How the West Was Cooked

By Guy Garcia

"TRY ONE OF THESE," MARK MILLER URGES HIS WARY GUEST, proffering a handmade sausage stuffed with duck, fig and habanero chile. Miller watches with satisfaction as his quarry reacts to a fugue of piquant flavors that slowly fades to a smoky afterburn. "The chile pushes the flavor," explains Miller, who believes that good food should sing. "The duck fat is the low notes," he says. "The habanero is the high notes."

Miller, the nation's foremost champion of hot cuisine, is conducting his experiment in the sculpted dining room of Red Sage, his $5.2 million, 18,800- sq.-ft. Western-style restaurant in Washington. Red Sage, which opened in January and is already booked weeks in advance, is an updated, upscale evocation of the American West rendered in buttery leather banquettes, panoramic murals and buffalo-motif chandeliers. In the street-level bar, cocktails are served with swizzle sticks that look like barbed wire, while on the ceiling a canopy of white plaster clouds floats across a starry night sky. "The world looks at America, and it thinks about the West," says Miller, who taught anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, before switching to the kitchen. "There's a spirit, a bravado, and Red Sage is part of that mythology."

The food, which Miller dubs "modern Western," is steeped in the same pioneering spirit. His eclectic menu ranges from neo-Tex-Mex tidbits like chipotle chile breadsticks to fresh-baked buckwheat cinnamon bread, smoked duck and buffalo jerky. "Smoking is a natural by-product of heat," Miller says, launching into an aria of poetic exaltation. "There's an intensity of wildness, of untamed flavor. It's loaded symbolically with a primordial sense of fire and man. I read a lot of meaning into food. I think it's one of the last experimental frontiers."

Miller's passion for untamed flavor began in his native Massachusetts, where Mexican and Indian friends of his French-Canadian family introduced him to the spicy exotica of non-European cooking. Travels in Latin America, Africa and Asia prompted him to experiment with ethnic accents, first as an assistant chef for nouvelle California guru Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and later in the same city at his own Fourth Street Grill, where he was one of the first chefs in the country to use mesquite wood for grilling.

In 1987 Miller opened the Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, specializing in a sophisticated fusion of nouvelle and traditional New Mexican fare. The restaurant was an instant hit as hordes of tourists fought their way to the tables to get their tongues tickled by his audacious, artfully presented dishes. That success put both haute Southwestern cooking and Miller on the culinary front burner. His Coyote Cafe cookbook has sold 90,000 copies since 1990, and his latest collection, The Great Chile Book, published last December, has sold 40,000.

Miller's aim at the Red Sage is to expand the traditional limits of Western cooking by incorporating Native American and Latin elements. "There were people in America before the arrival of Europeans," says Miller, who adds sizzle to poultry, fish and game with seasonings and textures derived from Plains Indian and Aztec recipes. "We are enriched as a culture by including these things, not by pushing them aside." Meanwhile, he expects the menu at Red Sage to continue the cultural evolution that inspired its creation. "The West has all these elements in its past, but it's still in the process of becoming," he observes. "It's not about looking back. It's about bringing it forward." -- G.G.