A Vegas Wedding for China and Mexico, Under the Chef José Andrés
By GLENN COLLINS
International Herald Tribune

THE whole Peking duck problem is actually a paradox, José Andrés
explained amid the bedlam of the subterranean kitchen at Oyamel, his
Mexican restaurant here.

"If the skin is crispy, then the meat is dry," Mr. Andrés said. "But if
the meat is juicy? The skin is't crispy."

So, this playful master of avant-garde food was experimenting to
discover The Answer: taking the dish apart, then putting it back
together. "You have to change the structure of how it is done," he said.
Mr. Andrés, the 41-year-old Spanish chef known for his bold ideas and
commercial cunning, was brainstorming the menu for China Poblano, the $6
million Chinese-Mexican restaurant he is creating for the Cosmopolitan
of Las Vegas, a 50-story resort casino opening in mid-December.
And the challenges he faced weren't only technical, but also cultural.
"I am afraid of Chinese cooking, doing it authentically, that is," he
said. "So before I did a full Chinese restaurant, I thought I'd do one
that is half and half."

A steamer-rich kitchen - where chefs will be filling and folding
dumplings amid a swarm of woks - will greet customers across from a
separate team making fresh tortillas on comal griddles. At communal
tables diners will socialize over steaming bowls of Veracruz-style
chilpachole soup as well as mi-fen, the Taiwanese vermicelli. Fried
wontons will be pressed into service for guacamole-dipping. There will
be Chinese noodles and Mexican ceviche, 10 different tacos and 10 kinds
of noodles and dumplings.

It's being billed as a casual noodle-and-taco place with an average
check of $40, including beverage, but given its cost, and his passion,
Mr. Andrés calls it "a grand, beautiful, sexy fantasy." Patrons will
enter through a Buddha-ish cutout, under red lanterns, and segue past
images of Chairman Mao and Frida Kahlo.

But with their kitchen just a construction site, Mr. Andrés and his
creative crew recently put in a five-hour stint of China Poblano
research and development underneath Oyamel, where Michelle Obama has
said she likes both the menu and the margaritas.
"Creativity catches you when you're working - never when you're on the
beach," Mr. Andrés said, as Rubén García, his head of research and
development, used a fork to aerate the skin of a duck. "Einstein said as
much."

"For chefs who are creating," Mr. Andrés said, "the United States right
now is like no other place in history. The openness. The ferment. The
availability of ingredients. This is a good moment."

What might seem to be basic Chinese cooking is an intricate puzzle to
this proponent of new-wave gastronomy. He began as a cook at age 15 and
arrived in the United States less than two decades ago with little more
than his knives and a few dollars in his pocket. He had been a star
pupil of Ferran Adrià - the dean of experimental chefs - at El Bulli in
Roses, Spain. They are still so close that Mr. Andrés is often Mr.
Adrià's translator in the United States. Mr. Andrés now has seven Latin
and Mediterranean restaurants in Washington and Los Angeles, but this is
his first foray into Asia.

"We weren't planning to do Peking duck in China Poblano," Mr. Andrés
said. But in July in Beijing, when he was aided in his omnivorous
restaurant-research process by his wife, Patricia, and their three
daughters, he said: "I asked my 5-year-old, Lucia, what was her favorite
meal there. She said: Peking duck. I take children's comments very
seriously."

He sighed. "How can I not do this if my daughter says it is great?" he
said. "But, there are a lot of good Peking ducks around. What, then,
would our difference be? How could we make it great?"
And so, Mr. García was experimenting with taking the skin off the duck
and painting the skin with aromatic, dark Shanxi vinegar and malt sugar,
letting it dry while pressed with weights, then freezing it so it shrunk
minimally when it was roasted at 300 degrees for 30 to 45 minutes until
the skin became crunchy.

Meanwhile Joe Raffa, who is the head chef at Oyamel and is spearheading
the China Poblano project, was marinating duck breasts so that they
could be cooked at low temperature sous vide.

"I don't know that we'll call it Peking Duck," Mr. Andrés said. "But we
will be serving skin that is intense and crispy, breast that is
flavorful and juicy, and the bones of the duck will go to make a
beautiful soup. And we'll serve caramelized, crispy feet."

He paused. "If we do it," he said with a shrug. "We don't know if this
will make it onto the menu. This is something we are playing with."
Nearby, Mr. Raffa was testing marinated duck tongues. And the team is
considering a menu offering of only crisp duck skin - "duckless duck,"
as Mr. García put it - possibly with a dipping sauce of molasses and
piloncillo, Mexican unrefined sugar. Mr. Raffa has spent hours
perfecting the flour consistency for handmade, conelike kao lao lao
noodles, which will be presented in a bamboo steamer.

The test kitchen's version of the Mexican salsa pico de gallo is a
radically reconceived fantasy of carrot, cucumber, pineapple and jicama
tubes ready for dipping in a sauce of red Chinese vinegar, sesame oil
and ginger.

And Mr. Andrés is thinking about "the theater of hand-pulled noodles,"
he said, referring to the noodles kneaded so showily in restaurants in
Xian and Beijing.

Meanwhile, Rick Billings - Mr. Andrés's pastry chef, formerly of
L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York - was trying to refine a
goat-milk flan with the sweet milk syrup cajeta, cilantro and
caramelized pineapple cubes.

"I don't know if the pineapple works," Mr. Andrés said after a taste.
"Did you see 'The Lord of the Rings'? Precious! We are getting too
precious here! We need to go more low-key."

Soon, Mr. Billings was preparing a tres leches cake with lychee flavors.
"We're calling it Tres Lychees," he said.

John Unwin, the Cosmopolitan's chief executive, enlisted Mr. Andrés to
create an offshoot of Jaleo, the tapas-and-Spanish-classics restaurant
that opened 17 years ago in Washington. "But every casino has to have a
Chinese restaurant," Mr. Andrés said, "and I said that I'd been thinking
about creating one for a very long time."

He first tasted Chinese food in New York at age 19, as a seaman in the
Spanish Navy on the tall-ship Juan Sebastián de Elcano (where he once
scampered up ratlines at the masts). "We were near the piers on the West
Side," he said, "and we ordered takeout. We just sat down on the street.
And ate. Fantastic."

The restaurant's name is a play on China Poblana, the legendary slave
woman of Asian descent whose arrival in Mexico is supposed to have
inspired the stereotypical "china dress" of the 19th century. But in Mr.
Andrés's universe, the second "a" in poblana has segued to an "o" in
homage to the mild Puebla chili pepper.

Mr. Andrés finds much commonality in the two cultures, where the
tortilla isn't that unlike the pancake used to wrap Peking duck. But the
combination of Chinese and Latin food is as commonplace as the
flickering neon signs proclaiming "comidas Chinas y Latinas"
(Latin-American and Chinese dishes) at storefront Hispanic restaurants
in New York. "But this is a new path for me," Mr. Andrés said.
Not for Mexican cooks, though.

"There is a Chinese tradition in Mexico, and for a hundred years there
have been large Chinese populations in Baja," said Jeffrey Pilcher, a
professor of history at the University of Minnesota whose forthcoming
book, "Planet Taco," is a chronicle of the global spread of Mexican
food. And for centuries the Manila galleons sailed to Acapulco in New
Spain, "bringing silk and porcelain from China in return for silver, and
bringing in immigrants as well," he said.

Unlike Mr. Andrés's haute experiments at Minibar, his six-seat culinary
laboratory upstairs in his neuva Latina restaurant, Cafe Atlantico,
China Poblano will not be a showy demonstration of Chemistry 101.
"We'll use our techniques sparingly, only as necessary," he said, "not
as a gimmick, but because it makes things taste better."

But inevitably there will be gels, foams, airs and infusions. One such
touch is in the siu mai dumplings, little purses wrapped in thin-sliced
jicama (instead of Chinese rice noodle), filled with crab and mango,
cilantro and scallions. Placed atop each will be a small
membrane-encased sphere of marinated salmon roe prepared in a sodium
alginate bath.

Mr. Raffa, Oyamel's head chef, spooned one of the salmon-roe-gel gems
atop a siu mai dumpling and presented it to Mr. Andrés, who popped it in
his mouth. "Good!" He nodded. "That's it."

Soon Mr. Raffa returned with a bamboo steamer that was only two-thirds
full with the conehead kao lao lao noodles.

"You gave up!" Mr. Andrés said sternly.

Mr. Raffa laughed. "I ran out of dough."

Mr. Andrés smiled, tasted, then held up the steamer and its shells as a
trophy. "Make a couple more?"

Mr. Raffa trudged across his cramped domain of blasting Vulcans and busy
knives. "When he wants a couple more," Mr. Raffa said, "that's a good
thing."

"Victor Sack" > wrote in message
...
> A Vegas Wedding for China and Mexico, Under the Chef José Andrés
> By GLENN COLLINS
> International Herald Tribune
>
> THE whole Peking duck problem is actually a paradox, José Andrés
> explained amid the bedlam of the subterranean kitchen at Oyamel, his
> Mexican restaurant here.
>
> "If the skin is crispy, then the meat is dry," Mr. Andrés said. "But if
> the meat is juicy? The skin is't crispy."
>
> So, this playful master of avant-garde food was experimenting to
> discover The Answer: taking the dish apart, then putting it back
> together. "You have to change the structure of how it is done," he said.
> Mr. Andrés, the 41-year-old Spanish chef known for his bold ideas and
> commercial cunning, was brainstorming the menu for China Poblano, the $6
> million Chinese-Mexican restaurant he is creating for the Cosmopolitan
> of Las Vegas, a 50-story resort casino opening in mid-December.
> And the challenges he faced weren't only technical, but also cultural.
> "I am afraid of Chinese cooking, doing it authentically, that is," he
> said. "So before I did a full Chinese restaurant, I thought I'd do one
> that is half and half."
>
> A steamer-rich kitchen - where chefs will be filling and folding
> dumplings amid a swarm of woks - will greet customers across from a
> separate team making fresh tortillas on comal griddles. At communal
> tables diners will socialize over steaming bowls of Veracruz-style
> chilpachole soup as well as mi-fen, the Taiwanese vermicelli. Fried
> wontons will be pressed into service for guacamole-dipping. There will
> be Chinese noodles and Mexican ceviche, 10 different tacos and 10 kinds
> of noodles and dumplings.
>
> It's being billed as a casual noodle-and-taco place with an average
> check of $40, including beverage, but given its cost, and his passion,
> Mr. Andrés calls it "a grand, beautiful, sexy fantasy." Patrons will
> enter through a Buddha-ish cutout, under red lanterns, and segue past
> images of Chairman Mao and Frida Kahlo.
>
> But with their kitchen just a construction site, Mr. Andrés and his
> creative crew recently put in a five-hour stint of China Poblano
> research and development underneath Oyamel, where Michelle Obama has
> said she likes both the menu and the margaritas.
> "Creativity catches you when you're working - never when you're on the
> beach," Mr. Andrés said, as Rubén García, his head of research and
> development, used a fork to aerate the skin of a duck. "Einstein said as
> much."
>
> "For chefs who are creating," Mr. Andrés said, "the United States right
> now is like no other place in history. The openness. The ferment. The
> availability of ingredients. This is a good moment."
>
> What might seem to be basic Chinese cooking is an intricate puzzle to
> this proponent of new-wave gastronomy. He began as a cook at age 15 and
> arrived in the United States less than two decades ago with little more
> than his knives and a few dollars in his pocket. He had been a star
> pupil of Ferran Adrià - the dean of experimental chefs - at El Bulli in
> Roses, Spain. They are still so close that Mr. Andrés is often Mr.
> Adrià's translator in the United States. Mr. Andrés now has seven Latin
> and Mediterranean restaurants in Washington and Los Angeles, but this is
> his first foray into Asia.
>
> "We weren't planning to do Peking duck in China Poblano," Mr. Andrés
> said. But in July in Beijing, when he was aided in his omnivorous
> restaurant-research process by his wife, Patricia, and their three
> daughters, he said: "I asked my 5-year-old, Lucia, what was her favorite
> meal there. She said: Peking duck. I take children's comments very
> seriously."
>
> He sighed. "How can I not do this if my daughter says it is great?" he
> said. "But, there are a lot of good Peking ducks around. What, then,
> would our difference be? How could we make it great?"
> And so, Mr. García was experimenting with taking the skin off the duck
> and painting the skin with aromatic, dark Shanxi vinegar and malt sugar,
> letting it dry while pressed with weights, then freezing it so it shrunk
> minimally when it was roasted at 300 degrees for 30 to 45 minutes until
> the skin became crunchy.
>
> Meanwhile Joe Raffa, who is the head chef at Oyamel and is spearheading
> the China Poblano project, was marinating duck breasts so that they
> could be cooked at low temperature sous vide.
>
> "I don't know that we'll call it Peking Duck," Mr. Andrés said. "But we
> will be serving skin that is intense and crispy, breast that is
> flavorful and juicy, and the bones of the duck will go to make a
> beautiful soup. And we'll serve caramelized, crispy feet."
>
> He paused. "If we do it," he said with a shrug. "We don't know if this
> will make it onto the menu. This is something we are playing with."
> Nearby, Mr. Raffa was testing marinated duck tongues. And the team is
> considering a menu offering of only crisp duck skin - "duckless duck,"
> as Mr. García put it - possibly with a dipping sauce of molasses and
> piloncillo, Mexican unrefined sugar. Mr. Raffa has spent hours
> perfecting the flour consistency for handmade, conelike kao lao lao
> noodles, which will be presented in a bamboo steamer.
>
> The test kitchen's version of the Mexican salsa pico de gallo is a
> radically reconceived fantasy of carrot, cucumber, pineapple and jicama
> tubes ready for dipping in a sauce of red Chinese vinegar, sesame oil
> and ginger.
>
> And Mr. Andrés is thinking about "the theater of hand-pulled noodles,"
> he said, referring to the noodles kneaded so showily in restaurants in
> Xian and Beijing.
>
> Meanwhile, Rick Billings - Mr. Andrés's pastry chef, formerly of
> L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York - was trying to refine a
> goat-milk flan with the sweet milk syrup cajeta, cilantro and
> caramelized pineapple cubes.
>
> "I don't know if the pineapple works," Mr. Andrés said after a taste.
> "Did you see 'The Lord of the Rings'? Precious! We are getting too
> precious here! We need to go more low-key."
>
> Soon, Mr. Billings was preparing a tres leches cake with lychee flavors.
> "We're calling it Tres Lychees," he said.
>
> John Unwin, the Cosmopolitan's chief executive, enlisted Mr. Andrés to
> create an offshoot of Jaleo, the tapas-and-Spanish-classics restaurant
> that opened 17 years ago in Washington. "But every casino has to have a
> Chinese restaurant," Mr. Andrés said, "and I said that I'd been thinking
> about creating one for a very long time."
>
> He first tasted Chinese food in New York at age 19, as a seaman in the
> Spanish Navy on the tall-ship Juan Sebastián de Elcano (where he once
> scampered up ratlines at the masts). "We were near the piers on the West
> Side," he said, "and we ordered takeout. We just sat down on the street.
> And ate. Fantastic."
>
> The restaurant's name is a play on China Poblana, the legendary slave
> woman of Asian descent whose arrival in Mexico is supposed to have
> inspired the stereotypical "china dress" of the 19th century. But in Mr.
> Andrés's universe, the second "a" in poblana has segued to an "o" in
> homage to the mild Puebla chili pepper.
>
> Mr. Andrés finds much commonality in the two cultures, where the
> tortilla isn't that unlike the pancake used to wrap Peking duck. But the
> combination of Chinese and Latin food is as commonplace as the
> flickering neon signs proclaiming "comidas Chinas y Latinas"
> (Latin-American and Chinese dishes) at storefront Hispanic restaurants
> in New York. "But this is a new path for me," Mr. Andrés said.
> Not for Mexican cooks, though.
>
> "There is a Chinese tradition in Mexico, and for a hundred years there
> have been large Chinese populations in Baja," said Jeffrey Pilcher, a
> professor of history at the University of Minnesota whose forthcoming
> book, "Planet Taco," is a chronicle of the global spread of Mexican
> food. And for centuries the Manila galleons sailed to Acapulco in New
> Spain, "bringing silk and porcelain from China in return for silver, and
> bringing in immigrants as well," he said.
>
> Unlike Mr. Andrés's haute experiments at Minibar, his six-seat culinary
> laboratory upstairs in his neuva Latina restaurant, Cafe Atlantico,
> China Poblano will not be a showy demonstration of Chemistry 101.
> "We'll use our techniques sparingly, only as necessary," he said, "not
> as a gimmick, but because it makes things taste better."
>
> But inevitably there will be gels, foams, airs and infusions. One such
> touch is in the siu mai dumplings, little purses wrapped in thin-sliced
> jicama (instead of Chinese rice noodle), filled with crab and mango,
> cilantro and scallions. Placed atop each will be a small
> membrane-encased sphere of marinated salmon roe prepared in a sodium
> alginate bath.
>
> Mr. Raffa, Oyamel's head chef, spooned one of the salmon-roe-gel gems
> atop a siu mai dumpling and presented it to Mr. Andrés, who popped it in
> his mouth. "Good!" He nodded. "That's it."
>
> Soon Mr. Raffa returned with a bamboo steamer that was only two-thirds
> full with the conehead kao lao lao noodles.
>
> "You gave up!" Mr. Andrés said sternly.
>
> Mr. Raffa laughed. "I ran out of dough."
>
> Mr. Andrés smiled, tasted, then held up the steamer and its shells as a
> trophy. "Make a couple more?"
>
> Mr. Raffa trudged across his cramped domain of blasting Vulcans and busy
> knives. "When he wants a couple more," Mr. Raffa said, "that's a good
> thing."

Victor,

I like his problems. Restaurant cooking seems to be taking quantum leaps
recently. I am not sure if I would recognize national cuisines in a few
years. Spain is slowly becoming unrecognizable.

As to Peking Duck. My preferred method(at home of course) is to steam the
duck. Not only does it gently cook the meat, but it renders the fat as well.
I then dry it out(just to remove moisture), and quickly dunk it into a hot
peanut oil dip. Crisp and juicy.

Alan

Motzarella > wrote:

> I like his problems. Restaurant cooking seems to be taking quantum leaps
> recently. I am not sure if I would recognize national cuisines in a few
> years. Spain is slowly becoming unrecognizable.

Yes, and I am not sure if all - or even any - of it is a good thing.

Victor