KITCHEN, MEET BAR Haute cuisine has been accompanied by fine wines for centuries, but it’s only recently that avant-garde eateries around the world are increasingly putting sommeliers and mixologists on the same footing as the chef. By Bill Knott Even before legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier was rattling the pans in the late 19th century, the pattern was set. Chic restaurants with smart menus had equally polished wine lists. You might start with champagne, move on to white burgundy, progress to a bottle of claret, and finish with a glass of something sticky. It was one of the immutable laws of the restaurant universe, and it barely changed for 200 years. Classic combinations included oysters and chablis, foie gras with sauternes, coq au vin with something red from the Côte de Beaune ... and diners would scour the list in vain for anything other than classic wines from the most prestigious, and most expensive, regions of the wine world. Should your finger alight on anything more benevolently priced – from the Languedoc, say – the disapproval of the sommelier could be almost palpable. And if your taste ran more to beer, cider or sake than wine, you would not just be out of luck, but very possibly out the door. Forsaking alcohol altogether? How about a nice glass of orange juice? Change, though, is afoot. Take Saint Peter, the groundbreaking Sydney fish restaurant from chef Josh Niland where, according to head sommelier Houston Barakat, “we treat John Dory livers just as preciously as foie gras. We make salami out of yellowfin tuna, and ham from striped marlin. Our diners are more adventurous than ever. If I were to serve something predictable – riesling with raw fish, say – not only would I be bored out of my mind, but the customer might rightly feel underwhelmed.” His current list includes a sake from cult Osaka brewery Akishika Shuzo, an amphora-fermented and aged rosé from the Macedon Ranges, north of Melbourne, and a macadamia-and-wattleseed liqueur from a gin distillery in Byron Bay. “As Josh often reminds us, without provocation there can’t be change. If we play it safe, where’s the intrigue? Where’s the interest?” muses Barakat. Saint Peter is a 19-seat restaurant in which, says Barakat, “chefs and front-of-house all work side by side behind the same bar, a literal example of how the demarcation between back-of-house and front-of-house isn’t as clear as it used to be.” In many new-wave restaurants, that synergy is just as philosophical as it is spatial, but the bar has taken a while to catch up with the kitchen. As a former chef, cocktail guru Ryan Chetiyawardana – aka Mr Lyan, with bars in London, Amsterdam and Washington, DC – remarks, “For a certain period, it was very onesided. The bar was riding the wave that the kitchen had created. The food offering was well established, but drinks were very ad hoc: there was an understandable lack of experience on the bar side. Now, though, there is a much tighter dialogue between front of house and back of house.” In the classical kitchen, complexity of flavour comes from meat- and seafood-based stocks, often heavily 48
educed. The resulting dishes are paired with wines that attain complexity by alcoholic fermentation, and often through ageing as well. Stocks in the sauces, grapes in the glass: two entirely different methods to achieve a similarly satisfying, mutually rewarding depth of flavour. But the search for complexity in many new-wave bar/restaurants is much wider than this, and has – crucially – led chefs and bartenders along similar paths, lending a natural sense of harmony to many modern menus and drinks lists, and bringing kitchen and bar much closer together. In the bar, you might find kombuchas, shrubs, kefirs and vinegars; in the kitchen, kimchi, garums, sourdoughs and pickles. They are, in effect, two sides of the same coin: the same lactic and acetic acid bacteria and wild yeasts are responsible for the aromas and flavours of both drink and food. It is a phenomenon especially noticeable in alcoholfree pairings, which, says Chetiyawardana, “are huge now. There’s a younger generation that drinks in a different way, and that really demands consideration from a restaurateur. A full-on juice menu isn’t good enough any more.” The art behind a successful food and cocktail pairing, whether alcoholic or non-alcoholic (the term “mocktail”, with its undertones of something fake, is universally despised), is the same as what underlies a good food and wine pairing: according to Chetiyawardana, “you consider the weight of the drink, the journey on the palate, its complexity, whether you want a drink to echo the flavours in a dish or contrast with them. You don’t need to be hidebound by convention.” Ivan Brehm, chef/patron of the Michelin-starred restaurant Nouri in Singapore, agrees. “The beverage landscape in restaurants has evolved tremendously quickly,” he explains. “There’s definitely a much greater focus on craft and small-batch producers for alcoholic drinks, but the non-alcoholic scene is just as exciting.” He credits René Redzepi’s legendary Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, with “breaking the mould, creating beverages out of brines, pickling liquids and ferments more than a decade ago”. It is the synthesis of his chefs and his front-of-house team that Brehm finds most stimulating. “At Nouri, zero- and low-ABV product development has been a pillar of our drinks programme. Unusual kombuchas, aromatic fermented brines of fennel and caraway, or lowtemperature centrifuged vegetable and fruit juices have been a part of our menus for years,” he says, adding that “the programme really escalated when we incorporated our front-of-house team, most notably beverage director Nicole Roche and manager Wyman Loke, who brought a passion and knowledge of mixology and wine into the game in an unprecedented way.” That the process is no longer a one-way street is now clear. A few years ago, Ryan Chetiyawardana was happy to welcome a team from Noma to his gizmopacked cocktail lab where, he says, “the chefs said they learned entirely new aspects of ingredients”. A highpressure distillation of black pepper, for example, which “opened up fruity, oily aromas and flavours that were a revelation”. T he modern drive towards sustainability and the “zero-waste” restaurant has also played its part in the new symbiosis between bar and kitchen. London brewer and restaurateur Steve Ryan, co-owner of both the 40FT Brewery and the adjacent Acme Fire Cult restaurant in Dalston, East London, collects both yeast extract from his fermenters – from which his chefs make a kind of Marmite, to be slathered on sourdough from the next-door bakery – and spent grain from the mash tun, which turns up in nukazuke-style Japanese pickles, a “miso radler” beer cocktail for the bar, and even dog biscuits for the canine clientele. Ancho chillies are used first for brewing, then retrieved from the tank to make Acme’s hot sauce. Oenophiles need not despair, but they may now find other temptations on the drinks list. The two-Michelinstarred Koan in Copenhagen, for instance, lists a host of stellar burgundies, both white and red, but there is also a pairing menu featuring various kinds of Korean ricebased liquors, both neat and in cocktails. Elsewhere, sommeliers have been seduced by natural, orange and low-intervention wines: at Spes, for instance, a trattoria in New York’s East Village, where 100 such bottles are all Italian and all available by the glass. Of course, there are still many great restaurants surrounded by vines, and their lists take a deep dive into the respective terroirs – on the following pages, there are examples in Champagne, in the Rheingau, in Mendoza and in Barolo, but they are far from alone. Diners can now choose between classic and modern: the reassurance of the tried-and-trusted, or the excitement of the avant-garde. For any open-minded lover of food and drink, this is truly a golden age. 49
