Chef Eric Ripert’s PBS series Avec Eric won the 2011 Daytime Entertainment Emmy Award over the weekend in the “Outstanding Culinary Program” category. The show beat out Cook’s Country, America’s Test Kitchen, Lidia’s Italy, Paula’s Best Dishes, and Secrets of a Restaurant Chef. Incidentally, Avec Eric also won a Beard Award this year for “Television Program, On Location.”

In typical reality-show vagueness, the description goes like this: “In the appetizer round, one chef rushes with less than two minutes left on the clock to plate all of the ingredients. The competitors give their entree dishes a kick with tequila, but a surprising ingredient inks away the competition. Then, one finalist second-guesses what to do with simple ingredients in the dessert basket.”

Desaintmartin’s competitors are three NYC-based chefs: Jonathan Doar (Fishtail by David Burke), Stephen Hartigan (No More Take Out), and Emily Sims (Ici in Brooklyn).

Judges are Amanda Freitag, Aarón Sanchez, and Geoffrey Zakarian.

I have had the pleasure of meeting French chef Bruno Lopez many times throughout his career.
I’ve tasted his dishes when he was working at different The Ritz-Carlton hotels, at the Regent Beverly Wilshire (now a Four Seasons), and the Hotel Bel-Air.
I was most impressed with his peach gazpacho with truffle oil, which he made when he was at the restaurant of the Raffles L’Ermitage hotel (now part of the Viceroy Hotel Group). I was sorry when he stopped serving the public when he became a private chef at the French Consulate Residence in 2009.

Last Friday, I got to congratulate him on his skills yet again, but the setting was quite different.
Lopez received the esnigns from French Consul General David Martinon making him an officer of the Ordre National du Mérite Agricole, in recognition for his work in promoting French cuisine in the USA.

“I am very honored,
 because the people who vote for me are also chefs,”
says chef Jose Gutierrez.

Olivier Desaintmartin was but a wide-eyed country pup from Picardy when he saw his first gleaming “presse” at La Tour d’Argent in Paris. As a 16-year-old cooking-school grunt doing his weekend turn as a student-server in that luxurious bastion of old-school French gastronomy, it’s easy to see how this diabolical instrument of culinary pleasure would have caught his eye.

Posed tableside, with a silver-plated wheel screwing down like a vise into a canister and crushing everything inside to a bloody pulp, it looks more like a medieval torture device than something to set a gourmand atwitter. It is definitely not for the squeamish. But once a roasted wild duck carcass and its innards are submitted to its pitiless embrace, the dark spirit that streams from its little spout becomes the essence of one of the most prized and precious dishes in French cuisine.

It’s no wonder Desaintmartin, now a 49-year-old kitchen vet, snapped up a genuine antique presse on an eBay discount to become the centerpiece for his Zinc Bistro à Vins.

http://www.zincbarphilly.com/

Bids begin November 30th and end December 21st; all auction proceeds benefit Action Against Hunger’s life-saving programs.
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