Book Title: Accessible Fine Dining – The Art of Creating Exciting Food in Your Everyday Kitchen by Noam Kostucki, with Chef Quentin Villers
Category: Adult Non-fiction , 128 pages
Genre: Creative Cookbook / Fine Dining
Publisher: Amazon
Release date: Dec 10, 2018

Synopsis

Six months after opening my first restaurant, one of my dishes was selected as “25 dishes to travel around the world”, featuring me next to culinary legend Heston Blumenthal.

Exciting and healthy food doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Over the years, I have seen some of the most exciting dishes come from the simplest kitchens and the most modest ingredients. The purpose of this book is to focus our attention away from the distractions of fancy kitchen equipment and luxury produce and instead focus our attention towards ingenuity in the kitchen and culinary innovation.

For some strange reason, cooking is taught in books as a series of mechanical steps to follow and repeat with precision. I see cooking as a creative art like painting or playing music: it is the freedom of expression that is most interesting to me. When we create from an artistic perspective, we give birth to something new and potentially magical.

The purpose of this book is not to teach you specific recipes, because the ingredients you will find in your local organic food market will likely not be the same as the ones we see here. Nor is the purpose to show you how to imitate us.The purpose of this book is to guide you into thinking about your dishes in a way that elevates them to a fine dining level, from ingredients which are easily accessible to you. Naturally, you will find a few recipes, but most importantly you will find a new way to look at food.

We will share how we think about food shopping, searching for unusual ingredients, the combinations of flavors, techniques, textures, nutritional value, and of course, plating. The purpose of this book is to guide you to become a more exciting, creative and adventurous version of yourself in the kitchen. What separates a craft from an art form is the story behind it; cooking is a craft, while fine dining is an art form.

If you want to create fine dining dishes, start to focus your attention on the different stories a dish can tell. Some stories can be told through your cooking, and others are told through words. Taking the time to present your dishes before people eat is crucial to creating anticipation for the food they will eat.

Excerpt

PLATING WITH PERSONALITY (an excerpt from Accessible Fine Dining by Noam Kostucki)

A friend of mine used to own a restaurant in Tamarindo, Costa Rica. They were serving food on beautiful white plates like everyone else. During their first busy season, they were overwhelmed by the number of guests and ran out of plates. In an attempt to save the day, my friend grabbed some small planks of wood and slapped down big leaves he had picked from palm trees. He served the food directly on the palm tree leaf. He was ready to be shot down by the guests, and to his surprise, for the first time, everyone took the phones out of their pockets to take photos. After that, he got rid of all his white plates and started serving everything on leaves, coconuts, and wood.

We created a dish with squid tentacles, a red Thai gazpacho and a lot of fresh leaves. We wanted guests to see everything. We wanted them to see all the details, and none of our plates did it justice. After a lot of tinkering, we eventually came up with a new idea: we grabbed red wine glasses, into which we served a small layer of the red Thai gazpacho. On top, we sprinkled thin sticks of yellow chard stalks. We then delicately placed squid tentacles on the gazpacho as if it was climbing up the wall of the glass. We finished the dish by placing fresh herbs as if they were coming out of the gazpacho. The result looked like a mini aquarium, and because it was served in a glass, it was at eye level, and guests could pick it up to look at in all directions. It was a magical dish and guests were in love with it.

Another of my favorite plating stories is from a dessert by the American chef, Grant Achatz. He removed everything from the table and put down a new black tablecloth. Waiters stood on both ends of the table and threw splatters of colorful food on it, making it look like a modern abstract painting. They then placed a white bowl in the center of the table, and when they broke it, a cloud of smoke came out. Then, guests ate directly from the tablecloth. It’s another way of breaking the rules of plating, and after experiencing it, you can’t help but tell everyone about it. Great plating makes people want to tell their friends about it.

Experiment with different types of plating. Deconstruct and explode your food, and try creating uniform towers. Let your imagination run free and create bold visual effects. The key to plating with personality is learning to express who you are visually on the plate.

Who are you visually?

Review

This book is inspiring.  It gave me new insights into foods, presentation, and endless possibilities.

The photos in the book are mouthwatering even the dishes that I wouldn’t eat (seafood).  The presentation of the dishes made me think that this was a 5 star restaurant in a large town instead of a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere in Costa Rica.  But as they say, looks can be deceiving.  It is all about using what you have available and opening your mind to taste, texture, and smell.

This isn’t a cookbook per se.  It is more about enjoying food and not being locked into a recipe or expect a dish to prepared a certain way.  It is also about being bold and experimenting and moving outside of your comfort zone.  It is also about eating locally and what is available in close proximity to where you live.

This is a book I will probably read several times because it is a fast read and I think I will pick up on new tips and tricks each time I stroll through the pages and view the images.

We give this 5 paws up

About the Authors

Noam Kostucki

MY NAME IS NOAM KOSTUCKI AND I CREATE SPACES FOR MAGIC TO HAPPEN.

I was an awkward child, so I changed school 5 times. I spent most of my life trying to please others, and be the kind of person I believed everyone else wanted me to be. I wasn’t happy and I struggled to get what I want. Everything changed when I started changing.

I spent the last 12 years creating the life I dream of. I’ve had the privilege to be homeless twice and to speak at Harvard about entrepreneurship. I have grown to be myself more fearlessly than ever before. I am now surrounded by people I love, and who love me.

I traveled over 40 countries, and I’ve helped over 25,000 people create magic. For example, Patryk Wezowski who raised $500,000 in 8 weeks and Esther Perel who gave the 30th most viewed TED talk. Some less public successes include a blind eyed student who experienced his blind eye for the first time and a journalist who left an abusive relationship.

As a university drop out, I was surprised when my first book (personal branding) became required reading at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, as well as receiving the UK Business Speaker of the Year runner up award, and an honorary degree in Business from Hofstra University. As an artist, I was honored to exhibit my photography at the European Union’s Innovation Conference.

My most recent venture is HiR Fine Dining, a jungle culinary adventure. I create a discovery menu of 7 plates per person for groups of up to 12 people. HiR Fine Dining became #1 fine dining on TripAdvisor in Tamarindo within the first month. Within 6 months one of my plates was selected out of 40,000 restaurants by OpenTable as one of “25 dishes to travel around the world for”. I was invited to speak at Chateau 1525, Costa Rica’s most reputable cooking school and our guest chefs include a blind chef who traveled all the way the United Kingdom.

Quentin Villers

Quentin has been cooking in restaurants since the age of 18. He helped his brother build a restaurant for which they received a Michelin Star. Quentin moved to Costa Rica to consult for hotels and restaurants. He managed 3 of the 4 restaurants at Hotel Nayara in La Fortuna, for which he led a team of over 20 people to be selected to enter Relais & Chateaux, a prestigious network of unique luxury hotels with exquisite cuisine. Quentin is a regular guest chef at HiR Fine Dining and consults for a number of fine dining restaurants in Costa Rica.

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Giveaway

Grand Prize: Win a 4-seat dinner at HiR Fine Dining in Costa Rica (value $580) or win a paperback or ebook copy of Accessible Fine Dining (20 Kindle copies and 10 paperbacks) open int’l to wherever Amazon delivers

(ends Feb 7, 2019)

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