LAURENCE GOTTLIEB
Executive Chef

Nation's Restaurant News ,  August 14, 2006   by Phyllis Richman

Some might say Laurence Gottlieb is ahead of the curve, so far ahead of the curve that he is beyond trends. He has dined at elBulli, the tiny restaurant on Spain's Costa Brava that is ground zero for the world's molecular-gastronomy movement, and he thought it was amazing. But even as Gottlieb enjoys the avant-garde, he nonetheless recently was named executive sous chef at the historic White Barn Inn on Maine's coast in the tradition-drenched town of Kennebunkport. After all, if Gottlieb had to put his money on the food of the future, it would be "nice, thick steaks."

Patrick O'Connell, chef-owner of the Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Va., and Gottlieb's mentor, set the stage for such devotion to tradition. O'Connell's response to being asked what is the next hot food was: "Are we still doing those? I stopped thinking in those terms a lot of years ago."

Gottlieb volleyed his dedication to time-honored dishes into a new venture when he left the Inn at Little Washington after six years as its executive sous chef and returned to his hometown of Savannah, Ga. His great-grandfather had opened a bakery there in 1884, and it lasted 110 years until his father closed it in 1994. A decade later Gottlieb was ready to try again.

The whole family joined in running the new Gottlieb's Restaurant & Dessert Bar. The restaurant was open for dinner and supervised by the three brothers. The bakery occupied the space during the day, when Gottlieb and his father, Isser, did the baking.

The restaurant developed a strong following; the location was fine and the brothers showed admirable teamwork, but the building was a money pit. Repair after repair ate away at their profit, yet the prognoses kept getting worse. Finally, after they'd sunk $120,000 into the maintenance of a building they didn't even own, the prospect of $30,000 more in repairs drove them to close the restaurant this spring. Needing a break and time to think about his future, Gottlieb hit the road for a month, heading for Napa Valley with his brother Michael, their girlfriends and his dentist--who also happens to be Gottlieb's best friend.

Tracked down recently in Las Vegas, Gottlieb sounds numbed not just by the future, but also by fresh encounters with glitz and bling. "The new generation wants the most elegant of things, but wants them as fast as possible," he says.

Gottlieb says he is intrigued by the grandiosity of the Las Vegas restaurants and couldn't stop marveling at the menu of Joel Robuchon at the Mansion in the MGM Grand. Its Australian king crab was "pretty cool," a golf ball-size body with long legs, deserving of simple brown butter and lemon, he says. But the most fascinating aspect of this crab was its $600 price tag, he notes. "I would hate to overcook that," Gottlieb says.

Gottlieb's Las Vegas experience was mixed. "I didn't have the budget for Robuchon," he laments, but he did find a really good gyro away from the Strip. His summation of Vegas: "It's really hard to find a piece of roast chicken."

Just a little bit country

Gottlieb could teach a lot of Las Vegas chefs how to fix a piece of roast chicken, even though his "aw shucks" country-boy traditionalism isn't exactly the way it sounds. At the now-shuttered Gottlieb's restaurant, he revealed more up-to-date inventiveness than he readily owns up to.

Such items as fried chicken, Brunswick stew, braised short ribs, corn cake and waffles made the menu sound like the South preserved, but if you looked closer, you'd find that Brunswick stew had been made from rabbit, the short ribs were Kobe beef and the corn cake was the base for lobster meat and lobster gravy. In addition, the waffle, in a marriage that challenged tradition, served as a pedestal for foie gras and sugar cane gastrique.

The former Gottlieb's even offered Chinese dim sum with a Southern accent: barbecued brisket in the steamed buns and molasses with soy sauce. Desserts were pure South and pure Gottlieb's, a massive roving cart crowded with Key lime custard in pecan crust, peanut butter cups, red velvet cake and the family bakery's signature Chocolate Chewies.

Not only did Gottlieb exhibit his subtle inventiveness at Gottlieb's restaurant, but also the discipline he'd picked up from the Inn at Little Washington, especially in sourcing. Although seeking fresh local seasonal ingredients is a trend that has become a mantra among American chefs, with Patrick O'Connell the quest was carried to extremes, so that one might almost expect the fruit for dessert to be picked after the main course was cleared. Bread came from the oven every few hours, and mushrooms, crayfish and rabbits were known to arrive at the backdoor by bicycle.

Gottlieb knew that no ingredient benefits more from personal attention than soft-shell crabs, so he found a woman who tended her soft-shell crab beds obsessively, checking on them every two hours, to provide the crabs at Gottlieb's. Her consistently exquisite little crabs inspired him to experiment at Gottlieb's, where he played with different batters for frying them.

He tried grilling soft-shells, but the results didn't meet his standards; the shells weren't transformed into that irresistible crispness protecting juicy meat. Instead, he says he much prefers the tried-and-true, pan-fried version. He also has stuffed soft-shells with deviled crab or shrimp mousse, and next he's going to try cornbread stuffing.

That cornbread also has captured Gottlieb's fancy. He changed its nature frequently at Gottlieb's. In addition to the bread basket standby, he sometimes added more liquid to the batter to produce a cornbread cake. Or he would thin it to a pancake batter, brown the cakes in butter, then top them with butter pecan ice cream and caramel sauce, a dessert that, without the pancake, was one of the mainstays at the Inn at Little Washington. Making the batter thicker, Gottlieb might fashion it into waffles.

Inspirations

In creating a new dish, Gottlieb says he looks not to the future--no molecular gastronomy in his kitchen--but to the past. He tries to satisfy nostalgia or update an old favorite that is too heavy or rich for today's appetites. Often he looks to street foods, fast foods and snack foods to give them a make-over. It's "My Fair Lady" revisited, with Gottlieb as Professor Higgins revamping corn dogs, tacos and quesadillas into elegant dishes even Audrey Hepburn might eat. His rules: Use the finest ingredients, and keep it simple.

Take the corn dog. It was Gottlieb's favorite food in childhood, but you can't serve hot dogs in a fine-dining restaurant.

What people do seek in restaurants of any level is shrimp, which are fresh and abundant in Savannah. What's more, the Georgia Shrimp Association asked Gottlieb to make a dish for its promotion. So Gottlieb impaled raw shrimp on small wooden skewers, dipped them in corn-cake batter and fried them at 350-360 degrees Fahrenheit in soy oil until they were golden. He served them at Gottlieb's with strained remoulade. The world now had shrimp dogs.

Savannah's oysters have a unique flavor that Gottlieb loves, and he eats a couple dozen a day in season. So it was to be expected that oysters would inspire his cooking. The result was an original combination called "skewer of May River oysters." He started with oysters and let the idea develop from there.

He likes poached oysters, so he poached them lightly in court bouillon with wine. He also poached bite-size nuggets of sweetbread, because the texture is so similar to oysters that the effect seemed interesting. He floured the poached sweetbreads and sauteed them in clarified butter until crisp.

The combination needed a touch of sweetness, but raisins wouldn't work on a skewer, so he tried prunes. And what finishing touch adds incomparable aroma, taste and texture to accent a savory dish? Bacon. It was, indeed, simple, at least in restaurant terms: using small silver skewers or rosemary branches, then threading them with a poached oyster, a chunk of pan-fried sweetbread, a prune and a square of crisped bacon so they looked like miniature sandwiches.

Gottlieb's brother Michael, who wasthe evening chef, also found that necessity motivated his creativity in the kitchen. The two used to drive to Hilton Head, S.C., for crispy orange beef from a Chinese fast-food restaurant, until that restaurant closed. Before long, Gottlieb's Southern menu included an elegant crispy orange beef made with thinly sliced tenderloin or rib eye, coated with cornstarch and fried in soy oil, then tossed with a sweet chile sauce, thick soy, garlic, ginger and green onion as well as orange.

Who's doing what

Gottlieb notes that everyone now is updating surf and turf, combining "any land animal with any sea animal." He says his favorite surf-and-turf combination is beef tenderloin and lobster. He doesn't much like scallops and duck, "although it's good if you add some truffle."

Gottlieb says he appreciates the high-wire, trendsetting, adventurous chefs, the ones "who are always going to put all kinds of things on the plate," because they are expanding diners' taste buds. "But when [customers] go home, they still eat meat and potatoes," he says. He predicts a bright future for simple food.

Showy dishes may get more attention, but that doesn't faze Gottlieb. "Julia Child is cheering for me up there," he says.

Mentor's point of view

In the kitchen as well as in the art studio or concert hall, mentoring follows the ancient pattern of trying to teach the student "to get in the mind of the artist, become like him, solve problems like him," says Patrick O'Connell, who obviously has thought about this a lot over his 26 years at the Inn at Little Washington. "It is a conversion project," during which the protege is "watching, copying, replating, problem solving."

Gottlieb, O'Connell says, "was able to see my world through my eyes. It is almost as though there are two of you."

Once Gottlieb made that leap, the two of them spent a lot of time on the road together, and the protege could observe the chef uncensored.

"Laurence is very sharp and very fast, and developed a point of view," O'Connell says. "He also developed that single ingredient lacking in most young chefs, a sense of appropriateness." O'Connell says Gottlieb could be trusted to run the kitchen in O'Connell's absence, with O'Connell knowing Gottlieb "would call the shots the way I would."

Not that the protege is expected to continue reproducing his mentor's style. O'Connell forecasts that Gottlieb will use his lessons as a foundation, not to make replicas of his mentor's dishes, but to cast dishes in their own original form.

"Laurence knew that there was a great place for simplicity," O'Connell says. In fact, if you push O'Connell to declare a trend, he'll insist the next big thing is going to be simplicity and authenticity. "There is going to be a big, big backlash against the bizarre, wild combinations that don't work," he says.

Most trends are inventions of the media, he declares. He cites as an example a deconstructed Caesar salad he had in New York. It was pureed and topped with foam. "Why not take the greater challenge and make a magnificent Caesar salad, the best possible?" he asks.

He predicts that the public is going to start making its preferences clear. "They have had enough artificial newness," O'Connell says. "They want realness, quality."

Laurence Gottlieb couldn't have said it better.

Biography

Title: Executive Chef at the Hamptons, Sumter, South Carolina, and former partner of the now closed Gottlieb's in Savannah, Ga.

Birth date: June 29, 1973

Birthplace: Savannah, Ga.

Education: University of Georgia art major, transferred to Johnson & Wales University, graduated in 1997

Career highlight: working with Patrick O'Connell

Favorite fast food: soft-shell crabs