Monthly Archives: March 2013

Food and Wine in Chicago? What an Amazing Surprise

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chez_panisse_crop380wI moved to Chicago in January 2009 from the San Francisco bay area (Berkeley to be precise) with the idea of trying something new and expecting to lose some of the things I had come to take for granted, namely, awesome food and tremendously good wine. After two months of living here I discovered that Chicago is actually a food destination city in its own right. In six months I had fallen in love with an amazing city (and an equally amazing woman).

Go Midwest Young Man

Just after my arrival, I set out on a quest to try a few of the extraordinary restaurants I had read about and I decided on Grant Achatz’s famed Alinea first. I am not here to write any reviews and I will gladly acknowledge that Alinea is a really special and memorable meal, but I have to admit that I was disappointed. I was disappointed because it was an event that I don’t really need to experience more than a couple of times in my lifetime. I was disappointed because one of the things I really love is spending a couple hours or more relaxing and talking over several courses of food and a few different glasses of wine with my friends and loved ones. A great restaurant for me is one that I can start a relationship with. A place I can go and know I will always get a wonderful meal. A place I can bring a couple bottles of wine that I can enjoy with my meal as well as share with the staff. A place I can develop a friendship with the people that work there.

The Good ol’ Days

I had that place when I lived in Berkeley, Ca. It was the venerable Chez Panisse. I ate upstairs in the café almost every single Monday for almost 5 years. I always brought a bottle of wine and dined alone half of the time. I could read a book and reflect over a leisurely dinner and then head home. Often times I would call the sommelier or the manager and asked if they felt like drinking any wine in particular. More than a few times I would bring 375 ml barrel samples of wine and seek the opinion of Jonathon the wine director.  It was something I expected not to find here in Chicago.

A New Place to Call Restaurant Home

After about a year of looking I found that restaurant in the Elysian Hotel, Ria (and its sister restaurant Balsan) when I met my dear friend Randy for dinner. I brought a bottle of chardonnay that I helped make and the 2001 Chateau Hosanna. As Randy and I got up to leave 3 hours later, I knew had found my new spot. It was my new go to restaurant and I looked forward to good wine, good food and catching up with the servers, bartenders, managers and, of course, the wine director. I called it dinner 3 or 4 times a month for about a year-and-a-half until Ria closed last May. It was a sad day for sure because I had to begin my quest for another restaurant I could call “mine”.

Let the Search Begin

So here I sit on a cold early spring day. My better half is out town and I really wish I had a new place where I can walk in and catch up with the staff, have a nice meal, a great bottle and a good read.

The 4 Wines that Changed Me

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There is always a beginning that starts a lifelong passion. That initial moment of being taken aback after having experienced something unimaginable for the first time. Sure there may be times when we step away from it for a short time, but we know that it will be with us for a lifetime.

Wine 1: Clubbed over the head2005-front

While I don’t recall the occasion or have any tasting notes I just remember that this was the glass that made me change the way I thought about wine. Sure I had lots of different wines but this was the first time I genuinely liked it enough to want another glass. It was the first wine that I thought was…well…good. That 1983 Chateau Cos d’ Estournel had me wanting to know why this was so much better than all the other wines I had ever tried. Within a week, I was subscribing to wine magazines and reading through the tasting notes for their reviews.

Wine 2: Deep pockets wine

The second wine was the 1984 Caymus Special Selection. It was a bottle  that I spent a small fortune on because it had received 98 points from the most widely read wine publication in America, Wine Spectator. I could taste, appreciate and understand the accolades. I started a modest but highly collectible California cabernet collection and began making friends who were into wine. It was all so perfect until wine #3.

Wine 3: A subtle surprise

The third wine epiphany happened while having dinner with a new friend (and future all-star wine maker) and a couple of his friends. I brought a bottle or two of high scoring California Cabernets and was eager to drink some until Thomas Brown handed me a glass of 1985 Armand Rousseau Gevrey-Chambertin Clos St Jacques. I distinctly remember putting my nose in the glass and then sitting down. I had never smelled anything so exotic, perfumey and pretty. I took a small taste and immediately accepted that this was a revelation. The flavors evolved and resonated. The world of red Burgundy had grabbed me by the neck and walked me over to sneer disdainfully at that bottle of Silver Oak sitting on the table. After that glass of wine, I never bought another cabernet from California to lay down for future consumption. I instead sold 6 or 7 cases of cabernet because I needed to explore the world of French pinot noir.

Wine 4: Close to the soul

Now we come to the fourth wine. It was one of the top-three greatest wines that I have had the pleasure of drinking. I have opened this wine a couple of times since that first encounter and the 1994 Zind Hmbrecht Pinot Gris Clos Windsbuhl Vendage Tardive has always been as good as I remember. I had sweet wines in the past but this wine has always been nothing short of of stunning. It has been 11 years since I first tasted this pinot gris but my memory is perfectly clear on this wine. A near perfect rendition of a late harvest wine that could comfortably last another 25 years. I am certain I will drink wines that will astound me, confuse me, bore me or simply disappoint me and that is essence and nature of passion. So, what were your four wines?

Intellectual Property and Food

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Kent School of Law

Close-up of the poster promoting the Gastro-Intellectual” panel.

About two weeks ago, we were given tickets by Ground Up Chicago to attend a panel at the Kent School of Law, hosted by the school’s intellectual property law society. Not sure what to expect (what, us have time to read?) We knew it was going to be a quality event when we checked in — lovely name badges, a bar and a really interesting gnoshing table.

Entering the lecture hall and taking a closer look at the program, it was such a wonderful surprise to see who was on the bill: Nick Kokonas of Alinea fame, Kevin Boehm of Boka, Thomas and Lori Leavitt from Ground Up Chicago, and Sendil Devadas from DuPont Pioneer. The moderator was Chris Buccafusco (a dead ringer for Joe Mantenga, if you ask me.) Buccafusco led a truly interesting discussion.

What we want to know about food

If the expectation was that the law students and lawyers in the room would jump on the poor fellow from Dow, the poor fellow from Dow was disappointed. When it comes to intellectual property and the food we eat, there are no more fascinating questions in our society today than who has the rights to seeds, and the moral and ethical questions that genetic engineering evoke, but the audience focused their sights on Kokonas and Boehm, asking quite a few questions about restaurants and recipes — and who can blame them? Kokonas and Boehm have amazing stories to tell.

Kokonas was asked a number of times about how he and Chef Grant Achatz react to people who steal Achatz’s recipes and techniques, and weather or not he felt the recipes should be copyrighted. “Good luck copying our recipes” remarked Kokonas, explaining that development cycles for Alinea recipes can sometimes take as long as two years. He explained that the restaurant has always had an “open source approach” and that, while they are sometimes imitated, they don’t often get litigious about it unless the infraction is completely overt.

Boehm was asked about Boka recipes being stolen, to which he replied, “as long as you attribute a recipe, it’s OK.” Later in the evening, someone asked, “when does a recipe become public domain,” and the rejoinder was mumbled, “when it hits Des Moines?”

Tip your hat to your local farmer

Farmers, it turns out, love the attention that attribution brings to their products, and the Ground Up team agreed that the idea of attributing local products on menus heightens awareness about the idea of “local”.

Consensus for the evening seemed to be that while a restaurant or a recipe could be “often imitated” it could rarely be duplicated — at least not to the extent that it would impact the bottom line for businesses like Alinea or Boka. “Being at our restaurants is an experience,” says Kokonas, who backed that up by noting, “I could give you an Alinea recipe and all the equipment you’d need to reproduce it in your kitchen, but it could never be quite the same as in our dining room.”

 

 

 

Love Affairs and One Night Stands with Wine

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mortetPeople who know me have often heard me wax poetic about the similarities between wine and dating. The analogy holds up in today’s world of high-alcohol and high-extraction wines. I used to taste 500-1000 wines a year and — like that first encounter with the opposite sex, I know from the initial taste/conversation whether or not I want to spend more time getting to know it/them better.

Wish they all could be California wines?

I would love to take credit for comparing wines to dating, but I must confess it was inspired by the late Denis Mortet who once shared with me about 12 years ago his obsession with pinot noir and how it reminded him of the romantic loves of his life. He described some of the great wines from California as “easy” and many of them as downright “whorish”. It is a wine conversation that I will never forget.

Fast-forward to Chicago about two years ago and a conversation I had with my friend and up-and-coming all-star sommelier Dan Pilkey (now at the just opened Boarding House). I brought a bottle of 2006 Molly Dooker “Velvet Glove”,  a wine that costs around $175, because Dan is the ONLY sommelier I can think of that does not lie about liking insanely high=alcohol wines with copious amounts of new oak.

I told Dan that this wine is the “high class hooker of wines”. It is ripe, forward and downright slutty. It is a great dinner companion that you might want to spend the night with, but you definitely would want to start a relationship it. The next week I brought some Burgundy — a bottle of 1999 Robert Chevillon Nuits St. George “les Cailles”. Dan opened the wine, decanted it and it was really, really good.

A woman of substance

Denis Mortet’s explanation of Burgundy goes something like this, “Great Burgundy is all things sexy and seductive, strong and lasting. Burgundies can be wines that a person will want to spend a lifetime getting to know.” We both agreed that as delicious as the Chevillon was, it was a wine we could date, but it certainly wasn’t marriage material, and with that, we raised a glass to Mortet.

 

Drink for Yourself!

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robert parker wine

Bryant Family label – loved by Parker, but do you love it?

Our palates are a curious thing. When it comes to food we trust it enough to opine. Almost all of us are able to sit and discuss new restaurants and old. Our favorite meals and least favorite.  We can go to work on Monday and tell our friends/co-workers about the fabulous meal we had at a critically acclaimed restaurant: “I started with the citrus salad that was topped poppy seed and crème fraiche dressing that was refreshing and delicious! We then shared the panko-crusted cod fritters and lemon aioli. They were a little salty but still good and the main course was braised short ribs with horseradish mashed potatoes. Oh my God they were SO good!”

Talk amongst yourselves

These kinds of conversations are not uncommon among people — they’re probably frequent if you are excited by food and food trends.

Now, allow me part of a conversation I had with man I know after he found out about my wine background. “Really, you were a wine maker? I had no idea,” he said, adding, “I’ve been into wine for 15 years. Have you had…”  You see where this is going. After a couple minutes of discussing wines we have had that were unique/good recently, he then says, “I just got three bottles of the 2007 Bryant Family Cabernet that Parker gave 97+ points. It is an awesome wine.” (This is a wine that sells for about $500 a bottle  so it had better be awesome.)

“But”,  I asked him, “Have you tasted the wine?” and the guy say “no.”

“How do you know it is awesome if you have not had it?” I asked.

The guy tilted his head a little and said “I know it will be delicious because Robert Parker gave it 97+ points.”

“What the hell man, you need to trust your palate!”

Like the wine that you like

I have helped make or made wines that Parker gave 95 and 98 points to, and while I think they are good wines I would rather drink something I really love. Just because a critic gives a wine a huge score doesn’t make it an awesome wine.

“Hold on a sec and let me explain,” I said to my friend, “I really respect the winemaking in Australia and I fully accept that Robert Parker loves these wines and gives them 95, 96, 97 points regularly because he trusts his palate. I also accept that these wines are really, really well made but here’s the thing: I don’t like American oak.”

As example, the 2005 Two Hands “My Hands” Shiraz that Parker gave 97-100 points to was aged for 38 months in new American wood. This, according to the Wine Advocate is a potentially perfect wine. But what if you’re someone who doesn’t like eggplant in any way shape or form and a food critic tells you that the best eggplant dish they have ever had is at restaurant X, you would never know because you don’t like eggplant.

So, this Two Hands shiraz might be the best shiraz that Parker has ever had but frankly, I would rather have a Foster’s Lager because I don’t like American oak!

This guy says to me “Yeah, I hear you but I know that Bryant Family will be awesome.”