It appears that the Boston culinary community has a bone to pick with Tim Cushman, chef of the highly praised Leather District sushi restaurant O Ya, who was recently named one of Food & Wine's Best New Chefs of 2008. The issue? According to Boston Magazine, Cushman may have been pulling a Dane Cook all along, stealing material from seasoned pros to fuel his own stratospheric rise.
We admit that we're a bit late to the party on this one (the Boston Chowhound board has been officially "aghast" since BoMag's October issue came out), but we're surprised there hasn't been more of a flap over the news, especially considering that O Ya has so far drawn mostly unfettered adoration from the press.
In "The Knives Come Out," writer Erin Byers Murray of Boston magazine has two chefs (Uni's Ken Oringer and Oishii's Ting San) claiming on record that, before Cushman opened his now hugely popular restaurant, he spent many a night at their sushi bars, taking copious notes. At the time, he told Oringer's staff he was "out-of-work musician," and the folks at Oishii that his job was to "to come up with a menu and ideas for people who were opening restaurants." So imagine their surprise when they got a good look at the new sushi chef in town:
When O Ya opened, Oringer's sushi chef and a waiter from Uni headed over to check out the competition. "When they saw who was in the kitchen, they were like, ‘Holy shit, that's the guy!'" Oringer says. "This guy we befriended, who'd been eating at the restaurants for at least two years, who said he was an unemployed musician, was now the owner of a Japanese restaurant? I'm still shocked."
After the jump, more on the scandal!
It is true that Cushman, a Berklee alum (class of 1980), was once an out-of-work musician. It's also true that he was once a restaurant consultant, a job for which he did have to take menu notes. In fact, he's always had a penchant for taking notes in restaurants—and he has the archives to prove it:
Cushman keeps those notes, random scraps of paper that date as far back as the early '80s, loosely organized inside about 60 cardboard filing boxes at his house. "I have notes from every city and every restaurant I've ever been in," he says. "I'm a student of food. If I'm in a restaurant and try something new, I want to know what it is." Constantly looking for dishes to put on his ever-changing menu, he still goes to the boxes for inspiration. But not to copy another dish directly, he adds quickly: "That would be redundant."
Cushman's also been a chef under other auspices, spending time in Japan and doing corporate chef work for a Chicago restaurant group called Lettuce Entertain You—which, despite its ridiculous name, somehow maintained enough credibility to put Cushman into contact with Nobu Matsuhisa, the original sushi king. One might argue that even without his dining experiences in Oishii and Uni, Cushman still would have opened a restaurant similar to theirs -- using the same palette of high-profile ingredients and splashy techniques that many great sushi restaurants have in common.
But Cushman's cooking chops aren't questioned in Murray's piece. It's clear the man knows Japanese food, but he apparently didn't know enough about the Boston chef scene to avoid breaking what, for some, is a rule of decency: he wasn't up front with his intentions to open his own place. As Radius chef Michael Schlow (who was once the toast of the town himself as 1999's Food & Drink Best New Chef) says: "Look, it's not even a responsibility [to introduce yourself] in this town," he says. "It's just the right thing to do."
However, No. 9 Park's hard-nosed Barbara Lynch gives Cushman the benefit of the doubt.
"I think every chef goes into restaurants and takes copious notes—even if it's on how not to do things," Lynch is quoted as saying. "Maybe he was thinking, ‘Ken has that, so I'm not going to do it in that order.' I don't know. Having someone take notes on your food, quite frankly, is an honor."
Cushman himself hastens to say that, despite the many ingredients and techniques (truffle oil, blowtorches) that may tie his food to the other great sushi houses of the city, his intention was not to steal, or even to imitate, but to learn what he could without giving too much away. Cushman says he and his wife didn't want to "jinx" anything, and wanted to keep their opening on the down-low (which they did: initially, the place sat empty for weeks).
"There was no deceit intended—it was just my business sense," he tells Murray, a bit lamely. "I realize I was naive to what I was coming into here. But I wouldn't change the way we did what we did."
Unfortunately for him, his reputation as the "stunningly creative" chef that NYT's Frank Bruni has painted him to be is now on the chopping block. Where once the quality of his food was hailed as original, it must now be suspect. And locals looking to spend their hard-earned cash on a night of pricy sashimi may pass over the new kid on the block in favor of the genuine article (a situation that would benefit Uni and Oishii).
However, as one of the pioneering chefs of the city that has struggled to put Boston on the map, and a female in a male-dominated industry, Lynch has the authority to suggest—as Murray appears to do more subtly throughout the piece—that these chefs may be partly motivated by sour shisho grapes. Put simply: Cushman's the new hotness, and he's hogging their spotlight. Murray quotes Lynch as saying:
"They all complain that we're not the dining destination other cities are and then someone comes in and does it well and it's all ‘boo-hoo.' What's that about? Who made them the sushi kings?" she says. Her view is the more, the merrier. "All I ask is, just open a good restaurant."
One might also argue that Dane Cook has raised the profile of Boston's comedy scene despite accusations of material theft, and that America is ready to elect Joe Biden and Barack Obama, even though both have come under fire for plagiarism in their speeches. Like these successful men, Cushman is taking this criticism in stride as he continues to march to the top of 2008's "Best" lists—albeit trampling a few Chowhounds' hearts in the process.
As for Bostonist? Well, we're not sure we trust the "ignorance" defense (although it seemed to work for Biden), but it would be naive not to question the motives of the highly competitive big fish in Boston's small foodie pond as well. In fact, it might be fair to wonder when the Spaniards and the Japanese are going to come a-knockin' at the doors of these other aggrieved chefs, demanding reparations for their ripped-off (albeit delicious) tapas and sushi.
Oishii image by Brandon Shigeta from Flickr, used with Creative Commons license.
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