Restaurants
Food Trends: The Rise of Cheek Meat
By Chris Johns published Dec 1, 2008
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Like disgraced heiresses and rehabbed singers, meats vie for their turn in the spotlight. There was a happy time for short ribs, around 2004, when it seemed every restaurant in the nation was serving them in every flavour combination possible (pineapple and broccoli seared short ribs with yuzu aioli?). The fickle dining public sated itself and moved on. Then pork belly filled the niche-protein void. Offal put in a valiant effort, never making much impact beyond liver and sweetbreads; and bone marrow remains too prehistoric for most diners. Yet our fascination with cucina povera (a way of eating imposed by poverty and the need to use every bit of food, common to the mother cuisines of France, Italy, and China) endures; now cheeks are having their culinary moment.
I first encountered cheeks in Karen Barnaby’s cookbook Pacific Passions around 1996. The recipe was for halibut cheeks with homemade potato chips, and I remember wondering who in hell had ever heard of halibut cheeks? I stumbled across them at a fish shop in Victoria a couple of years later (and bought all of them). Cheeks really hit the big time when Thomas Keller started serving them at his Napa restaurant, the French Laundry, in a dish called Tongue in Cheek (braised beef cheek and veal tongue). After he published the recipe in the The French Laundry Cookbook, it was only a matter of time before chefs everywhere tuned in. The real explosion is more recent still. “I think they really started to take off after Dine Out a couple of years ago,” says Jeff Van Geest of Aurora Bistro. “We served them then, and this year I wanted to serve them again but they were all sold-out and presold throughout the event.”
