Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #3 "The Country Restaurant"

Eleanor Davis's illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "The Country Restaurant"

Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “The Country Restaurant” (August 29, 2016) is about a wizard chef, Damon Baehrel, who operates his restaurant, called simply Damon Baehrel, in the basement of his woodland home, totally on his own. In Paumgarten’s words, he’s “forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper.” The piece reminds me of John McPhee’s classic “Brigade de Cuisine” (February 19, 1979) with one major difference: McPhee reveres his subject chef, whereas Paumgarten suspects Baehrel of “bogusness.” Baehrel claims to be booked through 2025. He says he derives all his cooking ingredients, except meat, fish, and dairy, from his own twelve acres of land in Earlton, New York, the location of his restaurant. Paumgarten is deeply sceptical of these claims. The action of his piece is his attempt to show Baehrel to be something of a phony. Normally, I’m not a fan of “betrayal” journalism, in which, unbeknownst to the subject, the writer is out to take him or her down. But “The Country Restaurant” is different. Paumgarten’s scepticism is tempered by the pleasure he experiences eating Baehrel’s cooking. The piece contains several wonderful descriptions of Baehrel’s culinary creativity. Here’s a sample:

Over the next several hours, as he brought in course after course, he appeared and disappeared (“I’ll get you some more sap!”) like a character in a resort-hotel farce. But the dishes were a dizzying array of tastes and textures. Oyster mushrooms, palate-cleansing ices (one was made of wild carrot juice, stevia tea syrup, pickled baby maple-leaf powder, violet leaves, and lichen powder), cured turkey leg, mahogany clams, lobster, prawns, swordfish ham, brined pork with goat sausage—all of it subjected to a jumble of verbs and nouns, many of them new to me. Bull-thistle stem, chopped barberry root, ostrich fern. I deployed an index finger to dab up every woodland fleck. The platings were whimsical and inspired. The sprigs and needles that adorned the mid-meal platter of cheese and cured meat brought to mind Saul Steinberg or Paul Klee.

The piece has a piquant tension to it – scepticism v. pleasure. And in the end, it seems pleasure wins out. Paumgarten writes,

Later, back outside, as Baehrel led us around the property and identified plants, my attention wandered, and I thought about my first visit, months before, and a particular dish, the sixth course, which had so engaged my attention that the only surreptitious photo I got of it was of a plate licked clean. It consisted of a small layered cube of wild daylily tuber and wild honey mushrooms—a phyllo of the soil. He’d sliced the tubers thin and soaked the mushrooms in fresh maple sap, then stacked them in more than a dozen fine alternating layers. He then roasted it on a slab of oak wood, dribbled it with grapeseed oil and wild-fennel-frond powder, and added a drizzle of dried milkweed pods cooked in fresh birch sap, which he’d mashed in a stone bowl with some rutabaga starch, and a second drizzle that he called burnt-corn sauce, made from liquefied kernels that he’d scraped off the cob onto a stone, dried, then thinned out with sycamore sap. Somehow I got all this down in the notebook. Beneath it, I’d written, “Sublime.”

And that’s exactly the word I’d choose to describe this extraordinary, delectable piece.