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Mohan Ismail, a Singaporean chef most recently at New York's Spice Market, sends out braised beef short ribs in a green curry with tiny, delicate Thai eggplant, slivers of bamboo shoots and baby bok choy. Ismail has toned down the fish sauce, and instead of the rougher texture of ground fresh coconut, his curry gets a silky smoothness from coconut milk and chicken stock and an almost grass green color from cilantro puree. Overton raves but doesn't have a place for it yet.
None of the chefs' artistry will ever make it to a restaurant unless it gets through Joaquin Marchan, a star Cheesecake Factory line cook who now puts new recipes through their road tests. It's here that the free-form lasagna started to fall apart. Okura and his chefs had perfected two versions of the dish, layers of pasta, cheese and sauce: one with roasted tomato sauce adorned with basil oil, the other an all-beef Bolognese with truffle oil.
Marchan, working from detailed instructions, ladles chicken stock and heaps of butter into a hot sauté pan and waits as the tomato sauce heats under a cheese melter, with Okura and Matz hovering like anxious trainers at the edge of a boxing ring. "You don't have to go so fast," Okura says, giving him a calming pat on the shoulders. He and Matz then shift gears. Instead of having him blanch the pasta, they want Marchan to finish cooking it in the sauté pan and then assemble the layers. His lasagna looks messier than the chef's version. Okura checks the clock. "Eight minutes," he says. "Eight minutes is a long time on a busy night." Even worse, "it's a little mushy," Overton says. No one is sure why--the last-minute pasta change?--but that may have ended its chances.
When Overton or one of the R&D chefs has a new idea in mind, Okura usually begins in his cookbook library, consulting cooking bibles such as Escoffier and Larousse Gastronomique and masters ranging from Julia Child and James Beard to Thomas Keller and Wolfgang Puck. "If David suggests something from Thailand or Argentina or Costa Rica," Okura says, he will talk to chefs with that expertise. "We will get to the core of any cuisine, any culture." Okura and his chefs may experiment with abandon, but they have a deep appreciation for the rules they're breaking.
When the restaurant introduced the Vietnamese summer roll--translucent sheets of rice paper filled with julienned vegetables and shrimp--Okura had to make several compromises. Instead of making them to order, Cheesecake prep cooks make them in advance every day, so he found shrimp that hold up in cold storage. A true summer roll would have mint, but that strong flavor turns off some people. "We had to make a hard decision as to whether or not we were going to stay that close to the traditional concept," he says. Okura left out the mint, and the shrimp aren't as plump as Gulf shrimp, but the crisp vegetables somehow still conjure up a summer roll's cool, fresh essence.