Remembering Three Greats
André Soltner, Charles Phan, Martine Saunier + Sweet Lemongrass Pork + A wine you won’t soon forget
They say deaths come in threes. So it was the last two months where three key figures from my food and beverage life passed away, one far too early.
But first a gentle reminder. Don’t miss out on my first Meet the Winemaker Virtual Tasting with Sonoma’s Schermeister Wines on March 13th! There are still a few spots left. Reserve your spot here and I will send the link for ordering the special three pack of Rob and Laura Schermeister’s excellent Pinot Noir, Grenache and Viognier. Looking forward to introducing you to this dynamic couple and tasting with everyone live!
1. André Soltner
By the time I arrived in New York City the summer of 2003, André Soltner had already sold Lutèce, the French temple to refined cuisine he helmed for over 30 years. As the old guard Midtown French restaurants closed with the aging of chefs and changing tastes toward sharing plates and lighter fare, Chef Soltner remained. Having accumulated numerous accolades, he was firmly cemented in the pantheon of chef-restaurateurs as the man from Alsace who changed the way Americans experienced French cuisine.
Though I would never dine at Lutèce while he ran the kitchen, his retirement was my good fortune. Soltner had not left the business but merely shifted into the role of teacher, as Dean of Classic Studies at the French Culinary Institute, the cooking school I attended.
About halfway through the ten-month program, our regular drilling on classic French recipes, like Blanquette de Veau and Pâte Brisée, was interrupted for a master class with Chef Soltner himself. The reputation of chefs in those days, particularly French chefs, was still very much in the style of testosterone fueled shouting and ruthless crushing of egos. I had no reason to expect Chef Soltner to be any different. But he was.
The school kitchen, normally a clanging, chopping, sizzling cacophony, was utterly silent as twelve students in our tall paper toques crowded around this elder stateman as he showed us how to use our pairing knives to their full effect. Like a magician, he turned radishes into flowers and transformed gnarled carrots into miniature football shapes.
The high point of the class was the demonstration of the omelet. Nothing, Chef Soltner told us, was the sign of a great chef more than his skill with an egg. After watching the Chef produce a perfectly silky omelet, we each had a try back at our station. When he came to check on my work the first thing he looked at was not my pan, but my empty egg shells.
“Come here.” He waved to my station mates and had us all gather back around the counter. “Look at this.” Chef Soltner picked up every empty eggshell at the work station and ran his thumb on the insides. Where albumen clung, he detached the white with his fingernail, scraping it into a small bowl. By the time he worked his way through all the shells, he had enough extra white to equal to about half the volume of an egg.
“Now, that might not look like much here, but say you are serving lunch to 200 people. How many eggs would you go through then? If you scrape out all your eggshells how many more omelets could you make with the extra egg? How many meringues or clarified stocks? When you run a restaurant, this kind of frugality is the cost savings that can determine whether or not you turn a profit.”
I never ran a restaurant kitchen, but I do manage my home kitchen and I’ve never forgotten how the King of French fine dining never failed to scrape out his eggshells. Perhaps the reason he reigned as long as he did in New York.
Read the New York Times obituary for André Soltner.
2. Charles Phan
If you look on my cookbook shelf, there is one volume that is dog eared and oil splattered beyond all others: Charles Phan’s Vietnamese Home Cooking. I never had the privilege of meeting him, but Phan has been in my home and my kitchen for over a decade thanks to this book.
It was through Phan’s restaurant, The Slanted Door in San Francisco, that I first got to know his cooking. I had traveled to Vietnam and eaten pho at folding tables sitting on low plastic stools, but I had never seen Vietnamese food presented the way he did it. Clean, fresh flavors and beautiful presentation; thoughtful service including an intelligent wine list; all in a warm, welcoming dining room. At a time when most Americans only thought of Asian food as take out in white cardboard boxes, Charles Phan brought a version of Vietnamese food that showed Asian food could, in fact, be fine dining.
In his introduction to Vietnamese Home Cooking, Phan writes that it took him so long to make a cookbook because he didn’t want to write a book that was only full of restaurant recipes. Instead, he took his time to gather recipes from his upbringing and dishes he made regularly at home as an adult to create a book that would allow any home cook to access Vietnamese cuisine, any time they liked. Caramelized Lemongrass Shrimp, Bánh Xèo, Sweet Lemongrass Grilled Pork, these are part of our regular family rotation thanks to Phan.
His flagship restaurant at the Ferry Building closed last year but is slated to reopen in a new location this spring. If you are in San Francisco, go visit and understand that wherever you are in America, if you are eating pho with decent cutlery or your favorite sandwich shop has a bánh mi on the menu, that is at least in part thanks to Phan. Or better yet, buy his cookbook and help his recipes live on, in your own kitchen.
Read the San Francisco Examiner obituary for Charles Phan.
Sweet Lemongrass Pork Chops
Adapted from Charles Phan’s Vietnamese Home Cooking. I like to make this with thin cut pork loin chops for more marinade penetration, which also makes this a good fit for lettuce wraps. I cut down the sugar from the original recipe slightly to fit my taste.
Serves: 4 adults and two kids or three adult sized appetites. Feel free to double for larger families, also great for summer barbecues and entertaining.
1.25 lb. thin cut pork loin chops
1 ½ T. minced lemongrass from ½ the white part of a lemongrass stalk (lemongrass saves well in the refrigerator, use the rest to pump of the flavor in your next green curry, or add to the dipping sauce below)
¼ cup sugar
2 ½ T. fish sauce
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 T. shallot minced (shallots vary in size, this is about equal to one half of a large shallot)
¼ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
½ Thai red chili pepper, stem removed, finely minced (optional)
Lettuce leaves, shredded carrot, sliced cucumber, herbs such as mint, cilantro and Thai basil
Vegetable or grapeseed oil
Rice or cooked rice noodles to serve (optional)
Nuoc cham (Flavored Fish Sauce)
¼ cup fish sauce
1 T. sugar
2 T. lemon juice
¼ c. water
1 clove garlic, minced
1 ½ T. minced lemongrass from ½ the white part of a lemongrass stalk (if you want to make the sauce, go ahead and mince the whole lemongrass stalk in one go at the beginning)
1 Thai chili (optional), stem removed and minced
Remove pork from the refrigerator and place in a single layer in a glass or ceramic baking dish that snugly fits all the pork (a 9 x 13 inch pan works well). In a small bowl, whisk together lemongrass, sugar, fish sauce, garlic, shallot, black pepper, and (optional) Thai chili. Pour the marinade over the pork, turning each slice once to coat thoroughly. Lightly cover and let marinade for 1-2 hours at room temperature. This can also be done in the morning and refrigerated until ready to cook in the evening.
While meat is marinating, wash and prep lettuce, carrot, cucumber and herbs.
To cook, heat a barbecue or heavy sauté pan over medium high heat. Oil the grill or add 2 T. of vegetable to the sauté pan. If cooking on the stove, you will need to work in two batches so that the pork lays in a single layer with space between the slices. Cook without moving for three minutes, until well seared on one side. Flip to the other side and cook for an additional 2-3 minutes until cooked through. Let rest and repeat with remaining pork.
To make the sauce, in a small bowl stir together fish sauce, sugar, lemon juice and water until sugar is dissolved. Stir in lemongrass (optional), garlic and chili (optional). Use immediately or make ahead and store in the refrigerator until ready to use.
To serve as lettuce wrap, cut into ½ inch thick slices before serving and pile on a platter surrounded by lettuce, carrots, cucumber and herbs. Serve alongside rice or noodles if desired.
3. Martine Saunier
I’ve written before about my idiosyncratic former employer, the first Frenchwoman to import wine from Burgundy to the United States. Martine Saunier was one-of-a-kind. She didn’t like the farmed duck in America so she learned to hunt, that way she could go out and shoot her own wild duck whenever she was in the mood. She enjoyed fencing so she took up yoga to stay limber, decades before Lululemon became the standard dress code for Californians. Whether sport or wine, if Martine had a passion, she followed it, and brought the rest of us along for the ride.
Despite being a female trailblazer, I don’t think she was ever that fond of women, she far preferred good-looking men on a Master Sommelier track. But on the days when I worked with her, taking Martine around to see my customers in New York, I tried to soak up all I could from her decades of experience and deep knowledge of the winemakers we represented.
Martine taught me to taste Sauvignon Blanc last in a lineup of wines, so the grassy notes don’t overwhelm the palate when moving on to delicate Pinot Noirs. She taught me to always put the cork back in the bottle the same direction it came out, even if you had to push really hard because the cork had expanded and putting the drier top in first would be easier. This was, she told me, in case there was taint in the top of the cork, so you don’t expose a new, potentially ruinous element to the wine below.
When it came to bestowing her wisdom, above all else, Martine loved to correct my pronunciation. Now, I was not a novice to the French language. I took French all through high school, two years of college and worked with French restaurants where many of the wine buyers were French. Still, she would make me repeat “Domaine de la Bergerie” over and over in a taxi on the way to an appointment until she was satisfied that my r’s were rolling in enough of a guttural, back-of-the-throat manner for her deem it satisfactory.
On one occasion, I got my own turn at providing education. After a day of pronunciation tutoring, Martine and I climbed in a taxi and I directed the driver to our last appointment of the day on the West Village’s Leroy Street. For Burghounds out there, the name Leroy undoubtably sounds familiar. Madame Lalou Bize-Leroy, the doyenne of Domaine Leroy, is a legend. Her family owns a 50% stake in Domaine Romanée-Conti, perhaps the most famous, and expensive, Burgundy in existence. The taxi took off in the direction I sent him, to the corner of Greenwich and Leroy, which I pronounced in the New York fashion, lee-ROY.
Martine, on instinct, swung her head in my direction, school headmistress and royal guard of the language police rolled into one. “You mean, leh-rwah.”
Imagine here that Martine rolled her r in the aforementioned majestic French way that sounds like you might soon after need a tissue for whatever phlegm you just dislodged. But of course, we were not in Burgundy on our way the way to an audience with the king (“le roy” or “le roi” means “the king”) or to visit Burgundian wine royalty. This was New York.
I replied in my best Californian living in New York accent, “No, I mean Leroy.”
Read the memorial to Martine on the MWines website.
To Drink…
Clos Uroulat Jurançon Sec Cuvée Marie 2017
I learned more about French wine representing the Martine’s portfolio than I could have read in any book. Thanks to Martine’s taste, I discovered corners of French wine making that are still little understood outside of the country’s borders, like the wilds of the Sud-Ouest where dry whites made from Gros Manseng make unusual and beguiling food companions, unlike anything else on the planet.
Before Martine passed away I had the opportunity to drop her a note, to thank her for all she taught me and to let her know that I had recently run across this little known Jurançon Sec Cuvée Marie at a small wine shop that had just opened near my home. It was a wine I also chose to serve at my wedding ten years ago. It was a wine I only knew about because of Martine. It was a wine anyone in the United States only knew about because of Martine. For anyone who has had the pleasure of tasting it, it might be the only time they have had a Jurançon Sec. And that is just one of the dozens of producers she championed over the decades. Think of how much richer and more expansive our wine life is because of the passion she dared to follow and share with us all. May we all end our days with such a legacy.
$26 from Caves in Encinitas or other online retailers