What Makes a Restaurant Meal So Special?

BY JAY DIAMOND

It’s a brisk, autumn evening. You are dressed in your favorite outfit and in the company of good friends and/or family. You’ve had reservations for the past three weeks at the best restaurant in town. You walk in and are immediately greeted by the host; he takes your coats and leads you to your table. The smells from the kitchen and the food on the other guests plates is almost overwhelming. You sit and order your favorite drink and prepare to peruse the menu. The options are staggering and everything looks amazing. Your table is a buzz of oohs, ahhs, and excited laughter. You haven’t eaten all day so you’ll have no problem with soup, salad, appetizer, entrée, dessert, and coffee.

You place your order with the waiter, who seems to anticipate your every wish. The conversation is rich and lively while you and yours wait for the food. You talk about movies, books, vacations, other dining experiences; both good and bad. The problems of the outside world seem miles away.

The soup arrives, silken and rich. Steam lazily wafts from the bowl wrapping its luscious aroma around you. The salad is crisp and cold, garnished with perfectly cut vegetables. The appetizer barely makes a dent in your empty stomach. You throw caution to the winds and dive into the warm, house-baked bread slathered with creamy butter. Your entrée is the apex of culinary achievement. The empty plate brings a pang of sadness as the meal is over. The coffee afterwards is but the cherry,
sprinkled with satisfied groans of gastric ecstasy.

Thoughts of your own meager kitchen and limited skills bring a deep pining for the ability to create food like this. Maybe if you bought that new Bobby Flay cookbook, or read Kitchen Confidential one more time you’ll find the missing piece. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s never gonna happen.

It’s not because you are not talented enough; talent only gets you so far. It’s not because you don’t want it enough; the Spartans at Thermopylae were chock full of heart. All the fancy-shmancy equipment that you can find in a chef’s catalogue won’t tip the scales.

Take a look at what you’re up against. The atmosphere was set when you walked in the dining room of your restaurant. Your living room just wasn’t built for it. The host, waiters, and busboys have made an art of pleasing the customer. Their entire day revolves around making their customers happy. Before you get all choked up, they’re not being benevolent, that’s how they make money. The cooks in the kitchen slave away night and day, obsessing about the cuts on the celery, or about the texture of their flan, or the consistency of the demi-glace. They have chefs whose sole job is to make sauces, really good sauces. This isn’t easy work either. Sauciers work 10/12 hours a day, really hot, demanding, volatile work. Some of their ingredients are thirty to forty dollars an ounce. They are surrounded by every implement know to man, every surface within their reach is hot enough to cook on.

So, don’t try to copy your favorite restaurants, and for pity’s sake, never compare yourself to seasoned professionals. It’s what they do for a living.

Now, if you still want to cook — and I hope you do — here are some hints to better your cooking skills.

First, learn the mother sauces. I know some of you out there pooh pooh classical methodology, but these are just too important. We begin with the mother of macaroni and cheese, country gravy, and smothered anything, Béchamel sauce. This is a creamy white sauce made of milk, butter, and white roux. Traditionally an onion was studded with cloves and raw flour was whisked into the milk; personally I leave those parts out. I make white roux by mixing vegetable oil and butter in equal parts and adding flour till it is difficult to stir. Bring the milk to a boil and add the cooled roux in batches until is the consistency of potato soup. Cook for another 45 minutes,
adding milk when it gets too thick. You must be patient and diligent in whisking or you’ll get lumps.

Then we have Veloute Sauce. Veloute is a white stock thickened with a blonde roux. What I mean by white stocks is that the ingredients of the stocks have only been sautéed, not roasted. There should be little to no color in the stock. Thicken with blonde roux like the Béchamel and cook afterwards to cook out the flour flavor. This is a great base for soups and braising meats.

Next is Espagnole, or Brown, sauce. This is a rich beef stock that can be reduced to that most holy of all magic kitchen ingredients, demi-glace. Mastering this sauce is a labor of love and requires special equipment and lots of space. Ten gallons of stock that take two days to make is then reduced slowly down to one gallon.

Then we have the Eggs Benedict yummy goodness of Hollandaise. It’s a bit tricky to do with just two hands, but practice makes perfect. Clarify 1 cup of butter and then separate three or four eggs from their yolks. Put the yolks in a metal mixing bowl and add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, 1 teaspoon of Tabasco, and a dash of salt. Place the bowl in a pot of boiling water holding on the bowl with a towel. Whisk vigorously allowing the water to heat up the outside of the bowl. Be careful not to scramble the
eggs! Whisk until the yolks are thick and fluffy. Remove from the heat and anchor the bowl. Pour the butter into the egg yolks in a pencil thin stream. Whisk constantly and quickly. The eggs will absorb the butter and become thick. If the sauce breaks (separates) you must use a clean bowl and new yolks. Repeat the thickening process and use the broken sauce as you would the original butter.

And, of course, last but certainly not least, Tomato. Not the Ragu you may be used to, but a rich tomato sauce that is reminiscent of Barbeque sauce.

Choosing a sauce can make or break a meal. A good chef can take a two-dollar piece of fish and make it delectable with a good sauce. The above sauces are good to learn because they make you think in different directions. You can make any kind of soup you want with a veloute to bind it. It’s commonly referred to as food glue. The same goes for béchamel. I once made a fried soft-shell crab soup with veloute. It was awesome. The sky is the limit. Be careful when salting these thick sauces, their viscosity slows down the salt dispersion time and what wasn’t salty 20 minutes ago is now unpalatable.

By no means restrict yourself to these basics. You can use pureed vegetables to bind sauces. I’ve juiced a case of red peppers and reduced the liquid to a fire engine red paint that screamed red pepper in whatever I garnished it with. I’ve thickened soups with pureed celeriac and loved it so much I made it again with just the celeriac (a later addition of Bleu Cheese crumbles put it right over the top). A sauce can be as complicated as Gumbo or as simple as a squirt of lemon juice.

Remember; don’t compare your cooking to an entire restaurant experience. Just remember why you cook and if it makes you smile, keep it right up.

Jay Diamond is a chef and writer who has taken up residence in our area after being displaced by Hurricane Katrinia.

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