What Makes Restaurant Recipes Exceptional?
Over the years many restaurateurs have considered the quality and freshness of ingredients to be of such importance that they have purchased farmland and grown their own produce. Restaurants known for their fine barbecue often buy their wood from a single supplier who can guarantee exactly the type or age of hickory they want.
At West Virginia's much celebrated Greenbrier Resort and Spa, the peaches used in the peach shortcake are of such exceptional quality the hotel sells them frozen solid in shiny cans to be taken home, thawed and enjoyed in a homemade version of this Greenbrier favorite. In their relentless quest for the perfect sprig of watercress, fine chefs have even been known to consider the mineral content of the earth and water in the areas where this and other herbs are grown. Perhaps Pellegrino Artusi, the great food writer was thinking about restaurateurs and their ingredients when he assigned cooking to science and eating to art, but the fact remains that in a nation crowded with supermarkets, restaurant quality ingredients, especially the more exotic ones, often elude the grasp of private shoppers.
In cases where imported ingredients are outrageously expensive, substitution is a reluctant, but common practice among amateur chefs. We make the substitution, but we take ourselves to task for it. Will it really matter, we argue, if I use a long-leafed basil instead of a short-leafed one, knowing full well that if we do, the taste of what we prepare from our restaurant recipe, while good, will still have been compromised.
And then there are the restaurant recipes, vastly in the majority, that are not so extreme. Many of these recipes call for fruit or vegetables that grow well locally or can be found in abundance where the restaurant is located. These signature dishes might spotlight cranberries from nearby bogs or call for a type of fish that is plentiful in local waters, which is great for the restaurant chefs, but if you don't live near cranberry bogs you must take what you can get at your supermarket.
Once the ingredients have been gathered, experience comes into play. If you do something long enough and often enough, in theory, at least, you become very good at it. Chefs who prepare signature dishes have logged hours of conscientious repetition. The keyword in this statement is conscientious. The restaurant business is just that - a business. Patrons who visit establishments time and time again, who always order the Boston cream pie or the sweet and sour cabbage rolls expect these dishes to always be delicious in the same way. In fact, part of the attraction of restaurant recipes is that they have been tried many times and found to yield the same results. Like the final version of a novel, they have been revised and edited until they are ready for public consumption.
By paper proxy, the chef who created the signature dish holds our hand each time we attempt to duplicate it. And yet...and yet a great restaurant recipe and a great restaurant dish are not and never will be the same thing. One is a challenge under the guise of a gift; the other is an experience.
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