boutons_
06-29-2006, 08:57 PM
June 28, 2006
Back From France, Winning the Heart of Texas
By R. W. APPLE (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/r_w_jr_apple/index.html?inline=nyt-per) Jr.
SAN ANTONIO (http://travel2.nytimes.com/top/features/travel/destinations/unitedstates/texas/sanantonio/?inline=nyt-geo)
AS every gardener knows, flowers bloom in strange places.
Le Rêve is a spectacular case in point. Who in his right mind would expect to find a fairly formal French restaurant — jackets for the gentlemen, please — on a drab downtown corner in easy-living San Antonio, a city known for air bases, the Alamo and Tex-Mex, and most certainly not haute cuisine? But there it is on Pecan Street, a "rêve" (dream) in more ways than one, flanked by a Greyhound bus station and a barbecue joint.
Not just formal and French but fabulous — worthy of the most exigent tastes, Texan or otherwise. Patricia Sharpe, the authoritative food critic of Texas Monthly, considers it the best restaurant in the state, which is saying a lot when the competition includes places like Cafe Annie in Houston, Abacus in Dallas and the Driskill Grill in Austin. I doubt there is a better restaurant in the country so little known.
The dreamer in question is a San Antonio native named Andrew Weissman. Abetted by his Costa Rica-born wife, Maureen, who oversees the 38-seat dining room, Mr. Weissman, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and well-regarded kitchens in France and New York, has won the hearts of an initially skeptical city with dishes that are light, eclectic, inventive, refined. He seldom overreaches.
"I believe in minimal manipulation," he told me not long ago. "I try to coax out the essential excellence of my ingredients."
Mr. Weissman started things off with a single oyster, poached and served on the half shell with a perfectly modulated wasabi beurre blanc, topped with strips of gently braised cucumber and a dollop of paddlefish caviar. Complex in technique, taste and texture, yes, but not fussy or far out — a good example of Le Rêve's style.
Something a bit more classic? Mr. Weissman, 39, makes a superb caramelized onion tart, Alsatian style, but he replaces the usual crème fraîche with goat cheese to gain an additional, more robust, taste dimension. He sautés duck breasts and serves them with Bosc pears, which is straightforward enough, but he paints the birds lightly with a mixture of corn syrup, honey and balsamic vinegar before cooking and infuses the pears with thyme before serving, which gives each of the elements a welcome lilt.
He calls his foie gras dish "Sunday Brunch," and I'd be thrilled to find it on my plate on that or any other morning ... or lunchtime ... or evening. A generous slab of sautéed Hudson Valley duck liver, thickly crusted outside, remarkably tender inside, comes with a hunk of Ducasse-like pork belly, a quail egg, a waffle, a maple syrup reduction and blackberries. Sweet, tart, salty — who needs Wheaties?
Best of all, from my point of view, Mr. Weissman displays a nice culinary wit, like Michel Richard of Citronelle in Washington, and precious few other chefs. What pleasure it gave my wife, Betsey, to discover that her delicious "lobster éclair" was that old New England standby lobster roll, all dressed up in party clothes!
One difficulty in running a restaurant like Le Rêve in San Antonio is finding the raw materials. South Texas is no agricultural paradise, but Mr. Weissman uses what local produce he can — in a wonderful pink grapefruit and vermouth sorbet, which awakens rather than deadens the palate, for example, and in the cheese course, where a mature (almost but not quite too mature) bleu d'Auvergne is combined with comb honey produced in Mason, Tex., in the Hill Country northwest of San Antonio.
Axis venison from Broken Arrow Ranch in Ingram, Tex., appears on the menu some nights, although not when we were last in town. Brown sugar pie and "decadent tres leches cake with coconut ice cream," as Southwestern as a rodeo, often feature on the dessert list. (Confession: I went for the decidedly un-Texan lemon curd tart and Meyer lemon sorbet, which provided a sweet little piccolo trill at the finish of a meal full of savory cello tones.)
Much comes from afar, like the Meyer lemons, and even jets have significant limitations. Mr. Weissman stubbed his toe, in my view, just once: his European white asparagus was impeccably cooked and sauced, but asparagus is one of those things, like shrimp and sweet corn, whose flavor begins dissipating the moment it is harvested, in this case too long ago.
You eat a sophisticated, expertly executed dish like Mr. Weissman's wild striped bass with trumpet mushrooms, fingerling potatoes and morel cream — talk about surf and turf! — and ask yourself how this experience came to be. Here's how:
Raised largely by his mother, the future chef, an undistinguished student by his own accounting, passed all but unnoticed through the University of New Mexico (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_new_mexico/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and the University of North Texas in Denton, earning a degree in television journalism. He proved to be better at cooking staff meals than at actual broadcasting, and before long he was on his way to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., in pursuit of a new career.
And thence to France, where he encountered a kind of passion about food he had seldom seen back at home.
Working for Bernard Andrieux at his Michelin one-star restaurant in Durtol in the Auvergne, in central France, Mr. Weissman said, he saw Mr. Andrieux fall to his knees and cry with shame when a dish was sent into the dining room with a fly in the sauce. Later, in Alsace, when the young American cooked some quail, which he knew well from Texas (http://travel2.nytimes.com/top/features/travel/destinations/unitedstates/texas/?inline=nyt-geo), and won praise from his French counterparts, "I was so proud," he told me, "that I went up like a balloon."
Stops elsewhere led to a gig at Le Cirque 2000 in Manhattan, beginning with its opening in the New York Palace Hotel in 1997. By then Mr. Weissman's innate modesty had been leavened with a lot of understated self-confidence, and after a time he felt, as he put it in our recent conversation, "that I could do as well or better."
So he returned home to see his parents and ponder his next move. He considered Houston and Dallas, both big-time eating towns, but not New York or California, and finally settled on San Antonio because it came with a built-in family support system and because a dollar went further.
A good thing, too. He had little money. When he first saw the small, squarish room that was to become Le Rêve, a woman was using a Shop-Vac to clean up after a flood. Undaunted, he begged and borrowed $60,000 from relatives, added a bare $3,000 of his own and took the plunge, without a single truly "outside" investor.
"I built the restaurant myself," he said, with more than a little pride.
It has celadon-colored walls decorated with prints in gold frames, frosted windows and oil lamps on the tables. Not a dollar has been spent on ostentation, as anyone can see — no velvet, no silver cloches, no Sèvres, no Christofle. The servers, including the chic, dark-haired Ms. Weissman, 32, are dressed unassertively in black. They know precisely what they are doing, and they do it in an utterly natural manner.
Two things bring the space alive: flowers, like lavender tulips and apricot roses, and customers, a mixture one weeknight in May of locals, Houstonians, a handsome Mexican couple who are regular visitors, and a table of three women, childhood friends, who had gathered from all across the country. Needless to say, the whole shebang has nothing whatever to do with the Texas of clichés; it is unbig, unloud and unflashy.
Like all restaurants of real excellence, Le Rêve gets the details right. The modern chairs stay comfortable for the three hours or so you are likely to spend at table, the wineglasses are comme il faut, the salt is Maldon from England and the dinner rolls, baked daily by Mr. Weissman, are exemplary — crunchy yeasty numbers flavored with peppercorns, as well as softer ones tasting very delicately of rosemary.
This is a place to indulge oneself in the wine department, because the Weissmans track down the best and price it gently. The list is not long, but it is full of gems like 2002 Zind-Humbrecht riesling Herrenweg, from one of the best producers in Alsace, for $63, and 1993 Volnay Santenots from Robert Ampeau for $96 — superb red Burgundy, superb year, superb grower, at only about twice the retail price.
I should have seen what was coming. Before visiting Le Rêve, Betsey and I ate lunch at another Weissman enterprise in San Antonio, a tiny seafood emporium called Sandbar. (There is a third, a coffee shop called Sip.) The first thing I noticed was the brassy motto on Mr. Weissman's black T-shirt — "Frozen Fish Stinks!" — and the second, atop the stainless steel bar, was a big basket of limes. Not those pulpy, undistinguished supermarket limes, but genuine Key limes, which are harder to find, costlier and of course better. Only perfectionists go to such lengths.
Sandbar offers seven kinds of oysters daily, usually including both East and West Coast varieties; a delightfully sour, clean-tasting ceviche (Mrs. Weissman's inspiration); a bountiful shrimp salad with avocados and Roma tomatoes; and sashimi made with pristine ahi tuna and served with microgreens from nearby Seguin, Tex.
San Antonio is a long, hot ride from Boston, but Sandbar's milky, buttery clam chowder, chock-full of Little Necks, bacon, celery, potatoes and onions — no flour, no cornstarch, no thickener of any kind — gets the accent right. Likewise the Key lime tart, a square slab with a graham cracker crust and those bar-top Key limes.
Mr. Weissman's restaurants are by no means the first ambitious restaurants in San Antonio; Biga, run by an English chef named Bruce Auden, has been serving imaginative Southwestern- and Asian-flavored dishes (as well as a definitive sticky toffee pudding) since 1991. But coming here and staying represented a major gamble.
"It was a phenomenal decision," said Ms. Sharpe of Texas Monthly, "and I have no doubt that it retarded Andrew's recognition as a chef. He's not nearly as well known as he would be if he were in New York or San Francisco or even Houston."
So be it, the young star said. Like many great European chefs, he rather relishes life away from the bright lights. The only thing that really annoys him and his wife, he said, "is the people who tell me that our food is too good for San Antonio." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif
Back From France, Winning the Heart of Texas
By R. W. APPLE (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/r_w_jr_apple/index.html?inline=nyt-per) Jr.
SAN ANTONIO (http://travel2.nytimes.com/top/features/travel/destinations/unitedstates/texas/sanantonio/?inline=nyt-geo)
AS every gardener knows, flowers bloom in strange places.
Le Rêve is a spectacular case in point. Who in his right mind would expect to find a fairly formal French restaurant — jackets for the gentlemen, please — on a drab downtown corner in easy-living San Antonio, a city known for air bases, the Alamo and Tex-Mex, and most certainly not haute cuisine? But there it is on Pecan Street, a "rêve" (dream) in more ways than one, flanked by a Greyhound bus station and a barbecue joint.
Not just formal and French but fabulous — worthy of the most exigent tastes, Texan or otherwise. Patricia Sharpe, the authoritative food critic of Texas Monthly, considers it the best restaurant in the state, which is saying a lot when the competition includes places like Cafe Annie in Houston, Abacus in Dallas and the Driskill Grill in Austin. I doubt there is a better restaurant in the country so little known.
The dreamer in question is a San Antonio native named Andrew Weissman. Abetted by his Costa Rica-born wife, Maureen, who oversees the 38-seat dining room, Mr. Weissman, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and well-regarded kitchens in France and New York, has won the hearts of an initially skeptical city with dishes that are light, eclectic, inventive, refined. He seldom overreaches.
"I believe in minimal manipulation," he told me not long ago. "I try to coax out the essential excellence of my ingredients."
Mr. Weissman started things off with a single oyster, poached and served on the half shell with a perfectly modulated wasabi beurre blanc, topped with strips of gently braised cucumber and a dollop of paddlefish caviar. Complex in technique, taste and texture, yes, but not fussy or far out — a good example of Le Rêve's style.
Something a bit more classic? Mr. Weissman, 39, makes a superb caramelized onion tart, Alsatian style, but he replaces the usual crème fraîche with goat cheese to gain an additional, more robust, taste dimension. He sautés duck breasts and serves them with Bosc pears, which is straightforward enough, but he paints the birds lightly with a mixture of corn syrup, honey and balsamic vinegar before cooking and infuses the pears with thyme before serving, which gives each of the elements a welcome lilt.
He calls his foie gras dish "Sunday Brunch," and I'd be thrilled to find it on my plate on that or any other morning ... or lunchtime ... or evening. A generous slab of sautéed Hudson Valley duck liver, thickly crusted outside, remarkably tender inside, comes with a hunk of Ducasse-like pork belly, a quail egg, a waffle, a maple syrup reduction and blackberries. Sweet, tart, salty — who needs Wheaties?
Best of all, from my point of view, Mr. Weissman displays a nice culinary wit, like Michel Richard of Citronelle in Washington, and precious few other chefs. What pleasure it gave my wife, Betsey, to discover that her delicious "lobster éclair" was that old New England standby lobster roll, all dressed up in party clothes!
One difficulty in running a restaurant like Le Rêve in San Antonio is finding the raw materials. South Texas is no agricultural paradise, but Mr. Weissman uses what local produce he can — in a wonderful pink grapefruit and vermouth sorbet, which awakens rather than deadens the palate, for example, and in the cheese course, where a mature (almost but not quite too mature) bleu d'Auvergne is combined with comb honey produced in Mason, Tex., in the Hill Country northwest of San Antonio.
Axis venison from Broken Arrow Ranch in Ingram, Tex., appears on the menu some nights, although not when we were last in town. Brown sugar pie and "decadent tres leches cake with coconut ice cream," as Southwestern as a rodeo, often feature on the dessert list. (Confession: I went for the decidedly un-Texan lemon curd tart and Meyer lemon sorbet, which provided a sweet little piccolo trill at the finish of a meal full of savory cello tones.)
Much comes from afar, like the Meyer lemons, and even jets have significant limitations. Mr. Weissman stubbed his toe, in my view, just once: his European white asparagus was impeccably cooked and sauced, but asparagus is one of those things, like shrimp and sweet corn, whose flavor begins dissipating the moment it is harvested, in this case too long ago.
You eat a sophisticated, expertly executed dish like Mr. Weissman's wild striped bass with trumpet mushrooms, fingerling potatoes and morel cream — talk about surf and turf! — and ask yourself how this experience came to be. Here's how:
Raised largely by his mother, the future chef, an undistinguished student by his own accounting, passed all but unnoticed through the University of New Mexico (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_new_mexico/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and the University of North Texas in Denton, earning a degree in television journalism. He proved to be better at cooking staff meals than at actual broadcasting, and before long he was on his way to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., in pursuit of a new career.
And thence to France, where he encountered a kind of passion about food he had seldom seen back at home.
Working for Bernard Andrieux at his Michelin one-star restaurant in Durtol in the Auvergne, in central France, Mr. Weissman said, he saw Mr. Andrieux fall to his knees and cry with shame when a dish was sent into the dining room with a fly in the sauce. Later, in Alsace, when the young American cooked some quail, which he knew well from Texas (http://travel2.nytimes.com/top/features/travel/destinations/unitedstates/texas/?inline=nyt-geo), and won praise from his French counterparts, "I was so proud," he told me, "that I went up like a balloon."
Stops elsewhere led to a gig at Le Cirque 2000 in Manhattan, beginning with its opening in the New York Palace Hotel in 1997. By then Mr. Weissman's innate modesty had been leavened with a lot of understated self-confidence, and after a time he felt, as he put it in our recent conversation, "that I could do as well or better."
So he returned home to see his parents and ponder his next move. He considered Houston and Dallas, both big-time eating towns, but not New York or California, and finally settled on San Antonio because it came with a built-in family support system and because a dollar went further.
A good thing, too. He had little money. When he first saw the small, squarish room that was to become Le Rêve, a woman was using a Shop-Vac to clean up after a flood. Undaunted, he begged and borrowed $60,000 from relatives, added a bare $3,000 of his own and took the plunge, without a single truly "outside" investor.
"I built the restaurant myself," he said, with more than a little pride.
It has celadon-colored walls decorated with prints in gold frames, frosted windows and oil lamps on the tables. Not a dollar has been spent on ostentation, as anyone can see — no velvet, no silver cloches, no Sèvres, no Christofle. The servers, including the chic, dark-haired Ms. Weissman, 32, are dressed unassertively in black. They know precisely what they are doing, and they do it in an utterly natural manner.
Two things bring the space alive: flowers, like lavender tulips and apricot roses, and customers, a mixture one weeknight in May of locals, Houstonians, a handsome Mexican couple who are regular visitors, and a table of three women, childhood friends, who had gathered from all across the country. Needless to say, the whole shebang has nothing whatever to do with the Texas of clichés; it is unbig, unloud and unflashy.
Like all restaurants of real excellence, Le Rêve gets the details right. The modern chairs stay comfortable for the three hours or so you are likely to spend at table, the wineglasses are comme il faut, the salt is Maldon from England and the dinner rolls, baked daily by Mr. Weissman, are exemplary — crunchy yeasty numbers flavored with peppercorns, as well as softer ones tasting very delicately of rosemary.
This is a place to indulge oneself in the wine department, because the Weissmans track down the best and price it gently. The list is not long, but it is full of gems like 2002 Zind-Humbrecht riesling Herrenweg, from one of the best producers in Alsace, for $63, and 1993 Volnay Santenots from Robert Ampeau for $96 — superb red Burgundy, superb year, superb grower, at only about twice the retail price.
I should have seen what was coming. Before visiting Le Rêve, Betsey and I ate lunch at another Weissman enterprise in San Antonio, a tiny seafood emporium called Sandbar. (There is a third, a coffee shop called Sip.) The first thing I noticed was the brassy motto on Mr. Weissman's black T-shirt — "Frozen Fish Stinks!" — and the second, atop the stainless steel bar, was a big basket of limes. Not those pulpy, undistinguished supermarket limes, but genuine Key limes, which are harder to find, costlier and of course better. Only perfectionists go to such lengths.
Sandbar offers seven kinds of oysters daily, usually including both East and West Coast varieties; a delightfully sour, clean-tasting ceviche (Mrs. Weissman's inspiration); a bountiful shrimp salad with avocados and Roma tomatoes; and sashimi made with pristine ahi tuna and served with microgreens from nearby Seguin, Tex.
San Antonio is a long, hot ride from Boston, but Sandbar's milky, buttery clam chowder, chock-full of Little Necks, bacon, celery, potatoes and onions — no flour, no cornstarch, no thickener of any kind — gets the accent right. Likewise the Key lime tart, a square slab with a graham cracker crust and those bar-top Key limes.
Mr. Weissman's restaurants are by no means the first ambitious restaurants in San Antonio; Biga, run by an English chef named Bruce Auden, has been serving imaginative Southwestern- and Asian-flavored dishes (as well as a definitive sticky toffee pudding) since 1991. But coming here and staying represented a major gamble.
"It was a phenomenal decision," said Ms. Sharpe of Texas Monthly, "and I have no doubt that it retarded Andrew's recognition as a chef. He's not nearly as well known as he would be if he were in New York or San Francisco or even Houston."
So be it, the young star said. Like many great European chefs, he rather relishes life away from the bright lights. The only thing that really annoys him and his wife, he said, "is the people who tell me that our food is too good for San Antonio." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif