The Brazilian chef Alex Atala was in the middle of preparing two canapés and five dinner courses for about 70 people in Manhattan on Friday when it dawned on him that he needed black plates.
Liz Barclay for The New York Times
The chef Alex Atala, in Manhattan for the New York City Wine and Food Festival, prepared zucchini, top right; loin of lamb, bottom right; and heart of palm fettuccine for a dinner.
Most of his dishes, composed with Brazilian ingredients that even some of the most serious North American gastronomes have never heard of, would be whisked out of the kitchen on traditional white plates. But dessert was different: it consisted of three ravioli stuffed with skinny disks of banana and suffused with the flavors of lime and
priprioca, an Amazonian root whose vaguely sweet, autumn-leaves-in-the-woods-ish fragrance tends to show up in perfumes.
The pouches themselves were made from a transparent gelatin, giving the ravioli an almost embryonic or extraterrestrial cast whose visual impact would be lost without a black plate. “If you put something transparent on a white surface, you don’t get enough contrast,” Mr. Atala said.
Somehow, everything worked out. He made a request, and 75 black plates arrived a few hours later on the 51st floor of the Bank of America Tower in Midtown.
Mr. Atala was thousands of miles away from his acclaimed
D.O.M. restaurant in São Paulo, and juggling ingredients from the United States and Brazil in two different New York kitchens (the first in the back of
Momofuku Ssam Bar and the second in the Bank of America Tower). But he managed to confront one glitch after another without losing his cool. In fact, merely tagging along with him seemed like a remedy for high blood pressure. In his orbit, silence is golden and spatula-throwing tantrums are banned. “There’s no dramas,” he said. “As you can see, there’s no noise, no screaming.”
Which is not to say that this dinner, the first D.O.M.-style meal he ever cooked in the United States (as part of the
New York City Wine and Food Festival), was free of stress. Pulling off the feast depended on the arrival of two team members from D.O.M., Dante Bassi and Katrin Vetter, but their original flight from Brazil had been canceled. (In New York, they would work with Matthew Rudofker, the executive chef at Momofuku Ssam Bar, and other cooks plucked from David Chang’s Momofuku empire; Mr. Atala and Mr. Chang are friends.)
Then there were the crucial ingredients those two cooks were bringing with them on the plane. Among other things, they had a container full of frozen strands of hearts of palm, which Mr. Atala planned to use, as a São Paulo-style replacement for pasta, for a fettuccine with butter, sage, Parmesan and popcorn powder.
The Brazilian cooks wound up making it to New York a day later, but “I was pretty nervous before,” said Mr. Atala, 45. “I couldn’t sleep.”
The fare at D.O.M. could be seen as a culinary spin on a magical-realist novel about Brazil, and its connection to native ingredients runs so deep that conjuring up Mr. Atala’s food without them would qualify as an empty gesture. For that reason, he and his crew had brought along Catupiry cheese and aromatic pepper oil, priprioca essence and a funky ghee-like Brazilian butter that Mr. Atala cheerfully described as “rancid.”
And if anyone wanted a sample, the chef was happy to oblige. “This is an amazing ingredient,” he said at
Booker and Dax, the cocktail spot attached to Ssam Bar, where he and his team shucked oysters and wrapped loins of lamb in string. He grabbed a squeeze bottle full of priprioca essence and squirted a few droplets into a napkin so that a visitor could breathe it in.
“When I smell this, it reminds me of musk, but much more delicate,” he murmured. “There are oak notes, as well.”
Probably to the relief of invasive-species monitors around the country, Mr. Atala declined to smuggle in any insects. His new cookbook, “
D.O.M.: Rediscovering Brazilian Ingredients,” features a striking image of a signature dish,
“ants and pineapple”: a pale-yellow cube of fruit crowned by a single saúva ant. Those who have popped it into their mouths say the ant has a haunting spiciness that calls to mind lemon grass, ginger and cardamom.
Like many chefs, though, he isn’t keen on shortchanging his vision, and pairing Brazilian elements with those rustled up in New York caused him a bit of quiet vexation. One of his canapés involved langoustine enrobed in thin blankets of zucchini and topped with aromatic pepper oil and edible flowers.
Yet as the dinner hour loomed, the chef could be found garlanding each bite with microgreens instead. “I was going to use flowers,” he said. “But the flowers were not beautiful.”
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