Jesse Barber's Venice restaurant Barnyard offers fresh ingredients, grilled breads and plainly delicious assemblages.
Critics of California kitchens, usually East Coast guys trained in the complexities of classic French cuisine, have been known to describe what local chefs do as more assemblage than cooking, as nothing more than arranging superb local produce in Instagram-friendly arrays. Momofuku's David Chang once joked that San Francisco cuisine was a fig on a plate. Bay Area chef David Tanis once wrote a cookbook — a great cookbook — actually called "A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes." And to some extent, the stereotype is true: When a chef can get something like a Weiser melon or a bunch of Coleman arugula at the farmers market, his or her first duty is to get it to the table without messing it up too much.
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