July 2011 Archives

Jacob Gershovitz was born in Brooklyn at the end of the 19th century, the son of Russian Jews. Like Mozart, he died young; like Puccini, he wrote music that effortlessly assimilated the melodies and styles of other cultures. Like so many first-generation Americans, he was fiercely proud of the country his parents had adopted. (In that regard, Gershovitz was rivaled only by Israel Isidore Baline, whom he would call "the greatest songwriter who ever lived.") But unlike Irving Berlin, who worked alone, George Gershwin was a musical collaborator when it came to songs. His older brother, Ira, wrote the lyrics for his songs and Broadway shows. The Gershwins' only opera, "Porgy and Bess," currently at Seattle Opera, was based on a play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward.

The story of a beggar and a floozy set in a tenement on the South Carolina coast, "Porgy" has been under fire since it was written 75 years ago, with leading African-American actors and singers complaining its use of Gullah dialect and (stereotypical) black low-life characters was racist. It has a mixed record as a novel, stage play, Broadway musical and Hollywood movie, but as an opera its power is undeniable. The score has bottomless chromatic depth and complexity; its best-known melodies come to life with an organic inevitability. To name but a few: Summertime, A Woman is a Sometime Thing, I Got Plenty o' Nothin, Bess You Is My Woman Now, It Ain't Necessarily So. Stereotypes? What did a Jewish piano player from Noo Yawk know about fishermen and cotton-pickers in the Deep South? What did a Frenchman know about gypsies in a Spanish cigarette factory, or an Italian about geishas in Japan? At least Gershwin spent a summer in South Carolina assimilating the humanity beyond the stereotypes.

There is no more anti-consumerist anthem than Porgy's "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin," as modern today as ever (with lyrics updated from the opera's Gullah dialect to slightly more standard English):

I got plenty of nothing
And nothing's plenty for me.
I got no car, got no mule, got no misery.

Folks with plenty of plenty,
they got a lock on the door
Afraid somebody's gonna rob them
while they're out making more
What for?

Above: Gordon Hawkins as Porgy, Lisa Daltirus as Bess. Seattle Opera photo by Elise Bakketun

This is not a condescending celebration of peasant simplicity (Marie Antoinette playing Farmville) but a ringing manifesto of minimalism. I only wish it had been delivered (by the estimable Gordon Hawkins) with more eloquence. It comes as an almost offhand soliloquy, the second number at the beginning of the second act. (Were "Porgy" a Broadway musical, it would be a first-act closer.) The poor, crippled beggar Porgy lurches across the stage on a crutch (not a goat cart), yet is never seen pleading for pennies, a man whose infirmities confer upon him not the nobility of the "noble savage" but a high ground of moral decency. Trouble is, in this production, Porgy himself doesn't command the stage; he's relegated to sideline benches while the colorfully costumed denizens of Catfish Row get good dance numbers, and the secondary roles are handled with a high level of expertise.

Mary Elizabeth Willians as Serena gives the Seattle audience the opera's best singing in her funeral lament for her husband, Robbins ("My Man's Gone Now"), murdered by Bess's no-good lover, Crown (well played by a very fit Michael Redding). It's a twist on "Old Man River" (from Showboat, 1925) that you might call Old Man River Sorrow.

Jermaine Smith makes Sportin Life a nasty snake with a redeeming smile; Gwendolyn Brown plays Mariah as Big Mamma, but in a good way; Angel Blue as Clara (who sings "Summertime" at the opening curtain) and Donovan Singletary as her huband Jake are particularly appealing young parents.

Porgy is an exhausting role, and Hawkins has been performing it for a quarter century. Ironically, he became an opera singer only after he washed out of professional baseball. A regular performer in Seattle for the past 20 years (Rigoletto, Macbeth, Tonio, Count di Luna, Gemont, etc.), Hawkins has 150 performances of Porgy on three continents under his belt, giving it everything he's got and often literally whispering his last lines (in "Lawd, I'm On My Way").

Seattle is fortunate that General Director Speight Jenkins's casting over his tenure has been resolutely color-blind. No local opera-goer bats an eye if Aida is black and Radames is white, if Macbeth is black and Lady Macbeth is white, it's all about the voices. But the license to stage Porgy and Bess comes with an inviolable condition from the Gershwin estate, which holds the copyright: all the singing parts, including the chorus, must be performed by artists of color.

Duke Ellington, who complained about "Gershwin's lampblack Negroisms" in 1935, reversed himself "Your Porgy and Bess the superbest, singing the gonest, acting the craziest, Gershwin the greatest." he telegraphed the producer of the Broadway production.

In Seattle, a cast of African-American actors refused to perform the play during the Depression; it was envisioned as a Works Progress Administration production but was never performed. Grace Bumbry, who sang Bess at the Met in 1985, understood that the opera was more than a faded snapshot but a living piece of Americana. "Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there."

Gershwin himself called Porgy and Bess an American Folk Opera, yet its biggest successes have been outside the US, most notably a European tour by a South African company. "I think we've got a little jaded in the US with Porgy and Bess," Lisa Daltirus told The Times of London in 2009. But the argument over the opera's relevance is far from over. "A lot of people just think that this is a show that is lovely to listen to and happened way back when," Daltirus said. "They're not thinking that you can still find places where this is real."

Daltirus, whose steely Tosca at McCaw Hall in 2008 sent chills up my spine, has two lovely duets with Porgy but needs only four lines of Summertime (reprised in the opera's second half) to melt the hearts of the audience.

In the pit for this run is John DeMain, who has conducted more performances of Porgy than anyone alive. Far from running on auto-pilot, DeMain infused the opening night performance with verve and wit, from the overture's opening notes (a rocket that takes us to another world) to the rich, complex, hyperkinetic orchestrations that don't stop until Porgy hobbles off into the sunset, three and a half hours later.

Finally, the New York Times reports this weekend that there will be a new musical version of "Porgy and Bess" (a "commercial-minded reconception") opening on Broadway in December, starring Norm Lewis and Audra McDonald.

Seattle Opera presents "Porgy and Bess" through August 20 at McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer Street, Seattle. Tickets cost $25 to $241 and are available by phone (206-389-7676), at the box office (1020 John St., Seattle), or online

It's not just a cliché -- restaurant kitchens really are dominated by macho males. We're not talking pastry; rare (though not unheard of) is the woman feisty enough for that profane, hellish world, ballsy enough to give as much as she's expected to take, talented enough to shut down the swaggering boys club.

There's no shortage of female firepower, though, when it comes to telling kitchen stories. If the Internet sometimes seems made-to-order for young housewives sharing their seemingly boundless enthusiasm (for knitting, tie-dying, puppies, babies, collecting ephemera), there's a serious counterpart to the airheaded blogger: the professional food writer and restaurant reviewer. And in Seattle, this summer at least, this vital function is in the hands of a capable coterie of young women.

Elsewhere around the nation, the split seems to be weighted in favor of male writers. The New York Times has Sam Sifton, the Washington Post Tom Sietsema, the LA Free Press the redoubtable Jonathan Gold. Freelancers Jeffrey Steingarten and John Mariani produce books, but then so does Ruth Reichl. The difference in Seattle is that the women are both younger (under 35) and newcomers.

Hanna Raskin, 34, the new restaurant writer at Seattle Weekly, arrived only recently from a similar position at the paper's sibling Dallas Observer. A journalist who got her start as a crime reporter, she immediately took aim at local landmarks (targeting the "soul-wilting flavor" of the food at the Space Needle's restaurant; hissing at Thierry Rautureau's Luc), noted a shortage of immodium at Seattle drugstores, and took to previewing her printed reviews on the Weekly's food blog, Voracious. Unlike many critics, Raskin has no qualms about being seen in public, sometimes on her bicycle, sometimes even wearing a name tag. She gets a lot of credit from Seattle's inbred food community for not being her predecessor, Jason Sheehan.

Keren Brown, 32, a Canadian, arrived in Seattle a little over five years ago as a "trailing spouse" and set out to learn about Seattle through its food scene. She enrolled in cooking classes and began prowling food stores. She began writing a blog titled the Frantic Foodie ("I really do have a lot of energy," she admits), and before long started organizing meet-ups for the then-small group of fellow food bloggers. That morphed into Foodportunity, a series of quarterly get-togethers for the general public that quickly became indispensable for foodies and professionals from related fields like hospitality and public relations. Martha Stewart, the original (and un-frantic) one-woman-band, named Brown "Doer of the Week" in April of 2010.

Soon after, Brown was asked by Globe Pequot to write The Food Lover's Guide to Seattle, which was published earlier this month. It's a 272-page compendium of restaurants, recipes, markets, bakeries, and food artisans (modeled on Patricia Wells' "Food Lover's Guide to Paris") that promptly shot to the top of Amazon's bestseller list for travel guidebooks. The big treat of this book is the variety of specialty purveyors, from exotic spice shops to ethnic bakeries hidden (in plain sight) in urban neighborhoods (Fresh Flours in Phinney for pastries, Foulee in Beacon Hill for Filipino deli items, Gorgeous George in Greenwood for Middle Eastern food. Claudio Carallo's chocolates on Westlake).

A reporter who had lived in Seattle and San Francisco, 31-year-old Allecia Vermillion returned to Seattle in March, 2010, with her husband and quickly took up the editor's mantle at Seattlest, a group-written website where her nostalgia for food writing became apparent. Earlier this year, the newsy-gossipy national website Eater.com, already buzzing on both coasts, picked Vermillion to helm its expansion into Seattle. Vermillion has made Seattle.Eater.com into a must-read, starting each day with a dozen or so links to other local and national food stories, continuing with an assortment of tasty morsels and nuggets, a self-referential feature called the Raskin Report, and some serious original reporting as well. Nothing escapes Vermillion's notice for long; she has an especially keen eye for bloggers writing about what's on the culinary edge.

Yes, there's an old guard as well, a sisterhood of journalists who've been around for years. At the Seattle Times, Nancy Leson's blog, All You Can Eat, is a chatty, informal gold mine (Leson is Seattle's only full-time, salaried food blogger) and Providence Cicero's restaurant reviews are rock solid. Bethany Jean Clement directs food coverage at the Stranger. There's Ali Scheff at Seattle Magazine, Kathryn Robinson and Jessica Voelker at Seattle Metropolitan, Jill Lightner at Edible Seattle, and a coterie of freelancers like former Post-Intelligencer critics Leslie Kelly (who writes for Voracious) and Rebekah Denn, columnists Braiden Rex-Johnson (Pacific Northwest) and Sara Dickerman (Slate.com), cookbook author Cynthia Nims, and recipe curator Sheri Wetherell at Foodista.com.

One to keep an eye on: Jacqueline Pruner of Heed the Hedonist. A Canadian who lives in West Seattle, Pruner, 38, covers spas and culture as much as she writes about food, and she's a lawyer, not a journalist. With a cable-network food show "in the works," however, she has her sights set on becoming the next Martha Stewart or Rachael Ray.

Used to be, a reviewer was someone who'd been around long enough to know where the bodies were buried, who'd been fired by whom, who'd slept with whom. In an age of smart phones, the notion of institutional memory has been discarded in favor of the latest tweet. (For an example of how convoluted this can become, take a look at this chart showing 30 years of chefs at Le Cirque in New York City.) In fact, in the age of Daily Deals and "What's Trending (Hot) Right Now," an encyclopedic knowledge of local history is a downright burden. Fresh young faces prowling for a place to eat (and unburdened by a houseful of kiddies) rely on the fresh voices of food journalism to tell them the who-what-where-when-why and how of what's for dinner.

Last night was last call for a couple of iconic Belltown spots, Restaurant Zoë and 94 Stewart.

Zoë is moving up to Capitol Hill (14th & Union, sharing a building with Oola Distillery) and will be replaced by a clone of Spur Gastropub. Scott Staples already has Quinn on the hill and Uneeda Burger in Fremont.

Chef Celinda Norton has sold 94 Stewart; the new owners will change the name. But Cindy and her son, Nic, will reopen in another location and with another name, details to come.

Another Market icon, Campagne is in the midst of a remodel. It will reopen as a market-focused restaurant called, what else, Marché, by early September. Its below-stairs sibling, Café Campagne, down in Post Alley, remains open.

Rumors continue to circulate that Taberna del Alabardero will reopen after a remodeling to simplify its elegant decor and complex menu. It survived two and a half years, though, with its paellas and promotional dinners.

Next door, the former Del Rey has reopened as Sarajevo Lounge (nothing like a war zone reminder for the corner of First & Battery). Across the street, though, sister restaurants Ventana and Twist, which shared a kitchen and a chef, have closed.

Finally, Lucky Diner, at 1st and Cedar has decided the time is right to start a 24-hour schedule. Weekends for now, full 24/7 to come. Beer and wine are available, but the focus is on food and coffee.

You can wring your hands at all the closings, or you can look at the restaurant business as a Hydra-headed organism, constantly changing, shifting, regrouping, ever alive.

Once again, Puget Sound Business Journal's "40 Under 40" feature has come up with a passel of successful, influential food entrepreneurs.

Last year, three: Jason Wilson (Crush), Terresa Davis (Blueacre, Steelhead Diner), Ethan Stowell (Tavolata & many more).

This year, six: Brian Canlis (Canlis, at left), Jody Elsom (Woodinville's Elsom Cellars winery), Angela Shen (Savor Seattle food tours), Molly Neitzel (Molly Moon ice cream), Laura Olson (Pterodactyl Group), and Jim Brooke (Corfini Gourmet). Olson's outfit owns Po Dog, among others, on Capitol Hill. Corfini supplies Seattle's better restaurants with its better meats, everything from foie gras to ostrich.

Over at Eater.com, they must figure wine's okay but meat don't rate. Their pickup doesn't mention Corfini.

In two blindly stupid measures over the last ten days, Seattle's city council has declared war on neighborhood restaurants, the very constituency it should be courting, not harming.

First, by mandating paid sick leave for all employees without providing a tax subsidy or similar funding mechanism, the Council has reached well beyond the arena of public policy. Is it even the role of a municipality to mandate what amounts to private health insurance for hourly workers? A statewide initiative, appropriately funded, might make sense, but the Council's version of this bill adds a significant and specific dollar amount to the cost of doing business in Seattle. Perhaps there will be an offset in the city's iniquitous Business & Occupation Tax? Don't count on it.

And now Seattle is to begin subsidizing dozens of vulture food trucks with below-market "parking" fees, turning the city into a landlord and competitor for restaurant business. Where in the municipal code does it say that a particular category of entrepreneur is entitled to a city subsidy? Particularly if the beneficiary becomes a competitor to similar businesses that must pay full rent, utilities, property tax and commercial insurance? Any restaurant owner will complain about the high cost of water, sewage, electricity, dishwasher maintenance, walk-in refrigeration and fire suppression for range hoods, to name just a few of the myriad costs involved.

Please understand that I'm not arguing against street food. But Seattle's getting it exactly wrong, while Portland (with food pods equipped with city-supplied power, water, sewage) seems to be getting it right.

Portland, at least, charges fair market value for the utilities and real estate provided to the carts. And it should go without saying that I'm far from neutral. My dog in in this fight is a neighborhood restaurant, Enza Cucina Siciliana on Queen Anne, where my friends pay $30 per square foot in rent, plus insurance, gas, electricity, water, sewer, city and state taxes, L & I premiums, linen & laundry rental, dishwasher service, health department licensing, $400 a year in DOT fees for (year-round) sidewalk use, burglar alarm, aside from printing (menus) and phone (landline, internet), and a complete inventory of dishes, glassware and cutlery.

We wrote admiringly earlier this year about a changing of the guard at the French Tourism Development Agency, Atout France. A new cabinet-level minister, a new director in New York. And now a new logo.

Let's start with the original mistake. French Government Tourist Agency was a mouthful, but Maison de la France, as it was known on its home turf, had a certain staid logic. (Germany's equivalent was and is Goethehaus.) But someone decided to update the name and put some lipstick on the old girl, so they came up with Atout France.

Fine. In French, "atout" is your strong suit, your trump card. But in English, a tout is the guy who gives you bad advice at the track. Not what you want from a government agency.

Now on to the logo.

The designers originally came up with this: a clever way of promoting the sexy image of France with some subtle typography. (Sorry for the lousy image; the original has been expunged from all the official sites.) You do see that the r and a gently show two chaste breasts, non?

With great fanfare, Atout France asked for votes on four variations of a new logo. After parties in three cities where guests voted, and an online election, they came up with this:

Frère Jacques, dormez vous?

The new minister said his number one priority was a new website. France, after all, is the most visited country in the world, and its visitors certainly deserve better than they're getting now with the dismal www.franceguide.com. But bureaucracy is both defensive and well-entrenched. Along with the new logo came word that FranceGuide.com has moved up from the number 106 ranking among travel sites to number 64. And there's a slightly better new site (in beta), rendezvousenfrance.com/fr

Félicitations, I guess.

(Cross-posted on my Canadian blog, The Poutine Routine.)

It's called God's Mountain Estate, at the top of an unmarked driveway off Skaha Lake, a 14-room private hotel with a spectacular sunset view. Twice a week during the summer season, they have dinners here, prepared (because there's no kitchen) by an outfit called Joy Road Catering. The creative energy of "Joy Road" emanates from Dana Ewart, a cheerful, 34-year-old woman with an intuitive sense of taste and texture, and a caterer's ability to roll with the punches.

Clouds and showers? Set up on the covered veranda. A couple of last-minute guests? Bring up another table from the basement. No bouquet of flowers? Peonies in a jam jar. The result, as you can see, is a convivial table for 36 diners, convened on this summer evening to showcase the wines of Blue Mountain Winery.

With the winery's owners, Ian and Jane Mavety looking on and beaming proudly, the Brut Rose was poured with appetizers of mussels and pissaldiere. With the sauvignon blanc, a salad of shaved fennel and goat cheese. (This sounds like the biggest cliché in the business, but it was one of the tastiest salads I've had lately.) With the chardonnay, seared scallops. The sun came out (as it has off and on all day) and there was some talk of moving back down to the edge of the bluff overlooking the lake, but the consensus of the guests was to stay put, on the terrace, with the music of clinking glasses and lively conversations between diners who were strangers half an hour earlier.

But Dana decided it would be much nicer under the trees overlooking the lake, with fairy lights hanging from the branches as the last rays of the sun lit up the sky. "Bring your forks, napkins and your wine glasses, " Dana instructed firmly, and everyone meandered down the steps while her staff (a permanent group of ten, each one as goodnatured as the next) swiftly move chairs, tables and place settings.

Out came the platters of roast pork and carafes of Blue Mountain pinot noir, roast pork, and as the sky turned dark, pastries filled with lemon-flavored marscapone andsour cherries (picked that afternoon from trees along the drive).

Some of the diners were fortunate: they were hotel guests and wouldn't have to leave until morning, if ever.

God's Mountain Estate, 4898 Lakeside, Penticton, BC, 250-490-4800. Rooms $150 to $320 per night.

Blue Mountain Winery, 2385 Allendale Rd., Okanagan Falls, BC 250-497-8244

Meet Pierluigi Bolla, scion of one Italy's first families. They used to own the giant, highly respected Bolla winery outside Verona, which they sold in the mid-1980s, to their American distributor, Brown-Foreman. Pierluigi's brother until recently was chief executive of Barilla, Italy's largest pasta producer. And he himself runs Valdo, the fourth-largest producer of Prosecco, the iconic sparkling wine from the Veneto.

Prosecco is made from the glera grape, with the sparkle coming in a second fermentation that takes place in large, stainless steel tanks called autoclaves; it's known as the Charmat method even though it was invented by an Italian named Martinotti. Sparkling wine is made all over northern Italy, but it can only be called Prosecco if it comes from a delimited area of the Veneto; the best comes from two DOCG regions, Valdobbiadena and Conigliano. Valdo, founded in the 1920s and purchased by the Bolla family in the 1940s, makes more Prosecco, 10 million bottles, than all the fancy Franciacorta producers put together! (Here's a report on my visit to Franciacorta last December.) Ten million bottles is also substantially more than the entire output of the Collio, where I visited just last month.

Impeccably turned out in a Brooks Brothers blazer, blue Oxford button-down and tie, Dr. Bolla presided over an Italian-style lunch at Serafina (bruschetta, calamari, ravioli, tuna, espresso). "Our biggest export market is Germany, then the UK," he said. "We've only been in the US for the past year, but we have some wonderful new products coming into the market." Like many, he was seduced by the potential of China, but abandoned that market after 20 frustrating years. His best sales are still at home; Italians drink three out of five bottles of Valdo.

Cross-posted on my new blogs, PaninoPanini (all things Italian) and SlightlyPickled (all things boozy-woozy).

This is a "loaded" topic, since everyone's got an opinion. "I'm from Noo Yawk," they'll say, "and I know pizza." Or "South Philly pizza's da best," or South Jersey's, or Chicago deep-dish, or Frank's New Haven "apizza," and so on. So, okay, you guys are all right, There's a whole lot of styles because each big city used to have a Little Italy, settled by immigrants from different regions, each bringing a unique culinary culture from the Old Country.

The pizza above, by the way, is from Tutta Bella right here in Seattle, part of a new menu for summer. They do everything they can to produce an authentic "Neapolitan" pizza, using imported 00 flour, DOP San Marzano tomatoes, and baking the pies in a 900-degree, wood-fired oven that's been certified by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, right down to the blisters on the crust. And Tutta Bella's founder, Joe Fugere, was recently named VP of the AVPN; he was also one of the Seattle business leaders invited to have lunch with President Obama earlier this year.

But we Merkins are a nation of culinary tinkers. We'll deconstruct something as straightforward as pizza and reimagine it six ways from Sunday: as flatbread, as tarte flambée, as pissaladière, as soca. There's pizza topped with doner kebabs in Sweden and a Pizza Hut outpost in Peshawar, Pakistan.

And then there's Chuck E. Cheese. Not a pizza chain (550 stores and counting) so much as family-fun destination (the corporate name is CEC Entertainment), and they've come out with a "new recipe" for their pies. Here's the video; note how the employees aren't so much cooks as equipment operators.

If you're still with me after watching that, ask yourself if it isn't worth $14 to have this prosciutto and porcini pizza at Tutta Bella, and not have to play Skee Ball?

Tutta Bella, 4411 Stone Way N., Seattle, 206.633.3800  

Additional locations in Columbia City, Westlake and Issaquah.

And here are some more photos:

Several events over the three days of the Washington Wines Festival. At Pier 70's Waterfront Seafood Grill, a so-called Magnum Tasting as the sun set slowly over Elliott Bay. Stunning wines from Leonetti, Quilceda Creek, Betz, Hedges, Dunham. Docs were, as usual, well represented. Dr. Richard Baxter, author of a book titled "Age Gets Better With Wine," and a blog called Health and Wine, serves on the organization's board.The Medical Director of Schick-Shadel Hospital was one of the guest sommeliers.  Explained Dr. Erick Davis, "It's my patients who have an addiction problem, not me."

Moving on. Moving to Tulalip, actually; It could have been a weekend get-together at the foot of any highrise apartment complex: fire pit, barbecue wagons, kobe beef sliders. It was, however, a wine tasting on the patio of the Impulse Lounge at the 350-room Tulalip Resort Casino. They do this every month or so, under the tutelage of the resort's sommelier, Tommy Thompson, whose guest this time around was Kevin Correll, the owner of Barrage Cellars. As the wines were poured this cool, early-summer afternoon, executive chef Perry Mascitti and his crew stood ready at half a dozen grill stations (steak, shrimp, pizzas, sliders, Cuban corn).

Correll hasn't given up his day job at Boeing, where he essentially teaches people how to build airplanes. But he's applying the elements of his profession (breaking down a vast, complex process) to a no-less daunting craft: making wine.

Barrage Cellars (a blend of barn and garage; nothing to do with the French word barrage. a dam across a body of water) is currently producing about 3,000 cases, not enough to be commercially profitable, but Correll's not worried. He's buying high quality grapes from good vineyards, and getting set up with hardware and French barrels. As long as he's on the Boeing payroll. he'll be fine.

More photos from these events on my new, beverages-only blog, Slightly Pickled.

A couple of observations before we begin. First, Mark Bittman has an article in today's New York Times about cooking side-by-side with Fernan Adrià, all chummy. Second, Adrià has entered into some sort of global consulting deal with Pepsi. And why shouldn't he?

Nothing in Lisa Abend's fascinating book, The Sorcerer's Apprentices, suggests that Fernan Adrià is actually the spawn of Satan. But it could be argued that his megalomania (masquerading as playful creativity) has allowed him to convince critics around the world that his private inferno personal plaything (a 40-seat dinner house named el Bulli, on the northeast coast of Spain) is the best, most innovative restaurant in the world.

Let's back up. el Bulli (or elBulli, in the restaurant's typography; it's actually named for a small statue of a bull) has been called the World's Best Restaurant every year since 2002 by guidebooks, by Restaurant Magazine, dethroned finally in 2009 by a Danish restaurant, noma, whose chef, Rene Redzeki, is a former el Bulli stagiaire.

Abend, a terrific writer in the long tradition of Time-Life journalists, takes us through a season in the life of el Bulli's stagiaires, the platoons of unpaid interns in the bowels of the fine-dining world. They arrive on the Costa Brava from all over (Japan, Italy, Australia, North America, South America) with their backpacks, their not insubstantial résumés, and their dreams. A six-month internship, a stage at el Bulli, they are convinced, will provide the ticket to professional success. Or the difference between a jump-start and a long, hard slog. It's hard enough to get a dinner reservation in the restaurant; the odds are even harder to get a spot in the kitchen.

But once they find themselves a place to live (the closest housing is in Roses, a fishing village 15 minutes away), these kids will be consigned to the most menial tasks. (Well, no, they're not kids. They're young professional chefs at the start of their careers.) They start by cleaning the stones in el Bulli's parking lot (!), then get kitchen assignments like making yuba (the skin of boiled milk) used as a wrapper in several dishes. It is tedious and mind-numbing work, in a routine that never changes, but probably preferable to cleaning bunny ears or making frozen spheres of olive oil. Abend follows a "class" of interns for a six-month season, introducing us to their hopes and dreams as well as their daily tribulations. We feel the frustrations felt by Luke, the Korean chef who doesn't speak Spanish; we share the dreams of Katie, whose goal is to open her own restaurant in North Carolina. We learn who's sleeping with whom. We admire the professionalism of Adrià's lieutenants.

To understand the spell cast by Adrià's kitchen wizardry, it helps to know what he's up to. "Molecular gastronomy" is only shorthand, and neither helpful nor accurate. "What we've done," the book quotes him as saying, "is create a new vocabulary, a new language for cooking." "Dragon cocktails" that make the drinker breathe smoke, "caviar" made from tiny spheres of olive oil; hot turns into cold, sweet into savory, solid into liquid or air. "Adrià's cooking plays with the diner's expectations, undermines established categories of taste and texture, and constantly, miraculously, continues to surprise."

So far, so good. Food as tricks, food as magic, dinner as theater. (It's not solving climate change or curing cancer, El Bulli's pastry chef acknolwedges.) It's more like old-fashioned, medieval alchemy, turning dross into gold.

The chef as perfectionist, or mad scientist, can also be the chef as asshole. Not that anyone has ever called him that; rather, critics praise him as a theolgian, ambassador, and peace-maker bringing happiness to the world. But the chef as technician, artisan and artist is also the chef as charlatan.

Adrià is almost a shadow presence in the book; he's seen tasting but not cooking, approving concoctions proposed by his chefs but not inventing them. He's a benign patriarch to his staff, "his family, but not his friends." But then, this isn't about him, it's about his interns, three dozen of them from 20 countries and speaking a dozen languages..

"Thirdy percent of our clients will hate it," Adria exclaims of a new dish, a swirl of black sesame paste and transparent white yogurt., but he sends it out anyway because it because it meets his standard for creativity: "It's magic!" Creativity comes first, what the customer likes colmes second. "We don't ask if a dish is good or bad. Our question is, does it make your hair standup on end? Is it magic?"

So it's clearly not a conventional restaurant that nurtures and cares about its guests. But Abend's accounts of the stagiaires routine is no less hair-raising.

As a food writer, I've often wondered what el Bulli's food would taste like. In Navarra last year, I had the chance to eat a few surprising dishes, food that isn't what you might think, made by chefs emulating Adrià's style. Anthony Bourdain, the bad-boy of American gastronomy, called his dinner at elBulli the best meal of his life. (I think he was dazzled by the footwork.)

But here's the thing: those brave, gallant, patient, long-suffering stagiaires don't actually get to eat the food they make. they might as well be robots. Says Adrià: it would be too expensive.

Adria's army of slave labor makes the "food" possible, and at no cost to el Bulli or to the diner. If el Bulli actually paid those slaves beyond their one meal a day, paid them even a minimum wage, it would have to charge at least $500 per head for dinner (instead of $350, wine additional).

Actually, Adrià is getting out (while the getting's good). He's closing el Bulli (the restaurant) at the end of July and will reopen it is a "creativity center" in 2014. Meanwhile, he and his brother Albert have opened a couple of far more conventional spots in Barcelona, two hours down the coast. The Adrià brothers also market their own brand of shape-shifting culinary chemicals, Texturas, to provide the structure (xanthan gum, algar) required for all that spherification. It's industrial food's technology in the service of your dinner.

The world's press is enthralled by this; they call him a genius. But I'll call bullshit; I say it's Kool-Aid. Spherified, liquid-nitrogen-flash-frozen, but Kool-Aid nonetheless. Whatever Adrià has achieved, it's exploitation on a staggering scale, as reprehensible as sex slavery. It makes my brain explode.

Late word: Abend's book is going to be made into a movie later this year, something between "The Social Network" and "Ratatouille." I wonder if the stagiaires will be played by cartoon mice?

The Sorcerer's Apprentices, Free Press (Simon & Schuster), 296 pages, $26

Cheese maker Dario Zidaric and a plate of his cheeses. The Jamar is in the foreground.

TRIESTE, Italy--This corner of the world, where the Adriatic meets the Alps, where Italy meets Slovenia and Croatia, is full of sink-holes and limestone caves. It was also the first flashpoint of the Cold War, before the borders melted into the European Union.

On the surface, though, you see only the gray rock called karst, and you admire the perseverance of the families who plant grape vines and olive trees here. The whites include picolit, malvasia and vitovska; the red varieties go beyond cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc to include refosco, schiopettino, and terrano. (Go ahead, tell me you've tried vitovska! On the other hand, the New York Times ran a Diner's Journal post about vitovska four years ago. So there.)

My visit here was sponsored by the Collio Carso wine consortium, but I was so taken with the cheese at Josko Sirk's La Subida the other night that we had to make a non-wine stop. It was at Dario Zidaric's farm and vineyard a few miles outside of Trieste, capital of the Friuli Venezia Giula region.

Dario is a big guy, a giant. Patient, kind, and unafraid of hard work. The perfect disposition, I'd say, for a farmer, or, for that matter, for a cheese-maker whose flagship product requires aging deep underground in a cave you have to actually descend into using serious climbing gear.

His 90 cows give only half the milk of an industrial farm: 700 liters a day of unpasteurized organic milk (which translates to about 70 kg, 150 lbs, of cheese). He makes eight or nine different styles of cheese. The "simple" ones, like Montasio and caciotti bianchi, go to local shops via a network of cheesemongers. The more complex, like an aged caciotta covered with an indigenous herbs such as the thyme-like santoreggia, are destined for high-level restaurants across northern Italy and Austria. And then there's Jamar.

The Jamar spends four months ripening in a very damp, very dark cave 250 feet underground. You don't walk in, you don't ride in, you drop down, in full spelunking gear. (By coincidence, I think, there's a cave-climbing device manufactured in Switzerland called Jumar.) Dario does this once a week, taking 100 fresh, 10-lb cheeses with him and bringing a similar number of aged cheeses back up from their makeshift shelving. The ripened Jamar has a remarkably rich, nutty flavor that resembles a cave-aged Gruyère from Switzerland or a mature Comté from the Massif Central of France, earthy and truffle-scented. Once the mold is brushed off, it will sell for 25 euros a kilo, about $17 per pound.

Dario owns the cave outright. It's on (inside?) a piece of land a mile or so from his farm, but no, I didn't go down.

Sincere thanks to the folks who hosted my trip to the region, the winemakers consortium of Collio and Carso.