vwin德赢ac米兰食品和美酒vwin德赢ac米兰Best New Chefs 2021: Blake Aguillard and Trey Smith
Chefs Blake Aguillard and Trey Smith are, to put it frankly, huge nerds. The chefs and co-owners of Saint-Germain in New Orleans openly geek out over ikejime, a Japanese fish-butchering technique (it's considered more humane and helps keeps their menu prices down), or the results of a fermentation experiment (transforming scraps of venison into garum, a fish sauce–like condiment that takes three months to make). It's hard to resist getting caught up in their earnest and infectious excitement.
史密斯说：“布雷克和我在一场运动和艺术之间看到美食。”“我们喜欢尽可能地推动事情。”餐厅总是干燥，固化或发酵。一批西红柿被当地农民掉下来，在阳光下在阳光下干燥Saint-Germain's锡屋顶，之后他们将发酵一个月。大多数饭菜都是从面包菜的过程中开始的，培养的黄油已经老化了这么长时间，它开始像帕尔马干酪一样味道。史密斯（Smith）挥舞着关于他和阿奎拉德（Aguillard）曾经保存萝卜几个月制作的素食奶酪课程，然后用他们用来制作内部奶酪的文化清洗根蔬菜。史密斯说：“当你吃这些萝卜时，它们的味道像布里。”
The two chefs met as young line cooks, working their way up the ladder at Restaurant August under the guidance of the chef de cuisine at the time, Michael Gulotta. Aguillard and Smith bonded immediately: "We both took every level of cooking very seriously," says Smith.
他们具有深厚的目标感，但是他们的背景并没有什么不同。阿古拉德（Aguillard）是路易斯安那州的本地人，他知道他想从小就成为一名厨师，并且仍然非常致力于烹饪的技术方面。有一次，他甚至离开了Gulotta餐厅Mopho的厨师De Cuisine位置，他曾帮助开放，在旧金山的Saison担任厨师。阿奎拉德说：“我只是想做更多的烹饪，更多的学习。”另一方面，史密斯（Smith）在新墨西哥州度过了童年的拜访家人，然后搬到休斯顿（Houston）攻读经济学学位，然后在法学院进行了短暂的职务，然后才意识到他真正想做的就是做饭。当阿奎拉德（Aguillard）在塞森（Saison）时，史密斯（Smith）留在新奥尔良，并继续与古洛塔（Gulotta）合作，帮助他开放了五月把架，并“真正参与了商业方面”。
当阿奎拉德（Aguillard）返回新奥尔良时，很明显，在阿奎拉德（Aguillard）的深厨房专业知识和史密斯（Smith）的商业敏锐度之间，是时候开设一家餐厅了。与教育前后业务的第三位合作伙伴德鲁·德鲁格（Drew Delaughter）一起（史密斯（Smith）在纽约海德公园（Hyde Park）参加美国烹饪学院时遇到了他，他还曾在Mopho担任总经理），Aguillard和Aguillard和史密斯（Smith）于2018年在拜水社区的一个昏昏欲睡的通道上在一个前比萨饼的地方开设了圣日耳曼。
Saint-Germain is one of just a handful of restaurants in New Orleans to offer a tasting menu, and it's one of the most exciting, and affordable, in the nation. (In April, my five-course tasting menu was $79, plus tax and tip.) The reservation-only 12-seat dining room is an intimate affair, where the walls are lined with the cookbooks that have influenced the chefs over the years, and dishes like a small brick of toasted housemade sourdough soaked in a rich sauce of chicken jus, sherry, and Roquefort cheese and blanketed with a dry-aged beef tartare are placed in front of you. The chefs almost never offer the same dish twice. (The rare exception? A dessert of peach ice cream topped with fried honey-butter chips.) No reservations are required for the wine bar, where seating spills into the dreamy backyard, and it's easy to pass several hours with heavy pours of natural wines and what has to be the most interesting crudité platter in the country—a recent iteration included daikon compressed in sweet soy sauce and a shower of crispy wild rice.
Aguillard and Smith want to make their culinary creations as accessible as possible. "It's always been a goal of ours for anybody to eat here," says Smith. One week a month, the team runs "Vegetarian Week," where the tasting menu is meatless but still every bit as creative and ambitious as the usual menu. "People are often served mashed potatoes with green beans or something like that," says Smith. "So when you're vegetarian and you get something that somebody has worked on for five or six months, it means a lot to them."
两个厨师也希望圣日耳曼爵士ve as a blueprint for others. They take pride in the fact that they are a true small business, and they have no desire to add more seats, even if it means passing up the opportunity to make more money. "When you have a huge place, 10% of your guests get something," says Aguillard. "But when you have a smaller place, 100% of our guests get everything." Expanding the restaurant's capacity would mean compromising on how they love to cook. "Because of our hyper-focused model, you don't need 200 people to understand what you're doing," says Smith. "You only need 15 to 20 people per night who get you."
Photos by Cedric Angeles