Word: chefs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...results are often so tempting that even Julia Child, the reigning resident French chef, is being swept up in the tide of Americana. Says Child of a resent experiment with corn-bread sticks: "Well, they're just delicious. I also did abalone burgers, and I use soy sauce now, which I never used to. Also Chinese black beans, Tabasco sauce and an occasional chili pepper. It has freed me." As American chefs begin to surpass French counterparts as status symbols, many restaurateurs snap up baby-faced graduates such professional cooking schools as the Culinary Institute of America (C.I.A.) Hyde Park...
...most of these graduates, eclectic a key word. It certainly applies to the food served at Miss Ruby's Café, which opened late last year in Manhattan. Says Ruth Bronz, the Texas-born owner-chef: "I plan menu changes on a regular basis, switching from Cajun-Creole to New Mexican to Shaker. I'm missionary about it." Shaker food, along with the fare of the Pennsylvania Dutch and the American Indians, has already packed them in at special festivals in the formal American Harvest restaurant at Manhattan's Vista International Hotel. And surely eclectic the word for the menu...
Undoubtedly one of the most decisive influences on America's professional cooks was France's nouvelle cuisine, word of which reached this country about 20 years ago. Two messages registered seismic waves. The first was that the chefs were no longer servants but stars, an idea that inspired new talent to take up the profession. Not only did young people gravitate to cooking, but many who had trained for other careers switched. Says Wine: "It used to be that parents proudly said, 'my son the doctor' or 'my son the lawyer.' Now my father says, 'my son the chef...
...second message was that anything goes; the ironclad, oppressive dos and don'ts of classic cooking vanished. French chefs reached out to the Orient for ingredients and preparations and broke all the rules. Suddenly, creative minds went to work, often overzealously. "I don't want to be like everyone else," says Bradley Ogden, the 32-year-old chef who performs diligently if unevenly at San Francisco's Campton Place Hotel, proving that individuality itself is not the prize...
...realized that native dishes had to be re-created in larger-than-life versions to command top dollar. Says Baum: "Above a certain price, the public wants to see evidence of skill, and dishes they do not think they can make at home." Adds Barbara Clifford, the Texas-born chef partner in Manhattan's Yellow Rose Cafe: "My mother made home-fried potatoes swimming in oil. That's a little too down-home...