Restaurants : A Tale of Two Feasts : A French and a Chinese Chef Challenge Tradition by Returning to Culinary Roots

Two great chefs come to Los Angeles from halfway around the world, one from the East, one from the West. Each, an acclaimed master, produces a banquet. One is subtle, elegant, with flavors so delicate they threaten to slip away if you don’t concentrate. The other is earthy and robust, shot through with strong flavors that clamor for your attention. Which is Chinese, which French?

Alain Ducasse, the youngest chef ever to be awarded three stars by the Guide Michelin, came from his Monte Carlo restaurant, Le Louis XV, to cook at Champagne. Hui Pui Wing, Hong Kong’s most decorated chef and chief executive chef of the Harbor Village restaurants, traveled from Hong Kong to cook at the Monterey Park restaurant. The chefs did not meet and are probably unaware of each other’s existence. And yet, eating the two meals within a week of each other, I was struck by the way both chefs challenged the conventional American conception of their respective cuisines. And by the fact that each did it by going back to his roots.

Ducasse began his meal with a black risotto that was one of the most intense dishes I’ve ever eaten. The blackness of the squid coated my teeth and lips and left me tasting the exquisite black funkiness of baby squid all the way down my throat. It was rich, exciting food--and a hard act to follow.

Hui, on the other hand, chose to build slowly toward flavor, beginning the meal with a delicate salad of julienne strips of duck and jellyfish, tossed with slices of melon, herbs, sliced strawberries and glazed walnuts. There was lemon juice in the dressing, which married these disparate flavors and made the dish work.

For the second course, both chefs chose spectacular white mushrooms as the theme. In Ducasse’s case, they were white truffles, shaved generously over sea scallops and served with a small salad. Hui’s mushrooms were “forest bamboo,” long white tubular fungi found only in bamboo groves, which he stuffed with strands of Siamese bird’s nest. Ducasse’s mushroom dish was a little dance of flavor, the truffles lending a haunting forest flavor to the briny sea-taste of the scallops. Hui’s dish was a textural fantasy, layers of crunch threaded together with the most subtle of tastes.

Crunch was a theme in the third course as well, which was, in both cases, shrimp. Ducasse took local Santa Barbara spot prawns, roasted them and spread them across a crackly little bed of marinated vegetables. Hui also used fresh local shrimp, but here the crunch came in the shrimp themselves. The shrimp were cooked two ways. The bodies, stuffed with a small slice of ham and a powerful sliver of matsutake mushroom, were steamed to a delicate tenderness. Next to them sat the heads, crisply fried, feelers and all, then tossed in a spicy salt-and-pepper mixture. Hui followed with rattlesnake soup. Snake may sound scary, but this meat tastes like timid eel, and the soup itself was remarkably delicate. The broth was filled with strips of rattlesnake, chicken, mushrooms and bamboo shoots, and at the table diners sprinkled chrysanthemum petals, cilantro, and shredded lime peel over the top. The effect was refreshing, rejuvenating the palate as a sorbet would in the middle of a French meal.

Then came an entire suckling pig, borne triumphantly into the room, its skin glistening in the light. Servers carefully sliced off pieces of the crisp skin, wrapped them in pancakes and passed them around the table. Impressive as the pig looked, this turned out to be little more than a pause in the meal; after a few rich and wonderful bites, the pig was taken away. (The rest of the pig, beautifully packaged, was presented to each guest upon leaving.)

Ducasse also stopped for a small pause. He is, of course, far too modern to serve anything so old-fashioned as a sorbet. His pause came in the form of delicate cannelloni , each tube of pasta filled with a mixture of greens (spinach, lettuces, endive and herbs), topped with a light dusting of grated cheese and served with a saute of baby artichokes.

At this point in both banquets, servers arrived at the table bearing large earthenware casseroles. Ducasse’s was sealed with crust--a traditional European method of capturing flavor. When the crust was broken, revealing tender medallions of lobster nestled among black truffles and pale macaroni, fragrant steam went hissing into the air. How could lobster, coming out of this pot, possibly be so tender? Why weren’t the macaroni overcooked? Who would have dreamed that lobster and truffles were such a perfect flavor match? It was a magical dish.

Hui’s casserole was equally amazing. A whole soft-shell turtle--the most delicate of creatures--had been braised with shiitake mushrooms and bamboo shoots. Soft-shell turtle is more tender and more subtle than lobster and makes a perfect match with shiitake mushrooms. Ducasse’s lobster and Hui’s turtle dishes may come from opposite ends of the earth, but the sensibility behind them is much the same.

Ducasse’s sixth dish was a thick steak of cod, the skin crisp, on a bed of tomato confit and olives. This classically fresh Mediterranean dish was served with the traditional chickpea cakes of Nice called panisses.

Hui’s seventh dish was also fresh and classic: a white-on-white mixture of crab meat, egg whites and chrysanthemum petals. Looking at the dish, it was impossible to tell which was crab, which egg white.

The meat course, in both cases, had the simplicity of peasant cooking. Ducasse served shank of veal--poached in stock, drizzled with aged vinegar, sprinkled with coarse salt and pepper and accompanied by both the leaves and stalks of Swiss chard.

Hui’s was a tender braise of lamb with crisp, fresh water chestnuts, velvety mushrooms and chewy strips of soybean curd. At the table, greens were added to the pot: first chrysanthemum and then the tender, delicate shoots of snow peas.

Ducasse then brought out cheeses--the richness a shock and a reminder that his meal had been remarkably lacking in the cream and butter that have for so long been the hallmarks of haute cuisine. Hui’s penultimate course was a refined two-step: first little fried dumplings to dip into a bowl of hot broth and then elegant bowls of rice fried with ham, dried scallops and eggs.

While you might expect dessert to be the one course where the two cuisines diverged, even here there were similarities. Ducasse did not serve chocolate or pastry but a dish of warm strawberries and raspberries with a simple white sorbet made of mascarpone. Hui’s dessert was a soup, cradled in the coconut shell in which it had been cooked. In it was cream of hasmar (roughly translated as “snow-frog cream”), gently flavored with ginger and dotted with lotus seeds and red dates. Both were remarkably soothing dishes. These feasts were expensive by American standards: The French was $125 a person, the Chinese $150. But dinner at Chef Ducasse’s Monte Carlo restaurant can easily cost $300 a person, and Chef Hui is famous for his Hong Kong “imperial banquets” that last four days and cost more than $1,000 a person.

Alain Ducasse, unfortunately, has gone back to Monte Carlo, so if you want to try his food, you’ll have to follow him there. Chef Hui Pui Wing, however, shuttles among Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hong Kong, and banquets at the Monterey Park Harbor Village are easy to arrange.

Le Louis XV, Hotel de Paris, Place du Casino, Monte Carlo; 93.50.80.80. Harbor Village, 111 N. Atlantic Blvd., Monterey Park; (818) 300-8833.