Excellence on the Plate, Even Without a Chef's Edge Erik Olsen/The New York Times IF you're a chef - a great one - you will go to almost any length to gain marginal improvement in a recipe. You'll find the best provider for every given ingredient, and if you can gain an edge by fussing with those ingredients, you will. Chances are you're not the one doing the work anyway. These kinds of differences define the food of the most talented chefs, at least those successful enough to indulge their talents. It's also why their recipes are often as annoying as running out of garlic. I've spent some time trying to make those kinds of recipes more accessible, as often as not with Jean-Georges Vongerichten; we've been friends since he moved to New York in the mid-1980s, and have written two books together. It's been a while since we worked together, but his recipe here, for fried cakes of sushi-style rice topped with chipotle mayonnaise and raw scallop, then painted with a thin glaze of a soy-honey mixture, was just irresistible. If I were an award committee, I'd give it "best of the year." As irresistible, for me, was the opportunity to ask J. G. how to make the thing simpler; he knows full well that the subtle differences he's employed to make this dish near-perfect can be compromised with still-terrific results. One thing you can't mess with is the rice itself: perfectly seasoned sushi rice, made simpler by adding the fairly standard seasonings of konbu (kelp), mirin, salt and vinegar before the cooking instead of after. It's then fried, and this is the genius of the dish; it becomes a sweet rectangle of sticky crunch surrounding a sweet, tender interior. You could probably sell it at a fast-food place with ketchup and get rich. But everything else (and this is per Jean-Georges, not me) is pretty much fair game. The chipotle mayonnaise is spectacular, and making mayonnaise from scratch is simple. So simple that an essentially noncooking friend of mine, after attending one of the mayonnaise-based picnics I wrote about this summer, is now a homemade-mayonnaise fiend. This mayonnaise, seeking that marginal improvement, contains two kinds of oil and three sources of acidity. But there is an alternative: Jean-Georges said that when he made this dish at home, he laced bottled mayonnaise with sriracha and was happy. I spiked my Hellmann's with pimentón, or smoked paprika, and a pinch of cayenne, and thought that wasn't bad. Similarly, I noted that the role of the soy-honey-vinegar mixture was so subtle, and played such a small part in the overall picture, that it might be played by plain, high-quality soy sauce; the chef agreed. But the scallops are the big thing; one of the reasons this dish is so terrific is that the scallops Jean-Georges uses are live and in the shell just before they're sliced and layered on the fried rice cakes. Few people, myself included, are going to do this at home, or even have the option of doing this at home. What else works, I asked him? Well, basically, anything you'd use for sushi: avocado, which is incredible. Good salmon (if you can find it) or tuna - or almost any other fish for that matter. Cucumber, whose cool crunch adds a different dimension. These are not "lesser" versions. They're just the kinds of things nonchefs or chefs cooking at home do when they don't have every possible advantage.