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Fine dining maverick Daniel Patterson ready to serve Canberra

The chef who revived Californian haute cuisine is coming to Canberra, writes <b>Kirsten Lawson</b>.

Kirsten Lawson
Kirsten Lawson

Direct flavour ... Although Daniel Patterson is firmly haute cuisine, he uses seasoning to add "a guttural, peasant inflection".
Direct flavour ... Although Daniel Patterson is firmly haute cuisine, he uses seasoning to add "a guttural, peasant inflection".Supplied

When Daniel Patterson opened Coi in 2006, he was considered crazy to be opening a fine diner, given the overwhelming trend for casual food.

Seating just 30, Coi was the only restaurant in San Francisco to offer only a tasting menu, Patterson says, and he had no great confidence in how many people would turn up. But now there are perhaps 300 seats at tasting-menu restaurants in the city. He believes the resurgence is due partly to his success.

"Part of what was valuable about the restaurant was that we stayed in business," Patterson said with some understatement ahead of his visit to Australia this week, where he will make appearances in Canberra (Aubergine, November 13), Sydney and Melbourne. "And maybe that in part gave people confidence to think that San Francisco was more receptive than they thought it was to that kind of experience."

Twist ... Daniel Patterson's inverted cherry tomato tart with black olive and basil, from Coi.
Twist ... Daniel Patterson's inverted cherry tomato tart with black olive and basil, from Coi.Georg Lester
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Now 45, Patterson was never formally trained, but has had his own restaurants since his mid-20s. He offers complex, elegant tasting menus that have at their heart humble but pristine produce, wild ingredients and essential oils. He aims to offer a very local cuisine, so he serves the wheatgrass, sprouts and brown rice of Californian cliche, but with a fresh spin and complexity. He has been credited with pioneering a new Californian cuisine and such is his success, his was also the first restaurant in San Francisco to be awarded two Michelin stars. Michelin describes Patterson's food as having a "cerebral spin".

He aims to evoke food memories and emotion in his food, although not using the likes of cereal (or "cereal milk" made famous by David Chang) or childhood sweets or spreads that you'll find glorified on pop-culture menus the world over. Asked about this trend, Patterson says, "Cereal is a sugary, unhealthy processed food, so that's not the kind of memories that we're really looking for."

Patterson's memories are of healthy food at the hands of his mother (a teacher; his father is a lawyer) and a gift for food at the hands of his grandmother, from whom, he says, he inherited a way of connecting through cooking more than with words.

The act of cooking for someone is so satisfying; having that kind of generosity and selflessness in your life is very fulfilling.

Uncomfortably or a man who finds it more natural to cook than to speak about it, Patterson is also in demand on the international speaking circuit. "The kitchens where I began my career were filled with every manner of social misfit, and from the beginning I felt right at home," he writes in Coi. "Those were the days when no diner ever, ever asked to see the cook."

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He accepts the invitations now, albeit with the prospect of

"stumbling awkwardly through a presentation that I put together on the plane ride over", because they allow him to learn more about food and to catch up with his international chef friends, including Ben Shewry at Attica in Melbourne, of whom he is a fan.

Don't miss it ... Daniel Patterson will speak at a literary lunch at Aubergine in Canberra on November 13, hosted by Good Food Month.
Don't miss it ... Daniel Patterson will speak at a literary lunch at Aubergine in Canberra on November 13, hosted by Good Food Month.Supplied

While Patterson is firmly haute cuisine, he uses seasoning to add "a guttural, peasant inflection". He's aiming for "directness" in flavour, acidity, brightness and a fermented edge, rather than the traditional fine dining creamy sauces, which he says tend to mask flavour. In Patterson's food, there's nowhere to hide, which is why ingredients must be so pristine.

His favourite dessert is "a train wreck of sweet, sour, burnt", a fierce dish made of marshmallow that has been frozen and mixed with an "insane amount" of lime juice so "the acidity is electric, almost punishing … a complete inversion of the saccharine pillows that the name conjures up", and on top is a lime meringue, branded with a piece of charcoal to give the look of a toasted marshmallow.

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In his kitchen, every ingredient is hard-won, hunted out at the markets and from farmers, and foraged from the wild. "We check everything before we buy it, even when it's from the same farm we bought from two days before, to be used for the same dish. We don't trust anything unless we taste it," he writes. His dishes are fine-tuned merely not to a vegetable or cut of meat, but to a specific ingredient - these carrots, these beets, this duck, he says, with the emphasis. He makes everything from scratch, down to vinegar and butter, the butter perfected over years and now made with a culture and aged before use.

Which makes for a tough slog. The drudgery of scraping lichen for a dish of beef encrusted in lichen is a case in point - finding a lichen that tastes good, scraping sufficient from the branch of a tree, then boiling it till it's no longer bitter and your intuition tells you it's ready (one to three hours), then dehydrating and grinding it to use. This drudgery, he notes, is "an almost perfect metaphor for haute cuisine".

Cooking is hard, he elaborates. Physically demanding, with almost no tolerance for failure, in a high pressure and uncomfortable environment, and you do the same thing every day. But it has its transcendent moments.

"You endure the difficult parts for these rare extraordinary moments of success where you taste or do something right. You become flushed with a feeling that's indescribable, a kind of euphoria, and it's so strong and so evanescent that the second it disappears and you're trudging along again, all you're thinking is trying to get back to it.

"The creative aspect provides moments of extraordinary clarity. And also the act of cooking for someone is so satisfying; having that kind of generosity and selflessness in your life is very fulfilling."

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The New York Times has described him as a precise and deliberate in manner, with a quest for perfection that is almost alarming, and in Coi the book you get a sense of this precision. "Perfect food is born of perfect order," he states with zero ambiguity. "There are many delicious things in the world that arise out of chaos; none of them are in this book."

>>Daniel Patterson speaks at a literary lunch at Aubergine in Canberra on November 13, hosted by Good Food Month festival director and Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide editor Joanna Savill ($75, signed copies of his new book, $55 pre-ordered or $59.95 on the day, bookings 6260 8666, goodfoodmonth.com). He also appears at Attica in Melbourne (November 11), and Momofuku in Sydney (November 12).

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Kirsten LawsonKirsten Lawson is news director at The Canberra Times

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