Angus An has finally realized he needs to make noise.
The 27-year-old Taiwanese chef opened Gastropod restaurant to rave reviews at the tail end of 2006, picked up Vancouver Magazine's Best New Fine Dining award - and just carried on quietly doing what he was doing. Then 2007 rolled around and the city's restaurant scene exploded, with more than 100 new restaurants opening within a few months, and the buzz around Gastropod got lost in the shuffle.
It took a New Yorker to put his talent back in the spotlight. On March 15, Mr. An headed to New York to present a five-course tasting menu paired with wines from British Columbia's Joie and Elephant Island wineries at James Beard House under the banner of "Modern Canadian Gastronomy." (The specially created menu is available at Gastropod until April 13.)
The prestigious invitation came out of the blue. "It turned out that one of the [James Beard] Foundation's vice-presidents visited Vancouver and happened to eat here," Mr. An explains. "He came back twice more during his stay, then went back and talked about me to another board member who happened to be the alumni director of the French Culinary Institute - where I studied - and it went from there."
But such prestige doesn't come cheap: As he learned, almost all costs of presenting a James Beard dinner must be borne by the restaurant - and it can be an expensive affair. Rumour has it that a local restaurant group spent in the region of $80,000 when its top chef received the same honour in recent years. Mr. An's expenses were modest in comparison, but a significant dent in his small business budget. "My shipping alone was $1,800," he says.
At Gastropod, the menu is consciously constructed using the best local produce, so Mr. An turned to his suppliers for help. "Many of them were pumped at the opportunity to sponsor me and either provided their products free of charge, or gave me a break on the costs."
Heidi Noble and Michael Dinn of Joie winery agreed to provide all the wines (with a dessert wine sourced from their Naramata neighbour, Elephant Island), and menu planning began.
Two of the dishes were no-brainers: Mr. An's signature oyster with Sauternes jelly and horseradish snow, and his salmon "à la Gastropod" - sous vide wild salmon wrapped in nori and flash deep-fried in a tempura batter. "We have tried to take them off the menu a couple of times," he says, "but we have regulars that come to the restaurant and only ever order those two dishes."
The oyster became one of the four canapés on the menu, alongside a soup of matsutake (pine mushrooms), a brioche cracker with duck prosciutto and an escabeche of Quadra Island mussels served on a pickled beet and strawberry salad to bring out the fruit in the 2007 Joie Rosé.
Though he has a reputation for dabbling in the molecular end of the cookery scale (and has a stage at Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck on his résumé), Mr. An's use of modern techniques never becomes the focus of the dish itself. The salad that follows the salmon on the James Beard menu is all about showcasing the organic Redbro chicken from B.C.'s Polderside Farms. The breast is poached, the skin is turned into crisp crackling and the thigh is cooked sous vide. The glossy pillow of decadent truffle sabayon sitting atop a meltingly rich piece of organic pork shoulder elevates a rustic base into true elegance. Leg of Nicola Valley venison is completely deconstructed to remove every scrap of sinew, then "glued" back together with Activa (a natural food enzyme) to make every portion exactly the same consistency.
A James Beard invitation comes with strict guidelines: 80 guests, three or four different canapés (enough for two for each person) and a four- or five-course tasting menu. After the last plate of one course is served, chefs are allowed 10 minutes before the first plate of the next course must leave the kitchen, leading to logistical nightmares: "The kitchen is small and there is no space to lay down 80 plates," Mr. An says. "We had to double-stack them and as soon as the servers took the top dish, we'd plate the one underneath."
If it was stressful getting the food out on time, that was nothing compared with the day he spent driving around New York borrowing equipment. "First I had to borrow a sous vide machine and then it turned out that the sorbet maker wasn't good enough in the house. My old cooking school wouldn't let me take their Pacojet offsite, so I had to jump in a cab with my canisters and sit in gridlock both ways."
He's happier on home turf, where running his restaurant is a family affair. His wife, Kate Auewattanakorn, is Gastropod's restaurant manager and his four-month-old son, Aiden, hangs out upstairs in his onsite nursery. Mr. An's mother helps out with the baby and folds the napkins, and his father is general handyman and a regular cook.
And finally, he's getting some outside help. "Robert Belcham [of Fuel, the restaurant next door] told me I had to get PR," he sighs.
"I hadn't really thought about it. I was doing everything myself - the website, everything.
"I don't really understand why, but I'm learning that it's not all about selling food, it's about selling myself, too."
