Goodbye to Gumbo and All That

By Mimi Sheraton

This has been a banner year for food lovers. Ever more bizarre victuals found their way to specialty grocery stores, and a frenzy of new restaurants swept across the land. The cooking of the Southwest began to eclipse Cajun fare as our high-status regional cuisine--small wonder, when the gumbos, jambalayas and red beans of Louisiana became overworked into cliches. Its most overrated specialty, blackened redfish, is a culinary travesty. Scorched spices encrust the fish and mask its delicate flavor. There were contradictions, too, as Americans pumped iron to stay thin, then tried to maintain status by eating In. This was also the year of VCR cooking cassettes and prepared convenience foods, summoning images of the trendiest consumers sitting down to watch Julia Child unmold a fish mousse as they dined on frozen gourmet meals.

MOST INNOVATIVE RESTAURANT CONCEPT At Primi in West Los Angeles, the menu consists of primi piatti, first dishes that are appetizer-size portions of new-wave Italian specialties. In this sparkling cafe, with its black lacquer and mirror trim, a meal may include samplings of tiny clams in a garlicky tomato broth, tagliatelle in a meat and porcini sauce, chunks of snowy fish steamed with vegetables, duck breast rolled around a pureed olive "caviar." It is in relaxed contrast to Owner Piero Selvaggio's pricey, well-established Valentino.

HOTTEST KITCHEN APPLIANCE The microwave oven was a profit boon to retailers, and firmly established "microwave" as a verb. No one ever ovened a cake or stoved an egg, but Americans are microwaving with impunity.

MOST FULLY DEVELOPED RENDITION OF NEW AMERICAN COOKING Anne Rosenzweig produces creative cooking at its best. The dishes she prepares at Arcadia in New York City combine a sense of surprise with the comfortable recollection of the familiar. Rosenzweig and her partner Ken Aretsky opened this snug, intimate restaurant with its bosky seasonal mural just a year ago, and it soon had a two- to four-week waiting list for peak-hour reservations. She has a special talent for lamb and duck dishes. Other outstanding offerings include corn cakes with caviar and creme fraiche, chimney-smoked lobster, quail with beet sauce, warm apple timbale with caramel sauce and chocolate bread pudding.

MOST ESOTERIC CULINARY STATUS SYMBOL Squid ink. It is favored as a murky, caviar-like sauce for pasta or the Italian rice triumph, risotto.

MOST IRRESISTIBLE CALORIC BINGE Not to be confused with the soap of the same name, the DoveBar is old news in Chicago but attained stardom in supermarkets and on street corners around the country in '85. The hard-to-handle quarter-pound ice-cream bar has a crackling coating of dark chocolate candy. Invented in the early 1950s by Chicago Confectioner Leo Stefanos, this frozen dessert melts all resistance even at prices that range from $1.50 to $2.

MOST PROMISING NEW DOMESTIC CHEESE American chevre (goat cheese) has so far lacked the rich complexity of the French product. Serious efforts at the Coach Farm in Pine Plains, N.Y., are a big step in the right direction. The production is presided over by Marie-Claude Chaleix, a French cheesemaker who hopes Americans will learn to love the blue mold that indicates age and gives this white cheese its tantalizing earthiness.

MOST TALKED-ABOUT FISH RESTAURANT IN PARIS Long noted for the excellence of its stylish fish restaurants, Paris has turned its attention from such enduring favorites as Prunier-Traktir, La Maree, Le Duc and Le Bernardin. Most highly touted this year was Le Divellec. In the marine blue and white setting, classic seafood dishes such as soupe de poisson (the fish soup of Provence), and gratin de morue (creamed and baked codfish) are as well turned out as the inventive terrine of foie gras inset with crayfish and the turbot nestled on noodles tinted with squid ink so that they resemble ribbons of truffles. The delectable desserts are the creations of freckle-faced Lydie Bonneau, 20, a master at miniature pastries and preserves.

BRIGHTEST STARS OVER ITALY For the first time in history, the Guide Michelin bestowed a three-star constellation on a restaurant in Italy. Happily star-struck is Gualtiero Marchesi, a Milan temple of nuova cucina dishes. Thoroughly modern, Marchesi favors original sculptures instead of flowers as table centerpieces. Some of the best efforts by Marchesi, 55, the owner-chef, are "open" ravioli--spinach and egg pasta--layered with seafood in a white wine cream sauce, sauteed filets of sole in black truffle sauce, rare roast lamb with rosemary and jewel-like fruit sherbets. The most serious connoisseurs of Italy's new cooking might balk at the Michelin choice, favoring the extraordinary San Domenico restaurant in Imola, near Bologna, but clearly this year belongs to Marchesi.

BEST NEWS FOR WOULD-BE COOKS VCR knobs and dials may soon be sticky with egg and butter thumb-prints, just as pages of cookbooks used to be, as video cooking cassettes gain in popularity. For beginners, try the no-frills, clear and enticing Classic Cooking Made Easy (Barron's). For sophisticates there is Julia Child's The Way to Cook (Knopf) or The Master Cooking Course with Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey (MCA Home Video). For sheer spectacle watch the magical pastamaking episode in A Guide to Italian Cooking with Giuliano Bugialli (Videocraft Classics).

MOST REVOLTING FOOD IDEA In her Good Food Book, Jane Brody explains how she gets a healthful breakfast when traveling without having to order it from room service: "I may even make a doggie bag of an in-flight meal that seemed edible and nutritious but was served at a time I was not ready to eat (the air-sickness bag, believe it or not, is a handy waterproof container)." Believe it or not. --By Mimi Sheraton