Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/430172
december 2014 / the tasting panel / 77 "We'll order the proteins to know what dish to build it on, but in terms of how it's going to come together, we really don't know until almost the last minute. It gets a little tricky sometimes," he says. Foraging, he says, is "a fine line between being gimmicky and being real food. We do it as a way to accentuate the food and not really build a menu on it. Especially here in New Jersey, it's hard to go too far out of the box with ingredients." He serves two options: the all-vegetable Harvest menu and Grazing, the protein-based course. With training in three Michelin-starred restaurants includ- ing Atelier de Joël Robuchon, Nihonryori RyuGin in Tokyo and Pierre Gagnaire in Paris, Lourdes doesn't get ruffled easily, though he admits to having a few sleepless nights. A soft-spoken Kiwi with almost as many opinions, ideas and ideals as he has tattoos on his arms, Lourdes, 35, bases his life and cooking philosophies on his time spent in Asia (he also worked extensively for Shangri-La Hotels in Beijing). "Where I'm from in New Zealand, we have a lot of tradi- tional recipes—you have to get the ingredients from the land or else it doesn't work," he says. "The problem with food in this country is there's no identity . . . it's a take on everyone else's food and it's hard to find [my] place with that because I'm not from here," he says. "I cooked Japanese food in Japan, Chinese food in China, I cooked French food in Paris. So when I come here, it's like, what do I cook?" He relies on tools gathered from his work around the world—Japanese charcoal for soliciting intense flavors out of ingredients, and sous-vide, a technique he learned first-hand from the masters in Paris that "makes meat fall apart when you eat it because it's so tender." "I don't think I would ever be able to cook an American or a local cuisine because of where I start with my dishes— that's not typical for this part of the world," he says. "So, I don't try to cook American—it's not what we do here." Though, he admits, his kitchen escapes definition. "It's hard to say what we do here—we just try to do what we think is best with the ingredients. I wouldn't say it's easy, but I'm getting more comfortable with how it's done," he says. Whatever it is, it's working. The restaurant recently has won a spate of industry awards, glowing reviews in The New York Times and New Jersey Monthly magazine, and, for the first time in its ten-year history, Latour was named to Wine Enthusiast magazine's annual list of 100 Best Wine Restaurants, alongside Per Se, Le Bernardin and Daniel. "The main thing that we like people to understand is the purity of what we do. We don't try to complicate things," Lourdes says. "Or," he adds, "we do complicate it so much in the kitchen that by the time you get it as guest, it's uncomplicated." Jean Paul Lourdes checks his sous-vide for the evening's menu.