While the food Soleraserves all us regular folk on regular days is just fine (see review), the food coming out of the kitchen on Monday, April 28, was better. And not better by a little, but by leaps and bounds. Better by orders of magnitude. Better in a way that can happen only when a chef throws everything he has, everything he is and everything he's ever known into the execution of one great meal on one great night for what's probably the toughest crowd in town.
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So what was the big deal? Try the spring meeting of the Denver chapter of Les Amis d'Escoffier, a closed society of the food world's most serious movers and shakers, legions of high-end restaurant pros. Les Amis was founded to preserve and promote the memory of Auguste Escoffier, the French chef and food writer without whose culinary influence we'd all still be eating corn gruel and roasted turkey legs like those people who go to Renaissance festivals. And what better way to remember a kitchen guy than by throwing a big party in his honor once or twice a year, where members get all dolled up in black tie and tails, stuff themselves full of insanely good food, wash it all down with insanely good wine, and generally get as weird as you can imagine a room full of rich and powerful restaurant folk getting? To quote from the society's rulebook: "Since Les Amis d'Escoffier is dedicated to the art of good living only, it is forbidden, under threat of expulsion, to speak of personal affairs, of one's own work or specialty, and more particularly to attempt to use the Society as a means of making business contacts...Furthermore, at these dinner meetings, reference will never be made to the subject of politics, religious beliefs, personal opinions of either members or guests, irrespective of their profession or social status."
Which, in my opinion, doesn't leave much to talk about except for girls -- probably the reason I've never been asked to join. That, and the fact that I don't own a tux. There's also this rule about smoking and public drunkenness that I might have some trouble with.
If you think it's tough for a guy to cook when he has an inkling there might be a critic in the house poking through his ragout and sniffing at the couscous, try imagining what it must be like when he knows he's going to be cooking for a crowd that includes not one but two master sommeliers, as well as some of the top restaurateurs, best chefs and most discriminating palates in the city. Christian "Goose" Sorenson, Solera's executive chef and owner (along with partner, floorman and wine guy Brian Klinginsmith), could tell you all about that kind of pressure.
When I got him on the phone the day after the Les Amis dinner, he hadn't yet recovered. He was thrilled, exhausted, proud and still a little awed by an event that's like running a marathon while cooking a six-course, full-on French dinner for twenty or so of your closest friends. "I was here for almost thirty hours cooking," Sorenson said. "We finished up Sunday around 1 a.m., I sent my guys home to get seven hours' sleep while I worked, they came back in around eight, and we just kept on going."
Thirty hours? You bet your ass. That's how much time it takes to do things perfectly, and that's why you can't just walk in off the street and get this kind of food any day of the week. Thirty hours on the line is the difference between the frozen beef barley soup de jour at your favorite white-tablecloth joint and the second course of Sorenson's Escoffier menu, a potage queue de boeuf -- oxtail consommé filtered through three different rafts (a kind of egg-and-veggie mush that strains out protein solids and purifies the consommé) that alone took ten hours to prepare. Thirty hours gets you flawless oysters au gratin topped with panko breadcrumbs, shredded grana cheese and a squeeze of Meyer lemon rather than the lukewarm oysters Rockefeller dying in a hotel pan on some godawful lunch buffet. Thirty hours on the hot side of the line is the difference between Sorenson today -- dead on his feet but still high on the success of the dinner and his induction into the Les Amis brotherhood -- and the burnt-out, drunken Bennigan's fry cook he could have been.
According to the rules of Les Amis, as I -- a born outsider -- understand them, the kitchen must work entirely from the Escoffier cookbook, with the exception of one dish that's supposed to come from the chef's personal arsenal. "I'm so used to just kind of freeballin' it and doing whatever comes to me, so this was different," Sorenson explained. "I just did everything straight out of the book." He'd never really worked with Escoffier's recipes before and dove right in -- in the process discovering that while there's no doubt Escoffier was a genius, he could have done with a good editor, because every recipe seemed to be missing one or two vital steps right in the middle (a common complaint).
