Fun With Molecular Gastronomy

I talked last week with Stephan Frye, owner of Sobo American Bistro, which opened a couple of months ago at 657 South Broadway in Boulder (and should not be confused with the Sobo Bar on South Broadway in Denver). He was trying to explain his cuisine to me — calling it "Modern American," but then struggling to define exactly what "Modern American" meant within the confines of his bistro in particular. "We do a lot of American food," he said — but the American food that Sobo does is heavily informed by immigrant cuisines and European technique. There are Greek flavors, Asian flavors, Eastern European flavors — each of them distinct on the plate. "It's not a fusion," Frye said. "That's the way Americans like to eat these days, we think. The days of pot roast are over."

A bold statement, so I started asking for menu specifics, at which point he handed the blower to his chef, Scott Clagett, who once cooked with James Mazzio at Fifteen Degrees back when Fifteen Degrees was the hottest restaurant in the state. In the years since, Clagett has been everywhere — cooking in the Caribbean, in D.C. and on the West Coast, traveling through Hungary, Greece and Asia. But now he's back home again, doing interesting things with a menu that changes pretty substantially about once a month.

He has a Szechuan peppercorn-crusted tuna with a kumquat chutney, served in an anise-shot, pho-style broth, and a seared veal chop over carrot spaetzle and sweetbreads doused with a sauce of pure red bell pepper. His braised beef short rib is done sous vide, packed in a vacuum bag, ultimately sauced with honey and balsamic and roasted cipollini onions. The sous vide made me think of Kleinman, but when I asked Clagett about the influence of molecular gastronomy in his own kitchen, he laughed. "I know that stuff," he said. "And I like the guys who use it. But I wouldn't call anything I do molecular. I'm not into the chemicals. I'm more into using my juicer, my smoker, my vacuum sealer. Sous vide is about as far as I go."

But that's the thing, I argued: Five years ago, sous vide was way too far out for most guys. Clagett responded by reminding me that sous vide is a French term that's been around for a hundred years, that there's nothing at all new about it.

Clagett is predominantly a classicist. In his words, everything he does is in service to the food: the battle cry of the dedicated, ingredient-driven professional chef. And yet his menu at Sobo is a million years more advanced than what I was doing in Frenchy-ville ten years ago — a place where I couldn't get an immersion blender because it was too newfangled, too insultingly modern. Back then, his food would've been blasted as "bitch nouvelle" — a wonderful phrase from the chef's lexicon that meant too girly, too effete and too fussy all at the same time. Fusion-but-not-fusion, Asian flavors on a classical French plate, sous vide? He would've been the rebel then — whereas today he's defending the flag of the old guard.

Leftovers: Good news for fans of Mara Soutiere's restaurants, Magnolia in Louisville and Tahona in Boulder. She and her crew are hunting for a location in Denver where they can open a third restaurant, and are looking to multi-unit operators like Dave Query for inspiration. "These guys, they know that you have to keep your staff excited," she said. And one way to do that? Open another restaurant so there's room to promote from within — which is precisely what Soutiere is looking at now, scouting spots on both 17th Avenue and in the Highland neighborhood.