“A pumpkin full of pickles.”
When it comes to culinary inspiration, that probably doesn’t top many chefs’ lists, but that’s where Sean Brock started Tuesday night. “Amazing Cucumbers,” a signature dish of Moscow’s White Rabbit, was one of eight dishes Brock was tasked with interpreting for the The Grand GELINAZ! Shuffle Stay In Tour.
When Brock described the dish in the above way, I assumed he was exaggerating. This is what it looks like:
This and all following White Rabbit images courtesy of their Instagram: Please do not hold the quality of the photos of Brock’s food I took with my iPhone against him.
So, yeah, Sean Brock doesn’t exaggerate. On Dec. 3 at the future site of Joyland — aka the recently shuttered East Nashville outpost of Stay Golden — Brock cooked on behalf of his soon-to-open restaurant, Audrey, and turned a pumpkin full of pickles into this:
What you’re looking at is candy-roasted squash, grilled like meat and garnished with pumpkins seeds, fermented kelp, salted kelp and pickled hoshigaki (Japanese dried persimmon). It was a dense, smoky dish that did, in fact, eat like meat. I would’ve liked more pickled persimmons — the one thing the Russians and I agree on is that everything could use more pickles — but this dish shows you exactly what GELINAZ! is all about: interpretation and invention.
What is The Grand GELINAZ! Shuffle Stay In Tour and why is it yelling at me?
The name is a mouthful and the website is a migraine, so let’s go word-by-word. Spoiler: I don’t have an answer for the ALL CAPS or the “Grand” or the “!” other than the fact that these people are enthusiastic Europeans, which I dig.
A few years ago, France-based food writer Andrea Petrini launched GELINAZ!, a portmanteau of the virtual band Gorillaz and ... something else. Vanity Fair says it’s the Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini’s name; Vice says its “a particularly gamey breed of chicken from Toulouse.” So we writers are just as confused as everyone else. Whatever the origin, GELINAZ! events all have a few things in common. They involve the world’s best chefs — think Michelin-starred folks like René Redzepi (Noma) and Albert Adrià (Tickets) — doing flashy food events that are half pop-up, half performance. They all run several hundred bucks a pop, but that’s fairly standard at events where waitstaff outnumbers diners, as it did last night. In the past, GELINAZ! events have ranged from 25 chefs cooking versions of a single 19th-century recipe in Belgium to a surprise tribute to Wylie Dufresne at wd~50 before it closed.
A few years after its inception, GELINAZ! added the “Shuffle” component. Chefs all across the world swapped restaurants in what Laura Martin aptly called “the world’s largest game of musical kitchens.” During the week before the big cook, chefs work in their adopted kitchens, often staying in the traveling chef’s house and essentially living their lives. After five days, they cook a new menu using ingredients and inspiration from their temporary homes.
In 2015, Brock’s was one of 37 chefs in the first shuffle, and one of only a few Americans. The lottery sent him to Massimo Bottura’s kitchen, Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, which had just been ranked No. 2 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.
Brock pulled it off. Today he describes it as one of the best weeks of his life, topped off by one of the best meals he’s ever made.
The next year was a little different. Brock drew Moscow’s White Rabbit, where he cooked on Nov. 10, 2016 — two days after Donald Trump was elected. Brock recalls seeing Russian newspapers headlined, “In Trump We Trust,” and photos splashed all over of the president-elect hugging the flag (a link which you should not click unless you want to become clinically depressed). People were coming up to Americans in the street and congratulating them — a thing I know to still be a stomach-churning reality, because a Belgian man condescendingly did it to me this summer after learning I was American. (I tooootally calmly set him straight about how many of us actually voted against this disaster.) Political apocalypse aside, Brock again succeeded, cooking one of the nine most beautiful dishes from the event worldwide.
After taking two years off, GELINAZ! returned in 2019 with a “Stay In” concept, meaning everyone would cook in their home kitchen. Instead of swapping places, they’d swap recipes, which would be secretly distributed to a second chef across the world. It was all very hush-hush and dramatic and FULL OF CAPITAL LETTER-FILLED EMAILS. The chefs’ teams had one month to interpret the new menu before serving their “remixes,” which they did last night.
Finally, the “Tour” piece: It basically just means GELINAZ! is now all over the place, with this year’s event tripling the number of participating chefs from the 2016 event.
Does it need to be this confusing?
Hell no, and I left out a lot. You’re welcome.
What did we eat?
Here is everything, course by course:
Remix No. 1
White Rabbit: Eclairs with smoked salmon (left)
Brock/Audrey: Bucksnort trout and pickled beets (right)
“We had no intention of it looking like a Simpsons doughnut,” Brock said when presenting this dish. But its peculiar look helped set the night’s tone: strange, delicious food that didn’t take itself too seriously. The beets added sweetness, the roe a salty pop and the Bucksnort trout a meaty, satisfying shot of down-home Tennessee kickass. It was one of the top two dishes of the night.
Remix No. 2
White Rabbit: Morokovnik — scallop, carrot and seaweed (left)
Brock/Audrey: Scallop, lady-pea puree, carrot broth (right)
The scallops were poached in cashew oil and served on a sweet, vibrant carrot broth, but the show-stopper for me was the lady pea guacamole — a fresh, earthy, comforting reminder that even though we were in Russia for the night, we were still soundly in the Southern.
Remix No. 3
White Rabbit: Okroshka — pickled mushrooms in a broth of sour green tomatoes
Brock/Audrey: Chanterelle mushrooms and juiced green tomato with freshly pressed sunflower seed oil (pictured). The green tomato flavor wasn’t as much of a punch in the mouth as I would’ve liked by course No. 3, but I get that Brock probably wasn’t allowed to change the “remix” order because of ALL THE RULES! But it was a tasty, delicate dish nonetheless.
Remix No. 4
White Rabbit: Sea urchin caviar, potatoes, tangerines (left)
Brock/Audrey: Uni, paw paw, sweet potato (right)
This is one where the original dish is just as weird as the remix: a twice-baked potato with sea urchin served alongside tangerine dipped in seawater. (My dude Vladimir Mukhin of White Rabbit loves some seawater, and I support him in that.) Brock cooked his sweet potato for 20 hours, condensing the flavor and almost candying it from the inside. He served it with paw paw, which he described as, “a tropically flavored fruit from this area, and most of Appalachia, that looks like a papaya but tastes like a cross between mango and banana.” All true. From that, they made a savory curd that Brock rightly noted ended up tasting like foie gras. Eaten alongside what he jokingly called “a little uni,” it was the night’s most decadent dish.
Remix No. 5
See “Amazing Cucumbers” above.
Remix No. 6
White Rabbit: Crayfish and beer
Brock/Audrey: Crawdads and beer (pictured)
With an original recipe of crawfish bisque and beer ponzu, Brock went full Escoffier, mashing together crawfish royale, crawfish consommé and beer foam. The only way I can describe it is as the world’s best, fanciest beer-cheese Jell-O, which shows you how much words fail me here. Paired with local Blackberry Farm Saison, this was the second in the top two.
Remix No. 7
White Rabbit: Quail and polenta
Brock/Audrey: Quail, black truffle, cornbread (pictured)
“The next course is quail and grits, I’m not lying, almost as though it was rigged ...” Brock joked when presenting this dish — a reference to the fact that the restaurant he drew this year also happened to be the one he drew two years ago. I’m no mathematician, but drawing White Rabbit out of 40 restaurants in 2016 and then again in 2019 out of 148 restaurants is unlikely to say the least. I’d love for a smarter person than me to run those odds. Brock also joked that since he’s cooked grits a time or two before, he went with a puree of his own Jimmy Red Cornbread. It was a little thick for me, but the flavor was spot-on — Thanksgiving dinner in a bite — as was the mind-blowing quail it was served with.
“I first had this quail at Benu in San Francisco,” said Brock, “It came out and I was like, ‘That’s chicken.’ ”
It comes from Brett Wolfe, a guy who got his first quail from the fair when he was 11 years old and has kept the same genetics ever since. Brock says it’s the only kind of quail he could imagine serving when he got this menu. If you don’t believe Brock or me that it’s that good, believe Wolfe’s best customer: Thomas Keller.
Remix No. 8
White Rabbit: Black bread with black currants (left)
Brock/Audrey: Rye biscuit, cottage cheese ice cream, elderberries (right)
Cottage cheese ice cream is basically ripped from my dreams, so this was always going to win me over, especially when complemented by the nearly chocolatey rye crisps the tuile crumbled into. Paired with Madeira, it made for a diabolical dessert.
Why is this so cool for Nashville?
If you’re still reading this, you already know, but anytime you see a map that looks like this, take note:
Brock was the only chef in the South — hell, in the interior of the whole U.S. — to participate in this worldwide event. I’d wager he was also the only one serving his menu to a soundtrack of Sturgill Simpson and Tool, and likely one of the few for whom non-alcoholic pairings were as carefully chosen as wine. In fact, one of my biggest takeaways from the night was PriSecco Aecht Bitter, a sweet, tart, vermouth-y “prosecco” that’s entirely alcohol-free. Based on the reactions of my fellow diners, it’s those little discoveries — the ones that make you curious and get you talking — that make these fancy food things worth doing. If that’s the kind of community and conversation GELINAZ! seeks to inspire, Sean Brock — and Nashville — are great places to start.
