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"The gray light filters through the coastal clouds above David Kinch. It is ten in the morning, and the chef\u2014six feet, solid, his face as passive as a Buddha's\u2014is wandering his tiered farmland high on the slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains. This place, Love Apple Farms, is Kinch's laboratory, the source of nearly every bit of produce he uses in his restaurant, Manresa, considered by many to be the most inventive in the country. Walking down the rows, Kinch, 50, can sound like a seed catalog as he ticks of endless varieties, moving through potatoes, tomatoes, tomatillos, dahlias, Swiss chard, banana peppers, pole beans, eggplant, spinach, Jerusalem artichokes, strawberries, carrots. He's a technician carefully noting stems, flowers, leaves, fruits, and roots.\n\nKinch has a reputation as a genius. That's what his best friend, Wynton Marsalis, says, anyway. The two met as high school sophomores in biology class, and it was immediately apparent to Marsalis that this boy was diferent. \"I went home to my house and told my dad, 'I'm sitting next to a bad motherfucker,' \" he says. \"He's been a genius since he was 16.\" But Kinch is also afflicted with the genius curse: He has a really hard time expressing himself. Strolling past row after row, he says, \"I can't make up a menu, but if I hold, say, an eggplant, then I create a menu because there are so many parts\u2014the fruit, the leaves, the roots...,\" and he trails of.\n\nYou can't blame Kinch. No one has been able to put a finger on what he's up to in this culinary backwater of Los Gatos, California. The restaurant press says he is cooking New California Cuisine or he is cooking French or he is cooking Catalan or he is farm-to-table. His fellow chefs aren't as hung up. They say, simply, he is \"out of this planet\" (Eric Ripert of Michelin three-star Le Bernardin in New York) and he has \"the most beautiful hand in the States\" (Alain Passard of three-star L'Arp\u00E8ge in Paris). James Syhabout, chef of the acclaimed Commis in Oakland, worked with Kinch for four years. He refuses to compare his mentor's cooking to that of any other chef. \"Really, it's hard for anyone who came out of his kitchen to classify ourselves as a certain cuisine,\" he says.\n\nYou see, Kinch is something, but this part is hard to say, since he is the thing we can't quantify: original. Mario Batali and other titans of American cookery adjust Italian or French regional dishes to the American palate or create a kind of goulash of influences called fusion. Kinch is a culinary Mad Hatter seeking the essence of things\u2014a cabbage, say, or a tomato. In the reductive chatter of the food world, this focus on flavor is often called rustic, the fig on the plate that shouts at the diner, \"Hey, you fucking moron, you have never really contemplated the taste of a simple fig.\" Kinch is about something else: Deep inside a fig lives a flavor, and Kinch has gone in there with compass and camera and the most sophisticated technique and brought this back, and what do you think of it? He is trained in European fundamentals, he is half-crazed by Japan, but his dish An Autumn Tidal Pool (abalone, sea urchin, shellfish, foie gras, mushroom, dashi-based broth) is something a fish might whip up when feeling homesick.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Above: The chef's pantry.\n\nThe son of a civil engineer, Kinch became interested in food at a time (1977) when the world had almost no interest in chefs. He was 16 and training to be a waiter in New Orleans when he walked into the kitchen and saw the cooks shouting, talking loud and bad, and he thought they acted like a bunch of pirates, and he wanted to be like them. He traded the noise of college for cooking school and for two decades wandered with his knives in the kitchens of Europe, the U.S., and Asia. \"He was very serious and wanted to learn,\" says Barry Wine, owner of the departed Quilted Girafe in New York City, where Kinch cooked for four years. \"It was clear he was going to be a star.\" But Kinch didn't become a star. At least not until 2002, when he settled in Los Gatos, a hideout an hour south of San Francisco. He came because he liked the place and he liked the food resources. These days, he emerges only to collect a James Beard Award or to go mano a mano on Iron Chef America. (He beat Bobby Flay\u2014\"I kicked his ass,\" he allows.) He has only one restaurant and no plans to join the Food Network. \"David isn't about that bullshit,\" Marsalis says. \"He is so completely, absolutely real on every single level.\"\n\nMeandering among the beds, Kinch snaps of leaves and eats them. He tastes sprouts, stems. He chews toward a menu idea. On these twenty-two acres, as many as a hundred varieties of tomatoes grow. There are goats, chickens, three beehives, flowers, ancient strains of vegetables. Soon there will be a pig run and orchards. Here, harvest is permanent, since all parts of the plant might land on a plate. \"In fine dining, there has to be something thoughtful and intriguing for people, like in a great book,\" he says.\n\nThat night in Manresa, I begin on chapter 1. I am sliding into the tasting menu that runs fifteen courses and about $175. In the dining room, hushed and spare, the waiter arrives with a small bowl. At first I think it is tomato, but then I taste, and the strawberries explode in my mouth. Now something else: cucumber, garlic, balsamic vinegar, tarragon, olive oil. Strawberry gazpacho.\n\nIt's a typical dish for Kinch: familiar but inverted. \"I'll think of two ingredients, then a third element, a jarring element,\" he says. \"It could be a temperature or a pairing that is not normal. My goal is to have them go, 'Who knew?' \"\n\nLater, I marvel over garden beignets with vinegar powder. Panna cotta with abalone. A plate of risotto, made not with rice but the starch of the rice, plus farm eggs and porcini.\n\nThe waiter sets a salad before me with orange and blue flowers. The dish looks like a painting and is a signature idea of Kinch's cooking. It has at least forty ingredients\u2014a representation of all the seeds, ribs, leaves, and stems at Love Apple. The waiter says softly, \"Into the Vegetable Garden.\"\n\nEarlier Kinch told me, \"When the Savoy cabbage is ready, we're prepared to use it, because it's been growing in my head...,\" and again he trails of. At first you think he is apprehensive about questions and answers, and then you sense he is not completely present, that he listens and speaks, he physically takes up space, but he is actually somewhere else, in a secret world he explores and from where he files little reports from time to time, as menus.\n\n Charles Bowden is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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