And... "Give as much care to simple dishes and the humbler foods as you do to elaborate dishes and ambitious menus".
But he admits that his true weakness is a less elaborate dish: his mother's creamed onions with Cheddar and buttermilk.
Based on an elaborate dish I sampled at Don Antonio by Starita, a Midtown pizzeria, it has basil-perfumed ricotta and Parmesan in the center, and tomato sauce and melted mozzarella on top.
This elaborate dish takes two days to prepare, and includes veal sweetbread, brain, tripe, anchovies and Marsala, plus another 20 or so ingredients including capers and black-eyed beans.
Rising to a higher level of culinary ambition, I went on to make, the following night, a fish-stew recipe, a kind of English bouillabaisse, from Ian McEwan's superb "Saturday": Henry Perowne, the central character, a neurosurgeon, cooks this elaborate dish as he watches television and broods on "monstrous and spectacular scenes".
Nicole Mones's third novel, "The Last Chinese Chef," features a story interrupted by excerpts from a 1925 culinary masterpiece titled "The Last Chinese Chef" (also written by Mones), and is as unrelated to the old abyss as General Tso's chicken is to an elaborate dish one of its characters makes from tofu and a sauce of 30 crabs.
The paperback book (Chronicle, $18.95) has 70 recipes, including the classic bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, herb pasta with white beans, green beans with lemon zest and an elaborate dish of seared sea scallops wrapped in bacon and served on celeriac purée.
Apart from musing on something that occurs to a lot of us when presented with the over-elaborate dish ("Someone's been fingering that for quite a while"), Grayson Perry has a typically perceptive take: "Square plates – especially rough-hewn glass ones – seem to be an unofficial warning that the food is likely to be all show and no taste.
During the pre-Lenten Carnival more elaborate dishes are served, such as paella and talcari de chivo ("kid stew").
It uses local ingredients in elaborate dishes, and dinner for two with wine costs between 125 and 175 Canadian dollars.
The food is the show stopper here, and the elaborate dishes turn heads in the dining room.
