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Step into René Cruz’s world of mustard caviar and mint clouds
• by By Catherine Neville • Photo by Josh Monken
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Red is a high-concept new restaurant downtown that’s bringing diners a taste of eastern Europe spiced liberally with the flavor of modern America. Flat-screen TVs dot the interior, giving diners views of not only the kitchen but of each other, thanks to closed-circuit cameras placed throughout the long, narrow space. Patrons sit in concrete booths to experience an Americanized take on the former Eastern Bloc.
Executive chef René Cruz initially had only 72 hours to research and present to the owners his take on the cuisine of eastern Europe, “which is a very, very big part of the world – you have Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, the Ukraine, Croatia, the Czech Republic … all these different areas that have similar food.” He eventually decided to deconstruct the rustic dishes and reassemble them using that edgiest of modern techniques, molecular gastronomy.
Before you started developing this menu, were you familiar with eastern European food?
Not at all. … It’s great food, but it was more towards goulashes and a lot of stews, braising, sauces with bread or potatoes. I took their methods of cooking and introduced an Americanized feel.
How are you introducing eastern European flavors?
Taking [dishes] that people are familiar with and creating around that. … People know stroganoff. … People are familiar with short ribs. But they aren’t familiar with the accompaniments, so I set staples that people are familiar with and then play around with everything indigenous to eastern
European food.
Take me through the evolution of a dish on your menu.
The [pastrami-scented salmon with pumpernickel beurre blanc] started off as salmon with rice pilaf and vegetables. … Traditional pastrami spices [are used] as a seasoning over the salmon. … After that, we figured, pastrami, what goes better with pastrami than pumpernickel bread? So we took beurre blanc and instead of using traditional ingredients, … we use caraway and rye whiskey, which are the two main flavors in pumpernickel bread.
Do you have a favorite?
Carpaccio of port-poached pear with spinach, prosciutto, lemon mustard and preserved lemon. … I wanted to introduce fruit to the menu and into a salad.
Can you describe the flavor?
It’s crisp. It’s clean. It’s really fresh. … You get a subtle, almost sexiness to the dish. … The pears are cored out and in place of each core [is] a piece of preserved lemon, so when you look at the dish, it looks like a brilliant flower. This is something that I dreamt of – it was literally a dream. I was like, “Cool. I’m going to try this.”
These desserts sound unique – for example, rosemary cake with olive oil ice cream and drunken black pepper dates.
I wanted to make [this part of the menu] more American. With the rosemary cake, I collaborated with a couple chef buddies of mine. Matthew Malone, he was like, “You’ve got this opportunity, we’re going to collaborate with each other.” We wanted a savory dish, … so by doing the rosemary cake, we hit the savory and then ended up doing the olive oil ice cream with the help of Serendipity. … On the dish you’ll have a couple pieces of dates soaked in port just to have that nice tart, sweet and savory all in one.
How else are you challenging yourself?
This is [my first time] using molecular gastronomy, playing around with different preservatives and additives and manipulating their structure.
Going back to the pastrami salmon, I have a mustard caviar on there. It’s a faux caviar that’s done with a sodium citrate-sodium alginate solution with the flavor [added] to it. It’s two liquids creating a solid … [when they’re dropped] into a calcium chloride bath. It beads up, so it looks like caviar. And then you take it out; you chill it. …
We’re using tapioca maltodextrin [to stabilize fats so they can be powdered], xanthan gum for thickening agents, soy lecithin to create emulsions that are obscene.
What’s another example?
We have the curried carrot [soup] with curry oil and mint cloud. The cloud is emulsified with xanthan gum in an iSi charger [used to make, for example, whipped cream or seltzer water]. It’s a mirroring effect: the carrot soup then the oil and, on top of the oil, this mint cloud that looks like it’s hovering above the soup itself.
In such a rustic cuisine, what inspired you to bring in this science edge?
It was my buddy Matthew – he ended up telling me, “If you’re going to do something, do something that people will remember.”
It’s great that you can collaborate with a fellow chef.
He’s kind of living vicariously through me – he’s in business with his father, so he’s no longer in the culinary field. But he still has the passion. … And he pretty much gave me the means and the way to explore the culinary evolution.
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