Relish

What do you do when your father is a very public genius, and one day, you’re expected to take over his job and show the world that, you, too, are capable of earth-shattering ingenuity?

The pressure on Sebastien Bras is not slight. His father, Michel Bras, is considered not just an icon but a “deity” in the world of haute cuisine. The elder Bras’ restaurant, simply called Bras, is a destination for hardcore food snobs willing to journey to the remote Aveyron region in the South of France. There, from a mountaintop eyrie with glorious views of green, rolling hills, Bras prepares elaborate multi-course meals -- based largely on the vegetable crops of his beloved Aveyron region – and demonstrates the astonishing precision and creativity that has earned Bras the highest Michelin rating, three stars.

Chefs in particular revere Michel Bras because he never went to cooking school and never apprenticed at a restaurant; he is 100% self-taught, which is absolutely unheard-of in the rigid hierarchy of French cooking. To ascend to the top of the short list of planet earth’s highest-ranked restaurants with no mentor at all makes Bras that much more of a god to maverick chefs who seek attention by bucking the rules.

According to this article, “Wiley Dufresne [of NYC’s celebrated wd~50] admits, ‘he [Bras] has been copied by every chef in the world. We’ve all taken a page out of the Bras book – the smear, the spoon drag, putting food on a plate like it fell off a tree.’” (examples below)

Bras is also credited with inventing the molten chocolate cake, so ubiquitous it is now available at every Domino’s Pizza. His signature dish is the gargouillou, a maddeningly pretentious salad of 60 different vegetables, flowers and seeds (below) laid one at a time on the plate for maximum aesthetic impact.

Both of the dishes above are prepared in the new film, Step Up to the Plate, a look at the passing of the toque from Bras père to Bras fils.

Sebastien has basically been groomed from birth to take over the family business. Photos of him as a child, dressed in complete chef’s whites and toque, are disturbing to anyone who’s suffered through a stage parent. Michel, though, is not intent on fully retiring. The restaurant is his baby, and he can’t get too far away from it without scurrying back to stick his finger in a saucepan and make sure quality has not been sacrificed. The Bras boys bicker, but mostly in a loving, forgiving fashion.

Foodies who have seen it will immediately recall the recent documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, which focused on a similar maverick, molecular gastronomy innovator Ferran Adria. Both docs also share the pains of a restaurant opening for a new season, with footage of servers and cooks enduring the kind of tough love from superiors instantly recognizable to anyone who’s toiled in a restaurant at any level.

Also like the El Bulli film, the Bras doc offers compelling scenes of experimentation in a test kitchen to dream up wild haute cuisine. In the latter, Sebastien Bras joins the skin harvested from chilled milk curd, fried breadcrumbs, gossamer-thin breadcrust cooked in a pizza oven, chopped jambon, local cheese, spaghetti squash, blackberry jam and other ingredients in a bizarre, multi-tiered presentation in one of the Bras’ signature “cracked eggshell” plates. It turns out his madness has method in it -- the dish is designed to yield sweeter and sweeter bites as you sup.The testing kitchen is the crucible where Sebastien must match his father. Does he? Can he? The film is surprisingly light on these sorts of answers. Maybe that’s partly because comparing these thoroughly odd meals is subjective, to say the least, but also because they won’t be serving Sebastien’s roasted onion stuffed with herbed cheese at the cinema near you. Who can say if the son matches the father? No one, truly.

The film is also surprisingly light on footage of food. Shots of bizarre and exotic meals being assembled should be the meat and aligot of the doc, but it’s only with 15 minutes left in the film that we’re finally rewarded with our first look at dishes being cooked from ingredient to plate. This blogger, for instance, managed to do much more in the way of images (see left) than the filmmaker does.

More issues: footage of Sebastien jogging and stopping to look meaningfully into the distance is a sign of heavy-handed directing (and there’s more where that came from).

If you’re already a worshiper of haute cuisine, you’ll want to add the viewing of Step Up to the Plate to your bucket list. If you don’t know molecular gastronomy from mashed potatoes, this one earns a modest “eh.” And if you’re truly ignorant of this stratum of high-end restaurant, consider the film as one big unintentional comedy. When two chefs argue over whether a sauce should be smeared to the left or the right on a diner’s plate, and then garnish a dish with a single, lonely bean, the absurdity of it all is hard to ignore.

Step Up to the Plate
Opening Friday, Oct. 26
Tivoli Theatre
6350 Delmar
314-727-7271