Future Shock

Jing Tio of Le Sanctuaire can get you anything: exotic spices, European cookbooks, methylcellulose, a $4,000 Gastrovac. What will SF chefs do with the city’s new cutting-edge culinary resource? We challenge two top cooks to don their goggles.

Check out behind-the-scenes photos, featuring chefs Ron Siegel and James Syhabout at work in the kitchen.

The new culinary technology has its ups and downs. Ups: You can make like a mad scientist, donning gloves and laboratory goggles in order to squeeze drops of olive oil into liquid nitrogen so you get icy little pearls that are frozen on the outside and olive-oily on the inside. Downs: You might be lent a temptingly shiny, all-the-rage, new-to-the-US $4,000 gizmo called a Gastrovac, which was developed by a couple of famous Spanish chefs, and then waste three days trying to figure out how the hell to make it work.

Which is exactly what happened to chef Ron Siegel of the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton when Le Sanctuaire—San Francisco’s newest professional culinary resource—gave him a Gastrovac for a trial run. “I called David Kinch last night,” he says of his 911 to his chef compadre down at Manresa, in Los Gatos, “and he couldn’t figure it out either.” To illustrate his point, he impatiently flips up and down a switch on the machine that, by lowering atmospheric pressure, can cook such things as vegetables at a very low temperature, which in turn keeps the produce’s cellular structure intact. According to Siegel, the Gastrovac also requires a chef to check on it constantly. “I mean, hello!” he says, “Are you going to go home and set your alarm to go off every hour?” Siegel, who is of the opinion that “if a carrot is perfect, it’s pretty damn perfect” and thus doesn’t require much manipulation, shrugs it off. “I don’t want to spend my whole day using a stupid piece of equipment.” Still, I can tell he wants to kick it.

Siegel is hardly alone among SF chefs in his resistance to high tech in the kitchen, whether or not you attribute it to the Alice Waters effect—as Daniel Patterson, the chef and owner of Coi, did a couple years back in his New York Times Magazine article “To the Moon, Alice?” bemoaning the lack of envelope-pushing here.

So I was surprised to learn this January that Jing Tio, the 34-year-old founder of Le Sanctuaire, the nationally celebrated Santa Monica store that sells what it calls “essentials for exquisite cooking,” had chosen SF to be the home of his second retail space. (A grand-opening celebration is planned for this month.) Although Tio sells the likes of specialty olive oils and vinegars, rare cookbooks, schmancy pots and pans,  Japanese knives and a variety of high-quality spices brought in from all over the world (including many different varieties of black pepper from his family’s spice plantation in Indonesia, his birthplace), it’s his obsession with European-driven, cutting-edge haute cuisine, and its accompanying gadgets and potions, that has solidified his reputation as the go-to guy for the country’s best chefs.

This means if you’re looking to buy a scale that measures in gram increments from someone who isn’t a drug dealer; or some coffee oil; or a spoon with a built-in clothes pin from Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s line of tabletop settings; or an “anti-griddle,” which freezes foods just on the outside; or, yes, a Gastrovac (for which he’s the sole US importer)—Tio’s your man. As Siegel says with a laugh, “Jing can get you anything—a flat-screen TV, furniture …. ” To procure these things, Tio, who lives in Orange County with his wife and young son, travels the world, including, of course, Barcelona, to which he makes monthly trips.

When I stop by Tio’s rather modest fifth-floor Union Square showroom, the check-in list is like a culinary who’s who: There’s David Kinch, Daniel Patterson, Corey Lee from the French Laundry, Michael Tusk from Quince and Peter Rudolph from Campton Place. Tio often collaborates with chefs, once tasting pure liquid nitrogen on their behalf—“it was like Dumb and Dumber,” says Tio of the day-long numb tongue he suffered—and making custom spice blends for them. Two big plastic bags at the front desk, just dropped off by Chris Cosentino, the innards-happy chef at Incanto, are full of dried beef tendon and kidneys. Cosentino has asked Tio to use help pulverize the offal so it can be used in a salt mix. As odd as it sounds, this is clearly business as usual for Tio, a man who—despite his casual attire of jeans, a puffy jacket and Crocs—gets excited about anything exotic, unusual and, generally, very expensive.

Although Tio is invested in SF, he doesn’t hesitate to give his two cents about the city’s dining scene. Showing me an assortment of white powders that he sells (carrageenan, gellan, xanthan gum, methylcelluose), all mostly used to control the viscosity of liquids, Jing says that, in terms of technique, “New York is 10 years ahead of San Francisco, and San Francisco is 10 years ahead of L.A.”

I present this statement to Siegel, who is himself working on a line of proprietary salt blends with Tio. (Tio approached him with the idea after experiencing Siegel’s salt-and-pepper dinner at the Ritz.) A dark cloud moves over his face. “I like forks and stuff. I like ingredients,” he says. “But take the crappiest peas and put alginate with it or whatever? I don’t agree.” On the other hand, a sous-vide machine, something else Tio sells, is now a staple at the Ritz (parts of a suckling pig are cooking in it as we speak), and Siegel is happy to have his Thermomix, a food processor that Tio also sells and that can weigh, steam, cook, chop, blend, crush and emulsify. And for gellan, a gelatin-like substance he uses to set sauces, he has a reverence that only a chef could apply to a mouthfeel. “It just makes things so soft,” he says with tenderness.

So what might diners in SF be enjoying in 2017? I challenge Siegel—who’s been one of the city’s top chefs for 10 years, since he started at Charles Nob Hill (now closed)—to show us. And, wondering what a greener chef might come up with, I pose the same question to James Syhabout, the 27-year-old who took his first head-chef job, at PlumpJack Cafe, in October and was swiftly given three and a half stars by Michael Bauer.

At Le Sanctuaire one March morning, Syhabout ponders his response to the idea that we’re behind the times, and what he might be cooking when he’s a mere 37. The quiet Oakland-raised chef is no stranger to working with the assistance of liquid nitrogen and enzymes: He followed three years of working at Manresa with apprenticeships at Adrià’s El Bulli and the Fat Duck outside London, only to return to SF to help Patterson open Coi.

At PlumpJack—not known as the most thrill-seeking restaurant—Syhabout cooks with cutting-edge restraint. He’s tinkering with serving foie gras with a raisin consommé made by placing a Cryovac bag of water and raisins in a sous-vide machine in order to extract the natural essences, and he’s using xanthan gum, a thickener made from seaweed, with mustard chlorophyll (the juice from mustard greens) and pairing it with sweetbreads.

“Maybe we’re five years behind,” he finally concludes. “I was talking to Daniel Patterson about it. I don’t think it’s the cooks. It’s the clientele. New York is more open to things. A restaurant like WD-50 wouldn’t last here.”

Syhabout recalls a dish he made at El Bulli: poached lamb brains with sea urchin, sea grapes and puréed lamb brains. “A little out there,” he says—an understatement. Still, despite his interest in experimentation, the chef is  grounded in the sensibility that seems to keep chefs here from ending up in Never-Never Land—even if it means that we’re behind terms of “technique.” As Syhabout puts it: “We’re trying. Winterland [now closed], Manresa—these are places inching towards technology but still paying homage to food that’s delicious.” Delicious being the operative word—a quality I don’t see SF chefs compromising in any near, or far-off, future.



WHAT WILL JAMES SYHABOUT BE COOKING IN 2017?
Asparagus with Fermented Curry Spices and Olive-Oil “Tapioca”

Taking a cue from his Thai ancestry, chef James Syhabout of PlumpJack Cafe decided to conquer the Gastrovac and use the machine to infuse asparagus with coconut. He explains, “I put the asparagus in the Gastrovac in water for three minutes at 95 degrees centigrade with a .8 bar vacuum, then drained the water and put the asparagus under vacuum at room temperature for 15 minutes, which extracted all the vegetable’s natural water. I then put young coconut juice into the machine and submerged asparagus in it at room temperature, close to 1 bar on the machine, for 10 minutes.” The result is asparagus “impregnated” (a term the Gastrovac inventors came up with—not us) with young coconut juice, which, despite any innuendos, makes for a virtuous, bright-green stalk of asparagus that’s somewhere between cooked and fresh with just a gentle perfume of coconut.

Syhabout put on goggles for the next part, dripping olive oil from a squeeze bottle into liquid nitrogen (which makes little pearls of olive oil that are frozen on the outside). He bound the balls with methylcellulose to mimic the look and feel of tapioca and garnished the dish with a sprinkling of Jing Tio’s vadovan, a custom-made mix of salt, fermented garlic, shallots and curry spices. As for the Gastrovac? “It sounds good in theory,” says Syhabout, “but it’s not really practical for restaurant service.”

WHAT WILL RON SIEGEL BE COOKING IN 2017?
Seared Toro with Mirin Gellan, Pencil Asparagus, Shiso and Carrot Balls

Gellan gum makes the world go round, according to chef Ron Siegel of the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton. Poking fun at his own affection for the food additive—a natural thickener and gelling agent that is like agar but can maintain perfect visual clarity and withstand heat of up to 120 degrees centigrade—he says, grinning, “It makes things melt in your mouth, like a soft-serve ice cream on a 100-degree day right after you ride the Big Dipper.”

For his creation, Siegel chose to thicken a reduction of mirin (a sweet Japanese rice wine) and chicken stock, cut out a disk of this gelatinous substance and top it with a small piece of seared toro. Instead of making Syhabout’s frozen olive-oil balls, Siegel chose to squeeze drops of a reduction made of shiso as well as carrot juice infused with Szechuan peppercorns into liquid nitrogen. The resulting dish is representative of Siegel’s now-signature style—Japanese in flavor but containing a playful mix of hot and cold.

Technique isn’t everything—presentation is important too. Siegel likes his forks, but chose to ditch the traditional plate for a large piece of beautiful tile, decorated with two streaks of carrot reduction applied with a paintbrush. The future of food might just be at our local home-decorating store.

Check out behind-the-scenes photos, featuring Siegel and Syhabout at work in the kitchen.

Check out behind-the-scenes photos, featuring chefs Ron Siegel and James Syhabout at work in the kitchen.

The new culinary technology has its ups and downs. Ups: You can make like a mad scientist, donning gloves and laboratory goggles in order to squeeze drops of olive oil into liquid nitrogen so you get icy little pearls that are frozen on the outside and olive-oily on the inside. Downs: You might be lent a temptingly shiny, all-the-rage, new-to-the-US $4,000 gizmo called a Gastrovac, which was developed by a couple of famous Spanish chefs, and then waste three days trying to figure out how the hell to make it work.

Which is exactly what happened to chef Ron Siegel of the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton when Le Sanctuaire—San Francisco’s newest professional culinary resource—gave him a Gastrovac for a trial run. “I called David Kinch last night,” he says of his 911 to his chef compadre down at Manresa, in Los Gatos, “and he couldn’t figure it out either.” To illustrate his point, he impatiently flips up and down a switch on the machine that, by lowering atmospheric pressure, can cook such things as vegetables at a very low temperature, which in turn keeps the produce’s cellular structure intact. According to Siegel, the Gastrovac also requires a chef to check on it constantly. “I mean, hello!” he says, “Are you going to go home and set your alarm to go off every hour?” Siegel, who is of the opinion that “if a carrot is perfect, it’s pretty damn perfect” and thus doesn’t require much manipulation, shrugs it off. “I don’t want to spend my whole day using a stupid piece of equipment.” Still, I can tell he wants to kick it.

Siegel is hardly alone among SF chefs in his resistance to high tech in the kitchen, whether or not you attribute it to the Alice Waters effect—as Daniel Patterson, the chef and owner of Coi, did a couple years back in his New York Times Magazine article “To the Moon, Alice?” bemoaning the lack of envelope-pushing here.

So I was surprised to learn this January that Jing Tio, the 34-year-old founder of Le Sanctuaire, the nationally celebrated Santa Monica store that sells what it calls “essentials for exquisite cooking,” had chosen SF to be the home of his second retail space. (A grand-opening celebration is planned for this month.) Although Tio sells the likes of specialty olive oils and vinegars, rare cookbooks, schmancy pots and pans,  Japanese knives and a variety of high-quality spices brought in from all over the world (including many different varieties of black pepper from his family’s spice plantation in Indonesia, his birthplace), it’s his obsession with European-driven, cutting-edge haute cuisine, and its accompanying gadgets and potions, that has solidified his reputation as the go-to guy for the country’s best chefs.

This means if you’re looking to buy a scale that measures in gram increments from someone who isn’t a drug dealer; or some coffee oil; or a spoon with a built-in clothes pin from Spanish chef Ferran Adrià’s line of tabletop settings; or an “anti-griddle,” which freezes foods just on the outside; or, yes, a Gastrovac (for which he’s the sole US importer)—Tio’s your man. As Siegel says with a laugh, “Jing can get you anything—a flat-screen TV, furniture …. ” To procure these things, Tio, who lives in Orange County with his wife and young son, travels the world, including, of course, Barcelona, to which he makes monthly trips.

When I stop by Tio’s rather modest fifth-floor Union Square showroom, the check-in list is like a culinary who’s who: There’s David Kinch, Daniel Patterson, Corey Lee from the French Laundry, Michael Tusk from Quince and Peter Rudolph from Campton Place. Tio often collaborates with chefs, once tasting pure liquid nitrogen on their behalf—“it was like Dumb and Dumber,” says Tio of the day-long numb tongue he suffered—and making custom spice blends for them. Two big plastic bags at the front desk, just dropped off by Chris Cosentino, the innards-happy chef at Incanto, are full of dried beef tendon and kidneys. Cosentino has asked Tio to use help pulverize the offal so it can be used in a salt mix. As odd as it sounds, this is clearly business as usual for Tio, a man who—despite his casual attire of jeans, a puffy jacket and Crocs—gets excited about anything exotic, unusual and, generally, very expensive.

Although Tio is invested in SF, he doesn’t hesitate to give his two cents about the city’s dining scene. Showing me an assortment of white powders that he sells (carrageenan, gellan, xanthan gum, methylcelluose), all mostly used to control the viscosity of liquids, Jing says that, in terms of technique, “New York is 10 years ahead of San Francisco, and San Francisco is 10 years ahead of L.A.”

I present this statement to Siegel, who is himself working on a line of proprietary salt blends with Tio. (Tio approached him with the idea after experiencing Siegel’s salt-and-pepper dinner at the Ritz.) A dark cloud moves over his face. “I like forks and stuff. I like ingredients,” he says. “But take the crappiest peas and put alginate with it or whatever? I don’t agree.” On the other hand, a sous-vide machine, something else Tio sells, is now a staple at the Ritz (parts of a suckling pig are cooking in it as we speak), and Siegel is happy to have his Thermomix, a food processor that Tio also sells and that can weigh, steam, cook, chop, blend, crush and emulsify. And for gellan, a gelatin-like substance he uses to set sauces, he has a reverence that only a chef could apply to a mouthfeel. “It just makes things so soft,” he says with tenderness.

So what might diners in SF be enjoying in 2017? I challenge Siegel—who’s been one of the city’s top chefs for 10 years, since he started at Charles Nob Hill (now closed)—to show us. And, wondering what a greener chef might come up...

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