Ari Taymor shares his roots
Alma’s celebrated chef shows us how to make roasted carrots with chanterelles.
That chef Ari Taymor arrived by himself, carrying a small hotel pan stacked with plastic deli cups and kitchen towels, all haphazardly labeled with blue painter’s tape, was somehow f itting. Taymor’s restaurant, after all, began life as a traveling pop- up before establishing itself as a national dining destination.
He was demonstrating one of Alma’s recurrent dishes, a warm salad of roasted carrots and chanterelles that’s on Alma’s tasting menu and has been a standard, in various iterations, for the last two of Alma’s three years.
Taymor had on an apron over a gray sweatshirt and skinny black pants, his arms covered with tattoos, sockless feet in a pair of Converse sneakers. His accolades: Bon Appetit’s best new restaurant in 2013; Food & Wine’s best new chef in 2014; James Beard Rising Star Chef nominee this year. His tattoos: an Aristotle quote; a maple tree, to remind him of the one in his childhood yard in Palo Alto; “tout sera fini” or “everything will end,” which might remind him of his current legal woes ( Taymor is in the middle of a wrenching lawsuit over Alma’s ownership) or might just be a footnote to his time as a philosophy major.
The chef, who is now 29, unpacks the hotel pan, lining up small bowls of ingredients on the kitchen coun- ter. Butter- roasted baby carrots, sautéed chanterelles, dehydrated peaches, brown butter, vadouvan, peach soubise, a squeeze bottle of rice wine vinegar, nasturtiums, half an onion, a peach.
Taymor’s food is arty stuff, dishes orchestrated like still- life paintings, composed of foraged greenery, seasonal produce and highly curated ingredients. Although it can seem precious, it’s about f lavor rather than artifice.
The current version of the carrot dish is built around peaches, both dehydrated and fresh, that are added to the onion sauce soubise. “We wanted to f ind a way to use stone fruit differently. It has more dimensions than just dessert or cut raw.”
He points out that all the components of the dish can be made ahead and reheated, the assembly just a matter of temperature and aesthetics. “We got mislabeled as a molecular restaurant. We’re just rustic.”
While it’s possible that many L. A. diners, brought up on grilled cheese night at Campanile, might not use the word “rustic” to describe Taymor’s exquisite plates the cooking at Alma isn’t as rarefied as you might think. You do not need to make your own vadouvan but can instead pick it up from a spice shop. Buy some dried peaches from your farmers market. Then all you really need to do is cook some carrots and mushrooms, make a blender sauce and pick some nasturtiums, the edible f lowers grow like weeds in Southern California. Which is pretty rustic after all.