Posts Tagged ‘Melissa McCart’
First Look at Renovated 2941: Battered Economy Led to Dismissal of Fancy French Restaurant
Posted by Stefanie Gans / Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
“The French isn’t going to die. It’s still me cooking,” Chef Bertrand Chemel says, defending his menu change at 2941. The Falls Church restaurant closed last year to renovate the kitchen and to rework the entire menu, turning from fancy French to upper-scale Mediterranean. Chemel expects 2941 to reopen next week.
“For about four years we tried to change the perception,” the French chef admits about his struggling high-end restaurant. “People come here for celebrations and at the end of it, their check was high and that was the only thing they remembered.”
The economy played a role in Chemel’s decision to temporarily shutter the restaurant, acknowledging that selling a tasting menu in this climate–and in Falls Church–wasn’t working any longer. But the dramatic act of closing also let him finally shift attitudes. “We tried to do so many different types of menus and different types of advertisements, but it never changed,” Chemel says, adding, “We do run a business and it shows over the years that the percentage of tasting menu we used to sell, to now, declined a lot.”
With his kitchen equipment starting to break about two years ago, and the battered economy impacting sales about a year ago, Chemel used the opportunity to campaign for his updated restaurant.
Although, the menu won’t reveal a complete change as Chemel has been showcasing pasta dishes for years. The new 2941 will unveil different types of pasta, including buckwheat and chickpea. Another shift stems from ingredients. Before the renovation, only 20 percent of 2941′s ingredients came from local sources. That number will now jump to 50-60 percent.
Local sourcing, however, doesn’t translate to local drinking. Chemel hasn’t warmed to Virginia wines. “It’s very hard to sell to a guest a Virginia wine that we [buy at] $40 a bottle, and after we do the mark-up, they can have another one that comes from California and the quality will be much better,” says Chemel.
Creativity still reigns in 2941′s blended Italian-Spanish-South of France-American restaurant. ”If they like the dishes I used to make on the tasting menu, I think they will enjoy it as a la carte size or appetizer size,” says Chemel, noting he’ll transfer some of his tasting menu dishes to the standing menu. “What I think those people are looking [for] is to come to a beautiful place, but still to have the same quality food.”
But that doesn’t mean white tablecloths and what New Times food critic Melissa McCart terms, “dinner prison.” “People don’t want to stay two or three hours at the table,” Chemel observes, “and that’s the thing that changed from a long time ago.” Of course though, it will all circle back. “I think food is like cosmetics and clothing,” Chemel opines, ” it’s always going to come back.”
Chemel’s not too saddened about the change though,”I try to make myself happy to make my guests happy. I will still do fine dining, but in a more casual way [with] more friendly service, not surly service…” The native French-speaking chef then quickly chimes in, “I’m not sure about the exact wording.”
View the photos here.
Photos by Sally Traynham
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Home Sous Vide Gets Chilly Reception
Posted by The Editorial Desk / Monday, October 26th, 2009
(Image: SousVide Supreme)
Kitchen gadget collectors got served up a doozy on Friday with the release of the SousVide Supreme–a home water bath being marketed by “Protein Power” proponents Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades.
The high-tech oven was designed to introduce home cooks to the health benefits of sous vide, a commercial cooking technique that involves preparing vacuum-sealed foodstuffs in meticulously regulated tanks of water. The practice originated in industrial kitchens (our own Cuisine Solutions remains a global powerhouse), but has gained much greater traction with celebrity chefs (Heston Blumenthal is on the current promotional tour) in the past decade.
But is Suzie Homemaker ready to take the immersion cooking plunge?
Cookbook devourer cum techno-prep wiz Carol Blymire, she who battled her way through every French Laundry creation and parlayed her ongoing Alinea project into a spot on Grant Achatz’s line, hopes the SousVide Supreme instruction manual has been more carefully researched than the web site.
“The biggest thing that seemed off, or misguided, is the notion that you don’t have to worry about time when cooking … that you can just walk away and let the food sit in there as long as you want, which isn’t the case,” she warned. “With meats especially, you can leave it in there too long … the color of the meat won’t change, but the the texture will, which will alter taste and texture when you eat it–it’ll look rare, but will taste overcooked.”
Meanwhile, food blogger Melissa McCart imagines the space age appliance would just collect dust on the average cook’s countertop.
“I think it’s like a sausage maker: for the technical geeks, for super committed cooks. But really, a whole lot of work for someone who still buys chicken stock,” she posited.
At press time, Eades Appliance Technology had not responded to inquiries about when the Sous Vide Supreme pre-order price ($399) would expire.
–Warren
Posted by The Editorial Desk / Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
Staff Sergeant Nolan Kniss competing at the US Army Culinary Arts Show, Ft. Lee, Va.
It’s not often that I read something that gets me fired up enough to call out another writer, but enhancing an inaccurate stereotype of a group worth respecting is reason enough for me.
Let me be clear in saying that my purpose is only to correct the stigma most food writers and civilian chefs have towards military chefs and pointing them out when I see them.
The target of my angst today is Washingtonian food blogger Melissa McCart and an article she wrote for Gourmet magazine about soldier-chefs taking courses at a local D.C. culinary school, Culinaiere.
Full disclosure – for eight years, I was a military chef. And as a former military chef, I was offended by Ms. McCart’s portrayal of military chefs as cooks forced to rely only on their hot sauce to get by. More importantly, several of Ms. McCart’s claims are just plain inaccurate.
“But Army cooks only have one cooking school available to them — the Quartermaster Center and School, based in Ft. Lee, Virginia — and it offers a choice of just two courses: Basic Skills Training (also known as IET), during which they learn culinary and baking skills for 10 hours a day over the course of eight weeks; and Advanced Culinary Skills Training Course (ACSTC), which emphasizes knife skills, menu development, buffet platter production, table service, and purchasing. While Quartermaster courses provide basic culinary training, career cooks such as this crew found themselves hungry for a deeper understanding of ingredients, flavor dynamics, and cooking techniques that their classes hadn’t had time to cover.”
Yes, Ft. Lee does have one culinary school with both the Basic and Advanced skills programs. However, Ft. Bragg, the base these soldiers are assigned to, has an Advanced Culinary School of its own, taught year round by an American Culinary Federation (ACF) Certified Executive Chef. Additionally, Ms. McCart fails to properly check the accuracy of her source’s information when she quoted Master Sergeant Arthur Vernon as saying:
“It was difficult to convince the Army that a civilian cooking school was good for our unit, since it’s expensive and somewhat of an experiment,” but he argued that improved skills would cut down on waste, saving the Army money. His request was funded. As far as he knows, his group is among the first cooks at Fort Bragg and elsewhere to formally train among civilians.
While it was kind of Ms. McCart to qualify the quote with “As far as he knows,” a quick google search would prove that military chefs have been formally trained among civilians for several decades now. Heck, two paratroopers from Master Sergeant Vernon’s Ft. Bragg, N.C., unit just finished a training program at a local country club.
Several points need to be made here; first, there are numerous units locally and around the world who work hard to give their soldiers the best training possible. Locally, an over whelming majority of military cooks in the Washington D.C. area have at some point been sent to a civilian culinary school or apprenticeship for more training. Additionally, Stratford University was teaching culinary classes in kitchens at the Pentagon, Ft. McNair, the Naval Yard and Ft. Myer as early as 2000. One local Air Force unit has a partnership with several Northern Virginia restaurants that allows the airmen to train in those kitchens for several weeks at a time. And finally, the Army as a whole has sent numerous soldiers to train at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., at no cost to the soldier. (Heck, even Bobby Flay came to Ft. McNair in 2002 to do a post-9/11 show on military chefs.)
I’m not even going to get into the fact that the Army has an annual Culinary Arts Show; an Iron Chef-like competition that has been covered in the past by the Food Network, where teams of cooks come to represent their base in numerous static and live cooking competitions judged by ACF judges. Or that the Army Culinary Arts Team (USACAT) has dominated culinary competitions worldwide for several years.
The bottom line is this, yes, it’s great that the chefs from Ft. Bragg were able to take classes at Culinaiere, but military chefs are not what they used to be. Even in a combat environment, culinary skills are trained and nurtured by good leaders. While it is true that many meals in combat environments are ready-made, those too can be enhanced by talented chefs, not just hot sauce.
-Stephen Ball
