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Bad boys and celebrity chiefs

Time was when any young male daring to choose cooking as a career would be shunned from the school rugby team and regarded as far more likely to spend an evening listening to a classic recording of The Fairy Queen than hanging out with the bad boys glued to Grand Theft Auto IV… or whatever the equivalent was in the old days.

That’s boys for you, it’s true. They are undoubtedly the less-sophisticated sex. Yet in the past few years there’s been a strange change in attitudes. Nowadays the very boys who like to spend time making their own pesto ARE the bad boys. There’s no career more macho than high-end “cheffing”, with its lethal knives, burnt fingers and split-second precision. G no longer stands for Gangsta. G stands for … Gourmet!

As usual, it’s all the fault of the Americans of course. If you haven’t read Anthony Bourdain’s wonderful book, Kitchen Confidential, which tells of heroin addiction, arms dealing and serial bankruptcy in the New York restaurant trade, then rush out and get it now.

In no other book about the world of haute cuisine by a two-Michelin-starred chef could you read the following sentence: “They were assembling machine guns for sale in the employee bathroom when I arrived. All the line-cooks were hunched over Armalites and M16s, while outside in the nearly unmanned kitchen orders spewed out of the chattering printer and were ignored …”

It’s been translated into seven languages and the reviews worldwide are unanimous. “More gripping than a Stephen King novel”, said one. “It’s not exactly Delia”, laughed another, referring to the UK’s po-faced grande dame of TV cooking, Delia Smith. “Exposes Jamie Oliver for the choirboy that he is”, said a third. My personal favourite was: “Elizabeth David written by Quentin Tarantino.” And they were right. Mixing a few ingredients for lunch will never seem so harmless again.

Still, I’m confused. I simply don’t understand how a skill, a trade even, which in the past would have been strictly confined to “downstairs” in any self-respecting household, has suddenly become a bigger deal than rocket science or brain surgery. We no longer talk about chefs, we talk almost automatically about celebrity chefs. And yet the reality is that their Michelin-starred temples can disappoint almost as often as they delight.

Mallorca, of course, is no exception to this obsession with high-end food.

With a population of almost one million, we now have no fewer than five Michelin-starred restaurants catering to the rich and famous.

And I have to admit they exert a magnetic attraction. After a spot of morning shopping the other day, I found myself inexplicably drawn towards Tristan’s Bistro, a haven of gastronomy. I sat down on the terrace of their inviting Bistro and ordered one of the famous Mediterranean salads. I just adored it….and felt…..reinvigorated after lunch.

I have the same strange experience whenever I drive anywhere in the vicinity of Santa Maria. My best friend says it’s my driving, but I find the car takes on a life of its own and tends to veer towards Read’s Hotel. I see flashes of Marc Fosh’s superb Sea Bass with Wild Garlic and Almond Sauce. And I firmly believe it’s because, at a spiritual level, I am at one with Marc’s philosophy of cooking.

“My cuisine is creative”, he explains, “a blend of traditional French, modern Mediterranean and Asian minimalism. To me, food should be light and fresh with direct flavours, using seasonal produce that lets the ingredients speak for themselves.” You see, the man is a philosopher. I couldn’t have said it better myself … well not much anyway …

So maybe it is simply a myth that it’s always the bad-boy celebrity chefs who produce the very best, most mouth-watering gourmet food. Or maybe it’s a culture thing. In Anglo-Saxon countries the rule seems to be: if you’ve got it, flaunt it. In the UK, three-star chef, Gordon Ramsay, is the perfect example. Though in actual fact he wasn’t the first. Marco Pierre White, Britain’s youngest-ever three-star chef – with whom Ramsay in fact trained – was obsessive and obnoxious by turns as far back as his first television series in the … Seventies, I think.

In Mediterranean countries though, it ain’t necessarily so. My favourite restaurant in all the world is Arzak in San Sebastian. It’s run by the unassuming Juan Mari Arzak, one of the pioneers of modern Spanish gastronomy, with his daughter, Elena, who secured their third star. It regularly appears in listings of the ten best restaurants in the world – and rightly so.

In fact, in his follow-up to Kitchen Confidential, the equally bestselling A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain, describes a pilgrimage to eat at Arzak … and later “when I raved about the meal I had at Arzak to a tableful of multi-starred New York chefs (all of whom had already eaten there) they wanted to know only one thing: ‘Was Elena there?’”

Elena was there during my first visit and was happy to engage in some girly gastro-chat over coffee and petits-fours. But there was none of the ego one would expect from a three-star chef in the UK.

German chefs are similarly low-key. I was utterly amazed recently to find, for instance, that the gourmet capital of Germany is not Berlin – but the little town of Baiersbronn near Baden-Baden in the Black Forest, which has an extraordinary three Michelin-starred eateries, with seven stars between them.

Harald Wohlfahrt of Schwarzwaldstube at the Hotel Traube-Tonbach – he trained with Germany’s first celebrity chef, Eckart Witzigmann – has held on to three stars for a total of 15 unbroken years and this chic little restaurant is ranked as one of the Ten Best French Restaurants Outside of France. Claus-Peter Lumpp at Hotel Bareis has just earned his third star, so congratulations to you, Claus-Peter! And Joerg Sackmann at Restaurant Schlossberg has just been crowned with his first star, though hopefully not his last.

Believe it or not, Germany now has nine three-star restaurants, more than Italy, which has just five – and not a raised voice or a flying knife in sight. That must be food for thought!

About the Author

Dr. Helen Cummins is the Editor of abcMallorca Magazine a high quality guide to mallorca printed in three languages including informative Articles about Mallorca, up to date Events Guide and a Business Directory.

You can visit the abcMallorca website to read the original article about Bad boys and celebrity chiefs or related articles about Restaurants, food, cafes and catering.

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