When I was a child, my grandmother delighted me with mascarpone cheese whipped with sugar and powdered coffee, and my mother, her daughter, always affirmed that if you use ricotta instead of mascarpone the result is the same “and no-one will notice”. Humbug. While my grandmother has passed away, my mother has accepted the fact just when the way of perceiving food is changing and “good” food has different meaning and premises.
The fact that a tasty dish should also be healthy is not a recent caprice, it is – and will increasingly be – the totem of this decade, much more than using local ingredients because this itself is at the basis of the work in the kitchen. Once you have done your grocery shopping, you need to cook and it is at this stage that some true choices need to be made. While preparing the latest edition of
Identità New York, I had the chance to meet
Rouge Tomate and its chef
When Kristy is working, she dresses up as a chef but she is not a chef, at least not as a first step. She’s a nutritionist whom Jeremy wanted by his side when the owners of Rouge Tomate, having launched the project a dozen years ago in Bruxelles, decided to open in Manhattan, at 10 East 60 Street. As he explained himself during his lesson last Sunday (and before that, during the dinner at his restaurant) “I wanted to unite well-being and gastronomy, I wanted to make sure that health didn’t go against flavour. It was a big challenge for a chef who didn’t arrive from this world, since the last place where I had been cooking was a steak house in San Francisco”.
Jeremy Bearman and Kristy Lambrou
It was 2008 and for the past four editions the restaurant has been awarded with a
Michelin star, which is always a good presentation: “People were sceptical. We were those who put you on a diet, who deprive you of pleasure. Why should you pay not to enjoy yourself?”. I too asked for info around, and would hear people say “oh, that’s a vegetarian restaurant”, with compassion.
Rouge Tomate, in fact, is not at all vegetarian: “I cook fish and meat but if a chef thinks of the health of his clients, many people won’t understand”. I confirm: the
Sweetbread with mushrooms, for instance, was excellent.
They are too modern, beyond the sectarian nutritional attitude. The reference to my grandmother and mother was certainly not made by chance. At Eataly, Jeremy – the theme of his lesson with Viviana Varese being cheese, for instance Grana Padano or ricotta – prepared a mixture made with water and skimmed milk for the Gnudi with black truffle, celeriac and herbs, accompanied by a triumph of mixed mushrooms. An excellent dish.
Gnudi made with ricotta cheese and Grana Padano presented by Jeremy Bearman at Identità New York 2013
Water and skimmed milk, here’s the contribution of
Lambrou: “What we need to do is understand how to arrive to the same result by taking different ways. I have worked with two French chefs of the calibre of
Daniel Boulud and
Joel Robuchon and this helps me explaining my work. If I think of a chestnut cream, the former would start to sauté all kinds of ingredients, including diced prosciutto, butter and cream.
Robuchon, instead, to whom I feel more similar, would have cooked the chestnuts for 20 minutes adding nothing else. And then he would have cooked them in a litre of cream, blended them and serve them. My approach is completely different”. Certainly lighter and with clearer, neater flavours.
