Food and celebrity

The Cayman Cookout exists because it carefully harnesses three different forces:  the drawing power of a beautiful Caribbean island during the heart of winter, the ever-larger group of people who follow celebrity chefs, and the even bigger group of people who to some degree consider themselves foodies.  Today's events contained examples of all of these.

The biggest traditional Saturday gathering at Cayman Cookout is the beach bash, an event that for most attendees includes a boat trip to Stingray Bay and then a visit to a distant (for this area) part of the island for various grilled foods from chef-staffed stalls on a gorgeous beach.  I've attended this session in each of my previous four years here, but this time I opted for variety--drawn by the power of a chef whose food I've long enjoyed.

My choice for lunch was "Blending Cultures and Flavors with Chef Hubert Keller," a wonderful meal that took place in Blue by Eric Ripert.  Hubert Keller, no relation to the even more famous celebrity chef Thomas Keller, runs multiple restaurants, including Fleur de Lys, the Las Vegas version of which was where I enjoyed some of my first serious forays into haute cuisine.

The menu for lunch was classic Hubert Keller, a blend of local ingredients and traditional high-end French dishes.

Click the image to see a larger version.

All of the dishes were absolutely delicious, but the last two stood out for completely different reasons.  The beef cheek with foie gras was an absolutely perfect version of a stunningly rich classic.

Every single bite of this plate was an exercise in luxury and decadence.

The dessert, by contrast, tasted light in every bite--and yet was amazingly delicious.

The cilantro granite and crystallized cilantro chips were revelations, two uses of the ingredient I've never seen before--and incredibly tasty in their own right.

Next up for me was "Sweet Secrets" with famous dessert chef Florian Bellanger.

Bellanger demonstrated how to make macarons and served us a couple of them, along with a raspberry sorbet.  He provided recipes and a great many useful tips, with almost all of his focus totally on the food.  Everything of his that I've tasted has been delightful, and these macarons were no exceptions.

My last session before the evening's dinner event was "The Adventures of Eric and Tony," a gathering that was almost entirely about celebrity and one that has been a Cayman Cookout staple for at least as long as I've been coming here.  Basically, chef and Cayman Cookout host Eric Ripert stands with his even more famous friend, chef, author, and TV personality, Anthony Bourdain, and the two of them tell stories and poke fun at each other.

While doing this, they also typically make some dish; today's was a delightful bouillabaisse.  The two genuinely care for each other but also have some areas of serious disagreement, so their banter is always interesting and enjoyable.

The Cayman Cookout folks have tried a lot of different approaches to Saturday night's dinner, and tonight's was another new one:  "Meat and Greet by Niman Ranch," which took place in the hotel's "culinary studio," basically a teaching kitchen and function space.  As you'd expect from the sponsor, the emphasis was on meat.

The main steak course was the star of this particular meal, with incredibly tender and delicious meat.

The final event of the day was a party featuring Hubert Keller as DJ.  I listened for a few songs and enjoyed a couple of them, but ultimately it wasn't my scene; no surprise there.

Overall, another good Cayman Cookout day with a great many wonderful flavors.

A peek inside my brain: a foodie quiz

Quite a few folks have commented that they don't understand at all how I think. Sometimes, the context is my fiction and the ideas in it. Other times, the comments arise from my fascination with high-end restaurants, weird events, loud rock and roll, and other topics on which I've written.

Well, as I've said many times, I'm a helper. I want to help folks understand, so I pondered the options and realized that the perfect solution might be a variant of the Cooter Preference Test.

I had to take this test (and I do mean the test, not the band of the same name) as a college freshman. It consisted of hundreds of questions about preferences. You know the type: It's raining, so would you rather be outside playing in the storm, solving quantum mechanics in your basement lair, or taking advantage of that hole you drilled in the bathroom wall to take pinhole photos of your female cousins showering? Like that. (I had a hard time choosing between the second and third options on that particular question.)

The people who administered the test (the Cooters? who knows?) had given the same battery of questions to thousands of professionals in various fields. They then correlated (real heavy math stuff, not just a quick glance and a proclamation) your results with those of the various professionals. The result was a list of occupations whose practitioners' preferences matched yours.

In case you're curious, the test said I matched best with preachers, then therapists, and then artists--which is why it makes perfect sense that I've spent my career as a computer geek and businessman.

Building a test like that is a ton of work, but fortunately, we have only one correlation target--me--and I get to pick the number of questions, so I've simplified the quiz to one target area--food--and only a few questions. I'm also violating all good testing practices and making this simple for you to grade at home.

Take up your pencil and paper.

There is no time limit.

Let's begin.

At the Fleur de Lys restaurant in Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay casino, Chef Hubert Keller has reinvented the hamburger with his "Rossini" Fleurburger. The following questions concern this dish. Each question consists of a statement and then three opinions on the statement. For each statement, choose the opinion that most closely matches your own.

On the restaurant's menu, the Fleurburger appears to use Kobe beef.
(a) I hope it's real Kobe and not Wagyu, because the American stuff is great but the Japanese is insane.
(b) What a waste of money; any decent ground beef would make a perfectly fine burger.
(c) Kobe or Wagyu, the resources people are spending on those cows are an insult to the world's starving masses.

The Fleurburger sits in a shallot and truffle brioche bun.
(a) I hope they browned the inside with French truffle butter.
(b) As long as the bun is fresh, I'm good.
(c) Had the staff invested the same time and energy in helping feed Las Vegas' homeless, fewer Americans would be starving.

Sitting atop the beef in the Fleurburger is a slab of sauteed foie gras.
(a) I hope the foie covers all the beef and that they didn't sear it too long.
(b) Foie gras is gross, pure fat and nothing more.
(c) The torture we inflict on our animal cousins, those poor geese, is cruel and inhuman, and we must stop doing it.

Covering the foie gras is a layer of shavings of black Perigord truffles.
(a) If it's not truffle season, I hope they're keeping the truffles fresh and not stinting on the portions.
(b) I can barely taste truffles, so they're a waste of money.
(c) Imagine the good we could do if America invested all the money from a year of truffle indulgences in improving our education system.

The dish comes with two kinds of house-made mustards and three varieties of high-end salts.
(a) I hope they have the pinker Hawaiian salt, because I love the tang that one adds.
(b) Three kinds of salt is just silly.
(c) We're raping the environment to harvest salt for dishes like this one even as our world disintegrates from our indulgences.

Though they don't appear on the sample menu online, typically a large helping of truffle fries accompanies the burger.
(a) I hope they sliced the potatoes frites style and fried the beautiful sticks in duck fat.
(b) Truffles are wasted on fries; all you need is potatoes and grease.
(c) Our population is swelling like pufferfish poised to attack, and yet we're eating all this red meat and fried food.

The price of the Fleurburger also isn't on the online sample menu, but typically it runs about $75.
(a) What a bargain; in New York, they'd hit you for a hundred easy.
(b) You could eat just as well at Hardees almost ten times for the same money.
(c) Make a salad and donate the rest of the money to feed the world.

Put your pencils down.

Here's the scoring guide:

- If you answered (a) to everything, your thinking matched my own. You have both my congratulations and my condolences. When we next talk, we can compare dieting notes and discuss what types of stents we're hoping they'll use on us.

- If you answered (b) to everything, you think the way I once did, before I discovered the joys of high-end food. Do your budget a favor, and stay the sensible, grounded person you are.

- If you answered (c) to everything, you think like the person my liberal soul tells me I should be--but never will be. I know you love your Prius; mine is on order.

- If you answered with more than one letter, stop fooling yourself that you can have it every way and take a stand on something.

I hope this quiz has helped.

Oh yeah: I've eaten the Fleurburger four times and try to get to it each time I'm in Las Vegas. The thing is freakin' awesome!