14/2/92

Is the World Ready for Trendy Cholent?

Wouterus Lap faces journalists now rather than cannibals, as Tel Aviv's newest chef reveals his culinary philosophy and colorful background.

By: Sam Orbaum

We Jews have been sweating over a hot stove for, what, 5,000 years?, and we've managed to survive. So maybe we've had a little more heartburn than other nations. Why, then, do we go and create a Jewish State and instantly forget how to make a good chicken soup, and cringe from the thought of a nice fat schmaltz herring?
    More to the point, do we need Chinese food and nouvelle cuisine and frozen imitation shrimp, and hoo-hah European chefs in starched hats coming here to show us how to nourish ourselves? No, we didn't all move here from Brooklyn or Warsaw or Fez to eat gazpacho.
    I shlepped all the way to the Sheraton Tel Aviv to meet the new chef and ask him a question: did you come here to cook Jewish?
    Wouterus Lap gave an answer that might have been yes, or no, or both - I'm not sure - but it took up most of the afternoon and it was very entertaining.
    Only later did I realize that the answer came from his lunch guests, a few dozen journalists, almost entirely from Tel Aviv. Lap told us that he doesn't view kashrut as a limitation but as a healthy challenge. A derisive groan rose up from the tables. "I don't like that," Lap responded tartly, but the message was clear: most of these Jews would rather eat lobster than lokshen kugel.
    Lap's philosophy of food is called Trendy Peasant, a marriage of the creative and exotic with the traditional. "So an old man leaves his home in Crown Heights to visit Eretz Yisroel for the first time," I said to Lap. "He comes to your hotel and he says, 'I want a piece of gefilte fish and a bowl of chopped liver and a piece of herring.' What are you going to serve him?"
    "It would be arrogant," Lap responded, "to serve him anything else, just to satisfy professional ego." But that meal, with the special Trendy Peasant touches, would be something to tell the grandchildren about.

OF COURSE, most people who pick up a fork in a ritzy Israeli restaurant want haute cuisine fulfillment, and this is what the Lap philosophy is all about. "I used to fiddle with nouvelle cuisine, 10 years ago, but realized that people were eating the stuff and going home hungry. That's wrong. I hate nouvelle cuisine. Trendy Peasant is lots of food, the presentation is rich, but the meal is not heavy. A warm atmosphere and a satisfied feeling. It's the way I like to eat at home."
    The main course he served us featured goose liver ("trendy") and chicken ("peasant"). We began with fresh-baked peasant bread and ended with very un-peasant-like chocolate-rum balls. Chef Lap noted that even the menu was peasant-style, smartly printed on brown wrapping paper (correspondingly, the price of such a meal would be very trendy).
    The Sheraton chef has a buoyant bent for mischief, but not when he's talking about his concept of cooking. He'll teasingly jibe you to "be a friendly peasant" and sop up the gravy with bread, but then he'll describe how he got the gravy to taste so good and he'll sound like an astrophysicist explaining how we got a man on the moon.
    He'll laugh about the lunch he has served as being "a Flemish version of a French dish with a Japanese sauce served in Israel." But that will be a revelation to what Trendy Peasant is: "It is a combination of Far East cooking methods, European menus and local produce," Lap explained, "and the effect I intend is to shock people, just slightly." That is why when he envisions a smoked salmon plate, he reinvents it on a bed of koshering salt with an Indonesian paste, and good old pickled herring he sees served in an Oriental steam basket.
    He is a man with gastronomic hallucinations.

IF HE is going to shock people in this country, it will be with his concepts of management.
He is tall (1.94 meters) with a domineering presence (110 kg) and a voice that can command attention. With all that, he maintains a low profile with his staff. He does not bellow or bully, because he gets what he wants speaking softly. His people will adopt the Lap work ethic - discipline, professionalism, intelligence and pride - or they will work elsewhere. He demands a lot, and he gets it, because his staff love working for him - and, because he works for them, even when he has to take on hotel management. Dual loyalty and dedicated work ethic don't sound so remarkable, but in this country, they are.
    "I can't be in charge every day all day, so I have to train my staff to think like me, and work like me. They can make me look good or bad; any dish they prepare that is not perfect, is my failure. If a diner has a disappointing meal, he's not going to blame the sous-chef, he'll say 'Lap is a lousy chef.' "
    His employee relations were evident at the lunch he threw for the journalists. He introduced the kitchen workers individually, by name, describing their duties and expertises. Each one he warmly praised to the skies. Each one reacted with obvious pride and excitement.
    Lap presented a young Russian immigrant as his protege, "and even though we don't always communicate well with language, he knows exactly what I'm thinking."
    The chef then wrapped his arm around an older, meek man, and introduced him as the pastry chef; he spoke highly of his skills and then gave him the microphone to describe the dessert we were about to be served. Later, Lap told me that this fellow had been working in the business for many years but had never been given as much as a pat on the back. Now, for the first time in his life, he was speaking in public. For the first time, he heard the applause of admiration. With this simple but sensitive gesture, Lap won everlasting devotion from one person for this one moment of glory.
    Lap does not go in for affected humility. He urges his staffers to reach for the heights that he himself did, to accept no limitations. "At first they wondered, 'who does he think he is, driving to work in an expensive car, wearing silk ties and fancy Italian shoes in the kitchen, flashing a $1,000 pen?' They quickly got the message: 'You, too, can have all this. I started as a pot-washer; I made my own success. Strive high.' "

BACK TO Trendy Peasant and the Jewish Question.
    I asked Wouterus Lap if he can make a fantastic cholent. I loved his answer: "No."
    He tried, he said, but it didn't turn out right. His Russian-immigrant sous-chef is a master cholent-maker "because his heart is in it, and I'm hoping he can teach me."
    Lap showed that he's very versant on matters Jewish in and out of the kitchen (he rejected my suggestion that Jewish-style Trendy Peasant could be termed "Neo-Shtetl.") He knew when a cholent, even with all the appropriate ingredients and cooking methods, was not a cholent.
    I asked him what Jewish foods he could foresee adapting as Trendy Peasant the next time he takes up a job outside Israel. "Kugel, definitely. And kosher-style pickles. And even though it's not strictly Jewish cookery, humous and tehina." His pet project, though, would be to create a Trendy Cholent. "I think I would make it thinner, with much more meat. I would cook the meat in enormous slabs and then remove it, slice it thinly, roast the meat to make it crispy, and add locally popular herbs."
    A most serendipitous interruption in our talk occurred when a culinary colleague stopped by to say hello: Chef Shalom Kadosh from the Jerusalem Sheraton. Kadosh and Lap have the highest regard for each other professionally, but abide by different gastronomic theories. Lap, you will recall, "hates" nouvelle cuisine; Kadosh has built his renown on the concept.
    After Kadosh left us, I asked if there was any common ground where the twain can meet. Lap laughed lustily. He knew I'd love to hear what he had to say. "Oh, yeah, there is at least one thing." Lap, who is Christian, was planning to visit Kadosh, whose origins are Moroccan, to learn from the nouvelle cuisine master how to make ... gefilte fish!

(Box)

    At 31, Wouterus Lap has collected so many life-experiences that it is difficult to explain what makes him tick. To say that the Dutch-born Lap is a former paracommando with a third-degree black belt in karate misses the fact that here is a remarkably gentle man, one who loves to laugh and who gains enormous pleasure from playing bowls in the park with old men.

    To recount that he once sat in a hotel lobby of an African hotel with a machine-gun-armed cannibal who told him that "fingers are the best parts because they make for such good nibbling" misses the fact that Lap's honeymoon was timed to last "just until the moment when someone would come and say 'Pardon me, sir, but there is a small problem with your credit card.' "
    All of this may pose an eventual problem for his eventual biographer, but what is important to local gastronomes is that Lap is the newly appointed executive chef of the Tel Aviv Sheraton Hotel.
    Born in Amsterdam, Lap started his culinary career at age 19. "That was a bit late," he recalls, "because most European chefs start at 12." He started off in the profession by washing dishes in a restaurant that had two stars in the Michelin Guide. "I knew that once I got in I would work my way into cooking," he says. By the time a year had gone by he had worked in every section of the kitchen. In addition to "working six days a week, 16 hours a day, and loving every minute of it," he also talked to anyone who had anything to say about food and read everything "that even had the word 'food' in it."
    Before long he had worked his way up and had become a junior sous-chef in a one-star restaurant. He realized that he needed formal credentials and went back to school so he could continue his professional progress without hindrance. He enrolled at the Hospitality and Hotel Management School in the Hague but was not pleased there.
    "I made lots of friends there and we had lots of fun drinking beer in the bar in the basement of the school, but to tell the truth, they really didn't have much to teach me."    While there he also met the woman who was eventually to become his wife. Both wanted careers (hers is in hotel management), and even before they were married they made a deal. Depending on where her work took her, he would follow her first and then it would be her turn to follow him.
    The first stop was in Brussels, where she had been invited to work at the Hyatt Hotel. He, in turn, found work at the Brussels Sheraton where he met chef Claude Rendu, the man who was to become his mentor and personal hero. The next stop was in Melbourne and Lap remembers with a smile that "I had no idea what awaited us there, but I felt safe because I brought along 10 kilos of pipe tobacco to protect me against the harshness of the unknown."
    He liked Australia because "the people are laid back and nobody bothers you," and as executive sous-chef at the brand new Pavilion Hotel in Canberra he began to discover the playful-creative side of cookery. "Kangaroo meat is something that most Australians do not consider upbeat food," he remembers, "but I surprised people by marinating the meat as you would venison, with juniper berries, red wine and ground pepper and then served it with a crust of macadamia nuts and garlic."
    The two saved their money and returned to Holland where they got married. After their honeymoon, which took them through France, Italy and "every penny we had saved," the Sheraton chain appointed him as the executive chef at their hotel in Gabarone. For six months everything went splendidly until "some of the local revolutionaries burst into the hotel and tried to kill everyone." It was there that he had his social encounter with the armed cannibal who, when he discovered that Lap was a chef, also explained that "white people have a bitter taste."
    When the Sheraton people wanted him to go to their hotel in Libraville, he was a bit hesitant ("Who knows where the next cannibal or revolutionary will pop up"), but the couple spent a comfortable and rewarding year there. Now just starting in his role as executive chef at the Tel Aviv Sheraton, Lap describes his cookery as "trendy-peasant ... trendy because it is well thought out and attractively presented, peasant because every dish must respect the integrity of its ingredients." He also admits that he likes the idea of "subtle shocks," such as decorating tables with fresh herbs instead of the usual flowers that one has come to expect; serving beer made with cherries; or preparing eight different types of rolls, all baked together in a ring and served simultaneously at the table.