Here's a quote from chef Johnny Vinczencz in 1997, at the tender age of 32, when South Florida's most adored young foodist was rising as brilliantly as a solid-gold moon over Miami:
Joe Rocco
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Smith & Jones, 1313 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. Open daily 11:30 a.m. till 2 a.m. Call 954-888-8993.
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"There's so much glamour in this business that it's easy to get caught up with presentation and looks. But I make sure my people keep asking themselves one thing, 'Does it taste good?' It's so simple and so important."
Vinczencz was running the kitchen at the posh Miami Astor Hotel then, having completed his apprenticeship with Ziggy Alespach, Norman Van Aken, and Kerry Simon. His customers were falling all over themselves to scarf down his wild mushroom pancakes with sun-dried tomato butter and drizzled balsamic. Ten years later, after tours through Delray Beach (Sundy House) and Lauderdale (Johnny V), Vinczencz was back at the Astor, serving that same portobello short stack as one option in a menu of "Nuevo American" dazzlers. In the intervening decade, he'd perfected a whimsical cooking profile that was part Deep South, part Latin-Caribbean, and part circus: Florida lobster corn dogs; barbecued wild boar with corn-bread crostini and star-fruit salsa; local black grouper with citrus dulce de leche; and sage-grilled Florida dolphin with lobster pan gravy and cranberry-mango chutney. He was the über-locavore, and he'd earned fame for his three- and four-way presentations long before those notions became hackneyed clichés in the hands of lesser chefs. His "duck, duck, duck" offered seared duck breast, a confit leg, and duck liver-wild mushroom stuffing; a quartet of "four shells" tossed shrimp, mussels, clams, and scallops in a luscious tomato saffron broth with chorizo; "tres maneras" featured vaca frita, empanada, and ensalada, all composed as variations on beef short rib.
Vinczencz's sensibility, in keeping with his Midwestern roots, has always been tinged with the scent of barbecue smoke. Critics called him the "Caribbean Cowboy" because he elevated baby backs and pulled pork into a gastronomic tour de force. Lauded in Esquire, fêted by the James Beard Foundation, featured on Iron Chef: In short, he was our darling, darling boy, and if we could have swallowed him whole, along with his plates of "green eggs and ham," we would have. And licked our satisfied chops.
The glitter that has fallen from Vinczencz's chef's toque every time he turned his beautiful head has bedazzled us for well over a decade now, and expectations were starry for his new place on Las Olas, Smith & Jones, which opened in November. We had high hopes even after we learned that his most recent Miami venture at the Astor had floundered and failed. It didn't bother anybody much to hear that at Smith & Jones, he was serving affordable comfort food (pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, meatloaf) or that the restaurant was situated on the lower-rent end of the street — those details just added to its potential charm.
Here, at last, was a Vinczencz for the people. And just in the nick of time too, because the economic crisis was promising to strip away every shred of our financial dignity. We were losing our shirts, but we still had Johnny V's short ribs. We had a few things to be thankful for, and the anticipation of a fried green tomato and molasses-cured bacon sandwich ($9.95) at Smith & Jones was one of them.
I thought about Johnny V's question, "Does it taste good?" as I bit into a fried green tomato BLT one afternoon at Smith & Jones about a month after it opened. Because it didn't. Taste good. I had to take the sandwich apart to figure out why. The fried green tomatoes were sodden and greasy. The bacon cloyingly sweet. The toast, if it wasn't Wonderbread, was a wondrous approximation of it. And the lettuce! I was shocked by it — the wilted white ends from a head of romaine, the very part of the vegetable most of us toss into the compost pile. I considered what might motivate a line cook to put that bloodless, sour stuff on a sandwich, particularly where it's one of the headlined ingredients. In a BLT, after all, the L stands for something more than a garnish. I tried to imagine him, my sandwich man, putting the final touches on his creation. Was it boredom? Contempt? The place was nearly empty at 1 p.m. on a Sunday, so it couldn't have been that he was rushed.
You'll say I'm making too much of a few nasty salad greens, but something about the unrelenting mediocrity of that sandwich really hit me hard. Vinczencz has said that he named his new restaurant Smith & Jones because they're the quintessential American names to represent his quintessentially American restaurant. With no disrespect to the Smiths and Joneses who may be reading this column, they're also names that quintessentially represent the masses, the faceless, the average, the unexceptional, the common. They're the aliases you take to disappear, the monikers of men in gray flannel suits, the humdrum one fears to become.
What had become of Johnny V? The man I knew would never serve his customers a sandwich like that. The day I picked apart my BLT, we also ate a plate of smoked beef brisket and sausage, which came from Kreuz market in Texas ($16.95). We had a dish of runny macaroni and cheese made with Cheez Whiz ($4). And on the side were homemade barbecued potato chips ($4). None of it rose beyond competent; none of it approached what hundreds of mothers across the southeastern United States have been serving their families for decades, much less what you'd expect from a chef of this caliber. It hurt my brain and my heart.
