by Tejal Rao
February 2007
The wave of open kitchens and over-the-top meals that require instructions
has set diners standards extraordinarily high. They don’t
just want a meal that amuses the mouth with flavors and textures,
they want to be entertained. At Luqa, Chef David Gilbert’s
exciting high-concept dishes do both. The concept begins with the
voyeuristic floor-to-ceiling glass in Gibert’s kitchen. While
the unsuspecting diners at Luqa can’t hear what’s going
on inside, they watch the kitchen and the cooks. And when we tell
Gilbert how much we enjoyed sucking tart, fruity mousses from the
open-ended test tubes that arrived on a black napkin, he nods and
smiles, “I know,” he admits, “I was watching.”
The downtown Dallas restaurant, which lies between miles of highway
dotted with strip malls and familiar chains, is an unexpected shrine
to unpretentious and interactive fine dining. A meal at Luqa
stimulates the diner with interaction that goes beyond picking up
their fork and knife and sawing away. Instead, they suck on tubes,
inhale the scent from hot rosemary stems, and break the crust of
a crème brulee hovering 6 inches above its custard. In this
way Gilbert removes familiar ingredients and pairings from their
usual context without alienating the diner.
The eggplant and garlic soup is the opening act: a bowl of soup
sitting in a bowl of rosemary stems that release a warm, piney scent
when hot water is poured over them tableside. The experience is,
although seemingly opposite, very much the same as the more obviously
sensual act of eating blindfolded: a self-conscious effort to enhance
one sense by fooling another…you can taste the green even
though you’re not eating it. Maybe it was his time spent cooking
in Amsterdam at Vermeer – although Gilbert claims
to have been working too hard to indulge in the mind-altering Dutch
frivolities of the Milky Way – but Gilbert’s dishes,
while grounded in our world, transport the diner to another.
His barley risotto, a tender ode to caramelized bacon and onions,
woos the underappreciated ingredients with a luxurious bath of cream
and stock. The risotto is contained in a clear ring, where pudgy
onions and bubbles of spiced froth press against the glass. When
the glass is pulled away, the tower of barley collapses into a bowl
of loose, aromatic risotto topped with tiny slices of scarlet-centered
squab. The onions, bacon bits and froth mingle on the plate. Ta-da,
the diner is amused!
The little quenelle of mascarpone mousse, striped with truffle
honey, serves as both delicate composed cheese course and refreshing
pre-dessert. What follows is a sweet potato crème brulee:
a bowl of sweet potato cream topped with a crispy bundle of sweet
potato threads and balancing an ultra-thin shard of anise flavored
sugar. Like a classic crème brulee, a few taps with a spoon
break the sugar into the bowl where you’re free to play some
more, dipping pieces of sugar or crushing them to bits.
What makes Gilbert’s eccentric touches successful is not
just his precise technique with ingredients but the way he anchors
his dishes to familiar flavor-profiles. In the brulee’s case
it’s the micro-planed cinnamon bringing the dish into a Southern
dessert context. With the rosemary scented soup it’s the classic
match of eggplant to garlic. One gets the feeling Gilbert isn’t
seeking to impress but simply encouraging diners to join him at
play, have fun, and enjoy the experience of dining out again.
back to top
|
