Eat American!

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Even in New England, where lobster remains the runaway summer favorite, there is a new look, especially at the hands of Lydia Shire, the chef at Seasons, the restaurant in the Bostonian Hotel. Here traditional grilled lobster is garnished with untraditional chive butter and Chinese pot stickers--steamed dumplings filled with lobster, pork and ginger. "The average diner is very much aware of 'new American cuisine,'" says Shire. "It's out of the fad stage and is really the creative cooking of good simple food, using American products and infusing some kinds of classical preparations."

Also designated as Californian because so many of its highly visible practitioners are on the West Coast, this new cooking is an intellectualized, even esoteric style, characterized by the use of fresh native products and seemingly disparate ethnic ingredients and influences in a single dish. In addition to local produce, some of the trademark foods are goat cheese, blue cornmeal, wild mushrooms and game. American wines from a number of states are featured. The preferred fuel for grilling is mesquite, a wood native to the Southwest. Indeed, that part of the country, along with Louisiana and the Carolinas, provides much of the inspiration for dishes that are usually modified with Oriental, French and Italian overtones, all in the best melting-pot tradition.

The results are often so tempting that even Julia Child, the reigning resident French chef, is being swept up in the tide of Americana. Says Child of a resent experiment with corn-bread sticks: "Well, they're just delicious. I also did abalone burgers, and I use soy sauce now, which I never used to. Also Chinese black beans, Tabasco sauce and an occasional chili pepper. It has freed me." As American chefs begin to surpass French counterparts as status symbols, many restaurateurs snap up baby-faced graduates such professional cooking schools as the Culinary Institute of America (C.I.A.) Hyde Park, N.Y., Johnson & Wales Providence and the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. Several of the professional cooking schools have waiting lists for entry and report three to six available jobs for every graduate.