Tabla turns ten

[Fat Guy]

Last night, as I was heading into Tabla for the restaurant's tenth anniversary dinner, I thought back to the fifth anniversary dinner. I hate to sound like an old-timer, but I can't believe five years have gone by.

During those five years, and during the five years before them (Tabla opened just around the time I was starting to write about food as a full-time proposition) I've been watching the progress of what used to be called "fusion" and the related movement that Tabla has been calling "New Indian Cuisine." To me, fusion was the self-conscious attempt to shoehorn Asian ingredients (I include Indian as part of the Asian category) into a Western culinary model. New Indian Cuisine was, conversely, Indian cuisine informed by Western ingredients and technique, if I may oversimplify it for the sake of clarity. The New Indian cuisine movement always seemed more genuine to me than the fusion movement, but they were related.

Today I think if you eat at restaurants like the Momofukus and the other places on the leading edge of contemporary cuisine, what you find is not so much fusion but what I've been calling a cuisine of "convergence." It's not that a chef like David Chang is incorporating Asian ingredients into Western dishes. It's that, in his kitchens, the entire notion of an East/West bifurcation has collapsed. Many of today's most forward-thinking chefs are simply choosing from a global palette of ingredients and techniques and creating whatever they think will be delicious without regard for the old categories.

Nowhere has this evolution been more evident to me than it was last night at Tabla's tenth anniversary "New Indian" dinner. They're still calling it "New Indian" but it's not. It's post-Indian, post-fusion and category-defying. It represents exactly the convergence that is one of the most important culinary developments of the past half decade. And it's always a pleasure to see Tabla operating as a nexus for chef collaboration on the leading edge. I eat at Tabla -- particularly Bread Bar -- a lot and kind of take the place for granted on a day-to-day basis, so it's nice to be reminded that Tabla is more than just a good restaurant, it's an important one.

If you wanted to create a wish list of New York-area chefs representing some of the best thinking about cuisine today, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a better list than the one Floyd Cardoz created last year when he was planning this dinner. His wish list was David Chang, Dan Barber, Marcus Samuelsson and Michael Romano. He reached and, miraculously, every one of the chefs agreed to do the dinner. Each in his own way embodies the changes that have happened in the past half decade. Five years ago there was no Momofuku. There was no Blue Hill at Stone Barns. (Both opened later in 2004.) Marcus Samuelsson had just started to flex his global muscles at Riingo. And Michael Romano wasn't operating an outpost of Union Square Cafe in Japan, soaking up the Asian culinary culture and bringing it home (the idea for Tabla a decade ago, by the way, was Michael Romano's). When you look at the covers of food magazines today, and you think about who has influenced and is revered by the newest generation of chefs, it's hard to believe that five years ago some of these guys were just starting to find their voices.

Unlike the fifth anniversary dinner, where all the chefs were Indian, here there was no identifiable ethnic or stylistic connection between all these chefs, yet they produced a remarkably coherent and integrated meal. Every dish last night was memorably excellent -- something that rarely happens at these multi-chef, banquet-format meals but that, when it does happen, can lead to some of the most special meals.

The first dish up was Marcus Samuelsson's foie gras ganache with pomegranate vinaigrette. Think molten-center chocolate cake, but with foie gras. I've had excellent meals at Marcus Samuelsson's restaurants, but never anything as great as this dish. If I'd just come in last night and had that dish, having never tasted Samuelsson's food, I'd have concluded that he's one of the top handful of chefs in the world. Samuelsson, by the way, gave co-author credit on the menu to Jimmy Lappalainen, who is I believe the chef at Riingo.

Then an iteration of a dish Floyd Cardoz has been making, refining and improving for more than a decade: rice-flaked halibut with cauliflower puree and maple-tamarind glaze. The roots of this dish can be traced all the way to Floyd Cardoz's tenure as Gray Kunz's top sous chef at Lespinasse in the mid-1990s. The fish was different, the exact crust formula was different, it was all different but the soul of the dish has endured. This was the most elegant version yet, and was a lot less fusion-y than it used to be, swimming in a bowl of Asian stuff that didn't do as much as last night's minimalist treatment. An excellent demonstration of the less-is-more philosophy expertly applied.

Dan Barber delivered a poached egg with curried lentils, lettuce broth and dried winter vegetables. This to me was the most interesting dish of the evening because I wasn't sure how Dan Barber's locally oriented style would square with this global dinner concept. But there was no tension at all, which again shows how the effortlessness of convergence is pushing the heavy-handedness of fusion aside. I think a dish like this also shows how far Dan Barber has come since the early days at Blue Hill. Here he has captured that same early stylistic penchant for soft, subtle compositions but with much brighter flavors that really focus the dish without undermining the subtlety.

Michael Romano's dish is one I need to learn a little more about, because it was such an eye opener for me. He made tonarelli (a pasta shape that appears like spaghetti but with a square cross section) from scratch, tossed it with spiced shrimp, and created a sauce based on coconut that was a little bit carbonara-esque, a littl bit Alfredo-esque, but it was coconut. I'm guessing he used a combination of coconut flakes and reduced coconut milk, but I have to check. It was great, although the wine pairing with this course, a Cabernet Franc from Chesler, was a strange choice. But I guess that's what you deal with when you're getting wine donated for a fundraiser (the non-media paying customers were ponying up something like $300 in support of literacy projects in India, so the event had a number of sponsors). This was the only dish of the evening that felt "fusion-y" but it was so natural and right that it didn't fall victim to the fusion mentality.

David Chang's superstar status is clear in so many ways, but certainly another demonstration is his positioning in the slot for the final savory course on the menu, not to mention the palpable anticipation all evening for the David Chang dish. It was pork, of course. Braised pork belly with daikon and pickled mustard seeds. Fantastic.

Dessert, prepared by Tabla's pastry chef Melissa Walnock, was on the level of the rest of the tough-act-to-follow meal. Pain perdu, creamed coconut brulee, mango chutney and yuzu sauce.

Here's the menu:

My little camera was no match for the distance and lighting conditions but here's the cast of characters. Marcus Samuelsson and Jimmy Lappalainen:

Floyd Cardoz and Michael Romano:

David Chang and Dan Barber:

[victornet]

Wow, that dinner sounds fabulous.

We held my son's bar mitzvah party at Tabla - that was fusion!

[ulterior epicure]

What a different way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Tabla.

That foie gras ganache is wicked.

[Fat Guy]

There's some professional back-of-the-house photography of the event on the Feedbag blog.

[kathryn]

Really nice ones by Time Out New York (The Feed Blog):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31356424@N08/

[Chris Amirault]

Great report. I wonder if that tonarelli had finely ground coconut powder, which you can use as a thickener in other liquids like stock. You get the coconut component but in a liquid that has other properties (like a collagen mouthfeel).

As you reflect back on the meal, do you have a sense of where this cuisine of convergence may be heading next? Though a lot of the influences seem broadly "Asian," there are others at work, especially in Samuelsson's dish, which (not surprisingly) bears the marks of north African cuisines: a flour-based savory with nuts and pomegranate.

Also, most of those dishes were beautiful without seeming to be creations of culinary art. I don't know if that's an effect of the banquet-style plating or not, but it feels relaxed and confident.