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January 15, 2005
About Us
This blog is run by two passionate gourmets, Mikael and Vedat.
ABOUT MIKAEL
According to Mikael’s mother, Mikael’s obsessive food interest started about the same time as he could walk. He started cooking very early in life and cooked dinners in people’s homes when he was an early teenager.
Destined to become a chef he did some basic training in professional kitchens but due to allergy, which later disappeared, he had to give up his plans to work professionally as a chef. He was fortunate enough to at an early age be intoxicated by haute cuisine and has since studied fine dining at various dining temples. Mikael will never be impressed by prestige, stars or luxury settings. Only what is served matters and Mikael could enjoy exceptional food even if it was served on a cardboard.
Mikael has devoted much of his time to studies of truffles, black as well as white, lobsters of all forms, chickens and many other ingredients that has caught his interest. These studies are still carried out and it is likely that they will never finish.
If you go early in the mornings to the markets on the French Riviera, you can often spot Mikael hunting for ultra fresh gamberi’s, rock red mullet, Mediterranean sea bass, langouste, milk-fed lamb, squab from small breeders and fresh vegetables from local farmers.
Mikael likes to eat most great produce the planet has to offer but is especially fond of gamberis from San Remo, Gaulois chicken, telinnes from Camargue, Salers and Simmental beef, pré-salé lamb, Pauillac lamb, courgettes nicois, asparagus from Vaucluse and Valbenga, morels and ceps. He likes to drink Burgundy wines from Roulot, Roumier, Coche-Dury, Comtes-Lafon, Jayer and Lafarge and Rhone wines from Chave and Jamet. Mikael prefers cheeses from affineurs such as Bernard Antony, Hervé Mons and Aleosse.
ABOUT VEDAT
Since early childhood Vedat has taken for granted the abundance and availability of good food on an everyday basis. This was a time when good quality fish, meat and seafood was available for very reasonable prices and before the World Bank (where Vedat has worked in the early 90s) had started to corrupt Turkish agriculture in the name of efficiency. He was also lucky that he grew up with his paternal grandparents. His grandmother, from Konya, was a serious home cook, besides being a beautiful lady who gave importance to aesthetics, and his grandfather, educated in Germany in agriculture, was an entrepreneur who introduced modern farming and food processing to Turkey and would discuss with his only grandson his experiments to cultivate the best fruits and vegetables. The only casualty of these early years is that, because Vedat unwittingly observed the slaughter of chickens in his grandpa’s farm at the tender age of 6, he would never ever taste a chicken again, even if it were a Gaulois chicken cooked by Mikael!
Upon coming to the US for graduate studies Vedat was awed and distressed by two things. First, as he unscientifically observed, Americans ate more chicken than anybody else on earth. Second, and especially in his International House dormitory at Berkeley, in California, getting decent, let alone good food, was as difficult as finding the needle in the haystack. Soon after, Vedat, who is about 5 foot and 8 inches tall weighed about 120 pounds and was on the verge of getting hospitalized.
It is at this point that Chez Panisse came to the rescue and was an eye opener for him in the sense that he had never thought that one could eat great food in restaurants (even to this day, the best of the Turkish cuisine can only be experienced in households). About the same time, Vedat has also discovered the taste of decent Southern Rhone wines that he could afford at Kermit Lynch and he realized the true meaning of a cliché, that the sum is greater than the constituent parts when wine is carefully matched with food.
Next came a half year fellowship in France intended for the study of French Economic Planning, but in practice resulted in the study of dining out at the Michelin starred restaurants, including 30 or so meals at the best restaurant of the time, Robuchon’s Jamin when there still was a 140 FF lunch menu which was equivalent to about $15 given the exchange rate at the time. The rest is, well… history. Once bitten by the lure of exquisite eating and nostalgic for his country and his childhood Vedat developed a fascination, one can also call obsession, with good food. To this day, he is crazy enough to drive to the middle of nowhere in rural places, say Spain, to eat 20 day old lamb from the Churra breed in an asador, or he can scourge the whole Mediterranean in search of the best “langouste”. To him, Michelin stars and luxurious surrounding mean nothing either positive or negative, and instead what is on the plate matters the most—besides good company of course which enriches the dining out experiment. As to what he likes to drink, besides freshly squeezed mandarin juice, Vedat is particularly fond of the silky Burgundies in H Jayer’s style and also Northern Rhones, Barolos and Barbarescos from both old (Giacomo Conterno and Giacosa) and new style (Roberto Voerzio, Sandrone) producers, some old Riojas and Meursaults from the likes of Roulot, Jobard, Coche and Lafon. All this said, he would gladly share with you a ‘45 or ‘47 Ausone if you have a spare bottle or two!
MIKAEL ABOUT VEDAT
Vedat is the most meticulous diner I have ever met. It takes an eternity to order a meal at a restaurant with him. He goes through dish after dish and asks the maitre d’ detailed questions about the provenance and characteristics of the produce of each dish and only stops short of asking if they know what the wild sea bass had been eating before it was caught. He has a relentless desire to discover and enjoy the culinary treasures of the world. His knowledge on ingredients and their preparations in particular and dining in general and the multitude of his “taste reference library” are beyond comprehension.
When he eats one can see he is analyzing every bit and every savor yet at the same time enjoying and taking enormous pleasure from great food like few if any people I have ever met. He is the ultimate gourmet and a true pleasure to dine with.
VEDAT ABOUT MIKAEL
Mikael is the most knowledgeable person about food in general and ingredients in particular that I have ever met. Actually, having read and reread some of his posts in a gastronomic website and having exchanged some emails with him I had dreaded meeting him in person. Somebody that knowledgeable and also Swedish to boot-- the cliché of Scandinavians being detached and aloof—I had started to think that he may be intimidating and not necessarily an ideal dining companion.
How wrong was I! The first impression I had of Mikael is that, when meeting him at Lucas Carton, his eyes were genuinely warm and friendly and his gestures and body language graceful. While about a head taller than me, and I suspect than most people, he is never intimidating, on the contrary. I was actually dumbfounded to learn from him that a common friend had called him a “Swedish teddy bear” as, after meeting him my wife also had told me that he is a cuddly type that will be liked by girls; he is like a “teddy bear” she said.
Even more striking for me than this nice surprise of dining with a pleasant person was the fact that Mikael’s palate turned out to be even more discriminating than I would have imagined. He would look at my langoustines wrapped in vermicelli and exclaim that it was oily and a tad too thick, while I had to taste it and then reach the same conclusions but only after tasting it. Or to give another example, this one at Les Ambassadeurs right after Piege took over the kitchen, he would taste a Comte from Bernard Anthony and learn from the server that it is a 1999, and after a bite he would proclaim that good as it is the cheese is 2000, not 1999. Guess what? Bernard Anthony was dining in the restaurant the same night and came to our table to say hello and corroborated that the restaurant had run out of his 1999 and they were now serving the new vintage. Well, if a man can tell the difference between the two then he will be intimidating as a food critique for many celebrity chefs who normally get away with murder.
I am also dumbfounded by the fact that Mikael can eat an inordinate amount of food and enjoy every bite of it. Our feast at Ambassadeurs has started at 8:30 PM and the same day Mikael had just had lunch of 20 courses or so, specially prepared by Chez Gagnaire which had ended at 5 PM. I do not know how anybody can do this and I am hoping that Mikael will reveal his secret one day in Gastroville.
To contact Mikael and Vedat:
mikael@gastroville.com
vedat@gastroville.com
Comments
Please, if you find yourselves in Copenhagen, take an evening to enjoy Noma. My website has my own amateurish review, but I'd love to read the post after you two ate there. I was genuinely surprised by the quality and inventiveness of the food. Zagat says:
“Exceptional” new Scandinavian whose stellar chef René Redzepi relies on authentic Nordic ingredients like wild salmon, seaweed and berries for his “inventive” cuisine; “fabulously located” in a renovated waterfront warehouse in Christianshavn, its unique interior mixes the new (minimalist sheepskin-covered chairs) and the old (original beams and bricks) with timeless views of the city skyline and harbor."
I say, better than anything I've had at French Laundry, and well worth the trip. Oustanding.
Keep up the great work. I love reading your reviews.
Posted by: Aimee Cardwell at July 5, 2005 10:13 PM
