Yōshoku boomerang; how to roast a chicken; adieu to Trois Mec
Brenner Report #4
Happy Monday!
Last month, circumstances collided in my imagination and my kitchen, causing me to develop a fascination with an unlikely dish: Japanese potato salad. Partly it was because the pandemic had me craving potatoes (comfort carbs) and therefore potato salad in general was top-of-mind. Potatoes are cheap and plentiful (even the organic ones I insist on buying), and though normally I reserve them for special occasions because their lofty spot on the glycemic index makes them fattening (so I’ve read), indulging in them during the pandemic seemed a harmless enough pursuit.
As I ran through potato salad possibilities in my head, I remembered a wonderful Japanese spud salad I had enjoyed pre-pandemic, at a newish Dallas ramen-and-yakitori spot, Salaryman, from chef Justin Holt. Also, I was working on a review of a Japanese cookbook, Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, which includes a delightful recipe for Potato Salada.
Hmm. I suppose I had never really thought about the fact that Japanese potato salad is a thing. Hard to say exactly what distinguishes it from other potato salads, except that it often has cucumbers and/or carrots and/or green beans in it and it’s dressed with Japanese mayo.
My son Wylie, a recent college graduate who minored in Japanese and spent a semester in Japan, explained to me why it’s called potato salada in that language. The phrase “potato salada” is an example of gairaigo — Japanese words based on a foreign language, generally western; “borrowed words.” When you hear them, they sound Japanese, but you can see their Western, often American, roots. Hambagu or hanbaagaa (hamburger) is another.
That led to a conversation about yōshoku: Japanese dishes that were originally imports, often from the West (as distinguished from washoku, traditional Japanese cooking). Their names are often gairaigo. Like korokke (from the French croquette). Or kareraisu, (curry rice from India by way of Britain). Or sandoitchi — sando, for short.
Unless you’ve been hibernating much longer than Covid-19 has been with us, you know that sandos have been a huge food trend stateside in recent years. The trend actually represents a giant culinary boomerang.
Evolution of the sando
The creation of what we call a sandwich is usually attributed to the fourth Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu. The 18th-century British statesman (and notorious gambler) didn’t think it up out of the blue, however; according to the Food Timeline, he had been inspired by pita canapés served as mezze during his trips to the Eastern Mediterranean to ask his cook for a way to eat while he continued gambling. Sliced meat between two pieces of toast was the answer, and it took off. The invention of packaged, sliced white bread in early 20th-century America was a boon to the sandwich, which made its way to Japan, where yummy-looking egg salad and other sandoitchi on fluffy white milk bread can be found, cut in half, smartly packaged cut-side up and sold in convenience stores — konbini (another gairaigo).
Sometime around 2014 (according to a 2018 Eater article) is when chefs in Tokyo began wowing diners with dramatic sandos filled with wagyu katsu — luxury marbled beef fried up like a pork cutlet, impressive looking when cut in half.
Chefs in L.A., Washington, D.C. and New York brought the trend, cutened up and made Instagram-snappy, here in 2017; both luxury wagyu katsu sandos and democratic egg salad sandos started trending wildly. The apogee, of course, was Bon Appétit naming L.A.’s Konbi — an Echo Park sando shop — Restaurant of the Year in 2019.
The trend made its way around the country; Dallas, for instance, has had them for about half a year, and now they are suddenly exploding, with a new “Instagram-mobbing, online-order-only, curbside-pickup Japanese sandwich sensation,” as D Magazine’s dining critic Eve Hill-Agnus calls Sandoitchi.
And in case you’re wondering whether L.A. is over the sando craze? Not yet! On Friday Daniel Son, who first launched his katsu sando pop-up within his West Hollywood sushi restaurant Kura in the fall of 2017, debuted a take-out and delivery sando spot in Chinatown.
Doesn’t it seem inevitable that a potato salada trend will be nipping at sando’s heels? Sounds like the perfect pandemic box lunch.
Meanwhile, in the context of our national conversation about cultural appropriation in cooking and our uneasy relationship with the idea of fusion, I think there’s something valuable to be soaked up in the sando-boomerang phenom. Culinary evolution has always been about the migration of food trends — otherwise known as fusion. Without the 13th-century Moorish cooks on the Iberian peninsula who thought about dredging a piece of fish in flour and eggs and frying it, as Charles Perry wrote in one of my favorite stories from my years at the L.A. Times, we might not have Baja-style fish tacos. Sixteenth-century Portuguese traders brought the fried-fish idea to Japan, where it was adopted as tempura, and in the 1920s, Japanese fishermen who were brought to Ensenada, Mexico to teach fishing and diving techniques, also brought their tempura. It fused with a tortilla, and the rest is food history.
Related: “Flavor of the Week: Japan’s Soft and Fluffy Milk Bread,” Nation’s Restaurant News, July 13
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The sky is falling
With so much comfort to be taken in things we know we can rely on, it is probably not the moment to hear that everything we think we know about roasting a chicken is wrong. Yet that is what Bill Buford is telling us in The New Yorker. Seriously, Bill? Do you really need to shake my chicken world at a time like this?!
Now, because I can’t just let something like this go, I’m going to have to poach an entire chicken until it’s almost cooked, and then finish it, “as fleetingly as possible,” in a hot oven or on a rotisserie.
To tell the truth, I was ready to dismiss Buford’s counsel, until I got to the part stating it’s the preferred method of Antoine Westermann, proprietor of Le Coq Rico — the Paris restaurant that makes some of the best chicken in the universe. There the rotisserie is king.
Weirdly, I’d had a Cuisinart TOB-200N Rotisserie Convection Toaster Oven saved for later in my Amazon queue. Part of my perpetual annoyance that we can send a man to Mars but we can’t make a decent two-slice toaster. Yep, I pulled the trigger — into the shopping cart it went, expected on my doorstep today. Will report back.
La fin des haricots
So very sad to report that chef Ludo Lefebvre has permenantly closed Trois Mec, the Los Angeles restaurant he opened with Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo on Highland Ave. in 2013, and which last year was awarded a Michelin star. With only four tables and eight seats at the bar, it was just impossible to make it work in a social-distancing context, Lefebvre wrote on his Instagram feed on Saturday. “COVID-19 has changed everything and there is still such an unknown period ahead of us. I had to accept the reality that it was time to let the idea of reopening Trois Mec go.”
Lefebvre’s wife and business partner Krissy Lefebvre told the L.A. Times’ Garret Snyder that they’ll continue to let José Andrés use the Trois Mec space as a resource for World Central Kitchen.
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What’s been cooking
Wrapped up my review of Falastin, Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s outstanding cookbook celebrating the foods and people of Palestine. It is filled with well crafted, deeply delicious recipes — the rare kind that bring a talented chef’s inimitable flair but that are easily achieved and actually work. Several are included with the review.
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Happy corn season! In an inspired spread in his cookbook Vegetables Unleashed José Andrés shares a trick for microwaving two ears at a time: With the husks still on, put them in the microwave and zap them on high for 7 or 8 minutes. Pull ‘em out (they’re hot!) and cut the bottom quarter inch from the stalk end. Pick up one by the top of the husk, and the ear falls out pretty cleanly, perfectly cooked and sweet. Andrés suggests slathering and sprinkling with one of four combos. Per his instructions, I smushed together two tablespoons of room-temperature unsalted butter and a tablespoon of white miso to slather those two ears. Next combined half a tablespoon of furikake (Japanese seasoning mix) and 1/8 teaspoon togarashi (dried Japanese red chile) for the sprinkle. Ususally I go for naked corn, but this was pure luxury.
Worth reading
• “Danny Meyer’s Restaurants Will End their No-Tipping Policy,” The New York Times reported last Monday. “We don’t know how often people will be eating out, we don’t know what they are going to be willing to pay,” Meyer told Julia Moskin. “We do know that guests want to tip generously right now.”
• “James Beard Employees Demand More Diversity in Leadership, Salary Transparency in Internal Letter” — Elazar Sontag tells the story on Eater.
• “Uniquely Japanese Food” from One Table, One World on Medium — insight on some dishes you might not know about. (I’ve had shirako — cod sperm sac — exactly twice in my life; once at Kikunoi, the famous over-a-century-old kaiseki restaurant in Kyoto, and once at Tei-An, Teiichi Sakurai’s extraordinary soba restaurant in Dallas. In case you thought Dallas was a culinary backwater.)
• “Is Monday the Worst Day of the Week to Eat Out at a Sushi Restaurant?” by Kaz Matsune, who busts the fresh-is-best sushi myth on Medium.
• “La Caridad 78, a Beloved Chinese-Cuban Restaurant, Closes,” reports Florence Fabricant at The New York Times. This one really got to me; I used to love going there 30 years ago.
• Alicia Kennedy launched a new newsletter just this morning, “On Vegetables.” Her writing is so good.
That’s it for now. Thank you for reading. Please share your thoughts about anything in this post! (And of course I would be super grateful if you’d share this newsletter with someone who you think would like it — or on social media. Growing my subscriber list will help me keep this thing alive!)
Have a good week. Stay safe, and help keep others safe: Wear your mask.