30 world famous dishes from great restaurants

[Ken Gargett]

after rob's post this morning on great historic american restaurants, happened to come across this. 

have enjoyed a few of these. great to see Tets and his dish - brilliant chef and amazing dish. 

 

 

Iconic Dishes of Fine Dining

 

30 Iconic Dishes of Fine Dining

Dishes from the past century and a half that exemplify the zeitgeist, or bend the course of cooking in a new direction.

By Aralyn Beaumont Art by Armando Veve

 

Within each culinary era, there are certain dishes that exemplify the zeitgeist and others that bend the course of cooking in a new direction. What follows is a list of thirty such iconic dishes, selected from the past century and a half of fine dining. We see these dishes recreated again and again in different forms by chefs who admire and take inspiration from them.

It is by no means a definitive list. It may seem disproportionally French, because it is: much 
of modern fine dining has deep roots in French Nouvelle Cuisine.

In creating this collection, we solicited input from chefs, restaurateurs, and writers: David Chang, Will Guidara, Daniel Humm, Corey Lee, Tatiana Levha, Pat Nourse, Enrique Olvera, Daniel Patterson, Andrea Petrini, and René Redzepi. They provided insight into the dishes that were influential in their careers, and helped us right some glaring omissions. Not all of the chef-panelists are featured, but all have dishes that are currently making waves around the world: Olvera’s mole madre; Humm’s carrot tartare; Lee’s thousand-year quail egg.

We expect (and hope) that this list will spark some debate among fine dining fanatics. For everyone else, here’s a chance to bone up on your culinary history.

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Canard à la Presse

Frédéric Delair – Tour d’Argent Paris, France 1890

Frédéric Delair didn’t invent the duck press—that was likely the work of a Rouen man by the name of Méchenet earlier in the nineteenth century. What Delair created was a grand bit of tableside theater: he would place the carcass of a roasted duck—breasts removed—into an ornate silver press and crank the wheel, crushing the duck and draining its blood and juices into a silver bain-marie. He then cooked the duck juice down with Cognac and Madeira into a sauce to be poured over the sliced duck breast. Grandiose tableside plating was popular with chefs in Paris and the Lyon region through the 1960s, but nothing ever generated the same level of awe as canard à la presse.

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Poularde en Vessie

Fernand Point – La Pyramide Vienne, France 1920s

In his book Ma Gastronomie, Fernand Point credits Marius Vettard of Café Neuf with inventing this dish, but it’s Point who made it a symbol of Grande cuisine. Half a century before immersion circulators were invented for laboratory use, Point was sealing foie-gras-and-truffle-stuffed-chickens in pig bladders and simmering them in a consommé of madeira and brandy, like a proto-sous vide. To the delight of his diners, Point would slice the ballooned bladder open tableside, revealing a perfectly cooked Bresse chicken within. From Bocuse to Boulud, chefs have been recreating poularde en vessie for nearly a century. Recently, Daniel Humm has revived in-bladder cooking at Eleven Madison Park in New York, with vegetables like celery root or asparagus in place of the chicken.

Related Recipe

 

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Red Mullet with Potato Scales

Paul Bocuse – L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges Lyon, France 1960s

The “scales” for Paul Bocuse’s red mullet are made from slices of young potato brushed with egg yolk to form a single sturdy layer over the entire fillet. Bocuse himself was inspired by something he saw at a French food show—a dish of cold salmon topped with cucumber slices. Frédy Girardet would reimagine Bocuse’s creation with red mullet and zucchini scales; Charlie Palmer made a version with scallops and potato chips; and Daniel Boulud and Gordon Ramsay would honor the original with more faithful recreations.

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Saumon à L’oseille

Jean and Pierre Troisgros – La Maison Troisgros Roanne, France 1962

Some chefs credit this dish with putting an end to the long-standing tradition of Western chefs overcooking fish. Every component is just-cooked, from the bright pink salmon (previously always sickly pale) to the bed of tart sorrel in a citrusy cream-and-white-wine sauce. The acidic flavors, lighter sauces, and restrained cooking times would become defining characteristics of nouvelle cuisine, a movement partially inspired by Japanese culinary culture. The combination of salmon and sorrel would also become a pillar of Lyonnais cuisine, recreated by French chefs for decades.

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Bouillon de Champignons comme un Cappuccino

Alain Chapel – Restaurant Alain Chapel Mionnay, France 1970s

Alain Chapel, who trained under Fernand Point, is one of the founding fathers of nouvelle cuisine. This soup course reimagines a cappuccino as an earthy, silky mushroom consommé topped with frothed broth. Crayfish tails hide under the foam in the soup, which is made without cream. Shades of Chapel’s cappuccino can be seen in Eric Ripert’s lobster cappuccino, Massimiliano Alajmo’s cuttlefish capp, and Thomas Keller’s version with forest mushrooms.

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Pieds de Cochon aux Morilles

Pierre Koffmann – La Tante Claire London, England 1977

Pierre Koffmann’s pigs’ trotters are a paragon of fine dining finesse and technique. The trotter has to be dehaired, skinned, and deboned with careful attention. From there, they’re braised in a mixture of port, Madeira, brandy, and white wine, then stuffed with a farce of chicken breast, veal sweetbreads, and morels, and finally steamed and topped with a sauce resembling the cooking liquid. This dish is renowned for aggrandizing scrap cuts and rustic technique. When Marco Pierre White opened Harveys, it appeared on his menu as “Braised Pig’s Trotter ‘Pierre Koffmann.’”

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Le Gargouillou de Jeunes Légumes

Michel Bras – Bras Laguiole, France 1978

For each plate of gargouillou, the cooks at Bras artfully arrange petals, slices, shavings, fronds, and purées of fifty to sixty different vegetables—from foraged herbs and garden flowers to cucumbers and potatoes. Bras’s seasonal and thoughtful approach to sourcing ingredients and presentation has echoed throughout fine dining in the decades since the dish’s invention, reinforcing the importance of foraging and establishing a new plating aesthetic. The aftershocks of this dish are still shaking up menus today, inspiring dishes like David Kinch’s Into the Vegetable Garden and Daniel Patterson’s Abstraction of Garden in Early Winter.

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Baked Goat Cheese with Garden Lettuces

Alice Waters – Chez Panisse Berkeley, California 1980

Alice Waters helped define California cuisine as a culinary movement that revolved around seasonal ingredients and responsible sourcing. This dish introduced many Americans to chèvre and exalted the pleasure of a simple garden salad. Soon, goat cheese and carefully prepared salads would appear on restaurant menus across the country. The salad became a symbol for California cuisine, and Waters’s approach to cooking gave rise to farm-restaurants like Blue Hill at Stone Barns, run by Chez Panisse alum Dan Barber.

Related Recipe

 

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Riso, Oro e Zafferano

Gualtiero Marchesi – Ristorante Gualtiero Marchesi Milan, Italy 1981

Stories of baroque-era food infused with gold inspired the Milanese tradition of serving risotto with raw egg yolks (and later saffron) so that it shone a pale yellow. Three centuries later, influenced by the artful plating of nouvelle cuisine, Gualtiero Marchesi introduced a new gold standard to Milanese risotto: he infused his risotto with enough saffron to turn it bright orange, then draped a square of edible gold leaf over the center. Marchesi would continue to bring dramatic plating to his dishes and, in so doing, forged a link between Italian fine dining and the visual arts.

Feuilleté de Truffe Fraîche “Bel Humeur”

Bernard Pacaud – L’Ambroisie Paris, France Early 1980s

Bernard Pacaud is a Parisian chef whose cooking is deeply rooted in the Lyonnais culinary tradition. In the early 1980s, Pacaud made a canapé of “good mood” that transported diners back to Lyon in the 1960s. He baked layers of truffle and foie gras in a dome of puff pastry (Bocuse’s en croûte style) and served it on a bed of puréed black truffles. The juxtaposition of crunchy and creamy textures with fatty-earthy flavors was a revelation. A few years later, Daniel Boulud served Sea Scallops “Black Tie” at Le Cirque: a reinterpretation of the bel humeur with thinner discs of black truffle and scallops in place of foie.

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Chaud-froid d’oeuf au Sirop d’érable

Alain Passard – Le Duc d’Enghien Enghien-les-Bains, France Early 1980s

The chefs of nouvelle cuisine introduced amuse-bouches—miniature dishes served before a meal—to excite the palate and prepare the diner for the meal to come. After leaving Le Duc d’Enghien to open his own restaurant in 1986, Passard continued serving the chaud-froid d’oeuf as part of a series of amuse-bouches that kick o the meal at Arpège. It’s a dish of contrasts: warm poached egg yolk and cold sherry cream, sweet maple syrup and savory spices. The dish is served in an egg shell, a beautiful example of careful technique and delicate presentation. David Kinch cites Passard as a major influence and serves a version of the chaud-froid egg at his restaurant, Manresa.

 

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Pizza with Smoked Salmon and Caviar

Wolfgang Puck – Spago,  Los Angeles, California 1982

Though some still refuse to recognize a distinct California style of pizza, Wolfgang Puck’s influence on the pizza arts is undeniable. The “gourmet pizza”—topped with unexpected luxury ingredients—came to be in the 1980s when Puck began serving them at Spago in Beverly Hills. More important, the door to fine dining was thus opened to pizza and other everyday fare. For his part, Puck says that the smoked salmon and caviar pizza was an accident—he claims the kitchen was out of bread when a famous actress came into the restaurant asking for smoked salmon and brioche.

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Purée de Pommes de Terre

Joël Robuchon –Jamin, Paris, France 1981

When Jamin was only three months old, Michelin inspectors awarded it one star for Joël Robuchon’s stylized nouvelle cuisine—his masterful gelées and perfectly cubed vegetables—and his mashed potatoes. A few years later, Robuchon made a decisive turn toward more rustic cuisine influenced by his grandmother’s recipes, but by then his purée de pommes de terre were already cemented in history. Robuchon’s once outrageous two-to-one potato-to-butter ratio is now the standard for fine dining taters.

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Flor de Huevo y Tartufo en Grasa de Oca con Txistorra de Dátiles

Juan Mari Arzak – Arzak, San Sebastián, Spain 1980s

Juan Mari Arzak brought the techniques of nouvelle cuisine (taught to him by Paul Bocuse) back to Spain, launching a culinary revolution that stripped back the richness in Basque cuisine and merged its rustic nature with refined techniques. In this iconic dish of New Basque cuisine, Arzak wrapped an egg tightly in plastic with truffle juice and duck fat before poaching it. The unwrapped egg emerged looking like a flower and was originally plated with chorizo-date mousse, mushrooms, and bread crumbs. The technique lives on, known simply as the “Arzak egg.”

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Foie Gras en Raviolis aux Truffes dans un Bouillon de Poule

Alain Ducasse – Le Louis XV, Monte Carlo, Monaco 1987

Ducasse was one of the first French chefs to ignore the principles of nouvelle cuisine, reintroducing the richness of earlier decades. Ducasse rose to fame in Monte Carlo by combining the culinary traditions of Italy and his native Provence. Foie gras-stuffed ravioli is a Ducasse signature, rehashed by numerous French-inspired chefs, including Sottha Kuhn at Le Cirque and even Ducasse himself: in 2008 he served the foie ravioli in a sunchoke consommé at his New York restaurant Adour Alain Ducasse.

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Black Cod with Miso

Nobu Matsuhisa – Matsuhisa, Los Angeles, California 1987

Nobu Matsuhisa introduced American diners to an idea of Japanese cuisine beyond teriyaki and sushi rolls with dishes like this one. Drawing on traditional curing techniques, Matsuhisa marinated black cod fillets in sake, miso, mirin, and sugar, then roasted the fish until the exterior was browned and crisp. Suddenly, miso wasn’t just a soup, and once-cheap black cod rose in esteem and price all across Los Angeles and New York (where Matsuhisa opened his TriBeCa outpost Nobu).

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Tagliatelle of Oysters with Caviar

Marco Pierre White – Harveys, London, England 1987

After training at La Tante Claire and Le Gavroche, Marco Pierre White opened Harveys in London and made a name for himself as England’s brightest and fiercest young chef. Per- haps his most famous dish from this period was a set of five oyster shells, each filled with its oyster in a tangle of tagliatelle, beurre blanc, and a caviar garnish. White acknowledged the dish’s French roots—oysters served in their shell with mousse (Le Gavroche), and langoustines prepared with tagliatelle (Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons)—but it was his fresh perspective that modernized and legitimized London’s culinary scene.

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Sashimi of Young Maguro, Mustard, Soy-Marinated Egg-Yolk Sauce

Yoshihiro Murata – Kikunoi Kyoto, Japan 1990s

While Yoshihiro Murata’s cooking at Kikunoi shined a spotlight on Kyoto-style kaiseki cuisine in the 1990s, this dish became iconic for the liberties Murata took with traditional cooking. He was one of the first kaiseki chefs to popularize thick cuts of sashimi, and his soy-marinated egg-yolk sauce was a rich alternative to the typical simple, acidic accompaniments. Chefs like René Redzepi, Ferran Adrià, and Nobu Matsuhisa have credited Murata with emphasizing how aesthetics are integral to the dining experience and the importance of fermentation and umami.

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Confit of Ocean Trout

Tetsuya Wakuda – Tetsuya’s Restaurant, Sydney, Australia 1992

Tetsuya Wakuda synthesizes Japanese culinary philosophy, the French techniques he learned from chef Tony Bilson, and Sydney’s local ingredients to create an ever- evolving seafood-focused menu. Wakuda’s confit of ocean trout topped with kombu, fennel salad, and ocean-trout roe traces back to Pierre Koffmann’s confit of salmon in goose fat. Wakuda’s decision to use local ocean trout and olive oil and cook the fish at a low temperature to retain its color made him, and Sydney’s fine dining scene, famous within the international dining community.

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Oyster and Pearls

Thomas Keller – The French Laundry, Yountville, California 1994

This decadent dish—one of several staples on the French Laundry menu—is a playful interpretation of a natural phenomenon. The “pearls” in this case are tapioca balls—folded into a rich sabayon—and a fat quenelle of sevruga caviar. The oyster rests half-submerged in the sabayon, nestled next to the caviar. The French Laundry, hidden away in sleepy Yountville, forged new ground by merging rustic surroundings with ultra-luxury. Grant Achatz has called this dish (and his meal at the French Laundry) a turning point in his cooking career, noting that he’d never seen such a generous serving of caviar before, let alone as a garnish.

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Whole Baked Abalone Puff with Diced Chicken 

Chan Yan Tak – Lung King Heen, Hong Kong, China 2000s

As the chef of the first Chinese restaurant to earn three Michelin stars, Chan Yan Tak is credited with introducing the world to fine dining Cantonese cuisine. Chan’s whole abalone baked into puff pastry with diced chicken has become the stuff of legend for its expert preparation of abalone and its elevation of traditional dim-sum cookery.

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Fine Galette de Champignons de Paris, Foie Gras Marine au Verjus, Plantin

Pascal Barbot – Astrance Paris, France 2005

Like the chefs before him who traveled to Japan and came back with nouvelle cuisine, Pascal Barbot pulled from culinary experiences in Australia, Indonesia, and Mexico to forge a new path for French cuisine. His focus on vegetables and products in their natural state was revolutionary at the time. For his iconic foie-gras-and-mushroom galette, he layered products rarely served raw in France—thinly sliced Paris mushrooms and verjus-marinated foie gras—into a towering mille-feuille-like wedge, served with hazelnut oil and lemon curd.

 

 

Spherical Olives Ferran Adrià – El Bulli, Roses, Spain 2005 While other chefs were focused on showcasing ingredients in their natural state, Ferran Adrià was building a mythic temple of modernist cuisine in Spain. Adrià’s stated goal with many of his impossible-seeming creations was to create a better version of an ingredient than nature could offer. To make these spherical olives, he puréed green olives and dropped spoonfuls of the strained juice into a liquid alginate solution, which reacts with the calcium in the olive to form a gel-like sphere. After marinating overnight, the “olives” are served with a gin-and-vermouth spray to create the effect of a dirty martini.

 

 

 

Hot Potato, Cold Potato Grant Achatz – Alinea, Chicago, Illinois 2005 Achatz’s exuberant avant-garde cooking has kept Chicago firmly in the fine dining conversation for more than a decade. The hot potato in this classic dish from Alinea is a sphere of Yukon Gold that has been cooked in clarified butter, then skewered with a piece of chive and cubes of parmesan and butter. It rests in mid-air, crowned with a slice of truffle, over a creamy soup of potato and truffle. The two potatoes come together theatrically when the diner pulls out the pin and the skewered ingredients fall into the cold soup below.

 

 

Eggs Benedict Wylie Dufresne – wd~50, New York City, New York 2005 Part of a relentlessly imaginative line of chefs that includes Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià, Wylie Dufresne took beloved and well-known American foods and completely reinvented them at his New York restaurant wd~50. This dish is a sum of many parts: deep-fried cubes of hollandaise (stabilized with hydrocolloids and coated in Thomas’ English-muffin crumbs); fudgy-textured egg yolks cooked sous vide; and vellum-thin slices of Canadian bacon. The dish simultaneously surprises diners with its textural remixes and rings familiar with its flavors.

 

 

Edible Stones Andoni Luis Aduriz – Mugaritz, San Sebastián, Spain Before your meal at Mugaritz, two envelopes are placed in front of you; one reads 150 MINUTES … SUBMIT! and the other 150 MINUTES … REBEL! Whichever card you choose, the meal will unfold the same way, but Andoni Luis Aduriz believes that much of our dining enjoyment comes down to perception. This dish is the perfect example: in front of you is a bowl of stones, two edible and the rest actual stones from the nearby river. The edible stones are boiled potatoes coated in a paste made from agalita (an edible white clay), lactose, salt, and water that sets into a rigid gray coating. The difference between a jarring find and a soft and creamy potato comes down to choice.

 

 

Sound of the Sea Heston Blumenthal – The Fat Duck Bray, England 2007 Blumenthal’s cerebral but lighthearted approach and trompe l’oeil creations earned him three Michelin stars at the Fat Duck and celebrity status around the world. The Sound of the Sea is possibly the most dramatic example of his brand of cuisine: a fragrant miniature beachscape of tapioca sand, sea foam, and pieces of fish and pickled seaweed, accompanied by an iPod hidden in a conch shell. The diner pulls headphones from the shell and listens to the calls of seagulls and waves crashing on a beach while eating the sea-centric dish, transporting them to the seaside and theoretically intensifying the briny flavors.

 

 

Pickled Vegetables René Redzepi – Noma, Copenhagen, Denmark 2007 New Nordic cuisine took the world by storm a decade ago and virtually eclipsed all other fine dining for a few years, largely thanks to René Redzepi and his restaurant, Noma. The dish that first sparked the nonstop chatter was this assembly of colorful pickled vegetables shaved thin, curled into rings, and arranged with flowers and herbs on a plate coated with bone marrow. Redzepi made vegetables, foraging, and fermentation part of the modern vanguard and opened the door for other Nordic chefs to reimagine their regional cuisine. Related FeatureFantasies of a Happier Kitchen Facebook Twitter Pinterest WhatsApp Email By René Redzepi

 

 

Beet Rose Daniel Patterson – Coi, San Francisco, California 2011 Daniel Patterson’s beet rose represents an evolution of California cuisine: produce is still the prominent feature, but simple preparations are spurned in favor of precise technique and painstaking plating. Each beet “petal” is sliced from the core of a roasted beet, dipped in beet juice, and delicately added to the flower until a full rose is formed. The rose is then transferred onto a base of beet purée, aerated yogurt, and rose-petal ice. Earlier this year, René Redzepi crafted an homage to the beet rose using rhubarb cooked in rose oil and kelp.

 

 

Ants and Pineapple Alex Atala – D.O.M., São Paulo, Brazil 2000s Alex Atala and his Brazilian restaurant, D.O.M., were among the first to push South America into the fine dining limelight. Atala is a champion of Amazonian ingredients and the importance of supporting indigenous communities. In the rain forest of Amazonas, Atala discovered the intense flavor of lemongrass and ginger given o by ants. At D.O.M., he served an intact dried ant on a cube of fresh pineapple, effectively destigmatizing bugs as ingredients in fine dining kitchens. Ants and other insects have begun to show up on menus around the world ever since.

[AndrewNR]

Few things there I recognise.. 

Marcos White Heat is a great example of a glimpse into what was once considered the benchmark and shows how quickly food becomes dated and trends change. 

That said some of the big people in food manage to stay relevant. 

Rene and Alex are examples I'm particularly fond of.