Chef Report

I went scavenging for a beer in my father’s fridge the other day and made a shocking discovery. The man had a free-range chicken sitting there, right next to the arugula. This is a man who grew up in small-town North Carolina thinking gizzards are gourmet, who even today takes his lunch to work in an empty bread bag (the same empty bread bag)–a lunch most often consisting of a half-gnawed pork chop and a biscuit pilfered from Mama Dip’s. But he knows his arugula from his radicchio. How did this happen?

You’ve got to wonder how professional chefs can compete when the gourmet food world is closing in on us. Weekly farmers’ markets throughout the Triangle boast heirloom tomatoes and just-stretched mozzarella; the local Teeter carries sashimi-grade tuna; you can’t drive five miles without running into an Asian or Hispanic specialty market; and we all know someone who can quote from Kitchen Confidential. Of course, the restaurants know we’re learning their secrets. So they up the ante. I’ll see your six-burner gas-top range and raise you a thousand-pound wood-burning grill. Hmm. With a warming drawer, you say? Well … how about this laboratory-grade water bath? Or some liquid nitrogen? Try that at home.

When every other kitchen in Brier Creek is installing a custom-color Wolf range, when your dad can sear a pork belly just as well as the next guy, why go out at all? (more….)

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.