menu of more rustic but equally entrancing
dishes, anchored by vast pans of paella—a
fingernail-deep layer of perfectly crusty rice
that makes you forgive the accompanying
page of text lecturing about its authenticity.
And to be fair, negotiating the rules and
language of dining these days is hard—when
to go low, when to go high, what to keep of
the past, and what to discard. Maybe it’s no
surprise that a restaurant in Brooklyn—a place
that, like Los Angeles, has become a diverse
mash-up of dining styles and influences from
around the world—seemed to me to crack the
code. There’s a tragic, wan aspect to Aska’s
Swedish-born chef, Fredrik Berselius, as
though he were an art student or a Goethe
hero. You want to buy him a sandwich and
a ticket for a roller coaster. Amazing, then—
especially in the genre of multi-course tasting
menus that can so easily turn into an endur-
ance test—how attentive this second iteration
of Aska is to comfort and pleasure.
When you sit in the darkened dining room,
cosseted from the rumble of the Williamsburg
Bridge, just above, you’re informed that the
table is yours for the evening; you should
feel free to determine the pace of the meal—
perhaps take a stroll if the mood strikes.
Berselius stands, dramatically lit, among his
clutch of cooks in the open kitchen, bent over
a square counter like a painting of medieval
medical students performing an autopsy. But
the sense is less that of a theatrical perfor-
mance than of an actual restaurant.
You can make conversation with your com-
panion without worrying about keeping your
eyes on the show. More miraculous, there are
smells and sounds of real cooking, rather than
the empty air of cold, clinical composition. The
dish descriptions, delivered by rotating chefs,
may take the usual Dadaist turns: “After we set
the lamb’s heart on fire, we crush it to get this
powder.” “Next to the bladder wrack, you have
a blue-mussel emulsion.” “Instead of milk, we
use pig’s blood.” But they appear on the plate
just as concerned with feeding your belly as
with feeding your mind: a slippery raw lan-
goustine bound in twine to a bundle of smol-
dering fragrant pine branches; a sea scallop
bathing in a broth of elderflower; beef, aged
to the very edge of spoiling, and then topped
with its own cured fat cap, an unctuous
translucent jelly that’s like the roe of some
mythical cow-fish. There is no greater cliché
in neo-Nordic cooking than lichen; I’ve nod-
ded politely at it any number of times. But
Berselius’s reindeer moss—gathered in the
Catskills and served partly submerged in a rich
wild-mushroom broth—was the first time I got
the point and the enjoyment.
Above all, while the arched windows are
reminiscent of Noma, and the animal pelts
on the chairs in the downstairs lounge
are unmistakably Scandinavian, Aska feels
like it could be nowhere other than Brooklyn.
Indeed, it feels like Brooklyn’s best, most
sophisticatedly bohemian version of itself.
Is it surprising that it took someone born
4,000 miles away to figure out what that
means and bring it to life? Of course not.
That’s how it works.
- ••
IN TASTING MENUS, the power of the chef
as autonomous artist finds its expression; in
the casual revolution, you see the creativity
born of democratized dining and thorny
economics. Where these two shaping forces
meet may be where you find the most exciting
food of the moment.
Witness the strange and beautiful Han Oak
in Portland, Oregon.Chatting at the counter
one night, chef Peter Cho, who moved west
after years working with April Bloomfield
in New York City, expressed some ambiv-
alence about landing on the long list of
James Beard Award nominees for Best New
Restaurant. “It’s not really what we’re try-
ing to do here,” he said. “I mean, we’re only
open two days a week.”
He was selling himself short—the place is
open an additional two days with an à la carte
menu of dumplings and noodles—but usually
I’d be inclined to agree with him. Pop-ups—
of both the roving and permanent varieties,
the latter of which Han Oak resembles—have
become an undeniably valuable part of the
culinary landscape, as places to experiment
and gain exposure, and as stepping-stones to
permanent businesses. But to measure them
against proper restaurants is to disrespect the
vastly more di∞cult day-in and day-out art ofrestauranting. It’s like giving a truck-driving
award to someone who did a really nice job
moving her couch in a U-Haul last Saturday.
Still, Han Oak feels like a special case. It
occupies an industrial building with roll-
ing garage-door bays. Cho lives in the same
space, with his wife and 2-year-old son. When
I was there, the family sat alongside me at the
counter, the little boy too fixated on watch-
ing Finding Nemo on a laptop to be bothered
to eat his father’s food. Cho’s father lingered
nearby, while his mother rolled dumplings. I
don’t know what voodoo Cho uses to retain
a full set of non-family servers and cooks for
four days of service (plus occasional private
events), but for all the warm, familial vibe, the
place runs as smoothly and professionally as
any I saw in my travels.
On the plate, Cho opts for soulful over
pyrotechnic, though a simple technique of
steaming and then deep-frying sweet pota-
toes yields something so deliciously crunchy
and rich you’re conditioned to assume some
higher science is involved. Other banchan,
the array of small dishes that introduce a
Korean meal, would be at home at any farm-
to-table restaurant,like cubes of winter
squash flecked with fried garlic and lemon
zest. Meanwhile, a main course of smokedhanger steak with cabbage slaw might make
you feel like you’re deep in Texas. But the
heart of the menu remains in simple home-
style Korean dishes: a bowl of hand-cut noo-
dles in chicken broth tinged with scallion and
soy sauce, squares of koji-marinated pork
belly served with cold discs of daikon, and
rice cakes. The four-course tasting menu cost
me an absurd $35, though Cho warns that it
may go up to $45, still a number that would
hardly cause an eye-bat attached to a single
entrée at many New York restaurants. Simply
put, Han Oak is a unicorn: something magical
to be seen at all costs, before it notices it’s
among us and promptly disappears.
Or, finally, there’s Kato, tucked away in a
West L.A. strip mall, in a space so tiny that a
man arriving with a guitar while I was there
represented a crisis of space (the instrument
wound up taking its own seat at the small
counter). If there’s any place to watch the
collision of creativity and economics, it’s
California, which is facing a minimum-wage
hike that will fundamentally alter how
restaurants are run. Certainly it will mean
a final farewell to such extraneous labor
as busboys, runners, hostesses, anyone to
answer the phone, and so on. At Kato, there
are three people running the front of house,
where once there might have been six. You’re
introduced to all three upon entering, and
they gracefully rotate duties, dropping by the
table, bringing drinks and ferrying 25-year-
old chef Jonathan Yao’s food from the kitchen.
Such e∞ciency is presumably what allows
Yao to keep his tasting menus to a shockingly
mild $55 or less. He has a prodigy’s sense of
flavor and restraint, with dishes that tease
notes of Japanese, Taiwanese, and Southeast
Asian cuisine: dashi-braised octopus atop a
salad of crispy rice and herbs dressed with
fish sauce; a warm porridge that mingles
Dungeness crab, uni, and the umami pulse
of dried scallop. The sole mild disappoint-
ment was a too tough piece of Wagyu beef
accompanied by pickled celery and an XO
sauce, Wagyu being precisely the kind of lux-
ury ingredient a place like this doesn’t need,
and XO having become what Sriracha was a
few years ago, a ubiquitous cheat. The light
touch is thrown to the wind on the list of sup-
plements you can add between your savory
and dessert courses: rice drowned in pork-
belly gravy, for instance, or a fried-chicken
sandwich topped with a bright slaw of cab-
bage, fish sauce, and herbs. It is delicious,
of course, if unwieldy: Like most chicken
sandwiches, it seems designed to be photo-
graphed as much as eaten. But if Instagrams
help subsidize the rest of what Yao is up to
(and I saw a sandwich on every table in the
place, including mine), it’s hard to complain.
At once creative and disciplined, thrill-
ingly new and comfortably familiar. In other
words, like all of this year’s list, the best of
what we hope for in an American restaurant.
I don’t know if the spark I re-discovered
at Salazar can be kept alive; I’ve lost and
found it several times since. Frankly, I don’t
know if we’re all going to be okay. I only know
that one thing we can do is keep repeating
that these are the things that matter—aloud
and as often as possible. And then go out and
eat, together.brett martin is a gq correspondent.BEST NEW RESTAURANTSCONTINUEDDESSERT
CEREMONY- THE MILLE-FEUILLE CARVING
Le Coq Rico, New York City
Antoine Westermann’s “bistro of ˆ
beautiful birds” is all about the
poultry, but at meal’s end your
server carves a crackling
rectangle of custard-cream
mille-feuille tableside
with all the pomp due
a prized chicken.
BEST OF
2017134 GQ.COM MAY 2017