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The new stone age
These places hand you a hot rock to cook raw food yourself,
as in days of old.
By Rick Nicholsn
Inquirer Columnist
Posted on Sunday September 21st, 2003
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Stone (not hearth, but stone) cookery, for most of its life, was a passive business: You heated up
the stone and let nature take its course.
This meant one of several things. You might end up with a clambake of sorts, as New Zealand's
fish-loving Maori did with their pit cooking. (In Hawaii, hot stones still do the honors,
slow-cooking the best luau pig.)
Before cauldrons made the scene, the Irish ancients were known to plunge red-hot rocks into
wood-lined pits to boil cooking broth.
But stone cookery ain't what it was in its heyday, at the dawn of man - and fire.
In the chic-er boites hereabouts, the planet's rawest materials are married with its higher-end
ingredients: yellowtail tuna, rack of veal, and Kobe beef.
The cookery has moved indoors into striking settings, among them Thai-Japanese Teikoku
(Tie-COKE-coo), the dramatic new bamboo-and-mahogany space west of Newtown Square's center.
And it surely isn't passive anymore. You'd best get busy with your new rock star. It's not
going to do all the work for you.
My first nouveau stone-age encounter was last spring at Vetri, the intimate and exquisite
northern Italian dining room at 13th and Spruce.
Taking a page from Ristorante da Cesare in Italy's Piedmont region, chef Marc Vetri served
rare slices of rack of veal sprinkled with olive oil and coarse salt, accompanied by a small,
oven-heated block of Pennsylvania blue stone.
It's a stage-stealer. As other diners wheeled to check out the sizzle, we seared each luscious
pink strip and consumed it with forkfuls of polenta and a tomato salad.
Three years ago, Ritz Seafood in Voorhees began offering 5 ounces of medallions of Kobe beef
tenderloin ($35) with a red-hot river stone.
Then last month, Teikoku joined in. Sutida Somboonsong, who opened the place with husband Win,
said her Thai father was smitten by the stone cookery during visits to Japan.
It has worked well for Teikoku, says chef Greg McColgan. He and general manager Umer Naim wanted
an affordable cut of Kobe on the menu, but worried that the kitchen would be stressed out cooking
thin strips to order. "The margin of error [between rare and well]," McColgan says, "is about
two seconds."
The solution? The kitchen keeps 4-by-4-inch squares of black granite in the oven, then fires
one up on the stove top before sending it out - at about 600 degrees - with four meltingly
tender, 1-ounce slices of Kobe rib eye, coarse salt, and a rice vinegar-citrus ponzu dipping
sauce.
The cook-it-to-suit-yourself appetizer goes for $20, at $5 an ounce probably the lowest-priced
taste of buttery Kobe beef on a local menu.
There's more stone cookery in town. Chef Masaharu Morimoto serves abalone with a hot rock. And
his raw-egg-topped buri bop, a takeoff on the popular Korean dish bi bim bop (rice and vegetables
with slices of marinated beef), comes in a blazing-hot bowl made from pulverized river stone.
Morimoto reimagined the dish for an Iron Chef TV segment, substituting slivers of yellowfin tuna
for the traditional beef.
You stir the egg into the hot, mildly sour rice, using your chopsticks to flick spinach, pickled
fern and raw tuna against the bowl's radiating sides.
It's done, as are the other stone-cooked dishes, in a flash - classic rock stealing fast food's thunder.
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By Rick Nicholsn
Inquirer Columnist
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