Story by Marian Betancourt
Photos Courtesy of Bright Sky Press
 

GLOBAL CUISINE TAKES ON NEW MEANING

A French chef cooking in Texas, and a Finnish chef operating an Italian restaurant in his homeland find they have enough in common to not only be good friends, but to combine their cultural and culinary roots to produce a gorgeous cookbook called Energy Cuisine. No, it’s not about the energy you get from eating well. The acclaimed restaurants of both chefs are located in the world’s energy corridors nestled amidst leading oil and gas corporations. Chef David Denis owner of La Mistral in Houston and Jani Lehtinen of Bucco in Pori, Finland, were brought together by energy executives raving about the other’s restaurant.

In 2005, when Chef Lehtinen came to cook at the James Beard House in New York City, I was pleased to write about him for the Associated Press because Finnish food was not on the culinary map. Since my own maternal grandmother was from Finland, it gave me a chance to talk about my childhood recollections of her coffee bread and herring salads, and also to describe Lehtinen’s delectable cauliflower soup with cold smoked whitefish and truffle. I still recall the lightly smoked venison fillet with rosemary glaze, roasted potatoes, carrots, parsnips and fried foi gras he served there. But never mind all that. Lehtinen at an early age discovered Italian food. His aunt married an Italian and moved to Italy, where Lehtinen spent summer vacations helping out in their restaurant. And while Lehtinen honors his own country’s best dishes, he is known to make the best vitello tonnato outside of Italy.

Chef Denis is from the south of France, one of my favorite parts of the world. He, too, grew up cooking and for him it was in his grandmother’s restaurant, called a routier, similar to a café in America. After culinary school and working in restaurants in Europe, he hired on as a private chef to a family dividing its time between Europe and Houston. He eventually opened a restaurant in Houston that he named Le Mistral, after the fierce wind that frequently blows through the south of France. At that time in America, people thought of French food as fancy, expensive, and served with really bad attitude. This concept was foreign to Denis, who showed them that the best food is humble, fresh, flavorful and simple, such as his three-grape tomato salad with shallots, parsley and basil dressed with a simple vinaigrette of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and crushed anchovy. In 2010 Zagat cited Le Mistral for having the best French food in Houston.

Transporting readers on an epicurean journey across the globe, Energy Cuisine brings over 100 recipes, a cupful of travel excursions, and a dash of humor to your table. The book is divided into sections of recipes, some by Denis, some by Lehtinen, and some by both working together, which they do several times a year at Chef’s Tables they host at each other’s restaurants. From Lehtinen’s pages, try the seared scallops with foie gras and crawfish reduction, or the creamy morel soup. Together the chefs created the rascasse (white fish) fillet wrapped in winter cabbage pictured here. Another combined effort is a luscious looking smoked beef tenderloin Wellington on a bed of asparagus and morels in a sauce made with cream and cognac.

Shannon O’Hara’s photos are so vivid you almost want to take a knife and fork to the page and dig in to dishes like Burgot Wallenberg. And it is not often that a cookbook is also such a good storybook, but this one with writer John DeMers, certainly is.  This is a story of both men; how they grew up to become the chefs they are today, the passion that drove them, and how hard they worked. (See if you don’t feel a romantic tug of the heart reading about how Denis met his American wife in Houston.)

I also love this book because I can read it. Last time I got a cookbook from Chef Lehtinen, it was written in Finnish, a language I could never learn, even when my grandmother was around.

© March 2011 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.