Chef John des Rosiers of Lake Bluff’s Inovasi has joined the ranks of the chefbloggers, and his first post out the gate is a doozy. “I think Molecular Gastronomy is a bunch of shit,” he writes, dismissing the science-and-lab-gear approach to cuisine as a detour on the road of culinary innovation that’s “on its way to an inevitable death.”
This isn’t a new position — his official bio notes that des Rosiers “eschews tech trickery and unrecognizable ingredients,” a position we’ve always found to be a little at odds with the fact that his restaurant’s name means “innovation” and the menu includes a pairing of smoked onion sauce with housemade “Doritos.” But that’s neither here nor there — far more interesting is the fact that it turns out that for des Rosiers, the real culprit for molecular gastronomy’s rise to global prominence isn’t Ferran Adria, Grant Achatz, or even increasingly easy civilian access to liquid nitrogen — it’s journalists:
Why is it that journalists have not challenged the idea that if you take a perfect piece of buffalo mozzarella from Italy and drop it into liquid nitrogen, you ruin the intrinsic value of each ounce of effort and passion that went into producing it. You in fact lose the very value it held. This is done on a wide scale with every type of foodstuff known to man . . . It was supposed to be journalists’ responsibility to call into question whether the style is not only enjoyable to eat, but whether it has a rightful place in the best restaurants in the world.
We’ve read plenty of takedowns of molecular gastronomy before, and outside of this particular bit of finger-pointing des Rosiers’ arguments aren’t anything terribly new. But! This is the first time we’ve found ourselves being blamed for it! We’d totally forgotten that this was all our fault — please, John, forgive us for failing to play our part in saving the world from the most innovative culinary movement to come along in decades. We promise never to do it again.
Cuisine Today [The Inovasi Thought]
