Recap Chef Foley's unveiling of Vegetable Alchemy

Forget Top Chef. Forget whatever wisdom Gordon Ramsay has to spread in Hell’s Kitchen. Former Printer’s Row restaurateur-chef Michael Foley has stumbled onto culinary wisdom far more forward-thinking via his new studio Vegetable Alchemy in West Town, and last Saturday he held a cooking demonstration to give everyone a taste of his food and, uh, “discuss the impact sound has on the body.” More on that in a moment. Basically, Foley says the new American cuisine is about rebuilding food on a cellular level, applying bioscience to gastronomy, though he doesn't seem to be cooking up anything remotely Alinea-ish. He has a book coming out next year laying out his master plan but wouldn't go into more details.

About 20 self-proclaimed foodies attended his demonstration to share lunch and listen to Foley talk about his views on the future of food and his plans for the new studio space, which he intends to be a center for the research and development of new techniques. (He bills himself as the "new architect of food.") If, at the end of the lecture, there remained some confusion about what precisely Foley believes about the future of food, it was intentional. “I’m not articulating it purposefully right now,” Foley said. Oh, good. The topic of genetically modified foods, which seemed relevant to Foley’s thesis, also remained intentionally untouched. “Those conversations always end in massive bloodshed,” he cautioned.

Foley was supposed to fire up an iPod, according to a release promoting the event, to describe his central thesis on the impact of sound on the body, but, once again, things didn't quite go according to plan. Turns out the iPod was on loan from a friend who needed it back the night before, so Foley made do with a CD player, spastically inserting and removing discs to play 30-second snippets of Bachata, Dave Matthews Band, and Benny Goodman. (Copious amounts of champagne dulled the unsettling effect this might have had on the group.) After he finished DJing, Foley asked for a show of hands to see which music had been the most popular (Bachata won), and used the non-unanimous vote as evidence that our bodies each respond to different vibrations.

Despite these setbacks, Foley commanded the room with his child-like interest and attention span. One moment he was chopping mushrooms for a soup, the next answering his cell phone, and the next pouring another glass of champagne and realizing that the soup was scorching on the hot plate. All the while he pulled books off shelves and from nearby tables while the topic of his lecture darted from organic gardening to neuroscience to the annual man-versus-horse race in Wales.

Dinah Grossman

Then, Foley disappeared into his kitchen for about 45 minutes, leaving his guests to, as he said, "Think about the Kool Aid today; don't drink it." At nearly 12:30 p.m. lunch appeared and the soundtrack settled on Christmas carols. A silky mushroom and miso soup was followed by a turkey and chickpea burger, with a spear of sweet potato and a side salad that included napa cabbage, snap peas, and Nigella seed. Foley came out of the kitchen to explain the composition of each recipe and how he’d retooled traditionally rich dishes like cream of mushroom soup and burgers to contain less fat and more flavor from add-ins such as toasted sesame oil and miso. The resulting dishes were tasty, though really more creations unto themselves than updates on classics: The burger was pretty heavy on the chickpea and might leave some burger lovers scratching their heads. A dessert of Opera cake (thin layers of almond cake and chocolate), apple cobbler, and vanilla ice cream evidently didn’t require much alteration.

Foley’s book “about a cook who learns something,” is scheduled for publication in 2009.