TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101292/1012571.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 3.7 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                FOOD, Page 78

How the West was Cooked



    "Try one of these," Mark Miller urges his wary guest,
proffering a handmade sausage stuffed with duck, fig and
habanero chile. Miller watches with satisfaction as his quarry
reacts to a fugue of piquant flavors that slowly fades to a
smoky afterburn. "The chile pushes the flavor," explains Miller,
who believes that good food should sing. "The duck fat is the
low notes," he says. "The habanero is the high notes."

    Miller, the nation's foremost champion of hot cuisine, is
conducting his experiment in the sculpted dining room of Red
Sage, his $5.2 million, 18,800-sq.-ft. Western-style restaurant
in Washington. Red Sage, which opened in January and is albooked
weeks in advance, is an updated, upscale evocation of the
American West rendered in buttery leather banquettes, panoramic
murals and buffalo-motif chandeliers. In the street-level bar,
cocktails are served with swizzle sticks that look like barbed
wire, while on the ceiling a canopy of white plaster clouds
floats across a starry night sky. "The world looks at America,
and it thinks about the West," says Miller, who taught
anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, before
switching to the kitchen. "There's a spirit, a bravado, and Red
Sage is part of that mythology."

    The food, which Miller dubs "modern Western," is steeped
in the same pioneering spirit. His eclectic menu ranges from
neo-Tex-Mex tidbits like chipotle chile breadsticks to
fresh-baked buckwheat cinnamon bread, smoked duck and buffalo
jerky. "Smoking is a natural by-product of heat," Miller says,
launching into an aria of poetic exaltation. "There's an
intensity of wildness, of untamed flavor. It's loaded
symbolically with a primordial sense of fire and man. I read a
lot of meaning into food. I think it's one of the last
experimental frontiers."

    Miller's passion for untamed flavor began in his native
Massachusetts, where Mexican and Indian friends of his
French-Canadian family introduced him to the spicy exotica of
non-European cooking. Travels in Latin America, Africa and Asia
prompted him to experiment with ethnic accents, first as an
assistant chef for nouvelle California guru Alice Waters at Chez
Panisse in Berkeley and later in the same city at his own Fourth
Street Grill, where he was one of the first chefs in the country
to use mesquite wood for grilling.

    In 1987 Miller opened the Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, specializing in a sophisticated fusion of nouvelle and
traditional New Mexican fare. The restaurant was an instant hit
as hordes of tourists fought their way to the tables to get
their tongues tickled by his audacious, artfully presented
dishes. That success put both haute Southwestern cooking and
Miller on the culinary front burner. His Coyote Cafe cookbook
has sold 90,000 copies since 1990, and his latest collection,
The Great Chile Book, published last December, has sold 40,000.

    Miller's aim at the Red Sage is to expand the traditional
limits of Western cooking by incorporating Native American and
Latin elements. "There were people in America before the arrival
of Europeans," says Miller, who adds sizzle to poultry, fish
and game with seasonings and textures derived from Plains
Indian and Aztec recipes. "We are enriched as a culture by
including these things, not by pushing them aside." Meanwhile,
he expects the menu at Red Sage to continue the cultural
evolution that inspired its creation. "The West has all these
elements in its past, but it's still in the process of
becoming," he observes. "It's not about looking back. It's about
bringing it forward." -- G.G.

    By Guy Garcia