as much in demand as one who can cross a high-schooler’s text message with Harold McGee and make it sound believable.
Consider the contrast between matthewtivy.wordpress.com and chefblog.marriott.com. The former was recently started by a New York City chef with a Provencal and a Japanese restaurant to his credit; on it he shows gauzy photographs of himself as a child and as a chef while posting recipes in the form of heartfelt cooking lessons on essential preparations such as beurre blanc. But the latter is as slick as a hotel brochure if much more entertaining (can anyone aside from Donald Rumsfeld ever resist a virtual trip to Paris?) The great battle of the internet may turn out to be between earnest and corporate.
Even if blogs do not totally eliminate the middleman, whether agent or collaborator, they do seem to liberate chefs. Which means the freewheeling style of cyberspace, where anyone can be a publisher, should be a great gift to internet surfers. A chef in the tiniest town in America can start a blog and make it as mesmerizing as the one by a young woman who adopted a baby coyote in Wyoming (dailycoyote.blogspot.com).
The trick, as always with the brave new virtual newsstand, will be getting it noticed. This revolution is not being indexed. . . .