Michael Roberts, a Chef Known for Unusual Dishes
NY Times
Michael Roberts, a restaurateur and chef whose playful and astonishingly successful marriages of preposterous ingredients helped forge the California culinary revolution of the 1980’s, died on March 30 at his home in South Philadelphia, where he had lived for the last several years. He was 55.
The cause was complications of Kugelberg-Welander syndrome, a degenerative neuromuscular disorder, his brother, Clifford, said.
A former owner and executive chef of Trumps, a stylish West Hollywood restaurant favored by serious celebrities and even more serious foodies, Mr. Roberts was known for his gleefully blasphemous approach to cuisine, including lobster in vanilla sauce, fried plantains with caviar, and duck with black beans and pumpkin chutney.
After Trumps closed in 1992, Mr. Roberts, with the actor Kevin Costner, opened the restaurant Twin Palms in Pasadena, Calif.
“He was in a small class of people who would break the rules,” Corby Kummer, a food critic and a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “It was a time of a lot of outré imagination and experiments that went nowhere. It was a time when everybody was breaking free of their bonds and trying wild and crazy things. But he knew what actually worked.”…
A frequent contributor to Bon Appétit, Gourmet and Food and Wine magazines, Mr. Roberts wrote several cookbooks, including “Parisian Home Cooking” (Morrow, 1999) and “Secret Ingredients” (Bantam, 1988). One of his recipes, from early in his tenure at Trumps, can be summarized thus:
Take a chicken. Stuff a great deal of foie gras under the skin. Batter and fry it.
