If Mies van der Rohe hadn’t already said it about architecture, one of the chefs David Hammond talks to in this week’s Food Detective column in the Sun-Times might have said it about… chicken. Or peaches. “If you really understand the ingredients and how good they are, then let’s have that steak taste like a steak,” says Mark Mendez of soon to be-opened Vera. The temptation is always there to dress things up to impress, like the student who puts a mediocre term paper in a really nice cover, but one of the best things about our current food scene is that it’s full of chefs who try to get the best ingredients and aspire mainly to let them be themselves. Or as chef Perry Hendrix of Custom House puts it, “I had a chef tell me once that ‘It’s not what you cook, but how you cook it’… That’s total bulls–t.”
Given best ingredients, chefs pull back on the flash [Sun-Times]
