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Collaborate, cooperate, celebrate...

Food sanity in Mad River Valley - Part 3

Too rich to go into in this post, and far too interesting for you NOT to explore further on your own, The Cellars at Jasper Hill is a twenty-two thousand square foot underground cooperative cheese aging facility and an organization with a powerful cooperative marketing arm, storing and selling some damn fine cheeses! Most of the restaurants we'd visited featured Vermont cheeses very prominently, which we definitely appreciated, and when I started writing this post and pulling together the web addresses for you it became apparent that The Cellars at Jasper Hill was one of their principal providers. Like the Vermont Fresh Network, they are another strong connector of producers, preparers, and consumers, bringing together and bringing to market - and thereby sustaining - healthful and delicious, high quality food products and businesses. 

At breakfast on our last morning at The Inn at Round Barn Farm, we were talking with innkeeper Tim Piper about all the great food and food culture in the area. After hearing us out a bit on cheese, he told us that they were hosting a three-day cheesemaking class in late to be taught by the highly accomplished and decorated artisanal cheesemakers at Three Shepherds' Cheese Company located just down the road in Warren. - And wouldn't you know, it also turns out that the Vermont Fresh Network annual meeting was just hosted at Round Barn Farm as well. Integrating, churning, connecting, learning. Impressive.

I can't help but feel that the food community in Vermont is showing us all the way to organize and operate a sustainable, high-quality, healthful food chain. What they're doing in the Mad River Valley, at least, creates and preserves jobs, respects the environment, celebrates the full spectrum of food arts, and - as far as we could tell - really enhances the quality of life for visitors and year-rounders alike. It was a little jarring to return to the big city from a getaway in the country and realize that suddenly my perspective had reversed: Notwithstanding the number of great, progressive restaurants we do have in the Greater Boston area, I realize now how far AHEAD of us city-folk they can be in the country when it comes to collectively embracing and integrating the local, the seasonal, the natural - and the people, both local and "flatlanders."

It's good to be served a slice of humble pie every once in a while - especially when it's delicious!

They get it in Vermont...

Food Sanity in the Mad River Valley, Part 2...

They get it in Vermont: Organic. Local. Seasonal. Hand-crafted. Small, artisanal producers, celebrating, supporting, feeding each other. It's impressive and profoundly satisfying to plunge into their world for a while. I don't feel like I have yet completely figured out why the commitment to quality and purity felt so pervasive, but I do think that the Vermont Fresh Network has a lot to do with it. Self-described as "dedicated to connecting farmers, food producers, and chefs to support Vermont agriculture and bring fresh, flavorful, high-quality food to all Vermonters and [their] guests," nearly every place we visited happened to be a member of the Network.

Yes, there is an evident, active commitment among so many of the local chefs to using high-quality local, seasonal, and organic ingredients. But just as satisfying was discovering that they take risks with their recipes as well, with wild boar, squab, even rabbit confit could be found at Hen of the Wood in Waterbury, The Black Door in Montpelier, The Pitcher Inn in Warren, and The Green Cup back in Waitsfield. Even our favorite place to stay in the area, The Inn at The Round Barn Farm, with an organic garden of their own, is very well aware of and closely connected with the burgeoning high-quality local food world around them. One morning they found a way to use local yak sausage as part of a delicious breakfast. - But, perhaps the most pleasant surprise was a brand-new vegetarian restaurant that grew out of a tea shop we remembered from our last visit to the area last March: Mint, in the heart of downtown Waitsfield, where I found their "Tempeh Bowl" to be one of the best lunch dishes I've ever had. 

One of the most refreshing aspects of this visit was realizing how selflessly they promote one-another. All our servers and proprietors seemed eager to share with us their local favorites, actively referring us to other good places in the area. Otherwise we may not have discovered Mint, nor The Black Door. However, it was the chef at our inn, Charlie Menard, who connected us in a new way with perhaps Vermont's best known culinary commodity: cheese. We were looking for a mid-afternoon snack and so he pointed us toward the East Warren Community Market - a new local cooperative market - where he said we'd find a great selection of local, artisanal food products, including cheese. He was right. 

Although the Market had sold out of fresh bread by the time we got there, we left with two great cheeses: Von Trapp [yes, those Von Trapps] Farmstead "Oma" and "Cabot Clothbound," an aged English-style cheddar that is nothing like your typical sharp Vermont or Wisconsin aged cheddar, nor anything like the more mainstream Cabot cheeses we commonly find in our local supermarkets. What most surprised me was the fact that, although the two cheeses were from altogether different producers, they shared nearly identical labels, prompting us to take a closer look. In so doing, we discovered yet another inspiring, community-building concept: The Cellars at Jasper Hill.

Next: Collaboration

Vegan and Vegetarian Food in Cambodia

Last September in celebrating with you our 2008 Best of CitySearch award for Vegetarian food at The Elephant Walk I explained that putting up our vegetarian menu was no simple matter. This is due to the fact that Cambodians, though mainly Buddhist, are rarely vegetarian.

I just visited the absorbing website/blog - Verdant Reports - of a gentleman who commented on that post earlier this summer. There you'll find an excellent post on this very same subject, Vegan and Vegetarian Food in Cambodia, including a very well-produced audio-blog entry wherein the blogger interviews a Frenchman who opened a vegetarian restaurant in Siem Reap, near Angkor Wat. It's worth 5-10 minutes of your time - especially if you are an avid traveler, a foodie, or - and especially - are vegetarian.

More than up to the Challenge...

This past Tuesday's Challenging Flavors dinner at The Elephant Walk in Waltham was a lot of fun. The spirited group dove right into all the dishes, which included plenty of pork belly, tamarind, shrimp paste and, of course, prahok. In fact, nothing daunted a soul, nothing until the durian served warm over sticky rice, that is!

It's always dangerous to generalize based on feedback from a self-selected group such as ours, but my biggest take-away from our guests is that flavors that once were extreme may be much closer now to the mainstream than even 10 years ago. Diners' palates have grown so experienced and sophisticated in the modern era of so many wonderful restaurants showcasing the full rainbow of global cuisines that there's not much people really don't like or can't handle. [Except maybe durian.... ;-)]

The wine component of the dinner was matched to the family-style presentation of the food: We offered 4 wines - 2 whites, 2 reds - up to the group to taste through in random fashion. Rather than the strict "this wine goes with that dish" traditional wine dinner format, we went free-form to acknowledge the fact that pairing Western wine with Eastern food is far from an exact science, or no science at all. As I suspected, personal choice ruled, with no obvious, perfect matches.

The one wine surprise to me was that the darker and more concentrated Toro - made with tempranillo - was much preferred over the brighter and fruitier Beaujolais-Villages - made with gamay. No question the Toro was the more elegant wine but what I didn't expect was that it would find such favor with our guests in the context of an unusual meal. To me, that's robust support for this truism I personally adhere to: "Have wine you like with food you like and very likely you're going to have a meal you like." - Tuesday's Challenging Flavors dinner was a good meal indeed.

Challenging Flavors

One of the things we've been doing in recent months is trying to align our self-perception with that of our customers. Our first step down that path was recognizing that most people view us as Asian restaurants first, and not fine-dining. And since most people expect non-sushi Asian restaurants to be inexpensive, we realized that we needed to lower our prices and did so in October.

Tomorrow night's "Challenging Flavors" dinner at The Elephant Walk in Waltham is another step in the direction of seeing ourselves as others see us.  While perennial Elephant Walk favorites like Poulet à la Citronnelle, Loc Lac, and Khar Saiko are authentic Cambodian dishes, they offer fairly mainstream flavors - very approachable for the vast majority of our clientele.

Most of our Cambodian menu consists of more approachable dishes for one simple, sound business reason: People like them and rarely send them back. For a vocal minority in the dining public, however, our playing it safe has been tantamount to a betrayal of sorts.

As you probably already know, there are relatively few Cambodian restaurants in this country, and precious few with a national profile such as ours. So when some people come to The Elephant Walk and find that prahok - a fermented and salted fish paste that is Cambodian cuisine's one truly unique ingredient - has only a bit part in our play, they feel let down and really slam us for it.

Those critics make a fair point. As a more mainstream Cambodian restaurant concept, it makes good business sense for us to emphasize the flavors that we've learned our clientele wants, and avoid serving those flavors they've taught us they'd rather not try again! But what about that vocal minority that craves the rustic intensity of prahok, bitter melon, shrimp paste, tamarind, and durian? What about their needs? One answer is our Challenging Flavors dinner tomorrow night in Waltham.

It is a small irony that our Cambodian, chef-owners, Nyep and Nadsa - who are mother and daughter - themselves prefer the more challenging flavors of their cuisine even as their customers do not. So they're pretty excited about tomorrow night!

Predictably, there's still some space available if you want throw your palate for a loop. But if you want to have this experience but can't make it tomorrow, don't worry: "Challenging Flavors" is a very special theme dinner we are sure to host again soon!

Defining - and delivering - Authenticity

You know something is authentic when you just know it's "the real deal," right?

Have you ever wondered about The Elephant Walk and how authentic we are?

Probably the most fascinating ad hoc debate I've observed play out on online "foodie" message boards like Chowhound and Yelp, as well as other restaurant listings sites that accept comments such as CitySearch, Zagat, and others, is over whether or not The Elephant Walk is "real - or really Cambodian," or "true - or truly Cambodian." As celebrated as The Elephant Walk has been over the years, we've also taken a lot of hits - some from native Khmers - for NOT being authentic.

Sigh... Of course we brought that on ourselves first when we chose to serve French food in addition to Cambodian food. But we really invited criticism from native Khmers and others who know Cambodian food well when we took the risk of creating NEW Cambodian food.

I remember well the evening in late 1992 when Nyep and I sat down at a table in the dining room of our orignal Somerville restaurant to talk about making some menu changes. After a tumultuous first year serving Cambodian food to primarily non-Cambodians in America, we had learned a few things about our guests' preferences. One of those things we learned was that the really strong and unusual Cambodian flavors were frequently rejected.

Customers sent back significant percentage of dishes that had enough shrimp paste, fish sauce, or prahok [the one truly unique Cambodian ingredient: preserved featherback fish - a VERY pungent fishy and salty paste that our primarily Western waitstaff dubbed "Cambodian cheese"] to really dominate their flavor profiles. And the people who ordered them sometimes left unhappy, panning us to their friends, and sometimes to our faces!

To tell you the truth, those experiences worried us. We wondered about the potential long-term affect on our business of serving people food they wouldn't like. Our most creative adaptation was to create a boxed-out section on our menu we called "Challenging Flavors." "Caveat Emptor!" we wrote, warning people that the flavors in those dishes were not for the faint of heart, or palate, and that people who didn't want a relatively extreme experience ought to think twice about ordering them. But even then we still had what felt like too many people leaving not having enjoyed their first Cambodian meal.

That was the context when Nyep and I sat down that night to talk about our next menu. She confided that she was worried, feeling like she had already presented most of the traditional Cambodian food that she thought our guests would enjoy. Well, what about presenting some new Cambodian food?, I said.

I'm not sure that even today most Asian chefs are comfortable creating new food for their their native culture. Even today most "ethnic" restaurants - Chinese, Mexican, Greek, Cambodian, you name it - tend to have menus very similar to one another. But now and then chef-driven restaurants serving higher-end "continental" cuisines - I'm thinking French and Italian, primarily - offer menus likely to be entirely unique, or original. More to the point, rarely in my experience do Asian restaurants in America take the "risk" creating an entirely new, original dish.

And I'm sure Nyep felt the same way that night; one just doesn't create new Cambodian food. It is our duty to serve the traditional, the familiar.... But of course, that leads to a dead end.

I pressed my case: "Who makes the rules, anyway? You're Cambodian. You're the best Cambodian cook I know, probably among the best in the world. If you prepare a dish that uses traditional Cambodian ingredients and techniques, is it not Cambodian just because no one's ever had it before? I think you are a culinary artist with the talent and this wonderful opportunity to continue to develop the medium in whatever direction your instincts take you.

"Chefs create; cooks re-create. You're a chef! You have every right to create new Cambodian food - as long as you respect the art of Cambodian cooking as you understand it.

"Plus, if you create new Cambodian dishes, you guarantee that The Elephant Walk will always remain unique, unlike any other Cambodian restaurant. And by continuing to evolve, we'll keep things interesting for our guests who will inevitably become bored if we limit ourselves to the strictly traditional."

Yes, we were worried that we'd reached a dead end. I tried to convince Nyep that new Cambodian food was the way out.

Late one evening about a week later Nyep emerged with a dish of chicken stir-fried in a rich, deep golden curry-like sauce fragrant with garlic, galangal [a ginger-like root] and its slivered kaffir lime leaf garnish. It was beautiful. I dove in. It was absolutely delicious.

"What do you think?" she said... I asked her what it was. Haltingly, she told me she didn't know, exactly; she'd just made it up... I smiled. We were free!

That was Nyep's first original Cambodian dish. She named it "Poulet Dhomrei," and it was a MAJOR hit, immediately. Many more favorites - Avocat Kanthor, Poulet Malika, and more have followed.

This is straight from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language at my favorite online wordsmithing referent, bartleby.com:

"authentic

"adjective: 1. Conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance or belief. 2. Having a claimed and verfiable origin or authorship; not counterfeit or copied...

"synonyms: bona fide, genuine, real, true, undoubted, unquestionable..."

The most visible change we made with our recent menu change was to reduce our prices so that all of our entrées cost less than $20, in line with what we've learned people expect of Asian and ethnic restaurants.

But the other major change is almost as important insofar as it attempts to address the authenticity issue, by clarifying who we are and what we do at The Elephant Walk. We re-classified our dishes so that each item we serve comfortably resides in one of three categories: Traditional Cambodian Food, Original Cambodian Food, and Original French Food.

There has been occasional and understandable confusion over the meaning of "original" in this context. Original Cambodian certainly could mean "First" Cambodian, or to some "True" Cambodian.

However, we refer to those dishes we serve that are known to people already familiar with Cambodian cuisine as "Traditional." Our Traditional Cambodian dishes - and a good synonym in this sense of the word would be "orthodox" - are the old-time recipes, food you'll often find in Cambodia today and served in Cambodian homes and restaurants the world around - dishes Khmer natives recognize as "the real thing."

At The Elephant Walk, our use of the word "Original" in describing our food is - and this is straight from Roget's Thesauraus: "characterized by new things or new ideas; not the sames as what was previously known or done..." - and also "arising from or going to the root or source." In other words, our Original Cambodian dishes are new Cambodian food created by our Cambodian chef/owners, using traditional Cambodian ingredients and techniques, a natural evolution of the Khmer culinary art. 

Is The Elephant Walk authentic? Perhaps that's not for us to say, for some people don't think a restaurant that doesn't serve strictly traditional food can be authentic.

But I think The Elephant Walk is authentic in the sense that our restaurants are an honest expression of who we are. The Elephant Walk is authentically us. We all [the owners] come from multi-cultural backgrounds. I grew up in Asia. Gérard [Lopez] is half-French, half-Spanish. The De Monteiros were raised in a Cambodia that was a French protectorate; they were educated in French schools. I think it's fair to say that the bi-cultural aspect of The Elephant Walk is more true to who they are than if it were Cambodian alone.

Our new menu format now makes it possible for anyone to enjoy a strictly traditional Cambodian meal anytime. Someone else will inevitably prefer to dine on some of our Original Cambodian [or French!] dishes instead. But either way, both can feel confident that their meals are authentic!

Basil - from The Elephant Walk Cookbook

Basil flavors are frequently used in Cambodian cooking, and many different herbs have a basil-like flavor.

Asian Basil (chi ng'rong or chi krahom in Khmer) stems and flowers have a purple tinge, and its leaves are more pointed than those of regular sweet basil.

Holy Basil (mareh preuw in Khmer) is known for its slightly hairy leaves and a sweet clove-like aroma. It has a somewhat flat, mildly bitter taste that sweet basil only approximates, and it is used largely in stir-fries and sour soups. Both of these herbs are available in Asian markets, and Thai Basil, as Asian basil is often called, is beginning to make an appearance in garden center herb sections.

Siam Queen is another variety being sold to gardeners. It is lighter green than sweet basil, with smaller, more pointed leaves and a flavor similar to that of Asian basil.

All of these basils, including sweet basil, can be used interchangeably.