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20 February 2002 Chef du jour Interview with John Hogan and Recipe
for Crab Cakes Before that I was at Kiki's Bistro in Chicago for five years, the Park Avenue Cafe in Chicago for three years and I was chef/owner of Savarin in Chicago for two years. Influences: Traveling and seeing what the rest of the restaurant world is doing are my main influences. Culinary philosophy: Simple food, great ingredients, straight forward presentation and technique. To me, the simplest things done well are harder to do than anything else done in a mediocre way. Favorite ingredient and how I like to use it: Wild mushrooms. I do a quick saute and turn them into a ragout of some sort, adding other ingredients. I might take some wild mushrooms, saute them with snails and salsify and serve with crunchy toast. I also might add lamb's tongue, pickled and julienned, for texture. I'm also into using bourgeois ingredients. Instead of filet and caviar I use the parts of the animal that other people don't use. The last meal I cooked at home was: Christmas dinner with my family. I made roast tenderloin with mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn and salad. My favorite place to eat out and why I like it: Le Cirque in New York (chef Daniel Boulud) and Guysavoy in Paris. They serve very simplistic but very top-of-the-line food. My advice for home cooks: Keep it simple. Stay within your reach in terms of ingredients and equipment, and don't give up on it. If something doesn't work in a recipe you can always fix it. Even restaurant chefs do it. A lot of chefs try to reinvent the wheel. Me, I just take the old wheel out of the garage and polish it up. My recipe today is: Crab Cakes. This is one of my signature dishes, and one of the most popular on Keefer's menu, but they are very easy to make. I like them because they are light and flaky, not heavy and fried.
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