Recipes To Applaud

At last, we have a program for the symphony that is a meal at Rover's

IN 2003, WHEN cookbook author Cynthia Nims interviewed the gregarious Thierry Rautureau at the Cascadia Culinary Conference, chefs and food writers packed the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts in bucolic Langley.

"For more than a year now," confessed Nims, "Thierry and I have been working together to develop recipes for a Rover's cookbook." The collaboration has finally yielded "Rover's: Recipes from Seattle's Chef in the Hat" (Ten Speed Press, $40). And, like a dinner at Rover's, this book was worth the wait. Each recipe is a detailed portrait of one of the carefully crafted dishes that appear on Rover's degustation (tasting) menus.

French haute cuisine, literally "high cooking," is always a tug-of-war between slavish devotion to exacting rules, codified over the centuries, and myriad inventions by any chef who knows the rules well enough to break them. Like a piece of music, each classical dish is new every time it is performed.

But even in France, haute cuisine has become as precious as grand opera — and almost as much in need of subsidies. Practically no one really experiences it anymore, and any trace of it brings little shivers of delight from those who still have some understanding of what it's all about.

So while a trip to many restaurants can feel like a night at the Cineplex, for gourmands living in Seattle, a pilgrimage to Rautureau's 50-seat Rover's is like a night at La Scala. The scripted performance at Rover's is at once as predictable and as variable as an opera by Verdi or Puccini. Every move of the dining-room staff is flawlessly orchestrated by general manager Cyril Fréchier. The appearance of a perfectly scrambled egg sitting in its shell and topped with caviar is as welcome as the opening notes of a familiar happy chorus.

As if anticipating the first aria by a favorite soprano, regulars await with building excitement the appearance of the foie gras. What will she be wearing tonight? The colorful vegetable dishes and jewel-toned garnishes are as eagerly anticipated here as the latest set designs for a production of Wagner's Ring cycle. And an appearance by Thierry himself, always ready to make a smiling spin around the room, is as thrilling as an encore by a favorite tenor. Rautureau is our Caruso, our Pavarotti. He knows what he is doing, we know what he is doing, and he clearly enjoys it as much as we do.

"What is success?" Rautureau once demanded of me when I asked the secret to his. "For other people, maybe it's making a certain amount of money or achieving a certain amount of fame," he said. "For me, it's being able to get up every morning, come into my restaurant and do what I love."

The patient and talented Nims, a recipe writer who trained in France, had the job of pinning down the restless Rautureau and codifying his recipes. Each week she'd set up camp in his kitchen and madly start taking notes, pausing now and then to help with peeling beets and such. Then, it was home to turn notes into recipes the home cook could use.

For orchestrating it all, I say "Bravo."

Greg Atkinson is a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com.