Anne E. McBride

Interview with Ruth Reichl

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 17:53:13 +0000

Interview with Ruth Reichl suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 13:53 January 1, 2006

From her days as a chef in Berkeley during the 1970s' California food revolution to her tenure as editor in chief of Gourmet - a post held since 1999 - Ruth Reichl has been one of the most significant culinary personalities of the last 30 years.

She wrote three memoirs, including the 2006 Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, which talks about her six years as food critic of the New York Times. She is also the editor of The Modern Library Food Series and all of the Gourmet books. In between book signings, lectures, and more writing, the unstoppable culinary and literary powerhouse sat with the Main Course.

How has the New York dining scene changed since you were a critic?

I don't know that it's changed that much since I was a critic. It changed a lot right before I got here. New York had really good high-end restaurants, but it was hard to find good middle and low-end restaurants. That changed a lot right before I got here. It's a great dining scene, and it was when I was a critic. So I don't see a huge change.

Is there a restaurant review that you wish you got to write now?

I went to Alinea in Chicago last week, and I would love to write about that. It was really exciting. Actually, I've had a bunch of meals lately that I thought would be really fun to write about although, to be honest, I don't think any of them have been in New York [laughs]. I mean, not that the food in New York hasn't been great - I've been to restaurants I really loved. But the ones that I've just thought, oh, this would be really fun to write about, have been in Las Vegas, in Dallas.

Could you write these reviews for Gourmet?

I can do anything I want at Gourmet, or I could if I wanted to [laughs]. But it doesn't make sense for us to do restaurant reviews, per se, anymore, in a national magazine. We used to do reviews in New York and reviews in California every month. It seemed that it just made a lot more sense to write national trend pieces rather than reviews of individual restaurants. Sixty-five years ago, when the magazine started, there weren't restaurant critics in every city. Now, there are so many good local critics working all over the country, people don't really need us to pinpoint individual restaurants. So we completely changed the format of how we do restaurants.

How do you decide what content goes in your magazine?

There are 50 of us here at the magazine. We have a lot of meetings, and we sit around and discuss what we should be doing. We have correspondents all over the world, who send us reports, and we think about what's most interesting to us. It's not me saying, okay, now we're going to do X. It's really this group of us sort of saying, how do we make the most interesting vibrant magazine that we can?

Do you need a formal culinary education to be working at a place like Gourmet?

I don't think it's necessary to have a culinary education. I do think it's necessary to have spent a long time eating and to have educated yourself. I think the big change in restaurant criticism in my lifetime has been, when I started being a restaurant critic in the early '70s, all you really needed to do, to know, to be a restaurant critic was French food, continental cuisine. Maybe you needed to know a little bit about Italian food.

And the reviews that were written of what was then called ethnic cuisine were stupid. People would say, well, I don't know what Thai food is supposed to taste like, but this tasted good to me. That doesn't work anymore. If you're going to review Japanese, Peruvian, Indian, Malaysian restaurants, you really need to have been to these countries and to have seriously studied what their food is supposed to do. It's not enough to do it from a Western orientation anymore.

You're now dealing with a very knowledgeable public, and you can't be in the situation where the people you're writing for know more about the food that you're writing about than you do. So, I wouldn't say, you need to have gone to cooking school, but I would say, you need to have been very serious about food, and to have eaten widely and without prejudice. In the early days when I was writing reviews, I if I would do a Malaysian restaurant, I would call up the consulate or the embassy and say, can somebody come out with me and talk to me about this food, if I hadn't been to the country. I would really try and do it from as knowledgeable a perspective as I could. I haven't been to Korea, but when I was first writing about Korean restaurants, I was in LA, which has a huge Korean population. We had a Korean art director at the paper, and I would take her with me to restaurants and really try and find out from people who knew about the food.

How has the readership of Gourmet changed?

I don't think just the readership of Gourmet; America has changed enormously. I wrote my first cookbook in 1971, and when I took that cookbook to a publisher, nobody said to me, can you cook? Where'd you learn to cook? Has anyone tested your recipes? It was just, oh, a cookbook, what a cute idea. And they just published it. Since then, the whole atmosphere around food has changed so much, food, cookbooks sell enormously. Every generation of America is better educated than the last one in food.

People have traveled really widely. Americans are probably the most curious eaters of anybody on earth and the most open. We're open to the food of everywhere. And so, whether you're at Gourmet of you're at a newspaper in a city like New York, you are dealing with a population of people who are very likely to have eaten in Japan, eaten in China, eaten in South America, eaten in Mexico. And if you say something stupid, they're going to know it. People likely to have actually been to cooking schools. A growing population of people who are very interested in food and cooking. And that's a huge change in America.

What are the biggest trends you see from a producer's perspective?

It's been going on for a long time, but there's a really growing interest in using local products, in forging relationships with producers. A much bigger interest and knowledge about issues of sustainability, a real sense that people in the industry have to think about being stewards of the earth and have to think about things like sustainability of fish and the fact that, if we don't control our appetites, children won't have any fish to eat. The industry has taken a real leadership role on issues of hunger, the environment, and understand that, if it doesn't come from the industry, who is it going to come from?

What is your take on food shows and the Food Network?

The more people watch food, think about food, the better it is. And I don't care what it is that people are watching. The fact that people are thinking about food, I think, is good for the industry and good for the world. Maybe some of the TV shows aren't as enlightened as we would like them to be. People start going into the kitchen, and maybe they're making stupid food to start with. But they are thinking about food, looking at food, cooking food. And they'll graduate. We need to get people back into the kitchen. We need to have people understand how much fun it is to cook. They start with baby steps.

I read that that's one of the reasons you're doing the 10-minute cooking, right?

Absolutely. Anything that makes people put food on their tables at home and sit around the table is great with me. And anything that gets any kind of food aromas into the air is great with me, and better that people make a 10-minute main course than call up for bad Chinese food. I truly believe that cooking---I don't mean cooking in restaurants, which is high pressure and different than home cooking---home cooking is fun, and people need to be reminded that it's really fun to get there and play and watch things get transformed, and the pride that you have in making something even if it's something that only took you 10 minutes and your family says, oh, this is great. Will you make it again? People need to be encouraged to do that.

What's your favorite thing to cook?

I really love cooking. It's fun for me. I like baking pies. That's probably my most fun thing. There's something wonderful about pie dough where it's always different and you never quite know how it's going to come out. I love the fact that you get to use seasonal fruit, that it changes with the seasons.

How do you feel about molecular gastronomy?

I think it's great. The problem with it is that it takes real talent to do it well, and a lot of people of very little talent are doing it and doing very bad versions of it, which is giving it a bad name. When you eat something that [Ferran] Adrìa has cooked or Heston Blumenthal, it's so exciting. The truth is most of the cooking that we do hasn't changed much in thousands of years.

So the idea that everything else should move forward but that people shouldn't be using all these scientific advances to do things with food that are not junk food, like chicken nuggets, trying to figure out how to make 30 chemicals into something palatable, but to take a carrot and use these new machines to transform it into orange air, I think it's wonderful. It's not for everyone, and it's also what chefs do. it's different than home cooking, and I'm sorry that so many people try and do chef cooking at home. I feel like there should be a real line between what chefs do and what home cooks do. One of the things that chefs do when they're very, very good is experiment with new technology. And it's great.

The same can be said about food writing, which so many people try to do but few do well.

I agree. Partly, we're the victims of people who think that food is so exciting that no matter what you put down about it it's going to be interesting. And that's not true. The truth is, it's like memoirs. Everybody's life is interesting. There is nobody who has ever been born who doesn't have an interesting life. But it's how it's put down that makes it interesting to other people. The person with the most interesting life on earth who tries to write a memoir and can't write is going to bore you, whereas someone to whom almost nothing has happened who has good powers of observation can make you fascinated by their lives.

You've had the benefit of both, right? A great life and great writing to tell it.

Well, thank you. I had the benefit of having been taught early to be a storyteller, which is also part of what the dinner table is. At my family's dinner table, you had to have a story about your life that day. You sat down, and what you were supposed to do at the table was say something that was interesting about what had happened to you that day, which is how you learn to be a writer basically. I was also really fortunate to be interested in food at a time when almost nobody else in America was. In the '60s when I loved cooking, I was the only person I knew who did.

In Berkeley?

No, when I was still in New York and then when I went to Ann Arbor [for college]. I cooked for all my roommates and loved it, always loved it. Everybody thought that was weird. I just sort of fell into the food writing, writing about food just because I was the only person who was doing it. And I sort of got to grow up with all of this change in America. I was in Berkeley at the time that Alice [Waters] was starting what she was doing and all the burgeoning California food movement. I moved to Los Angeles when all the energy moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles. Then I got to come to New York just as it was happening here. It was just luck.

Are you thinking of writing more memoirs?

I'm probably memoired out at least for a while. I sort of caught up with myself. You need a little distance.

Where is the line between memoir and fiction?

I don't think you should make stuff up out of whole cloth. Where my fictionalizing comes is, sometimes I will take two events and conflate them into one. Two parties will become one party, but it all happened. I didn't make things up that never happened. I just made a better story sometimes out of an event. I don't think you should betray your reader's trust by just outright lying.

Are the books you're writing a way to exist beyond Gourmet?

Partly that, certainly. Partly, I just have a need to write. Writing for me is very pleasurable. When I wrote Tender at the Bone, I'd been writing short for so long, I wanted to see if I could write long. I didn't know if I could. And I thought, this is a way for me to find out. Also when I was at the Times, I didn't even have an agent, but people kept calling me, editors, saying, you must be writing a book, I'd like to see whatever book.

After you get the 10th phone call like that, you think, oh, I must be writing a book. And then writing it was really so pleasurable to me. I'm not writing a book right now, and my husband said, I would bet anything that you will be by Christmas because you just can't stand not doing it.

For me, it's like knowing that there's this parallel life that I can go into that's very private, and that I can escape into for a while. Also, writing is like a kind of drug. I hate writing. I absolutely hate writing. I'll do anything but write, but I love having written. I love that when it goes well, the rest of the day you're so elated. For me, at the end of a good day of writing, nothing feels that good. It keeps you writing, wanting that feeling.

How do you do it?

As I get older I need to sleep less. I get up at 5, before the guys get up. I write, I don't make coffee, I don't do anything. I just grope my way to the computer and write for a couple of hours until it's time to wake them up and make coffee and breakfast.

Is it essential to reveal as much as you're revealing in your books to be a good writer?

I don't think so. Different writers do different things. I just happen to be a person who doesn't have a big regard for privacy. One of the things I learned when I was writing restaurant reviews is that the things that you're most scared of are the things that are worth doing. Every review that terrified me, those were the really good ones. The ones where I was going out on a limb or afraid I was making a mistake.

Writing's a little bit like that too. For me, it's the things that you're worried about revealing that are the things that are worthwhile to other people. When I wrote Tender at the Bone, I tried very hard not to write about my mother's mental illness. In the first draft I didn't, and my editor said to me, 'I don't know what it is, but there's something that's not here. I can feel that there's a secret here. There's something that you're not putting down.' I said, well, my mother, my mother was classically bipolar. And I just don't want to write about that. She said, 'Well, you're going to have to do something because your mother as a character isn't working.' I took this deep breath and thought, okay, maybe it would embarrass her, but I'm going to have to deal with this. And I did, and I have gotten dozens and dozens of letters from kids saying, 'Thank you so much for writing this book. My mother's bipolar. It's really nice to know that you can get through it.' So I thought, well here was this thing that was hard to reveal, and it turned out to be really useful to someone. I don't think that's for everyone. It just happens to be for me.

It also fits the genre. If you're not revealing as much as you do, a memoir's probably not going to work.

Right. But if you're JD Salinger and you don't want to tell anybody anything about yourself, but you're a brilliant writer, fine.

Who are your literary influences?

Obviously, MFK Fisher, who was very much the model of what this, where this book [Tender at the Bone] came from. This is an odd person to have been influential to me, but this woman named Kate Simon, who was a wonderful writer. She's not alive anymore. She wrote a guide called New York Places and Pleasures that I read a lot as a kid and then would go out on the street and see New York through her eyes. She was very important in not only teaching me to look and smell, and hear, but also teaching me that that kind of writing could enhance other people's pleasure. And then my father was a book designer. So we had piles of books in our house. Whenever he found a book he really liked that he was designing, he would bring it home in galleys for us to read.

Who are the people currently at the top of food writing?

Jeffrey Steingarten is wonderful. Tony Bourdain is great. Bill Buford's new book [Heat] is incredible. Michael Pollan's new book [The Omnivore Dilemma] is incredibly important and beautifully written.

How do you address nutritional issues in Gourmet?

We don't do nutrition, but we do a lot of, I would say, more politics than nutrition. That was one of the huge changes that I made when I came here. Five years ago, six years ago, we did the first piece on problems with farmed salmon that I know about. I still haven't seen this piece done anywhere else. We've done a lot of stuff about genetic modification. We do stuff about gene patents, the effects of Wal-Mart on the food industry.

We're very committed to trying to do something every month that has to do with this state of the food supply. Because our audience are people who care about food and who are cooking, it's important for us to say, 'these are things you really need to think about.' I think it's very hard to navigate American food today. Part of our job for our readers is to help them navigate, help them make good food choices.

What has escaped you, if anything?

This sounds so horrible, and I don't know if I should say it. But I feel like I've been so lucky that I have been able to, when I see something that I feel like I need to do, I have been lucky enough to be able to do it. When I wanted to write, to really think about, making connections between historically, everything that's happened in American food, I was asked to do the Tanner Lectures [on Human Values] last year at Yale, and I got to actually spend time studying, reading all this stuff. The thing I want to do next is write fiction. That's the thing that has escaped me so far, but I'm hoping I'll be able to do that.

With a food theme?

Probably not, although I'm sure that the food will come into it because I don't see how you live your life without thinking about food. But I don't think food will be the theme.

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Interview with Nathan Myhrvold

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 17:30:55 +0000

Interview with Nathan Myhrvold suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 13:30 March 29, 2018

By Anne E. McBride

Nathan Myhrvold is the lead author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, a six-volume, 2,438-page opus released in March 2011. He is also the co-founder and chief executive officer of Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle-based company focused on creating and investing in inventions, and has nearly 250 patents in his name issued or pending.

Myhrvold first made his name in technology: he became the first chief technology officer of Microsoft after the company acquired his software firm in 1986, and remained there until 1999. His scholarly credential run far and wide, from degrees in mathematics, geophysics, and space physics from UCLA (he started college at 14) to a doctorate in physics from Princeton University earned at 23 and studies with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University in England and Anne Willan at La Varenne Cooking School in France. Before cooking school, he spent two years as a stagiaire at Rover’s in Seattle. He has also functioned as chief gastronomic officer for Zagat Survey. He has nurtured his love of food and science-inspired cooking techniques thanks to numerous travels to the world’s best restaurants, which allowed him to get to know many of their chefs. The publication of Modernist Cuisine is the culmination of many years spent researching, writing, photographing, and editing, and even launching his own publishing company, so that the book would correspond exactly to his standards. The Main Course recently spoke to Myhrvold about the book and how he made it happen, helped by co-authors Chris Young and ICE alumnus Maxime Bilet and a large team at the Cooking Lab.

What made you decide to tackle this project?

I realized that there was an opportunity to create a comprehensive book that covers all aspects of cooking, from science to how traditional cooking works to these new techniques. If I didn’t do it, I was afraid that it’d be decades until somebody else did. The task at hand was first to see how to do it.

What was your next step once you decided to do it?

I wrote an outline, which included all the things I thought we needed to include to make a cohesive story. We pretty much followed that outline in the final book—I looked it up the other day. I found the second version of the outline, from June 2006, and it’s virtually the book that we wrote. For the last four and a half years we followed that outline. We reorganized things a little bit, of course: we initially thought it’d be one book, one big book with 600 pages.

How did you pick your collaborators?

I had worked with Wayt Gibbs, the editor in chief of the book, on a number of projects so this was a pretty natural collaboration. The next person I hired was Chris Young, whom I met at the Fat Duck [Heston Blumenthal’s avant-garde restaurant in England]. He was ready to come back to the United States, so it worked out. Then the first guy he hired was Max Bilet, who had also worked at the Fat Duck. With them the core team was in place. I initially thought I was going to take all the photos, so around that time, I hired Ryan Smith to be my assistant, but he ended up taking the majority of them.

A large number of scientists and chefs contributed their knowledge to the book and reviewed the different chapters. How did you decide to follow this peer review-like process?

We definitely made a point of having experts review each and every one of the pieces. Every chapter got some expert review. Sometimes it was a few experts, sometimes we couldn’t find more than one or two, but we had them reviewed. We wanted the book to be right.

And, is it?

Sure. If you ask me if there are any typos in the book, almost certainly we are going to find some. But in general we did a great job of making things accurate, and had an extensive copyediting process too.

What is Modernist, and why did you pick this name to define the type of techniques and food you are talking about?

There are two reasons. There was no good name to beginning with. Molecular gastronomy was the name that was most out there. But Hervé This hates if you use it to talk about cooking, and the chefs who cook in this style hate the term too. So no one was standing up saying that molecular gastronomy was a good name. It’s also a bit of a silly name. Yes, there are molecules in food, but they are in everything. So that didn’t work. Some people call it experimental cuisine. The problem I had with that is that every attempt to make a new recipe is kind of an experiment, so it doesn’t work so much as the description of a new style of cooking. Plus once we have it worked out, is it still an experiment? Some people call it Postmodernist, but what is Modernist then? So the reason is that Modernism in art, architecture, and everything was a really big trend; it shaped things in the 20th century. Modernism means making a break with the past, having an avant-garde movement that deliberately tries to be shocking, having a new aesthetic. For me, intellectually, this cuisine has all the hallmarks of Modernism. So the name felt appropriate from intellectual reasons. I have a long article in [the spring 2011 issue of] Gastronomica, which is an extension of things in the book and goes beyond what the book says, in a way, to go into the intellectual background and into the discussion of art versus craft.

At this point it’s clear that it’s not a trend: Modernist cuisine is here to stay. But what direction do you see it taking in the coming years?

There are several things to keep in mind. The first is that Modernism gave way to Postmodernism after about 100 years, roughly. Most people would say that Modernism in art went from about 1870 to the 1980s, in some level, so a good 100 years. Modernist architecture is not over, of course, but it probably was most prevalent from 1920 to 1980, so a shorter period but still 60 years. There are people who say that since Ferran Adria is retiring from his restaurant [elBulli], does this mean it’s all over? What you saw in art and architecture is that there are many movements, such as Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism—there were maybe 100 schools in painting and art, which were sometimes about a single artist and sometimes about a group. We could very well be entering into a period that’s like that.

By Modernist, I mean the aesthetics and the techniques of cuisine. It’s likely that in five years you will find many restaurants that don’t have a Modernist aesthetic but will have Modernist techniques. At Italian restaurants for example, which often have a very rustic aesthetic: if they are too refined, they have a hard time as an Italian restaurant, but that doesn’t meant they can’t be interested in the techniques. So I think that many chefs will use many Modernist techniques, even if on the plate the food will look Italian rustic.

What do you consider the most groundbreaking technique included in the book?

It’s really hard to say because it depends so much on how you cook. Here’s something worth the price of the whole book if you are a professional chef. I found a paper by an Italian scientist that allows truffles to stay fresh and have more aroma longer. The answer is carbon dioxide. If you squirt CO2 in the jar, your truffles will last longer. You don’t have to have many truffles last longer to make up for the price of the book. Our omelets recipes are pretty groundbreaking. The beurre blanc is pretty revolutionary, as are our techniques to hold risotto for service and techniques for other dishes that would be easily fallible. You can cook at home 80 percent of what’s in the book. You might need a few new pieces of equipment, but they are available at places like Williams Sonoma and Sur la Table. For home cooks, we have tons of recipes using pressure cookers, techniques like making beef jerky in the microwave oven, lots of very useful things.

Some reviews have compared Modernist Cuisine to Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire, in terms of its significance for the culinary world. What do you say to that?

There are a couple of aspects to that. In my Gastronomica article, I call Escoffier the Henry Ford of the kitchen because he established the brigade system, which is sort of an assembly line. I’ve been careful to not compare myself to Escoffier. It would be difficult for me to do it. It’s also a different age now than it was then. When people say things like that, I take it that it’s a significant book that will change the course of cooking. It’s too early to say, but that’s the goal. We didn’t invent most of the techniques that are in the book. We invented some. But most of the content of the book, there was somebody somewhere who knew it, but that someone was very few people. Some techniques were from elBulli, some from the Fat Duck, some from Alinea, some from wd-50, some from that Italian scientist who wrote about truffles. That information was very hard for people to access and to get to. The people who knew that information before the book really put a lot of effort into acquiring it: they staged at a variety of restaurants, they got their hands on scientific articles, etc. It was hard to come by. We’re hoping to make it easy. By making it easy we’re hoping to profoundly impact the way people cook. We did really try to put an unprecedented amount of information into one book to make that knowledge accessible.

Do you ever feel that you have to defend the book? It has generated so much buzz, but not all of it from people who actually understand its significance.

I don’t need to defend the book, but there are a lot of people criticizing the book who haven’t seen it. They have no idea what’s in it. There are some famous farm-to-table people who, when I’ve sat down with them and shown them the book said they didn’t realize that there was anything like this. They thought of it narrowly in the context of elBulli or wd-50’s food. I love that food, but we go much beyond that. Once the book is out there, I feel that more people will understand the breadth and depth of what we cover. So I don’t feel that I have to defend it, but I certainly have to explain it to people who are quick to leap to judgment.

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Interview with Johnny Iuzzini

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 16:33:09 +0000

Interview with Johnny Iuzzini suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 12:33 January 1, 2007

By Anne E. McBride

Johnny Iuzzini, the executive pastry chef of Jean Georges and Nougatine, earned his stellar reputation with desserts that are always creative, superbly executed, and, most importantly, delicious. He joined Jean Georges, which boasts four New York Times stars and three Michelin stars — the highest rating for each — in May 2002, coming from Restaurant Daniel, where he was the first American executive pastry chef.

His résumé also includes working with acclaimed pastry chef François Payard. Iuzzini won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2006, after also having been nominated in 2003. In 2007, Forbes named him one of the ten most influential chefs working in America today, while Pastry Art & Design twice chose him as one of the Top 10 Pastry Chefs in America and New York voted him Best New Pastry Chef in 2002. He can be found online at www.johnnyiuzzini.com, and will release his first cookbook, Dessert 4 Play, in fall 2008. The Main Course met him at Jean Georges in November.

How many desserts do you have on the menu at any given time?

In Jean Georges itself, there's four tastings. Each tasting comprises four different desserts. So a table of four potentially has 16 different desserts on the table at one time. And then Nougatine has a completely separate menu of another seven desserts. Plus room service, which is another menu. And small banquets.

How often do they change?

We change the menu as often as we can. It's very seasonally based. I'll do a cherry tasting, and I can only do it as long as I have cherries at the market, or strawberries, or whatever else. Sometimes it takes me a little bit longer to change, because I don't repeat from year to year.

I refuse to bring back that I've already done. Maybe a component here and there, but I will never bring back a dessert that I've done already. I just feel like it stifles you, you don't grow, you don't evolve. And at my age, I shouldn't have signatures. I don't believe in that.

So when do you think it becomes appropriate to have signatures?

I don't know. When you've established yourself, the day that you're maybe not in the kitchen every day anymore, and you've achieved enough. I feel like I haven't achieved enough in my life yet.

What process do you follow, to create all these new desserts?

First I'll start and pick the theme. So if it's apple, I'll make a list of all the things I can think of. I'll just write down ideas. I just kept going and going. Then I'll start thinking about it: 'Okay, I like this,' or, 'I like this component,' and I'll just start building it from there in my head. I'll come up with eight or ten desserts. Then I'll make them. Then I'll say, 'Okay. Well, I don't like this. I like this.' And I'll break it all down into four.

From the best of all those, I'll create the four desserts for the tasting. That's how I think. I don't go home and I wake up in the middle of the night and write down ideas. I have to really focus. I definitely have a line in my life that I always promise myself when I leave, I leave. But when I'm here I'm focused on the food. I don't have any cookbooks here. I have my archives from when I worked at Daniel or Jean Georges or Payard, all the stuff that I've already worked with. I keep an archive of all the tastings I've done since I've been here.

Those tasting sheets are what your staff works with?

Yes. I'm very organized. Each page has a photo and the recipes. On the back is the complete technique. That's what we use in the kitchen, and this is what [my upcoming] book is based on. It's a book of 15 tastings. Each tasting is four desserts, so it's 60 desserts.

Do you get to eat out a lot?

No, because I'm always here. I can't say I really get inspired by anybody else's food, because I don't have time to see it or do it. So I feel like sometimes I'm in a bubble, and that's horrible. I hate that feeling. I wish I knew a better way to create.

This seems pretty efficient.

It takes me longer, maybe, than it takes other people. But at least I can trace where it came from. I think that's cool that I always keep these.

Do you use savory ingredients in your desserts?

Always, yes. And there is salt in everything we do. In fact, one of my favorite ingredients for sure is salt, for balance, as a flavor enhancer, to help open up the palate. You wouldn't necessarily know or taste the salt. But you would taste it if I gave it to you afterwards without it.

What keeps you challenged?

This place. The fact that there's only three three-Michelin star restaurants in the city. We're one of five four-star restaurants. Where am I to go? What's better than where I already am? I'm motivated because all eyes are on us. Everybody wants to knock us off from where we are. So the challenge is to be better every day. I want people to see that we're continually evolving, we're not resting on our laurels. I want them to know that we still work hard and we still care about where we are and what we do. I feel very fortunate to be able to work here, because Jean Georges gives me the creative freedom that I have. He actually gives me free range.

The only thing that doesn't change is the chocolate cake. Nothing else. A lot of people go somewhere and they can't touch a lot of things. I always love to get as much as I can out of Jean Georges. He's traveled the world. He has so much experience. It's so different from when I came from Daniel to here, because Daniel is much more classically French. Jean Georges has a much bigger palate, as far as ingredients go. I really learned so much just being here and seeing the way they approach making new dishes in the kitchen, and I think I've adapted a lot of that style in my desserts.

Do you collaborate with the savory chefs?

Not so much. I'll give them stuff. Or if I'm working, I'll ask, 'What spice should I use with this?' 'I'm missing this or that.' So definitely there's talk. But there's no roundtable where we all work out our menus together. They do their menus, I do mine. I don't want to use ingredients that they're using. If I know they're using three or four things, I'm going to try to stay away from them, because I don't want the diner to taste the same ingredients over and over again.

Do you use technology in your desserts?

A lot of people are just using technology because they want to be known to be using technology. They want people to think that they're modern or whatever, but without truly understanding the function of that given technology. What benefit does it really have? Is it making your dish better in the end? That's the bottom line. For us here, we use technology, but we don't want to talk about it. We don't publicize anything we do.

The only reason we use it is if it allows us to achieve an effect or a texture or makes the dish better, lighter, whatever it is, but bottom line, better than it could have been without it. If it doesn't make it better, there's no point in using it. That's Jean Georges' credo. That's our credo. There's no point. I have an arsenal of things back there. But you'll never see me in an article about cooking with technology. A, because our clientele won't understand that. But B, because there's no need to. What do they care? If the dish's better, it's better.

How did you first get interested in that?

I was at the demo where Albert [Adria] announced the mango spherification in Las Vegas. He put it in my mouth in Vegas. I called back to New York saying, 'You're not going to believe this.' Before anybody else knew, in Vegas at that big pastry conference, Albert said, 'I'm going to show you something. I'm not going to tell you what it is. I can't tell you about it. First we're going to announce it to our restaurant, then we announce it to our country, and then to the world.' That's exactly how he said it.

Right away I felt like a dishwasher. Completely challenged. I love that. I love when I feel like I'm an underdog. It inspires me to push harder. I love going somewhere and not knowing how it's made. For me, that's inspiring. It makes me wonder, 'How come I don't know about this?' The whole technology thing is like that. We're not a dinner-only restaurant like maybe wd~50 and those guys, so they have a little more time to research than we do. But I learn as much as I can. I don't expect anybody to do it for me. I print it out. I read it. I don't expect to buy a book and then just follow their recipes. I expect to do the research like everybody else has done.

Do you understand everything you read in scientific articles?

Not everything, no. I'm not a science major. I understand what I can. What I don't, I'll call Dave [Arnold] or I'll call Wylie [Dufresne] or I'll call the companies. I'll call [the] Dow Chemical [Company], 'What does this mean? Why does it do this? This is what I did. Why did this happen and not this?' Otherwise I'll never truly understand it.

How did you first find yourself in a kitchen?

I started in a kitchen when I was 15 years old, as a dishwasher. We didn't have money, so it wasn't like I got allowances or anything. But I've always loved girls, and loved going out, and whatever else. My motivation was having money in my pocket to be able to go out on dates. It's sad to say, but all my friends had cool toys, Nintendo, Game Boys and everything, and we didn't have the money for a lot of things. My motivation was partly because I was embarrassed or ashamed, and the other part was that I wanted what I wanted.

I didn't expect anybody to give it to me. I worked for it. So I got a job at a country club. I washed dishes every day after school. The chef liked me, so he let me peel carrots eventually, use the deli slicer, things like that. He left to go to another restaurant, and I rode my bike every day after school there. It was just me and him, so I started to learn how to cook a little bit. At the time, I was enrolled in a voc-tech program in a high school. You'd spend half the day in your regular classes and then you'd spend half the day at a trade school for high school students. I went into the culinary program. I ended up going to competition, and I took second place in New York City. I went to state finals, and I blew that because I was too busy running around and being stupid.

From there, how did you become a pastry chef?

I grew up in the Catskills. I graduated high school at 17, and I was working at this restaurant there. The florist at that restaurant was also the florist at River Café in Brooklyn. At the time, River Café was still a very big deal, in the early '90s. She brought me in to meet the chef, and right after I graduated high school, he hired me. At 17 years old, I was working at River Café. But I have a problem killing things.

My mother was a wildlife rehabilitator, so I grew up with all sorts of wild animals with broken legs, feeding them back to health and then re-releasing them to the wilderness. Every kind of animal you can think of, we had in our backyard. We had six acres and we had all these pens. I grew up with the love of animals. So I have a hard time—I love to eat, but I can't butcher a baby cow. I can't do it. So I was working at River Café and the pastry chef there at the time was Eric Gouteyron. He'd be making the famous chocolate bridges and all this stuff. The only thing I knew about chocolate were Hershey's Kisses and Hershey bars.

I was still so ignorant, from the mountains of New York. I worked for free every night for him after I finished my shift as garde-manger, until finally he said, 'Okay. You come work for me,' and I switched to pastry. I'd already been accepted at the Culinary Institute of America in the culinary program, so right before I started, I switched to pastry, and I went to the pastry program instead. This was pretty early on. It was a pilot program. Half the time they didn't even know where our classrooms were going to be. My graduating class at CIA [in 1994] was three. My 18th birthday was my first day at CIA. I graduated at 19. And that's when I started with Daniel Boulud.

At Daniel?

At the original Daniel. My CIA externship was with Lincoln Carson, who had worked for François [Payard] at Le Bernardin. That was my connection into Daniel, into François. I spent the next four years or so with François. Three at Daniel and then a year opening Payard as sous chef. But then I knew I wanted to go and travel. I hadn't traveled yet. I was only 22 or 23 years old. I was just tired. I was working in the clubs at the same time.

Why's that?

Because I didn't make any money when I was cooking. I was lucky enough to have that to fall back on. That allowed me to pursue my dream of being a pastry chef. I knew a lot of people. I was always out at night. Clubs just started paying me to show up to these parties, paying me to promote, paying me to bring more people in. They would fly me to Vegas. They'd fly me to Miami to host parties. I'd end up making $1,300 in two nights to party. But it got to a point where Daniel was in trouble, so I was helping there, and I was working at Payard, I was working eight hours in each restaurant every day, then going and working the clubs at night. I was fried. I burned out after a year and a half, and I knew I had to get away from everything. I was at a crossroads in my life.

I was the only American in pastry for a while. They were telling me, 'You're stupid. You're American. Blah-blah.' I'm getting my teeth kicked in every day at the restaurant. I'm making no money. I love what it is, but it's such a hard environment to be in, especially being young and American in an all-French environment. So I decided to leave. Daniel found out I was leaving, and he told me, 'Well, I heard you're going around the world. How're you going to pay for it?' I said, 'Credit cards.' He said, 'I'll make you a deal. I'll give you $10,000, no interest. The deal is, you go do your trip. When you want to come back, you help me open up Café Boulud, you help me open up Daniel [in its new location] as sous chef.' So I said, 'Okay,' and I took the $10,000.

Where did you go?

I went from New York to Hong Kong, Australia, Bangkok, Moscow, Prague, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Holland. Ģ��Ƶ seven or eight months around the world, backpacking by myself. It helped with trying to find myself, trying to find out who I really am. Am I this club person? Am I this personality that I've created? Or am I a pastry chef? I just found myself kind of rotating myself back into kitchens, working for free anyplace I could go, eating at every little pastry shop I could find, and really figuring out that's who I am, that's what I love.

Then one thing led to another. I ended up in Nice where François is from. I worked for his father for a while in their pastry shop. I worked at another pastry shop called Pâtisserie Chéreau in Nice, which was amazing. Then I ended up in Paris working for Pierre Hermé. I spent about a month or two working at Ladurée. He let me work every station and really opened up his kitchen to me. It changed my life. I came back to Daniel, opened up Café Boulud as pastry sous chef under Rémy Fünfrock, and then opened up the new Daniel as pastry sous chef under Thomas Haas. When Thomas left, there was a window where they tried to bring someone else in. It didn't work out. Then Daniel gave me the pastry chef position. I was 26 years old, in January 2001.

Was that pretty unusual?

Yes, because I was American. I was his first American pastry chef. And also because I was so young.

You could have worked in other places where you being American would not have been that big of a deal, right?

I wanted to work for the best. I was lucky enough that I spent a lot years with Daniel, but I got to work for three different pastry chefs during that time. So it was like being at three different restaurants because you were exposed to three different styles.

You were pretty young when you came to Jean Georges as executive pastry chef too, right?

Yes. I came here at 27, about to turn 28, I think. Now I'm old, ready to retire.

You've always worked in really challenging environments. What is the advantage of making such a choice?

I always felt I'd rather make less money. This is the thing that I don't think students understand. Students come out, they're looking for a title, they're looking for money. Experience is almost going to come last. It's so wrong. I made every compromise I had to make to work for the best, whether it was making no money or I was working the longest possible hours because it was shift pay. It was crazy.

When I went to Daniel, I didn't even know how much I made until I got my first paycheck. I'm serious. It didn't matter. I knew I would make it happen with whatever they gave me, because it was that important for me to be there. Because I knew I wouldn't learn as much anywhere else. I think what students need to understand is, if you want to become one of the best, you've got to put your head down, keep your mouth shut, and just put yourself in a position where you're just going to absorb and absorb and absorb and absorb. The day you stop learning somewhere is the day you should move onto the next, and not before. My staff gets that. I'm nothing without my team.

You've gotten lots of awards. Is there one you haven't gotten that you would like to?

GQ Man of the Year. I'd like to appear in GQ someday. Daniel was on the cover of GQ one year. I think that's cool, man [laughs]. Growing up, when we would dress up, my mom would say, 'You should be in GQ.' I would like to be in there somehow. That'd be cool. It's very materialistic. I've never been driven by awards.

Like I said, if you put your head down and you focus on doing a good job and focus on quality and focus on pushing yourself to be better every day, they're going to come. I always wanted to win the Beard Award, but I thought that was never going to be something I could attain. I worked for François when he won. To think that someday this is something I could win was the last thing on my mind. When he brought it in and hung it there, I remember just sitting there holding it, like it was a Ferrari.

You never thought it was within your reach?

I never thought I would ever have an opportunity to be in that category. Never. When I got older, things started coming in and actually, I was nominated in '03, and I lost. Then they skipped me for two years. I thought, 'Well, it was anomaly I was even nominated.' Then all of a sudden I was nominated again and I won. I couldn't believe it. It didn't make sense to me. I was thinking, 'There's so many great people out there. Why me?' One of the things that Daniel told me and I tell all my cooks is, no matter what comes your way, just try to be humble. Don't ever let it get to your head.

Don't ever let yourself think that you're better than you are. I never forget that. There's nothing wrong with being confident, but don't be cocky. Confidence shouldn't be confused with being cocky. You have to bring a certain confidence to work every day. You have to command respect of your team and of people around you, but do it in a way that's respectful to other people. Don't put your chest out like a rooster and just expect people to respect you. You earn it through your work.

You've also worked in places where you would get the attention that leads to awards, though.

Yes. But everybody has that opportunity. I'm no different from anybody else. I chose this. I pushed hard. I beat out other people for the jobs I've had. It was never given to me. So you make those decisions. So I sacrificed a lot on my younger side to reap the benefits now.

But there's also something, the skills or the knowledge or the intelligence that you have in what you're doing, that may not be given to everyone, either.

I don't think so. I don't think I was raised in the Catskills with the knowledge to be a pastry chef. I think everything I have is taught. Everybody said, 'He's so talented.' For sure you have a touch in life. You have some kind of finesse. You need to have that. But I don't think there's a whole lot that I would do, in the way I think, that I wasn't taught. Techniques are learned. I tell all my guys, 'Suck the life out of me, because I want you guys to be better than I am. I want to see you in the papers in five years. I want to see you guys doing stuff that makes me scratch my head.'

That's what matters to me. I want my team to catapult past me, because I want to share with them what my chefs shared with me. I feel like I was very fortunate that they opened up themselves to me and their experience and their lives and shared with me and created me. I want to take everything that they've given me and give it to my guys, along with who I've become, and give them the opportunity to be the next generation. I hate that chefs are guarded and they don't share and they don't take their team under their wings. That drives me crazy. Then there's always the people like Daniel, Jean Georges, people that spawn the next generation of great chefs because they share. I want to be one of those chefs. I want to be remembered for sharing. I want to produce great pastry chefs.

Is everyone in your kitchen right now someone who will be the next you?

I think every person in my kitchen has potential to be a great pastry chef. Because they care enough to be here, they care enough to work hard day in and day to show me consistency, to show me they care, to show passion. It's not an easy job. I'm not the easiest person to work for, because I have certain standards as well. I'm not afraid to yell at someone — it's not a little candy-ass environment. This is a serious thing. We have a certain ranking that we have to live up to.

One weak link in that chain breaks the chain, and they all have to understand that. It's definitely not an easy thing to come to every day, knowing there's so much responsibility on your shoulders. I believe in order to come in and face that, they have to have heart. Someone without heart can't live here. We've had people come in and last a couple months, because they realized they're not at the same level, they're not in the same mind frame. I'm not talking about skill level. I could teach you anything. But you have to want to learn.

What motivated you to write a cookbook?

I don't know. I'm getting a lot of attention, a lot of people telling me, 'You should do a cookbook. You should do a cookbook.' And I thought, okay, if I can do a cookbook that's different from a cookbook that's already out there. I had to really soul search to see if I had something to offer. I put it off for a couple years. Then I said, 'You know what? There's no reason I can't do it.' I think it marks a point of my career. If anything, that's pretty cool. I think I have something to show people. Not necessarily a recipe, but the way I approach food, the way I put things together. It's interesting. I didn't want to make a pretentious book. We actually had to break it down and simplify it. I think we found a nice balance. There's so much involved in what we do, but so much of it is just a way of thinking. So luckily that's strong enough that we were able to simplify. There are still some techniques in there that maybe the home cook can't do right away, but there are sources to find everything you need. I wanted to create something that interested people and that they could use in their home, but also I wanted to teach. I think a book should be educational. I think there should be something in a book that you don't know about. That's the point.

What about your website? What prompted you to launch one?

At the time, [Jean Georges'] website really didn't give any detail about who was here, what was going on. I've always been a self-motivator, a self-promoter. At Jean Georges, we don't have a PR person. Anything you see of me in the news, it's me getting it, me going after it. I do demos. I do TV. Everything I do is me going out to get it. It's not that I want to be a celebrity chef – I don't. But I want to have options in my future. The more people who know my name and know the quality of my work, the better off I'll be in whatever endeavor I want to do. It's just logical. It's not about seeing my name in lights. It's about the day I want to do something, people thinking, 'All right. Well, I know who that is. I know what that stands for. That means master quality.' That'll be my brand. I want my brand to stand for quality.

Do you consider yourself a celebrity chef?

No. I think that Rocco [DiSpirito] and Marcus [Samuelsson] and those guys have that, and Jean Georges. It's nice to be known. It's nice to be respected. But do I need to be called a celebrity chef? I'd rather be infamous than famous.

Pastry chefs have become such stars. Why is that, do you think?

I don't know. I think the world goes through cycles of what's cool. Hopefully it's something that matters now. It took years and years for celebrity chefs to happen, right? So it's just a matter of time until they realize that a restaurant doesn't function on one side of the kitchen. It takes two sides of the kitchen. It's only the generation above me that really became known, like François and Jacques Torres. Even in that, some of them got some TV time and press time, but a lot of them were already past that. I think definitely there is a life expectancy for a pastry chef versus a chef.

How so? Think about who are, quote-unquote, the 'top pastry chefs' in New York now. Restaurant pastry chefs, what's the average age?

We're all between 30 and 35. I don't think there's a pastry chef on the top of that list that's over 35 years old. They decided to do a business. They go into ownership or whatever. I think our age, between 30 and 35, is the point where you figure out your next step as a pastry chef. Because the last thing I want to do is grow old in someone's basement. You max out as far as salary. I won't make more money than I already make here anywhere else. Any other move for me to a restaurant is a lateral or a step down. So what do I do?

What do you do?

Open a bar. It's eventually going to happen. There's no timeline on right now. That's my goal, and Jean Georges knows about it. My next goal is to develop a high-end bar concept with the world's greatest bar snacks with my partner Dave Arnold. That's for sure. Dave's been a huge asset for me as a pastry chef, just as far as I can say, 'Dave, help me with this.' Dave is great at doing research. Dave is great at building things. We have syringes here that we have a thing on that I'm able to do fluids on top of each other, because Dave built a machine for me. To have an asset like that is great. We're both very creative, very hyper people, and I think it's going to be a great, great thing. The idea is to roll it out, to do a bunch around the country. It's exciting to me, because I'll get to work my way up again, to re-earn the respect of people again.

Isn't that scary?

Yes. Right now I'm in the best of the best. For me to someday leave here, it's scary. It's not like I'm leaving any time soon.

What other projects are you working on?

I'm doing more and more TV, and I think that's going to be a great outlet. I'm working on a couple different ideas for pilots and actually getting ready to do a pilot or two. One of them on my own and one of them actually would incorporate Dave and I together. I think I'm lucky enough to have an outgoing personality, where I don't take myself too seriously, and I think that translates well. So I think TV's going to be a fun outlet for me, even if it's just temporary.

Pastry Arts Interview Guest Chefs

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People

A Conversation with Ivy Stark & Missy Robbins

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 15:42:10 +0000

A Conversation with Ivy Stark & Missy Robbins suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 11:42 July 1, 2009

By Anne E. McBride

Ivy Stark and ICE Alum Missy Robbins are at the helm of New York's most popular restaurants: Dos Caminos and A Voce, respectively. Their jam-packed careers have taken them across the country--and world--where they've earned countless accolades for their talents.

Ivy Stark is the executive chef of Dos Caminos, which has three locations in New York City. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in history at the University of California--Los Angeles, and later graduated from ICE. She worked for Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger’s award-winning Border Grill in Los Angeles, and when back in New York at The Sign of the Dove, and Cena. She returned to Los Angeles to become chef de cuisine at Ciudad, with her two mentors. The excitement of New York City compelled her to return as executive chef of Match Uptown. She then become the beverage director and sommelier at Brasserie 8 ½, followed by stints as executive chef of Zocalo and Amalia, and corporate chef of Rosa Mexicano.

Missy Robbins is the executive chef of A Voce and the soon-to-open A Voce at the Time Warner Center. She graduated from Georgetown with a degree in art history, and from ICE with a degree in culinary arts. Her career began at 1789 in Washington DC, followed by New York restaurants March, Arcadia, and The Lobster Club. She then went to work in several kitchens in Italy. Upon her return to the US, she worked at the SoHo Grand Hotel. In 2003, she became executive chef of Spiaggia and Café Spiaggia in Chicago, where she stayed until 2008. She was one of StarChefs’ Ten Rising Star Chefs of the Year in 2005, and the recipient of the Most Promising Chef Award given by journalist William Rice in conjunction with the Chicago Wine & Food Festival. Chefs Stark and Robbins were both inducted into ICE”s Alumni Hall of Achievement in 2005. The Main Course met with them at ICE for a joint discussion of their careers and the restaurant industry today.

How did you decide to become chefs?

MR: I traveled a lot, and my family was really into food when I was younger. I thought I’d have another profession and open a restaurant when I was older. Then I found out that a friend of mine went to college and was cooking. I thought, ‘Oh, if she can do it, I can do it too.’ I started applying for jobs my last semester, senior year, thinking I’d do it for a year and see if I liked it. I started cooking every Friday and Saturday night, which I thought was insane, but I loved it. After the first week, I really looked forward to going. I worked in this fine dining restaurant, 1789 [in Washington, DC], which happened to be above my college bar. I could sneak down the back, and my friends were there, so it worked out quite well. I ended up staying there for another year. The guys were awesome. I had no experience and they showed me how to hold a knife, the basic fundamentals, everything. I said I’d do it for a year and now 16 years later here, here I am.

IS: My father is in the hotel business, so I grew up around it. I remember my dad taking to us to the restaurant shows when we were little kids and seeing ice sculptures, things like that. That was really cool. I started working, in the summer when I was in junior high, as a busser in one of the restaurants. I’d always liked cooking, even as a little kid. I had the Winnie the Pooh cookbook, and I would rather do that on a Saturday afternoon than almost anything else. I worked in the kitchen through high school, and went to college. I had questioned whether I wanted to do it or not, and thought about some other things, about medical school even, and really decided that I loved cooking. I don’t know if it was ever a conscious decision. I just felt like it sort of happened.

MR: For me it was a conscious decision. Graduating from school, thinking about the kind of money you made in a restaurant… it definitely was a very conscious decision. My friends certainly weren’t going off to be chefs. They were going to law school and into investment banking. I definitely got a lot of---I don’t want to say scrutiny---but people were like, ‘Really? You just graduated from this really amazing school [Georgetown University] and you’re going to cook?’ Back then it was right on the cusp of when it started to become popular. But I mean it wasn’t like it is now. There was no Food Network. But I stuck with it because I really loved it and I definitely was having more fun going to work than anyone else I knew.

Which year did each of you did get started in the business?
MR: 1993.

IS: 1993, as a career. But I had been working in kitchens before that as a slave [laughs] in my dad’s restaurant.

With these types of backgrounds and hands-on experience, what made you decide to go to culinary school?

MR: I worked for about a year and a half before I went to school. I left D.C. and went up to the Berkshires for a summer to work. I essentially was really nervous to move to New York. I didn’t think I’d get a job, coming from D.C., which was a very different world then. I was doing pretty well in kitchens; I was moving up from garde manger. But I missed out on some fundamentals. I thought it would be a good way for me to move to New York, and to make sure I liked New York, for one, without committing to a job. It got me into the kitchens I wanted to get into, which might not have happened otherwise.

IS: I have a similar story. I wanted to make sure that I knew the basics before I went into a kitchen, so that I wouldn’t look stupid when someone told me, ‘Make hollandaise.’ And having already gone to college, I didn’t want to go to a two-year program.

MR: That’s how I felt also.

IS: The fundamentals are really crucial. The restaurant world is so fast-paced that you often don’t get the proper training completely on the job. You learn tips and tricks, but you may miss out on some basics just because the chef doesn’t have time to stand next to you and teach you all the time.

Have either of you ever considered having your own restaurant?

Missy Robbins: Absolutely.

Ivy Stark: I think that’s on every chef’s mind pretty much all the time.

MR: My intention was to move back to New York and open my own place, and then this job came along. The economy had also started to shift at the time. This job was an incredible opportunity. My reputation was minimal in New York, so I thought it was just a better way to come back and re-acclimate myself to the environment. But yes, I think every chef wants to open their own place.

IS: I definitely plan on it. It’s going to have to be the right time. And I’d like to find the right partner. I don’t necessarily want to do it completely by myself.

MR: I think that’s really important too, to have the right team of people to do it with.

IS: Yes. And that’s not always easy to find.

This question always comes up, and often feels like it matters most to those asking than to the chefs. But I’ll ask anyway: Have you faced any specific challenges, as a woman chef?

MR: Not really. I’m asked this question all the time. Maybe I have specifically chosen women friendly kitchens. I worked for Anne Rosenzweig for four years, so that’s a given that her kitchen was very female friendly. Wayne Nish, for whom I worked for a long time, always had almost 50/50 in his kitchen. Tony Mantuano, at Spiaggia, has had a woman chef for I don’t know how long, probably 15 to 20 years. That kitchen was pretty balanced---60/40. I just think that you have to pick kitchens that you’re comfortable in. I never went into it saying, ‘do they take women or not take women?’ I pick kitchens that made food that I really loved and a chef that I really liked and had sort of a rapport with. I never found it really difficult.

IS: I would have to agree with that. My first job was with Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, and it was mostly women in the kitchen. I’ve worked in kitchens where I was the only woman, one of two, or there were only women in pastry. When I was at Sign of the Dove, I was the only female in the savory part of the kitchen. I was a sous chef and I was responsible for all of the men in the kitchen. I had to show them of course at first that I could hang with them on the line and do the job. I don’t think it was because I was a woman; any new sous chef coming in would have had to prove themselves.

So how annoyed do you get at those gender questions?

MS: As I was leaving A Voce, my sous chef said, ‘Have fun.’ I said, ‘You know I love to go talk about being a woman chef.’ [laughs] It’s going to happen. There aren’t as many of us. But to me it’s a non-issue. I go to work every day, we have to do the same thing as the guys.

IS: I agree. Someone asked me the same question last week. There’s no difference between being a woman chef and a man chef. The job is the same. You find people who work with you, who are willing to work with you, who enjoy working with you, who respect you. For a man, the job is the same. I don’t personally care to be asked what it’s like to be a woman chef.

MS: It’s a weird question.

IS: It is. In fact, I remember that a few years ago, a new PR company I was working with wrote my bio. It said all this flowery stuff about ‘Ivy Stark is one of the best women chefs.’ I told them to take that word out. [laughs] I don’t want to be qualified. It’s kind of weird. There are women accountants, women lawyers, women doctors. I will say that if I’m at a special event with one of my male chefs, often people will walk right by me to him. It’s happened even with my sous chefs before. It was the funniest thing. I was standing in front of the table passing out the stuff, wearing a white jacket with my name on it and all. My sous chef was behind me, in a dishwasher shirt and whatever, and people would just walk right up, pass right by me, and say ‘Hi, chef, how are you doing?’

MS: Seriously?

IS: That’s happened quite a lot actually.

MS: Wow. That’s never happened to me.

IS: I could say that at almost every special event that I go to, that happens a lot. I think it’s just the general public not being aware yet.

You’ve both worked outside of New York. What are some of the differences or similarities between New York and other cities in the US, from your perspective as a chef?

IS: I worked in Los Angeles, which, at the time, did not have very many good restaurants. Now it’s got a great restaurant scene; I like to go visit. But part of the reason I came back to New York is because I felt I could get a better education by working in different restaurants, and also eating in different restaurants. Back then, in LA, there just really wasn’t any place even for me to eat and learn.

MR: I think that’s the biggest difference. In New York, there are so many places to eat and so many chefs. I left DC because it was time to leave---I’d been there for a while and I think that every young cook wants to cook in New York at some point. That was the ultimate goal. When I left to go to Chicago, it was a really good thing for me to go to a different city. It made me a better chef and mellowed me out quite a bit. It gave me perspective that there is life outside of New York. Coming back at this sort of level, there is a very different kind of pressure than I had in Chicago, just in terms of media and the blogging world in New York. That doesn’t exist in Chicago to the same extent that it exists here. My friends all told me, when I was coming back, that it’s really different. And now that I’m back here I get it. It’s much more competitive here for sure, and you have to want to be in that competitive environment, but take it in stride at the same time.

IS: There’s a tone of pressure, I think, from the media, and especially the blogs. I’ve been reviewed and opened restaurants before the blogosphere started, and it’s really changed things a lot. It’s very intense; everybody reads them, even if they say that they don’t.

How does that affect what you’re doing, what you’re putting on the menu, how you think about your food?

MS: I very rarely read them. My PR company reads them and sends them to me. Sometimes they’re important. If you read 30 things and they all say the same thing, you definitely have to ask yourself if you are doing something wrong, if you should keep a certain dish on the menu. You also have to take it with a grain of salt, and you have to look at the dates of postings. There’s still a lot of stuff up for A Voce, both negative and positive, from when I wasn’t even the chef here. You also have to realize that one in a thousand people that comes through your door is writing, so it’s one person’s opinion. You have to pay attention to it but I don’t think you have to heed to everything that everyone’s saying. It would be very confusing to do that.

IS: I just look at it in the same way that we look at our comment cards. They write both positive and negative things. We look at all of it, evaluate it, and if we get 10 comments that say that something is terrible, we all taste it and see if it really is terrible. We don’t get everything right all the time. Some dishes don’t resonate with people. But I wouldn’t say that I design my menu with that in mind.

What audience do you consider when you are designing your menu?

IS: We have a very loyal following. What I was able to cook at Dos Caminos six years ago is different from what I’m able to cook there now; people are starting to be a little bit more adventurous about Mexican food than they were. It’s still kind of a battle to convince people that there is no melted cheese in Mexico. I try not only to please people who want something very simple but also to have some items on the menu for the more adventurous diner who wants to learn something about the food. I look at Mexican food as where maybe what Italian food was 30 years ago, with red sauce spaghetti; now it’s evolved into something very refined in many cases. I hope that Mexican food can get there.

MS: When we look at the menus for A Voce, we want them to be accessible to people, but interesting. There are a lot of Italian restaurants in the city now, with more and more opening. I want to be authentic and true to Italian culture, but also give people something they might not have seen before. I definitely have tried to put some more interesting dishes on as specials, and like Ivy, sometimes it resonates and sometimes it doesn’t. As a chef, you have to take your ego out of it and say, ‘All right, this is a chefy dish and they’re not getting it,’ or ‘Wow, this scored and they are getting it.’ But you never want things on your menu that aren’t selling. So I’m definitely very quick to take things off if they are not selling, even if I like them or my kitchen or the staff likes them, because it’s just not worth it.

What are some of the advantages or inconveniences of working for a restaurant group, even a smaller one, versus for working for the owner?

MR: The company I came from, Spiagga, is owned by a very large company. It was frustrating at first. There are more rules, regulations, and paperwork. Then you get used to it and you learn to appreciate certain parts of it. Now, coming to a smaller but a growing company, I really appreciate the stuff that I had before. I think I would use a lot of those tools if I owned my own place. I’ve now been in a corporate environment for nine years. I think it would be really hard, as annoying as it is to me as a chef---because all you want to deal with is the food, your staff, and the guests---to go work in a place that didn’t have some of the structures that I’ve become accustomed to.

IS: I would totally agree with that. I don’t find many disadvantages to working with a big group. Sometimes you have to go through a couple of levels of approval. But the advantages way outweigh the disadvantages. You get a paycheck every week. That’s not always the case with an independent restaurant. I have very good benefits.

What do you look for when you hire someone?

MR: The desire to learn and succeed, and the humbleness that you just want to cook. And sense of humor for sure. It can be a quirky sense of humor but you have to have one.

IS: Yes. And they have to be nice. I only hire nice people. I just interviewed a kid yesterday, who was so nice, and I said ‘Well, I think he’ll fit in.’

MR: I’d rather hire a really nice, young, green, inexperienced person who’s going to fit in to the rest of the staff than someone who’s spent seven years cooking at every best restaurant in New York and thinks they know everything.

IS: I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t say that they would rather take a nice, enthusiastic kid out of school who doesn’t necessarily know as much over a seasoned line cook who has an attitude or who knows it all already, and maybe has bad habits that they don’t necessarily want to break. It’s about adaptability too. Certainly, the more skilled the people in your kitchen the better, but they have to be able to adapt to your style and do things the way that you prefer to have them done. That’s not to say that I can’t learn something from them, because I do all the time, but someone who absolutely refuses and says, ‘This is the way I learned to do it at such and such place’ doesn’t fly.

MR: It’s the worst.

What is one essential technique that you feel either you need to have or cooks in general need to have?

MR: Knife skills, really basic stuff is really what sets different cooks apart. A lot of cooks can cook and get food out of the kitchen and can sauté, but they can’t get the prep done properly. It starts with the fundamentals.

IS: Some people are incapable of following a recipe, of understanding how it works. It’s important for me because I have to run three big kitchens with countless people in them, so I have to be able to write a recipe, test it, test it with the sous chefs, and pass it along to them to teach the cooks how to do it. I want everything to taste the same every single time.

I actually learned that from Gary Robbins when I worked with him. He was adamant that the recipes were followed exactly. And he was right. Everything tasted the same every time and it was good. There was no room for any personal interpretation on the cook’s part.

What room is there for a young cook in your kitchens to be creative?

IS: There’s plenty of room for them to offer me ideas for specials or to make a sauce. I wish they would do it more, to tell you the truth. When I was cooking under other people, I was always bringing them stuff to try, to see if they thought it was good. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. My staff can offer me an idea about plating, and they do all the time.

MR: In terms of menu creativity, there’s not that much room right now. I’m also pretty new where I am and trying to establish myself and my sous chefs. I basically just opened a restaurant without opening a restaurant. So, right now, I don’t offer a lot of room. But sometimes they ask if they can do something this or that way. And I think, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ You feel really stupid actually.

IS: It happens to me all the time.

MR: And sometimes they want to change it and I’m like, ‘No, absolutely not.’ It depends on who the cook is, their approach, and how they deal with it, because some cooks are just talking and think that they know everything and they don’t. [laughs] But sometimes they do have really good ideas and see things from a different perspective than me walking in the kitchen and saying that I want to do this dish and this is how I want to do.

They have to actually execute it every night, all night, and they sometimes find ways that are a little bit smarter. But I want full participation from my chef and my sous chef. I want them doing the specials, participating and actively researching. We have a $29 regional Italian menu that changes every week. That’s a lot of dishes. I certainly don’t know everything about every region in Italy and they don’t either. So it takes the three of us really researching, studying, and coming together. It makes the food better.

What do you like most about what you do?

IS: Nothing makes me feel better than serving a dish that I am extremely proud of, that I know tastes good and that the guest is really going to like it. I love it every time.

MR: Serving great food to people, but also just the interaction with people in general. I also think that it’s really cool to develop people and see them grow. Two people whom I worked with in Chicago started with me as line cooks and are now chefs of two of Tony’s [Mantuano] restaurants, which is really rewarding. I also like the excitement of raw ingredients being delivered to the door every day.

IS: The interaction and camaraderie can be really fun, too.

MR: We work really hard and sometimes it’s really a stressful industry to be in, but we also probably have a lot more fun at work than most people. You have to, because you’re there all day together. Going back to what I look for in an employee: I look for people I want to spend 12 hours a day with. If I don’t want to spend 12 hours a day with you I don’t want you in my kitchen because it’s not good for you and it’s not good for me.

What do you like least?

IS: I could work a few less hours a week.

MR: I definitely think that the hours, the lifestyle are grueling. I didn’t think so necessarily in my 20s but in my 30s, and maybe not even five years ago, I do. As I get older, there’s a sense of normalcy that I crave a little bit more than I used to. I used to think it was cool that I was so different and that my friends had to wake up and go to work at nine and now I wake up and go to work at nine but I come home at midnight. [laughs] And managing people is really hard. As much as I love the positive parts of it, when managing large staffs, you’re half psychologist. I spend a lot of my day trying to figure people out.

Do you see yourself working in a restaurant in 10 or 15 years?

IS: Physically, I don’t know that I will be able to do what I do now. It’s extremely demanding physically. But I do see myself continuing to be in this business.

MR: I see myself in the business. I don’t know if I see myself working service every night, standing, expediting and all of that, but I definitely see myself involved in the food industry. I love food. I don’t know what else I’d do.

IS: Me neither. I can’t really imagine doing anything else.

What’s a word of advice you have for someone starting in this industry?

MR: Be willing to go into kitchens and learn. Don’t worry about how long it’s going to take you to become a sous chef or a chef. I took a pretty long route to get to where I am now. This is my first really major, on my own, chef job. I was executive chef at Spiagga, but Tony was there holding my hand. People coming out of schools today think that they are going to come out of school and be Emeril in a year; it’s a problem I see over and over again. People should just be excited to cook. You never get that time back. I was a line cook for six or seven years before I became a sous chef.

Once you become a sous chef, you end up making more money and it’s very hard to go back. You kind of crave the responsibility. I was very lucky that after I was a sous chef for Anne [Rosenzweig] for two years, I went to Italy. I was 28, and I went because I thought, ‘If I don’t do this now, I’m never going to do it. I’m going to start making too much money, I’m not going to be able to afford to go.’ You have to just enjoy the learning process and what you’re doing and not worry about moving up the ranks. That cooking time is fun and you should enjoy it. And I would suggest going abroad. I think it’s the best thing I ever did for myself, to experience not just the food but another culture.

IS: I would agree: don’t skip the basics. I was a line cook for a long time---more than most. Anyone who shows any promise as a line cook is a sous chef after two years now. I think that you need to spend at least five years as a cook, minimum. Spend that time cooking and learning, and if you don’t have an absolute driving passion for the work, don’t do it, because you’ll find yourself five years down the road wanting to get out. You have to be passionate, because it really takes everything you have.

Culinary Arts Alumni Interview Guest Chefs

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People

Interview with Gray Kunz

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 15:34:13 +0000

Interview with Gray Kunz suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 11:34 January 1, 2007

By Anne E. McBride

Swiss Chef Gray Kunz instantly seduced Americans when he moved to New York in 1989, with his decidedly modern flavors, inspired by his youth in Singapore and Switzerland, five years with famed Michelin-starred chef Freddy Girardet, and time as an executive chef in Hong Kong.

In his nine years at Lespinasse he earned a four-star rating from the New York Times and much critical and popular acclaim, but left in 1998 to pursue other projects. He opened Café Gray in the Time Warner Center in 2004, to the greatest satisfaction of the many who had long awaited his return to the forefront of the culinary scene. The Main Course met him there recently.

What is your concept for Café Gray?

Café Gray is a concept that I initially have seen in Eastern Europe. I fell in love with this whole idea of being able to come somewhere where you could feel comfortable anytime of the day. I could have never done the cuisine that they're doing over there, it would have just never worked. The best thing to do was to just to continue with the cuisine I'd been doing in the past, simplifying it to a certain extent, without losing the main flavors and the main ingredients.

There's an idea also after that, hopefully in the next year or two, to build a Café Gray Bakery, which is a very important part of this concept. The way we serve coffee here is very different — just the whole display and the coffee that we've chosen. One of the ideas was to have a link between New York and Eastern Europe. That's why we have this kitchen that's so modern in many ways, by the windows, where customers are actually seeing into the kitchen, seeing everything that happens, basically. That's the New York element of the whole idea.

Some people are critical of that design though, right?

I knew that was going to happen. I did it deliberately. I knew that there were also physical constraints that I had with the space. If I had done it in the normal way, I would have had one third of the dining room less in size.

What is your relationship with the press? They're not always kind to you.

I don't know why. I don't have a problem with the press at all. My policy with the press is to just stay away from it as much as I can because I think there are a lot of the issues that, as an owner, I have to work out. But it's actually nobody else's business but mine.

And I feel very strongly about that because I have to run this. I have the financial obligation to make it work. And the press, you know, can help or not help but I still have to push the organization forward. And I have to return to my investors. And pay the rent every day and pay my staff. My policy on that is just everybody that comes in here, into this restaurant, is my guest. I provide them with the highest quality and the highest level of food service and ambience that they can have, and that will be ultimately be my test. That's the best press you can get.

How did your time in Singapore, Switzerland, and Hong Kong influence who you are now?

It was very important. Particularly with the multifaceted aspect of what I'm doing today. I'm a New Yorker by now, but if I had the option I would probably call Switzerland my home. I think the Swiss part brought the solidness, the trustworthiness, the aspect of when I say something, I do it. The way I think, influenced by my schooling, my upbringing, and my dad, is say less and deliver more.

Then I have the artistic aspect from my mother's side. The upbringing in the Far East, working in Hong Kong, my internship in Switzerland, having all that solid basic training — New York was kind of the culmination of all those things put together. Actually it's the perfect time for me, and my career, and my life to be here in New York. It's been 18 years and it's still going on. I was very lucky to find the right mix, the right crowd that would understand what I'm doing. Where things were happening, from a culinary point of view, but also from a business point of view.

How has New York changed from when you came here 18 years ago?

It's changed a lot. It's first and foremost a much safer city. It's a cleaner city. It's a city that'll always be vibrant in the financial realm, in the political realm, the cultural realm. I think New York has still a lot to give. In my profession, restaurants are highly regarded as entertainment, as a place to go to. Therefore I think this is the ideal city for me to be doing what I'm doing.

But the distinction between business and private life has to be very carefully felt through, especially if you are a chef or an owner. That's why I own a house upstate. I need to get out of the city, in order to be able to cope with all the things that I have to cope with. Family is really something that's very difficult for a chef to be able to maintain.

I think the relationships, and the family, and having your wife support what you're doing, are an invaluable contribution. It helps also that my wife is Swiss; she understands what I'm doing. She, I think, understands that I probably will go the extra mile, even if I didn't need to do that. That's who I am. That's what I do. I cannot have anything done halfway. I just can't.

Is that a national trait?

That's probably a national trait, yes [laughs]. I think also an important fact in today's world of chefs, and their global organization and things like that. One important factor that is really a key element of what Café Gray is going to become in the organization — because it's going to grow — is that I'm still here every day. I'm in the kitchen, I work with my team. I have all the other assets that need to be taken care of, of course. But I'm here every day, in this restaurant.

Would you open another four-star restaurant?

[laughs] That's a good question. You know, I think there's maybe a place in town for me to do that. But I just know what it takes to do it from many, many years at that level. I want to have some fun with Café Gray. This releases me from all the pressures, having to pick up a glass that costs 50 dollars and it breaks, it's a big deal. I want to make sure that I can have a little bit more fun in the business that I have been doing for so long.

Will there be a fine dining restaurant along the way? There probably will be. But it will at my time and my call, when I feel it's the right time. I need to also be careful about the fact that a fine dining restaurant is not the best source of revenue. It is an emblem for the group. I have that emblem with Café Gray. So I'm not quite sure that I'm going to be doing that right away. I don't think so. It's going to be a couple years down the road.

You talked about 50 dollar glasses in a fine dining restaurant. But you've never been known to cut corners before. Have you had to here?

No, not here. I never have. We still deliver all the things that we need to do. I just have to be smart about it. A lot of things that you see here are specifically created for this restaurant. I'll never cut corners, at any level. Whether it's a four star restaurant or a hotdog stand, I'll always have the highest level in that category of restaurant.

How did you train your staff to be at that level?

Every day. All the time. I have some very good people with me. Who support the idea. Who are in here in the long run with me. But it is a constant training all the time. They are extremely dedicated, I think because initially when we put this together, I said ‘There will be more things to come, and you'll be part of that expansion.' Everybody's looking to grow in their careers, the same way I am. My goal is to have these key people as partners later on down the road.

What do you look for in a young chef or cook whom you're going to hire and train?

I don't necessarily need to see the resume. For me, it's the character the person has. Maybe that person doesn't have all the technical skills, but I can teach technical skills. The skills I can't teach are character, determination, goodwill, persistence. Someone who wants to learn has a very good, positive attitude in the profession. These are things that will come as a package to a person. The other part is taste. You'll be surprised how much I struggle with that every day.

With your staff?

With everybody. It's very hard for me to teach them how I taste. It's one of the most difficult things for me to do, because they'll never have [quote unquote] the palate that I have, because I've been specifically trained. I hope they have a good palate. But it's hard for me to train them, to tell them how to season if they don't know, to a certain extent, how to season themselves. And all the preparation in the world doesn't mean anything if you don't know how to season.

Do you ever take your staff on trips, to help them learn these flavors you grew up with?

We haven't done that yet. We're only two years old. I think this will happen probably in the third year. What we'd like to do is to have a system built in where staff can actually go out to the restaurants, and try things. It's also goodwill for the staff, that they can go and do that. I challenge them, here, so much, with flavors and tastes, every day. But after a while, those who really understand that, they really get it. And then, they start challenging me. They come to me with the dish and say, okay, so, what's missing in here? Can you tell me what kind of spices are in there? Then I know that person is there.

Are there things you don't put on the menu?

There are some exotic things that I would never put on the menu.

Such as?

I don't know, kangaroo [laughs]. One thing I would never put on the menu are endangered species. I follow very carefully the species that are not only protected, which you can't use anyhow, but species, mainly seafood, that are really over-caught, over-fished. I stay away from those, because I just don't believe in that. There are other things that I don't use that are really too ethnic, that are very hard for people to understand, although I could implement them. Mainly, if I do stay away from something, it's probably more related to seafood. I've been asked, by people calling me, to take foie gras off the menu, and I said, I'm absolutely not going to do that. I believe in the product, and it's been around for a long time. I think it's fine.

Does a chef have a responsibility to be aware of what's sustainable and what's not?

They have to be far more responsible, in a sense. I think chefs and restaurateurs could actually change the flow of that in a very big way. I'll give you an example. Swordfish, a couple of years ago, was basically arriving as smaller, and smaller, and smaller fishes. A lot of chefs just stopped using it because we knew there was a problem, and the species is coming back now. Not that we're only ones doing that, but there's a demand for certain things. And we can counterbalance that by having a better knowledge about what kind of products are really being over-fished and not use them.

Do you talk about that with your staff?

I'm always talking about that. We're trying as much as we can to use organic products as well, which I think is an obligation for us to do. I don't mention it on the menu, but it's just part of the exercise I'm doing in order for customers to take advantage of things. This should be my research. If you go to a financial person and say, can you manage my portfolio, you expect he can manage the portfolio. I see it the same way. As the public comes and eats here, I need to manage the food products.

What are your feelings on such issues as organic shipped from Argentina, organic grown locally, and non-labeled organic?

I'm always very strongly in favor of local. My dream is to build my own farm one day. It could happen. I just have a lot on my plate right now, but that's one of my big dreams, to be able to produce something on my own farm and have it used in the restaurant. So, local is, for me, very important. And I think local cuisine in America is something that is going to be emerging in a very big way. Whatever you can find regionally, you know it's the best food that you can find right there. I would love to learn more about what grows in Kentucky, or what I can find in New Mexico. These are things that will be very important to, to create more synergy and more of what is American cuisine.

What do you think of inspectors showing up in your kitchens to see if you have trans-fats?

I think it's great. I'm a fervent believer that we shouldn't be using any of those fats, because we don't break them down in our bodies. I was just talking to somebody today about it. I think that the very big corporations that are using a lot of oil will feel the pinch. I absolutely believe that trans-fats should not be anywhere, period.

Will that affect you in any way, if there's no trans-fats to be had here?

I would never use that. We even use grape seed oil to deep fry. I don't fool around with that. For me, that's a health issue. The customer's health on the line. And that's top priority.

Who are the people who've had an influence on you?

Freddy Girardet, there's no question about that. From a culinary standpoint, he certainly has had the biggest influence, and still has. There's a small handful of friends who have influenced me a lot, in helping me get through the difficult business decisions that I had to make, versus the culinary aspect. I must say, my wife should come first, she's the supporting factor. And family.

I also can be very inspired by a young chef if I see the drive, the enthusiasm. I have to help this person, guide his enthusiasm in the right director, so he doesn't lose the spark that he has. In any profession, the people that have succeeded have had mentors with them that were able to create and maintain the dialogue that helped that person through difficult times. It's not when everything goes well that you really see the character of the individual. It's when the hard times come. I've always had a lot of support in that sense. But I've also gone through very difficult times, in order to have a business open in New York. A non-American doing that is even more difficult.

Although, for me, America has given me everything that I ever had or dreamed of. This is a country where the dream can still happen, as long as you work really hard at it. And I think I'm working hard. I've worked harder in my life in New York than even in Europe, because there are other issues involved with it. But I never gave up on the idea of becoming an owner one day. It took me a long time to figure out how.

Did the six-year break between Lespinasse and Café Gray help you?

Well, that reinforced the fact that I said I could never go back and be an employee again. I just couldn't. It was very difficult because I don't think I had, unfortunately, the business skills that I needed to have when I went out. I didn't think it'd be a problem to find the money. But it was a problem. And it was a very demoralizing factor. I thought, I've worked so hard for my whole entire life, do I need to give up all of this in order to just open my business? I was not going to do it if it was not right. If it's not with the right people, if it's not the right money, if it's not the right combination of team, and all that. I took a tremendous amount of time, more than I ever anticipated. I wrote a cookbook [The Elements of Taste with Peter Kaminsky]. I did a lot of things in between, I helped Jean-Georges [Vongerichten] open Spice Market.

How were you trained?

I did my apprenticeship, and I always wanted to go into the hotel school. I actually had signed up at the Lausanne hotel school. Then, I got a call from Girardet to come and work for him, and that got, got canned. I worked with him for almost five years. When I went to Hong Kong, that was my first chef position, really running a complete team. A lot of them didn't speak English.

You went straight from Girardet to running a team in Hong Kong?

Yes. That was very difficult, but once again, I stumbled upon the fact and said, you know what, I'm here, trying to teach these people how to do something. They barely speak my language. I have to learn maybe their language, but most importantly of all, if I don't adapt to what they think or what they are trying to convey to me, I might as well go home. There was a very short period of time where I actually was contemplating to go back, because it was very difficult for me.

But at the same time, I, all of a sudden, found ways to do something. That team, still today, I remember it as being a team that was so cohesive, that would have gone through fire for me. When I left, I went back to Switzerland for about eight months. I did the restaurant hotel ownership school in Lausanne, always with the intention of opening my own business. But then, my wife was pregnant with the second baby. I had my daughter. I needed to go and find some work and earn some money. I came to New York through a connection from Hong Kong. I was chef at the Peninsula for three years, and then, I moved over to Lespinasse. I was there almost nine years, and now, here.

Have you ever thought of brand extension beyond restaurants?

I have. There are other things that I would like to do. I just don't feel comfortable with putting another olive oil on the shelf with my name on it. There are too many of them already there, so I just feel that there needs to be something more, something different that is going to make it worthwhile for me to do that. I have a whole bunch of ideas about food products, but there are a lot of food products out there already. I'm interested in maybe creating food flavors, perfumes. Not perfumes that you put on your body — perfumes that you can actually taste.

Would they go in dishes?

It could be that. I mean extract the natural perfumes that could be utilized. I think a second cookbook is probably something that needs to get done. What else can I think of? There are concepts. I'm not quite sure. I don't know about restaurant concepts. I just think that with these two restaurants, I'll have my hands full. If the opportunity comes along, and maybe there's an opportunity out there already, to go back to the Far East, I would definitely do that.

But that's a place where you couldn't walk 10 minutes and be there.

That's right. That needs a whole different organization.

If you could do anything, regardless of consideration of cost, whether it's a restaurant or fly to the moon, what would you do?

Well, I have my pilot's license, so, maybe I'm not too far from hitting that [laughs]. I just got it, actually, yesterday, or the day before. One of the dreams I've had, for a long time, is, A, get the pilot's license, and B is to maybe, you know, create a business inside the business, looking at how hospitality could influence a flight for customers, and then, relate that together with food, and then, maybe even fly the plane myself [laughs]. So, that's my dream.

What type of planes do you fly?

A single engine right now. It's a pilot license, but it's really a license to learn. And then, you can go on and do your instrument rating, and so forth. I don't know where I found the time to do it.

That's what I was going to ask you.

I found it on weekends. I squeezed every moment that I could in the morning, early, to learn, and it's tremendous. It's a great feeling.

Do you give yourself weekends off?

With the flying, I've done it, yes. I try to, and it's worked out pretty well. My staff has supported me with this. They actually gave me the initial present to do my flying school, because they know that's something that I always wanted to do, about a year and a half ago. I'm trying to be much more cautious of what I'm doing with my own time. If the business owner is tired, the staff and the business will be tired. I still work a very hefty day. But if the evenings are a little bit quiet, I can justify leaving a bit earlier. But I'm so involved with this operation. Many people are amazed at how much time I spend here. This is what I love. I love to see what the progress is.

That's pretty unique, in your position.

I'm here every day because the people, they're like sponges around me. They're just dying to see something new, that I'm there with them. I don't think this would have been ever the restaurant that it is today without me being here. I truly believe so. But it's heavy on my shoulders.

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Interview with Grant Achatz

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 15:12:37 +0000

Interview with Grant Achatz suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 11:12 Meet the award-winning Alinea chef. March 29, 2018

By Anne E. McBride

Grant Achatz incontestably is one of the top chefs in the country today. His progressive cooking style extends to providing diners with a unique experience that includes every aspect of the meal, from their surroundings to the food itself. In just three years, his Chicago restaurant, Alinea, has found a place among the most sought-after dining destinations in the world.

Prior to owning his own restaurant, he was the executive chef of Trio in Chicago, and spent four years at The French Laundry, working under Thomas Keller. The list of awards Achatz has received is seemingly infinite; it includes James Beard Awards for Best Chef Great Lakes in 2007 and Rising Star Chef in America in 2003, as well as a nomination for Best New Restaurant for Alinea in 2006. Food & Wine also chose Achatz as one of the Best New Chefs of 2002. Achatz is not taking any of these accolades for granted, however, and continues to push the envelope towards a greater level of perfection and more delicious food. He will release the Alinea cookbook in fall 2008, along with a companion website called Alinea Mosaic. The Main Course recently spoke to him via phone.

Why did you become a chef?

I was born in a restaurant family. My mother and father owned a restaurant. My grandmother owned a restaurant. A lot of my uncles and aunts owned a restaurant. I grew up in the environment. It just felt very comfortable. It wasn't like this great epiphany where as a 15-year-old student I said, I want to become a chef someday. It was just growing up in the kitchen, learning the culture and understanding it, and doing it.

And then ultimately trying to push beyond the experiences that I had as a young teenager in the restaurant, deciding to go to culinary school and finding out that food can be kind of an artistic medium versus just feeding people. That's what my family's restaurants were. They were just about feeding people and being a pillar, a social meeting place in the community. They weren't artistically fashioned. Once you're exposed to that potential, it's very exciting.

What types of foods were they cooking?

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mashed potatoes and meatloaf and omelets and eggs and burgers and fries. People went and filled their stomach.

What does your family think about what you're cooking now?

I think they're proud. I think they enjoy it. They've been here several times. It's much different. It's a big departure from what they're used to, but they certainly are proud, I suspect.

What do you call your style of cooking?

Progressive American.

Break down each term for me. What do you mean by progressive, and then what is characteristically American in your dishes?

Progressive being the utilization of cutting-edge technique and the exploration of creativity. And American being eclectic ingredients and regional items, and more of a global melting pot of cuisine styles. European countries have a very long-rooted tradition. France and Germany and all the European countries have just a much greater history than the United States.

The United States is a combination of people from all of those countries. That's how this country was founded. So there hasn't been one common cuisine in this country like there is in France or like there is in some other countries. What people don't realize is that, in fact, American cooking is influenced by all of these European-type cultures. It's a natural thing for us to take themes from different countries and incorporate it into our own cooking style.

How did you become interested in the progressive aspect? The technology, the different techniques.

It's just a matter of being curious. I was always somebody who was interested in art and construction and emotion, and then just always trying to push the envelope no matter whether I was in culinary school or working for other chefs or, ultimately, trying to create my own style. I don't think it's anything in particular other than just a personal characteristic.

What differentiates you from other chefs who use technology, such as Ferran Adrià or Wylie Dufresne?

Each of us certainly has our own style. We always get lumped together, but each one of us has our own individual style. We all share certain types of techniques, and we all share certain aesthetic emotions. But we definitely are all our own individual mind and we're not trying to emulate each other. It becomes a very personal thing when you're cooking and creating your style. Homaro [Cantu] at Moto has a very scientific approach that he actually likes to show, for example.

Here at Alinea, we probably use all of the same technologies and techniques, but we keep them more in the kitchen and make it more of a mystery for the guests. Whereas, he likes to kind of incorporate that as part of the experience, the actual science of it. Wylie certainly has his own style, based on his experiences from working with Jean-Georges [Vongerichten] and his influences from certain Spanish chefs. Conversely, I have my past with Thomas Keller. So that's a great influence for me. The problem is that whenever a new style of cuisine comes forward, it's always hard to define it.

And right now, what people don't realize is that this modern gastronomy movement really just started between five and 10 years ago. It's relatively new and people have yet to kind of have the opportunity to really analyze it and see how it's going to mature and then, therefore, define it. It's too early to define yet because you don't really know what's going to stick and you don't really know how it's going to trickle down. I mean, you certainly see it trickling down already. But you just don't know how far it's going to go.

At the same time, the media want to define it, obviously. They want to talk about what you're doing.

Well, then they should define it. That would be great. That's their job. If you look at a bunch of impressionist painters, do you think that back then they all got together and said, "hey, we happen to be all influenced by the same things and we happen to be about the same age, and we're all painting something stylistically similar, let's define our own movement?" No way. They're just painting, man. They paint and they let other people judge.

And it's the same thing for us. We're not sitting around going, "we have to come up with a way of defining our cuisine style." No. We live in our little bubble. We're cooking every day. I'm spending 14 to 16 to 17, 18 hours a day in this restaurant. I couldn't even tell you what Wylie's doing right now. I have no idea. Nor does he have any idea what I'm doing because we're too busy doing our own thing. It would be fantastic if somebody with an open mind and a very strong knowledge of food could actually sample Ferran's work, and Heston's [Blumenthal] work, and my work and Homaro's work and Wylie's work and make a really serious attempt to try to analyze it and define it. That would be great. I don't have time for that. But don't just do it like this. Don't say, oh, they're all performing molecular gastronomy. That's not correct.

But generally, the media label you as doing just that, without trying to understand what the term means.

Nobody's really realizing what that term means. Nobody ever looked at that term and said, "when I put molecular and gastronomy together, what does that mean?" They just start lumping all of us into the same pool. And it's just not correct. What is more definitive, in my opinion, is finding the essence of what the restaurant is trying to convey. What is the experience that the restaurant offers? That is the defining element of what it should be labeled as. Not because I use sodium alginate and so does Ferran Adrià, and therefore, we're all cooking the same way. That's just not fair. That would be like saying, this architect decided that he was going to use concrete stands and that architect is going to use concrete stands. That's absurd.

You're a painter using oil paint and that painter is using oil paint, and therefore, they're both the same. Come on. You don't see [the media] do this for anyone else, but they do it to chefs, and I don't know why. It's just incorrect. It's really unfortunate that people who are actually conveying the information to the public don't have a base knowledge or the dedication or integrity to really look at what is going on experientially at these restaurants and separate them and talk about them in intelligent ways. It's just easier to say here's a bunch of mad scientists, radical chefs out there and they're all cooking the same way. That's just silly. There. That's my little rant [laughs]. It's really frustrating. We're all different.

An Australian chef spent some time in your kitchen and then famously went on to copy your dishes. He got caught thanks to images posted on the Internet, but has this experience affected who you let into your kitchen, or if your cooks have to sign anything?

No. I find that silly. Look, the guy came over here and blatantly ripped me and Wylie off. He copied the dishes verbatim. He took them back to Australia. He put them on his menu. The wording on his menu was exactly the same as the wording on our menu. But you know what? He got caught. There's no way that you can get away with something like that. How can you feel proud doing that? I don't understand.

You're taking the essence right out of creativity and what we do. If you go and copy somebody's food, then really, what are you doing? You're really belittling yourself to just a rudimentary cook. You're no longer any type of artist. You're not constructing anything. You're just copying. So no, long story short, we still have an open-source policy, we still post photos on our website, we still allow people to come in. We don't make them sign nondisclosures or anything silly like that. If they want to try to steal it, let them steal it. They're not going to get too far.

Who are the people who work for you? Do they come because they really believe in what you do? I imagine you're not just attracting someone who's looking for a way out of college.

No. The kitchen environment here is very intense. It requires a great amount of discipline, a great amount of fortitude. They get here between 11 o'clock and noon, and they're here until two in the morning. It's an immense amount of work in a very strict, almost military-like, environment. It's difficult. We're trying to perform at the highest level with an extreme amount of professionalism. We get people from all over the world, and from all over the United States, the East Coast, West Coast.

The ones who really understand what we're trying to accomplish here are excited by the use of making new techniques in an effort to bring forth some creativity in cooking, but yet they also understand that our primary focus is to make food that's delicious and in a way that's very appealing. A lot of them end up try to apply and get a job here after they've eaten here because the overall experience, the architecture of the restaurant, the design of the restaurant, the way the service interacts with the guests, the food, the wine pairing, everything creates this experience that, hopefully, is very enjoyable and very unique and very original. That's ultimately what I think wins most of them over and they realize that we have something here that is largely different than what they can find in too many restaurants in this country.

I was impressed at the attention to detail, when eating at Alinea. Nothing was left to chance.

It's critical. When your ambition is to try to be one of the best restaurants in the world, and that's what we aim for, imagine the competition that's out there. Imagine the French Laundry, Per Se, El Bulli, Pierre Gagnaire, Noma, just all these great restaurants that are best in the world right now. It's a great, friendly competition to try to aspire to be as great as some of those restaurants. So you don't want to let any detail go to the wayside. You really have to try to pay attention to everything.

Why is it important to you to be among one of the best restaurants in the world?

That's just the competitive nature of my personality. It's something that I've always aspired to. I think if I wasn't cooking, I would be an architect. And if I was an architect, I would always want to aspire to be the best architect that I could possibly be. I've always had that personal trait. Whenever I played sports when I was young, I always wanted to win. It's just a drive. It's just this internal bug that you have that keeps pushing you forward. And it can be a very positive thing. The result of that is attention to detail and, hopefully, a really unique experience. I don't think it's a bad thing. Sometimes, it can become very frustrating because you realize that you can never create a perfect restaurant. You can never create a perfect dish. So in some cases, it becomes a little bit more frustrating than anything. But I think the goal to try to be a great restaurant is a very ambitious one, and I think it's commendable. I think it's very difficult.

Does that make you difficult to work with?

No. I don't think so. Not if you, yourself, kind of buy into that philosophy. If you fight the system, then you shouldn't be here anyway. You have to believe wholeheartedly in what we're trying to accomplish. And if you do, then you're actually energized by it. You're actually excited and invigorated and you're glad to be a part of it. But if you're a person who really, it doesn't matter much to you if you work in a great restaurant, you can just go work anywhere and make your money, punch in, punch out, and go home, then this restaurant's not the place for you anyway. So then, yeah, if you have that attitude, then I'm pretty difficult to work with.

Do you have people who've started working for you and it just didn't work out? Or are you able to screen early on?

I think we do a pretty good job of screening people. We make them come in and work a couple of days before they're hired. And either they realize that it's going to be too much work and too intense and they don't want to do it, it's not a good personal fit, or we realize that they should probably go work somewhere else. So usually we do pretty well at finding the right people.

You've talked a little bit about what has influenced you and all that or what makes a restaurant unique. How do you define your cooking philosophy, if you have such a thing?

That's always the most difficult thing to answer because, for one, it often changes. But like I said before, what I'm interested in is creativity, constant pushing of the new, constant evolution, not sitting still for us, and creating an emotional experience. We want people to come in and feel a certain way about eating. I love it when we can make people think about food differently. When they pick up something that is aromatic and they eat it and they have these nostalgic feelings about their childhood.

It's just maybe give it a more cerebral level, where they're actually thinking about what they're doing as opposed to just this monotonous action of consuming food, which we do three or four times a day all of our life. It just becomes so repetitive that you really don't even think about it. It just becomes this natural thing. What we're trying to create is much more than that. We're trying to make you stop and take notice. And certainly, it has to be delicious and we want you to enjoy it and it has to be fun, but maybe it should make you feel a certain way. Maybe you should giggle. Maybe you should be intimidated by food. Maybe it should make you think about it before you eat it. Kind of our whole thing is that people take it for more than just food.

You used the word “artist” before. Do you consider yourself an artist?

Yes. I don't think there's anything wrong with considering people who cook a certain way or for a certain reason artists. Art, to me, is anything that creates an emotional reaction or response. And I think that by crossing the line of just feeding people for satiation, what we have done here, all of the aspects that we've incorporated, add up to a sum of an artistic presentation. The collaboration with [designer] Martin [Kastner], making food almost an edible sculpture, having this industrial stainless steel sculpture come together with an organic-looking piece of food to form this one object that is homogenous and has function and purpose, and then being able to consume part of it, to me, it is art.

I maybe use the term a little bit too loosely. I don't know. But, to me, certain things are very artistic. The way people move, there's a certain level of finesse. People think of art and they just think of photography and paints and drawings and that's simply not the case. There can be artistic qualities found in many, many things. It doesn't have to be just your common forms of artistic construction. Why can't an architect be an artist? If a particular building makes you take notice and feel a certain way because of the stylistic forms and the lines and the materials and the textures and the colors, certainly, that's art.

But some people might just say, oh, he's an architect. A fine craftsman, a fine carpenter who creates this beautiful table or beautiful cabinet with creative lines and beautiful textures, that's art too. So, to me, the whole debate of whether cooking is a craft or an art simply boils down to the focus of the person executing it. If it's my grandmother and she's making meatloaf to feed her 11 kids in 1965, I doubt very highly that there was too much artistic focus going to there. Conversely, I think if you look at what Ferran does on a nightly basis, I think you have no choice but to consider it art. It's not just about the high concept nature of it; it becomes very obvious which people are actually trying to express something with food as a medium versus just giving people something to eat. It becomes very obvious when they're trying to communicate through their food.

Accusations of elitism appear around the type of cooking that you do. How do you respond to people who tell you that it's not accessible to all, perhaps even strictly financially speaking?

That's unfortunate. I agree with that. We're an expensive restaurant. There's a reason why we're expensive, because it costs a lot of money to do what we do. People think that we're expensive because we can charge it and people will pay it because of our reputation or the awards that we have won. No. Anybody who walks in the restaurant and looks into that kitchen realizes that there's 26 people back there and they're all getting paid [laughs].

No one's ever working for free. People expect and demand high-quality ingredients, organic ingredients, ingredients that come from a farm that only produces five pounds of butter a week. People love that. They expect it. They demand it. They also don't know what that costs. With all of these things come high cost and high overhead. So you have to charge for it. That's one disadvantage of what we do, is that it does cost a lot and we do have to charge a lot. You exclude a certain amount of people. However, what people don't realize is that when you walk into this restaurant, you don't need to be a foodie in order to enjoy it. You don't need to have this great understanding of gastronomy in order to really understand what we're doing, because we're trying to speak to people on a more emotional level.

Everybody's going to have their own feeling about what they're experiencing. A couple months ago or half a year ago or something, we had a woman who was celebrating her 80th birthday come in. And her daughter asked her, "Mom, where do you want to go for your birthday?" and she goes, "I read about this restaurant in Lincoln Park called Alinea that's really doing some interesting things. I want to go see that. I want to go experience that." So this 80-year-old woman came in with her daughter and her granddaughter for dinner and she came back to the kitchen to meet me after her meal. She said "I've lived for 80 years and I've never experienced anything like that before. It was the most memorable meal of my life."

She's not a foodie. In her life, she's seen everything. She's seen the Great Depression. She's seen the onslaught of American cooking through the '50s and '60s. She doesn't bounce around at Trotter's, Avenues, Alinea, or Moto. She's not one of those people. She just sat down and had an experience that spoke to her because she was willing to let it come to her, willing to soak it in. People have this conception that you have to be like an academic foodie in order for you to enjoy what we do, in order for you to understand it. That's just simply not true.

That must make it so worth it to do what you do when you hear those types of stories.

I would rather hear those than the guy who was in last night, who flew from New York yesterday morning, landed in Chicago, at 5:30, he went to Moto and had dinner there. He came over here at 9:30, straight from Moto, and had dinner here. He had 25 courses here. Then he got up today and flew back to New York. The whole reason for his trip was just to eat at these two restaurants. He talked about how great it was and all of this and that. And that's great. I'm glad we can appeal to that person, too. But it's almost more rewarding to hear the woman that's 80 years old say it's the best meal that she's ever had in her life. That's pretty cool.

Why is it important to have your menu broken down into 26 or so dishes, rather than just 5 or 10?

It's a matter of telling a story. People can come here and order 12 courses if they want. It depends on how long you want to be here. How long do you want the story to last? How long do you want to sit down in that chair and experience the movie, quote unquote? If you want it to be two and a half hours, then get the 12 course. If you want to spend four hours here, then get the tour.

Obviously, the more courses we give you, within reason, the more expressive it's going to be, the more opportunity we have to show you different things and different techniques and different sensations and emotions and flavors and textures. I think it makes it a more complex experience. But that's really the choice of the guest. If we did a three course meal, if I gave you two savory courses and a dessert, I couldn't possibly tell you the story that you want to hear. It just would be impossible.

How do you decide on the progression of the menu?

It's largely based on a synergy with the wine pairings. We start out by the understanding that it's good to go from sweet to savory, from sweet to savory, from sweet to savory instead of just going all savory then ending with sweet. It breaks up the monotony. Physiologically, it works because your body needs sugar at certain points. So if we interject some dessert courses in the middle, it'll actually make you a little bit more alert and awake and feel less full. It's just that varied approach, that breaking up the monotony. If you're sitting down for dinner for four hours, that becomes important. We really want you to be alert, to feel good about what you're doing as opposed to just slogging through another savory course and one after another after another.

And then, like I said, the synergy with the wine pairing is very important. The bridging of courses, the flavor profiles, the repetition of certain techniques and textures, that will all determine how dishes are presented together or paired next to each other. There are many, many reasons why we choose to organize the menu the way we do. All of these things kind of collide together and help shape the menu.

Do you ever turn over the menu all at once?

No, that would be impossible. Right now, we're starting to transition and do some more spring-like dishes---slowly because it's not really spring here in Chicago, unfortunately. So this week we introduced three new dishes. We do one a day, basically. Because there's so much training that has to go into it. Literally, we have to come up with a dish. We have to conceptualize it. We have to refine it. We have to get it to the point where we feel it's ready to serve to the customer.

Once we get it to that point, we have to give it to Joe [Catterson], the wine director, so that he can pair an appropriate wine with it. He orders the wine. Once the wine arrives, then we have the green light to serve it to the guest. But first, we have to train the front of the house because, as you know, some of the food requires explanation; not just basic explanation. Everybody should know every element that's in the dish so they can explain it.

But some cases, we can tell people the best way to eat it to get the maximum satisfaction out of it. So then we have to actually have the front of the house team taste it so that they can get a better understanding of what we're trying to accomplish. So that takes a couple of days. And then, finally, we put it on the menu. Then it goes through a period of refining at that point as well. So it's a tremendous amount of work just to get one new dish on the menu. It takes us a couple of weeks to get an entirely new menu on.

Are you at the origin of every new dish, or how does that work?

Primarily, how it works is that I will come up with an idea, and I'll write down some details, some notes on a notepad. I'll sketch out how I think it's going to look. And then, typically, I'll work very closing with my chef de cuisine, Jeff [Pikus], and he'll start working on the components of the dish. Once he has all the components, we'll get together and create the dish in its entirety for the first time together.

Then we'll just communicate and continue that with dialogue and refine it until we feel it's ready. So, really, my role now is more of kind of the idea generator and kind of the creative kind of supervisor. I have the initial vision for the dish. I have the initial creative concept. Then I'll try to delegate some of the actual cooking and technique to him or to one of the sous-chefs and then we will all get together and talk about the result and how we can refine the finished product.

And how does the collaboration with Martin play a role in each new dish? You can't just pick up any plate in your kitchen and serve that dish.

Right. The collaboration with Martin and I, basically, if I am visualizing a dish that I know is going to require a certain service piece that we don't currently have, then I'll go to him and say I need something that is going to support the function of this food. Like, it needs to stand vertically. Or it needs to help this dish or this bite of food remain very cold for a long period of time.

So then he attacks it from a functional design standpoint and comes up with a solution. Or I'll go to him and say look, I have this unique new food combination; let's try to create a service piece around it to support its esthetic or to make it interact with the guest or force some interaction in a certain way, make them eat with their hands or make them not eat with their hands at all or whatever it is. That's kind of how our collaboration works. At times, he'll come to me with an idea. He'll say, "I have an idea based on just the mechanics of eating. I've been thinking about table service and eating and I have this idea for a service piece. What kind of food do you want to put on it?" Sometimes, it happens like that as well.

What inspires a particular dish?

Everything. The world. I think being creative, to me, is about being very aware of your surroundings and being very aware of what's going on in the world. We can have an organic farmer from Michigan walk in the back door with a case of beautiful tomatoes, and that might inspire a dish. Or, I might be listening to a particular song, and hear a drastic tempo change, and that might generate an idea for a dish. Or be walking outside in the fall and walk on some dead leaves that crunch under my feet, and that might inspire a dish. I might be walking through an art gallery and see a particular texture or a particular form; that might inspire something. Martin might inspire something with the service that he comes to me with. It's just endless. It just comes from everywhere. There's no real template or documented way that we come up with dishes. It's just random. It's spontaneous.

It's great to hear you talk about farmers from Michigan for many people, it's either technology or local ingredients. They don't understand that if you don't start with a good product, you're not going to have a good dish at the end.

Right. In today's day and age, if you're a chef and you don't source high-quality ingredients, you're behind the times. People who talk about organic and sustainable and artisan, those are all passé. Who doesn't do that now? Sure, when Alice Waters was doing that in the late '70s, it was revolutionary because people didn't do that then. But now, in 2008, if you don't spend an enormous amount of your time trying to source quality ingredients from artisanal producers, it's just strange to me. I think everybody does that now. Or, at least, they should. Whether you're cooking like we cook or whether you're cooking like Paul Kahan at Blackbird. It's all about starting with the ingredients.

There's a cluster of people doing really interesting and innovative things that are not taking place elsewhere around the country. How do you explain Chicago?

There are a lot of reasons, I think. One is that for whatever reason, people tend to forget that Chicago has a history of being a city that supports its restaurants. It always had a history of being a great restaurant city, whether people want to believe it or not. Going back to the late '70s when Jean Banchet opened Le Français, it was considered the best French restaurant in the country. It wasn't anything in New York. It was Le Français, just outside of Chicago. And then, in the 80's, you had Jean Joho open Everest, and you had Ambria.

And then you had Charlie Trotter come into town in 1987. He's still considered, 20 years later, one of the best chefs in the world. That's unbelievable. What we have here is a combination of things. We have a history. We have a precedent set by some great chefs. We have an approachability and a dining public that is willing to accept restaurants for what they are and their vision. And then there's a certain coincidence to it. When I landed at Trio in 2001 and started cooking like this, nobody in the country was really doing it. Wylie wasn't open at wd~50. Homaro wasn't open at Moto. It was really just us at Trio who were doing kind of modernized cooking.

So then, eventually, Homaro decides to open a restaurant. Is he going to put it in New York, where it's a huge risk? Is he going to go to San Francisco where they're typically more rooted in the kind of farm, sustainability-type cuisine? Or is he going to put it in a city where he already knows from watching us cook at Trio that the local tradition, the local dining public are going to support this type of cooking? Well, he's going to put it here.

And then when Graham Elliot Bowles decided to open a restaurant or come to Avenues, of course, he's going to choose Chicago because he's watching Alinea, Moto become successful. It just kind of goes on and on and on. And then you have people like Paul Kahan doing Blackbird. You have people like Shawn McClain being incredibly revolutionary when they did Green Zebra. There's no other place in the country like Green Zebra. And it's going to get even more interesting. You have Schwa that just reopened. My old chef de cuisine, Curtis Duffy, went and took Graham Elliot Bowles' old spot at Avenues, and Graham is going to open his own spot in May. So it's getting even bigger, and better.

Do you have time to hang out with other chefs or culinary people?

No. Nobody has time. Occasionally, you'll see them out and about whether they're at the farmers' market or at some bar after work. But no, nobody really has time to hang out or share ideas or talk about stuff. Usually we see each other when we're cooking for events.

But is it important for you to know what other chefs are doing?

Absolutely. You have to try to pay attention to it. If nothing else, to avoid what they're doing. It would be really embarrassing if myself and Wylie were working on some technique that neither one of us know we were working on and then coincidently put out a dish that was very similar. You have to keep an eye on what people are doing and there's always inspiration in that, too.

Tell me a little bit about your cookbook and the website that goes with it.

It's going to be pretty interesting. The book is due out October 15, so you'll see it on bookshelves and in stores then. It's a large book, about 450 pages long. It's going to be basically over 100 dishes straight out of the Alinea kitchen that are going to deal with recipes that are adapted a little bit to the home cook but primarily set up more for the restaurant. They're going to be scaled in grams. The techniques are not really changed much; they're pretty much straight out of the kitchen.

We want you to really get the essence and understand what it's like to cook in the kitchen and create the food the way we do here at Alinea. The companion website, the Alinea Mosaic, is going to have recipes that we chose not to put in the book, which will be quite a few. It will have demonstration videos, which we've been filming here for about a year, compiling certain techniques and further explanation. For instance, if you're doing a recipe in the book and you're confused as to what the end result should look like or how a particular technique works, there'll be a companion demonstration videos on the Mosaic where you'll go and click and watch in real time kind of make the dish from start to finish, and it might give you a clear understanding.

There'll be additional writing. There'll be a blog where you can write in and ask us requests about the recipe or about the book or anything that you don't understand and we'll answer it. I think that web component is going to be very unique and very interactive. It should bring a great deal of that value and understanding to the book. A lot of times, when you get a cookbook and you're trying to cook all of it, you just don't really understand. This might help that. And it might make people attempt the dishes a little bit more frequently.

In general, can technology be used in the kitchen? In home kitchens, I mean.

Sure. There are certain things that we don't expect people to have in their kitchen. I don't expect you to have a $5,000 Pacojet in your kitchen. But it's not out of the ordinary to go buy a $40 nitrous siphon or go to the corner ice cream shop and get a block of dry ice, which can work just as well as the AntiGriddle. There are only a couple of pieces of equipment that we have in the kitchen that you won't have in your house. People expect the Alinea kitchen to be like a laboratory, but again, there's a Pacojet. There's a rotary meat slicer. Everything else should be able to be purchased. Even when we cook sous vide, now you can get a food saver for $100. You can get a dehydrator for $100. It's really not that prohibitive.

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Interview with Daniel Boulud

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 14:20:48 +0000

Interview with Daniel Boulud suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 10:20 August 1, 2011

By Anne E. McBride

Daniel Boulud is the award-winning chef-owner of Restaurant Daniel, Café Boulud, DB Bistro Moderne, DBGB Kitchen & Bar, Bar Boulud, Bar Pléiades, Boulud Sud, and Épicerie Boulud in New York, as well as five other restaurants in Palm Beach, Miami, London, Beijing, and Singapore, and one slated to open in early 2012 in Montreal. Chef Boulud was born and raised in Lyon, France, arrived in the US in 1981, and opened Daniel in 1993, after six years as executive chef of Le Cirque.

He has won James Beard Foundation Awards for Outstanding Restaurateur, Outstanding Service, Outstanding Chef, Best Chef—New York City, and Outstanding Restaurant for Daniel in 2010. He is also a member of the Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America, was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in France, and received Citymeals-on-Wheels’s Culinary Humanitarian Award.

Among the many books he authored are Braise: A Journey through International Cuisine, Daniel’s Dish: Entertaining at Home with a Four-Star Chef, Letters to a Young Chef, and Chef Daniel Boulud Cooking in New York City. The Main Course recently met him at Restaurant Daniel to talk about the latest developments in his restaurant group, Dinex.

You opened Boulud Sud and Épicerie Boulud in early June of this year. How is the response so far?

I think that people are very happy. The people of the neighborhood are diving into the Épicerie four times a day. We open at 7 in the morning and we serve until 11 at night, so we see them before work, we see them after work, we see them in between. My idea was to create a wonderful program of boulangerie, charcuterie, fromagerie, and then salads, sandwiches, soups, having also, of course, viennoiseries in the morning, then pâtisseries and ice cream. We serve coffee, we have a bar. We also have an oyster bar, sausages—hot dog, merguez, Thai sausage—and we are complementing that with other offerings soon. We’re going to make some crudo. It’s basically a tapas bar, but in the store. All these offer everyone a possibility to find what they need at any time of the day.

Is it a concept that you imagine being able to export to other cities?

No. But having a few more in New York could be possible. The concept is based on the fact that we already have a charcuterie program at Bar Boulud and DBGB, so we extended that program to retail as well, without serving the same charcuterie exactly everywhere. We have the bread—we have seven bakers working for us full time—so it was no problem to be able to provide some very good bread every day.

And then, between all our restaurants in New York and the corporate pastry chefs and all that, we may have about 50 pastry chefs. So I involve many of my chefs. Some of them do specific cookies for the store, some of them do the production of the desserts here at Daniel. It’s a little bit scattered right now, but we are building a commissary kitchen to be able to concentrate production of charcuterie and boulangerie, and some of the pâtisserie, but mostly the base of it, and then the finishing will be done there. We do all our ice cream ourselves. It’s kind of a little old-fashioned store, but in a very in-fashion way. Really, it’s about making a lot of things house made, it’s about following the quality of our offerings, even in the most simple way.

And what about Boulud Sud?

Boulud Sud, it’s the Méditerranée. I love Provençal, Mediterranean cuisine in France, and we have, I think, a very beautiful representation of flavors and a palette of cuisine, but I felt very limited with that. So I wanted to make sure that I was able to go beyond just the border of France in the Méditerranée. I wanted to embrace also the occidental part, which is Turkey, and certainly the more Middle Eastern side of the Méditerranée. That’s how it started. Many of the menu items are based on classic combinations and dishes, but then comes the refinement we put to that. It’s the personal touch we put to it that will really give Boulud Sud its edge, because they’re not all conventional dishes, even if the palette of flavors and the taste are very familiar.

How did you become familiar with that occidental side? Was that a cuisine that you had already been working with?

By traveling. Also because at Café Boulud, we have had the Menu Voyage for the past 12 years. In all our restaurants, we always definitely flirt with Mediterranean cuisine, but in a very scattered way. At Daniel, for example, in the summertime, we’ll have dishes that are really reminiscent of a technique or flavor or combination. We are very Mediterranean but never really put our focus on that.

And being next to Bar Boulud, I wanted to do a restaurant that was departing from the bistro, departing from all this pork-centric charcuterie and all the dishes like that. The wine program is also very interesting, with all the coastal countries of the Méditerranée. So to put that together was very important. We have a sort of very eclectic wine list, but mostly concentrating on the Méditerranée.

You’ve been expanding a lot around Lincoln Center.

Yes. We just locked up the corner. At the beginning, we weren’t going to take the corner where Épicerie Boulud is, but we worried about who was going to be the retailer. So we decided to come up with a concept. For me, épicerie was the proper word because it wasn’t a boulangerie, it wasn’t a charcuterie, and it was not a market. The word épicerie encompasses anything about food, and also some dry goods. We are selling olive oil, salt, some element of épicerie as well.

When you think about the Fauchon in Paris, for example, that always started with an épicerie theme. Then they went into more cooked products as well. So in a way, it’s in the vein of that. It’s an extension of the talent pool we have, and I think it works. It’s unique. It’s really a chef product made with his pool of talent around him, and you’ve got to have a large enough pool of talent to be able to achieve that.

You have two places in Florida. You’re opening in Montreal. Do those restaurants have to function more independently than the New York ones?

Every restaurant has to function independently, with its suppliers. The chef has to find his suppliers, his staff. The manager has to find his staff as well, his customer pool. Basically, every restaurant has to self-manage itself. And we have our chef and manager very responsible for it. Sometimes we have a local PR or promoter to support our PR team here, at Dinex. We are always doing special events and promotions to make sure that we keep the restaurant very active.

Sometimes it’s also being active in a social way with charities. We have been in Palm Beach for about 10 years, so the marketing and work we do there is different than what we do in Miami. While they are close enough, they are still very different. But sometimes, if we need some support in Palm Beach, we’ll take a sous chef from Miami, move him there for a couple of weeks, then bring him back to Miami. Staff exchange, cross training, and all that—I think it’s good.

How often do you travel?

As little as I can. But at the same time, I enjoy traveling and I think I have a team helping me today that I didn’t have five years ago. I didn’t have it 10 years ago for sure. The structure and the support in the business is much stronger today than it was, so it enables me to travel more comfortably and not worry so much all the time about the restaurants.

Is the team stronger now because these people have been with you longer, or is it because of the people you’ve hired in the last five years?

People have been with me for a long time. [Daniel Executive Chef] Jean François [Bruel], we have been together for 15 years. Many of the people on the management side have been with me for years. Our corporate chefs have been with me 10 years. I want to offer them security, and challenges and opportunities. There is a reward of security for myself as well. When I opened my first restaurant, I was spending 16 hours a day in the restaurant, but they were all in the kitchen. Today, if I spend 16 hours a day in my business, half of it is in the kitchen.

And you still spend about 16 hours working?

Am I cooking every meal? No, I’m not, but I’m definitely spending time with my chefs, communicating, tasting, watching, developing ideas. I sometimes miss cooking. Because I think it’s nice to be able to be in the kitchen and not have any distractions. But my distraction is now part of the business, I think. It’s one thing to accept, but I’m not detached from it, and I have people reporting to me all the time.

We communicate with our chefs, but we have AJ [Schaller], who is the communication person with all the chefs in the group, sending messages from me about recipes, about ideas and all that, and collecting information from all the chefs on the new things they have done, new menus, and constantly making sure we keep track of all recipes and have pictures of the food. We have a database established, so all the chefs in the group can have access to others’ menus and recipes. If anyone wants to be inspired by another one of our menus somewhere else, it’s fine.

When you say that you miss cooking, do you ever block off time to be in the kitchen? Do you say, ‘Monday morning between 10 and 12, I’m in the kitchen’? Do you get to do that?

It’s not like that, but I know the days when it is easier for me to spend time cooking than others. There is also a big social part in the business as well: people like to see me in the dining room. What I enjoy the most, when I develop a new restaurant, for example, is to spend time with the chef developing all the recipes for it. For three or four months, we will sit down, talk about the food, start to do the recipes, develop that, do a tasting.

It’s a very exciting time to see the whole preparation, creation, and formation of a new concept, a new menu, to build up a new program. Because once you have created the skeleton of a restaurant, things will change but usually the structure and the frame are made to function and won’t change all the time. It’s also affected by the price structure you have or the menu structure you create, so you try to respect that. After that, it’s mostly creativity coming into the dishes, which is the most important. But to create that platform of aspiration and direction, that’s the interesting part of things.

How long does it take?

Usually a chef is hired to start working for that development phase about four months before opening. At that time he starts building up a team by hiring people, or at least spotting people he’s going to hire. Then we start the development of the menus and the dishes. The two corporate chefs and the corporate pastry chef start to get involved, as well as the [new restaurant’s] pastry chef, the chef de cuisine, the sous chef. They all work together and start to build up the foundation of that new program. They have to write recipes, their full procedures, and their total costs. There is a lot of preparation to do besides just creating a dish.

Sometimes you do five dishes to keep one, so we taste a lot of recipes. In the case of Boulud Sud, for example, part of our R&D is to taste some recipes that are totally classic, such as Greek salad. Everybody knows what a Greek salad is, but our Greek salad at Boulud Sud is certainly way different than the Greek salad at Three Guys. But it’s a Greek salad. We press the cucumber sous vide. We marinate the tomatoes. We have an incredible feta. We make sure that all the herbs in the dressing are fresh, freshly dried, and all that.

You’re always looking at ways to refine your dishes.

Yes, refine and be as true to the authenticity of the recipe, but with something more personal.

It sounds as if it’s being true and authentic to both the recipe but also the Daniel Boulud way of doing something, no?

Yes, but at the same time, I don’t try to create gimmicks. I’m not going to make a sphere of onion or a sphere of tomato in a Greek salad. No. It’s about the product and the combination of products. There is not much gimmickry in the food.

How do you select the people you hire?

Of course they have to be good cooks; but they have to be good people too. There has to be trust between them and me. I feel it when someone is just way too opportunistic and needs me just to help his resume. But it depends on the position. If the person invests himself with us for three years or four years, comes to maturity to be a chef, and we think he can be a great chef, we’re going to do anything for him to succeed in getting one of the positions. If it’s a cook who is just passing by and staying a year with us, we might see each other again down the road. We might try to place him somewhere else for a promotion. And really, the good cooks have all been rewarded with promotion.

Some of them started from out of school, like the chef de cuisine at Daniel. Some of them came already well trained and stay longer. [The chefs in our restaurants] all have done their tour within the restaurant group, but also really kept progressing within it. There is a trust in their ability to manage, to cook, to hire, to really deal with pressure, and to be good partners to the front of the house as well. We want to make sure that they feel included. They are part of management. The chef is a very important part of the management, but it has to be in harmony with the front management as well. It’s not the old days, when the chef didn’t care about the front.

Have you ever hired an executive chef for one of the restaurants who was coming from outside?

[Café Boulud’s] Gavin Kaysen. But I knew Gavin from before. He was working as Le Cirque as an executive sous chef with Sottha Khun, so I knew he went to the right school for me. I also knew him when he was preparing his Bocuse d’Or. We spoke. He was hired to become executive sous chef at Daniel, but when he was coming to New York for a final interview, the interim chef at Café Boulud gave his notice because he moved to Virginia. So I told Gavin, ‘You’re not coming to Daniel anymore, you’re coming to Café Boulud. Do you want the job or not?’ I was taking a gamble in the sense of having a chef who had never worked with us.

But at the same time, I knew. I liked the positive energy of Gavin, the fact that he was passionate about French cuisine. He was very disciplined and respectful and creative and smart. He first made sure to understand the program and to really work with what. Café Boulud has always been offering the chef an amazing support for his talent. But at the same time, it does not mean that everybody can fit in. The chef has to have talent himself to be able to carry the program there. So Gavin, but otherwise most of the chefs are from within.

At the time I had some wonderful chefs, wonderful sous chefs, but I didn’t have the candidate ready for it. And I didn’t want to put a French chef there because it’s maybe the most, not American, but New York restaurant I have.

What place does France have in your life and in your cuisine at this point? You’ve been here 30 years.

France still resonates in many places in the menus and the dishes. But at the same time, what does France have to do with a lot of the American restaurants who are established with a model of French cuisine, which is seasonal, market-driven menus, farm to table? It’s certainly also a model of discipline, a model of balance. By the nature of our team, we are very French at Daniel, but not in every one of our restaurants. I’m definitely very comfortable in America, cooking in America and being French, but that does not mean I Americanized myself or I have lost my French touch. I just feel that not everything from France fits here.

And I definitely fill in the gap with other things that are as exciting for me, and as challenging and as rewarding for cuisine. With DBGB, I’m doing matzo ball soup, burgers, bangers. The concept was not really French to begin with. But yet it’s a brasserie, mostly, and some food is very, very French, and some food is very, very American, and they work together because it’s New York and because we are here. DB Bistro is also kind of a modern bistro, so there are some traditional preparations, but most of them are more of a simple derivation of sophisticated cuisine. It is sometimes labor intensive, but also it is refined. It is refined and yet a bistro like that can produce 450 or 500 covers a day. It is not that we are so precious and refined that we can’t even pull them off.

How many covers a day do you do at Daniel?
Oh, it’s different. At Daniel, 220. We can go bigger. We have 130 staff, it’s only open at night, and it’s closed on Sunday, so…. I believe that at Daniel, the cuisine keeps evolving and our inspiration keeps cross-pollinating with the complicity with the chefs and with our suppliers. Every season, something new comes in, or sometimes something old that is new for that season, which re-fires our inspiration and motivation here. That’s what we like.

What characterizes the restaurant Daniel?
What represents Daniel, I think, is, to me, le grand restaurant. It has a huge backbone for setting, table, service, wine cellar, l’art de la table. And a kitchen brigade with bakers, butchers, charcutiers, pastry. The whole brigade is still in the model of the greatest restaurants of the world, I think. It’s classic enough, but it lives totally with its time. It has an amazing following from regular customers; we have customers over the years who have been very faithful to me.

But the staff is still very young. The average age of our staff here is maybe 27-28. Except for me and a couple of the other guys, the rest are all in their 20s and 30s. That gives a certain dynamism and a certain energy. The restaurant is not getting tired, it’s not cruising. We have always been running and competing, and certainly rising. We keep rising. When you think about an established restaurant, the worst thing you want is to be cruising. Which means that people become a little more self-satisfied with what is done and don’t push anymore.

We constantly reassess our performance, our offerings. We want to make sure that the customer feels that there’s real value to the luxury we offer. It’d be easier to charge more money, like many luxury goods companies do. When you go and buy something in a luxury brand place, sometimes the cost of goods is 10 percent, and there is 60 percent marketing in it.

And you can’t do that here.

No. For us, our marketing is all about our work. Our only marketing budget is the work we put together and the satisfaction we give to our customers. I always feel that I have to make the customer feel very rewarded. And it’s not about me trying to get rewarded; it’s more about the customer getting the reward. That makes you very conscious of how much you charge in everything you do, and whether it is the right value.

Is this idea of value something that is also stronger now than it was, let’s say, 10 years ago?

It could be, yes. But the funny thing, a main course today in most of the average good restaurants, like Café Boulud or many other restaurants, averages between $35 and $45. The calf liver at the Four Seasons Restaurant in 1983 was $36 at lunch. And today, we’re going to sell the calf liver for $32 because we think it’s an inexpensive cut of meat. I don’t think that prices skyrocketed compared to what they were 30 years ago. We are stuck in the mud. Food in America has always been quite affordable, and lately it has gone very high—very high compared to what it used to be.

I think that the days of profitability were better before than they are today, because we cannot raise prices as much as costs have increased. Little by little, we have to turn up the price cost, and everybody has to do it because it’s inevitable. We are all in competition for the spending dollars in dining. The customer is looking for value and it’s very important to be value conscious. We do that at DBGB, we do that in all our restaurants. I think that every company today, every chef, is always concerned about the value he is giving to his customer.

You worked in Denmark right before you came to New York, about 30 years ago. What do you think of the huge boom in Scandinavian cuisine now?

I always thought of Scandinavia as a very creative cuisine, with very creative chefs. I saw Scandinavian chefs learning in France during the ‘70s and ‘80s. I lived in Denmark but I could notice Sweden and Norway. They were very well traveled and very inspired by the combination of cuisine, which sometimes wasn’t really French but had some sort of backbone in French cuisine. When I was in Copenhagen, I was surprised by the excellence of the restaurants there. It was a small number of them, but there were some fantastic restaurants. Today when you see Noma and the attention that Noma is giving to Scandinavia, I think it’s just the right recognition. It has always been a very small country with very good talent.

It’s interesting that it did take that long for Scandinavia to get that recognition, when you say that it’s been so good for so long.

Yes. What’s interesting is that [Noma’s] René [Redzepi] did most of his studying in America before he went back home, working with Thomas [Keller]. He went back home and really studied what was going to make him happiest, what he had locally, what could really sustain his cuisine and be sustainable. He’s very creative, and I hope that he can do it for the next 40 years like many of us. Because, elBulli is closing, and everybody felt like the ride was too short.

Did you get to eat at elBulli?

Yes. I love to go to those iconic restaurants. But to me, it’s a different breed of business. I’m sure that the Danish today don’t go to Noma as much as everybody else from the world, because they can’t. Is it a good or bad problem? A good problem for the country. But it’s a lot of pressure on [the chefs] as well. Talent will always keep growing.

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Interview with Dan Barber

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 13:38:27 +0000

Interview with Dan Barber suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 09:38 September 9, 2007

By Anne E. McBride

As chef and co-owner of Blue Hill in New York City and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in nearby Westchester County, Dan Barber has become one of the most visible advocates for sustainable cooking and eating in the US — as well as one of the country's most admired chefs, thanks to the unforgettable dishes he creates with locally grown foods.

He is also the Stone Barns Center's creative director, a frequent participant on panels and at conferences around the country, and the author of numerous national newspaper and magazine articles that address our need to care more about what we eat. Barber won the James Beard Foundation 2006 award for Best Chef, New York City, and Food & Wine named him one of the country's Best New Chefs in 2002. Both restaurants have been nominated for Beard awards. The Main Course met him at Stone Barns in July.

What is your day like?

My day starts early, when I go to the farmers' market at Union Square on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. This morning I was there at 7, but I'm usually there a little bit later than that. And then I drive up here. I usually have a quick meeting with the farmers about what's coming in, then work, then do service and then pack up the stuff from the farm here to go to Blue Hill in New York. I drive that down, and I finish my day usually in Blue Hill in New York.

Every day?

Nearly every night. Very late at night. Often after everyone has left.

Are there differences between the two Blue Hill restaurants?

I don't know. They feel very individual to me. Right hand, left hand.

In what way? Do you cook the same things in both or not really?

Not really. They're the same products; they're just interpreted a little bit differently. People have time here in a way that they don't in New York. The time has become this sort of big epiphany, or awakening. When people have time to sit and enjoy the meal, they taste a lot more and you can do a lot more. You can be more subtle with things, you can be you know more drawn out with the number of courses, with the different ideas because people come here as a destination. It's their night. Whereas in Blue Hill, New York there's a pace to it. There's a frenzy to it. It's in the West Village. It's small, cramped, and energizing. And so it's a different experience.

How did you become so committed to sustainable foods and agriculture?

Blue Hill Farm is a real farm in Berkshires that my grandmother started. I used to work at the farm growing up. My grandmother was a big believer in preserving open space. Blue Hill Farm is strikingly beautiful and in part that's because of my grandmother's desire to keep the open space, to keep that a farm. With that beauty comes kind a responsibility. I think she gave me that sense of responsibility because I was put to work. And so that must have translated into my feelings about food, which is to some extent the responsibility attached to the way we eat, or in the place that we eat. Or for myself, in the way that we cook.

Is that farm still an active farm?

Very, and it's become even more active in the last few years. We've bulked it up. Right now, it's a dairy operation that is supplying us with milk, and eventually cheese.

You're setting up to make cheese?

Yes, doing our cheese. That's the next thing that's coming.

Who is taking care of the farm?

We have a guy named Sean Stanton. He's a farmer and it's a similar economic relationship as this [Stone Barns] farm: everything that's produced on this farm is sold to us at a fair market value. And everything that even on our own farm is produced is sold to us at a fair market value. So it allows him to make a living.

So you buy all the produce that you use here from the farm that surrounds you?

Everything. And a fair market value for Westchester is very expensive. But that's the best economic model for the farm and for the center. It allows the center to exist, in part.

You're the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture's creative director. What does that mean?

Initially I had a big involvement in how this was set up, with my brother and my sister-in-law. The creative director role is in part to facilitate some of the ideas for the future, which means the program in terms of the farming, just where are we headed in the future. And to some extent, helping with programs that happen here. My interest is to share what we do here and have opportunities to do seminars and conferences and panels about the issues that we deal with here. It is important for why we're here.

That's something you do a lot. You participate on a lot of panels, you write editorials for the New York Times. How did you start doing that? You always seem very comfortable in public. Is that true?

[laughing] I don't know about that. That's not true. I mean, it's less a compliment for me than it is good timing of all this stuff. When we opened Blue Hill in New York, there weren't a lot of people talking about these issues. The consciousness on the part of the community, of the diners, wasn't quite there. Today it's a very different situation. So, I think I was just at the right place at the right time, believing strongly in things that ended up being important to a lot of people.

Our food system, our food chain, has been so disassociated from our understanding and our knowledge that I think it was inevitable that there was a time when people were to start asking a lot of questions. And that's happened. And so, because of this place, because of Blue Hill Farm, I'm pretty well versed in some of this stuff. I guess that makes me more of an insider.

How do you deal with that specifically as a chef?

As chefs the power rests with us in terms of our buying decisions. So the more informed you are as a chef, the better chef you're going to be in the future. To create a recipe today or into the future is going to require a lot more than just weighing your ingredients. I think that a recipe in the future is going to be about what your ingredients mean in terms of how they're being grown, who's growing them, where are they coming from, how far did they travel.

These are all questions that we don't ask. One way to look at cooking in the future is to look at a recipe in a different light, with the chef encompassing not just sort of the end product but looking at him or herself as part of a long chain. At the end of this chain, we, as chefs have quite a bit of power, to affect the beginning of the chain, to see the farmer, the transportation, whatever it is. Being at the end of the chain carries with it some responsibility. I keep repeating that; it's not really the right word: pleasure by way of responsibility. I don't know to say it. Knowing more about what you're working with not only makes you a better chef but a more informed person.

Do other chefs ever come to spend time here and see what you do?

A lot. It's funny, because when you come here and there's 50 different kinds of tomatoes growing outside the kitchen window, what I'm saying is obvious. Of course you've got to know how your food is raised. You're a chef, and you care about how things taste. You've got to know what the food you're using is eating itself, whether it's a lamb or a tomato. When you're surrounded by four walls and you've got the pressures of the day, which are immense and intense, it's hard to appreciate those things that are very important. I know that feeling. It's very easy to just call like a purveyor and get food in.

The distribution chain is very, very efficient these days. I can ironically call for a case of organic carrots from Oaxaca at midnight and get them to my door at 6:30 a.m., for about 30 percent cheaper than I can get just walking outside to get some carrots that are there, and much easier because I have to get a couple of cooks to do it with me, we have to clean them, we have to organize them, we have to weigh them. Making that phone call is quite easy. There's an efficiency to not knowing this stuff, but it's an economic efficiency. It's not an ecological efficiency, because ecological efficiency is a lot more complicated. And if you're concerned about these issues that are more important than the food you're putting on the plate, there's the answer. I don't know. That sounds a little too preachy, but it's not meant to be.

The people who work for you, are they all people who are seeking exactly what you're doing? They really believe and they want to apply these principles?

That's a great question. The cooks that end up doing the best and the ones who end up staying the longest and having the most effect and get the most out of it are the ones who are coming here for more than just the latest technological applications, of which we have many, or the latest food preparation or what not. I think they're here for more. Because it's hard work. It's a lot of hours, and this kitchen is very, very demanding.

You've got to want to be here for reasons beyond just your resume. They perform certain formal farm chores, and then there are very informal things that are going on all the time. Formal stuff happens for some people once a week for two hours, and for other people it happens sort of every day but little things like bringing compost to the pigs, or collecting eggs, washing eggs. That's the kind of stuff that's happening every day.

Obviously when you have people come here to work for you, you're not just showing them how to do your dishes. You have a much larger responsibility in terms of training them and showing what they need to do outside of the kitchen and all that. How do you do it?

I think I fall a little bit short on that one. I think I could do more. I just got through saying the ones who do the best here and are the most successful are the ones who want more. And so, how do you do that in the course of a day? In a busy day, it's very hard. It's time management that's very difficult. It's some discipline. I'm trying to get better. We do some things that I think are great, like bringing the farmers for talks with the cooks. Whenever there's a new thing that comes off the farm, we talk about it. Thursday night is pasta night for the whole community, so everybody comes together: cooks, waiters, farmers, and we talk about the week. The farmers talk about what's in the field, the educators talk about what they're doing, I talk about the restaurant, that kind of thing. So, we do a lot of little things, but sometimes I think it falls a little short. That's all.

Tell me about the technologies you use, either objects or products.

There's a lot of technology on the farm. I personally am really fascinated and a big advocate of this idea that one can be a sustainable farm but also adopt the latest and up-to-date technological applications. Innovation and technology are crucial to sustainability. I think you can be conscious of your food and promote a sustainable food culture and restaurant, but also prepare food with the most technologically advanced equipment available. And you can farm that food with the most technologically advanced machinery and applications out there, whether it be seeds, whether it be machines, whether it be innovative designs.

All of these things add to sustainability in the modern context. It's forgetting nothing from the past, but it's interpreting it in a modern context. I think that's an important way to look at it. Because if you, or your students, or the general public looks at food agriculture as something that's a throw back, that's nice. It adds a museum quality to it. But you forget about it the moment you leave here; it does nothing because it feels like the past when in fact the stuff that we're talking about needs to be a part of the future. Which is partly why the design of this restaurant keeps the old feeling of the barn, but there's upscale china, and beautiful linens, and there are things in the room that represent modernity. I like that symbolism of old and new, old world and new world. What we're talking about is that same idea in the field and in the kitchen.

Why did you become a chef?

Oh, I don't know. I graduated from school and I was earning extra money by cooking and I was just trying to figure out what I was going to do. I went out to the West Coast to bake bread, and I did terribly at baking bread. I wasn't made for that. That just sort of drove me back to the kitchen and I was still trying to figure out what to do and here I am.

What did you study in college?

Political science and English.

Is that why you are so interested in food policy?

I think so. I just put that together [laughing]. Really, I hadn't thought of that. Food is very political so it's natural that I would be interested in this. I need to call my dad on that one.

Who do you feel has influenced where you are now?

I think my grandmother influenced me, but not for actual cooking. Michel Rostang in Paris was a big one. I spent a year in his restaurant and I felt like he really took me under his wing. He was very kind to me and he set up 10 different places for me to go staging around France.

I just took the next part of the year just traveling around. He loved America. It's funny, because nobody in Paris loved America [laughing]. It was really inspiring to be around him. He is an amazing chef, and just a really neat guy. The way he walked around was very intimidating, because he's so knowledgeable and he's so good.

Is it still important to go work in France, or are other places becoming more important?

Well, there's Spain. So France seems a little bit dead. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it but I'm sort of a Francophile. I'm also a Hispanophile. I just now have gone to Spain in the last couple of years for the first time. The food is so incredibly thoughtfully done, in the places where I've been, and inspired. So there's nothing wrong with going to Spain.

But there's a food culture in France that's unlike anyplace in the world. And there's a discipline in the French kitchens that you won't find in other places. So if I were a culinary teacher instructing students on what to do with their selves after school, I would go to France. I'd try to go a lot of places, but I would start with France because of the discipline in that environment, of the quality of what you get out of the experience. That would be my take.

One thing that you do quite a bit is that you offer to cook for people, instead of having them order off the menu. How did you decide to do that?

That came out of my excitement about what was growing either at Blue Hill Farm or what was coming out of the farmers' market, or what was coming out of here. And often it was coming from the farm. I had very little of it; not a lot. And that was the kind of stuff that you can't put on the menu. So it grew into people coming in, whom I knew and whom I would cook special meals for. That's how it came to be.

And now, 50 to 60 percent, and sometimes much higher, 70 to 80 percent, of the customers here order a Farmer's Feast. They sit down and they close the menu. We do a slightly different menu for every table. Tonight, I have a couple of handfuls of beautiful watercress, and so I've got to use that, and I'll put them on a couple of menus and then they won't be back until next week. So that's where the offer to cook comes from. It's really the farm that's cooking for you. It's what the farm has produced. So it's basically saying this is what is at its height right now. It's a great way to experience the best we have.

What are some of your future projects? Are you working on a book, on more Blue Hills?

No more Blue Hills. We're working on Blue Hill Farm milk and Blue Hill Farm cheese. I'm really excited about that. And we're building out this hay barn here, which never got built out, across the way. It's going to be a conference center and a catering hall.

Do you ever think you'll become even more of an activist?

No, I don't think I would. I think rather that I'd like to tell stories about what happens on the farm and how food is grown. These kind of stories that come out of everything that's going on here are very interesting, and I'm lucky to be right at the gate of this stuff. I'm right there. So I'd like to record some of that stuff. In that way, that's activism, because it creates consciousness about where our food is coming from.

It's making people more conscious about their food, so they might then go into the supermarket and think twice about buying pig there versus at the farmers' market. I like this idea of telling stories about what's happening around the farm. That would then create more of this consciousness. So yes, quiet activism.

How do you create a dish? How do you construct whatever ends up on the table?

There's just so many ways about it – like any chef. You get a new piece of machinery, something comes in from your purveyor, or whatever it is. The best stuff we do comes out of these farm feasts, when your back is up against the wall a little bit, when you're creating dishes all over the place for people. It's a crazy kitchen.

David Bouley used to have this expression, ‘kick the ball around.' You're kicking the ball around and you're not sticking to a script. You're kicking the ball around, and things are coming out and things are happening around you and that's when things are created. There are other people who can create with a pen and a piece of paper and draw a plate. I'm just not that kind of person. You're kicking the ball around and things are happening and connections are being made. And sometimes they're awful and sometimes they're too bland. And sometimes they hit it right, so I'm learning that, too as I go on. It's a process.

Some people do find the food to be too bland.

The food definitely does not jump off the plate here. And I don't want it to — and I'm not defending this at all; I agree: a lot of times the food is a little bland and a little too straight forward or a lacks a sense of boldness. But often that boldness comes from ego. That's what I find. It's like if something jumps out at me, it says to me that the chef is trying to say, ‘How ya doin'? Here I am.' [laughing] That's what I think about all the time in the kitchen. Is someone perceiving this [dish] to be a manipulation? Because if they are, it's probably a bad dish. If it's got your signature on it, it's a bad dish.

Is that so?

I think so. And that's not just because I want the farm to say everything. I mean, that gets a little pretentious. But if the eating experience is about people recognizing the artistry in it up front in your face, it's not art and it's not good food. That's my feeling.

But what you're doing here has your signature on it also. With restraint, perhaps, but it has your signature.

True, but right, with restraint. There's nothing wrong with putting your signature on things, but it's under the radar. I'd like to think it's under the radar. That's an important distinction and sometimes it gets lost. But it's finding that balance… I think every chef struggles with that to a certain degree. If my ego gets in the way, I always know it's going to be a bad dish. I always know it. That's been my experience.

Are there times when that happened?

Oh, yeah. Because I'm a guy. I have my ego issues [laughing]. I have things that get me excited and I feel show-offy. It's an honesty about that that I feel maybe has been part of my maturation. But an honesty that that's not the kind of food that I'm preparing. Some people can get away with it and do it well. But at any rate, I know that's not the chef that I want to be.

Are you the chef you want to be?

Am I the chef I want to be? In some ways, yes, of course. I have done great things, but as I get more involved in the agriculture part element, more and more, I feel like what I'm doing is pretentious. It's to spend time with the lambs: they're born and you spend all this time feeding them and moving them, and then they're slaughtered, and the fact that you would trim the loin excessively so that you can wrap it, just seems so fucking crazy as I get older. That idea that trimming what you've worked with a long time and sort of wasting it and manipulating it just feels so silly, at this point.

My food is becoming much less complex and much less manipulated than even before. And I don't think that I manipulate food that much, but I think even less is probably where my future is. So am I the chef that I want to be? No. Sometimes I feel okay about myself but other, most times, it's like what the hell am I doing? I think that's a function of being closer and closer to the farm and not wanting to screw it up.

And one way to not screw it up is to just let it be itself. I'm not talking about simplicity either, because I hate people who say that. You're coming here and you're paying good money; you want me to do something. I'm fine with that. It's just a question of how much and to what extent. And there are just so many issues that one deals with as a chef to try and create good food, but there's a lot to think about. So the short answer to the question is no, I'm not the chef that I would like to be but come back to me in 10 years and I'll feel like I have a shot at it.

You'll still be here in 10 years?

You have to ask Mr. Rockefeller that [laughing]. Will I still be here in ten years? Yeah. What I've seen about the farm is what I'd like to see about ourselves: that the farm is getting much, much better. I'll tell you specifically how. The varieties that we're choosing for this ecology make more sense as we become smarter. They're tastier. They're more abundant so that we can do more with them. On the animal side, the breeds that we're choosing for this ecology are smarter.

The grass — because it's a grass-based system — is much better, much improved because of our ecological methods. Because the grass is improving, the animals that are eating the grass are improving, so this whole circle is getting stronger. And it's making me look like a better chef. Just seeing it over four years: I'm looking out at that field out in the back here. That's a field that was in serious trouble when we got here. And just because of the rotation that we've been involved with, it's enabled the number of animals on that grass go up by like 160 percent. On this area, which is about eight or nine acres, we had 400 egg laying hens when we first got here. Today, we have 1,190. That's 700 new birds on the same number of acres with the same number of employees.

So how did that happen? It happened because of grass management, because the ecology of the place improved, and with it came better economy and better flavor because the eggs they're laying are better, because the grass they're eating is better, because the insects that are in the manure and that they're picking apart are more of them and they're larger and they're better. So all of a sudden, all of the diets improved, the grass improved, and we serve a better egg. So what does it look like in ten years? I think the farm is going to look even better, and because of that I'm going to look better.

Sustainability Interview Guest Chefs Culinary Arts

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Interview with Colin and Renée Alevras

suzanne.zuppello — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 21:17:51 +0000

Interview with Colin and Renée Alevras suzanne.zuppello Wed, 03/28/2018 - 17:17 July 1, 2007

By Anne E. McBride

Colin and Renée Alevras have enjoyed a cult-like following since they opened their restaurant, the Tasting Room, in 1999. Focusing on local and seasonal foods, the Tasting Room has been named one of New York's Best by Food & Wine and New York City's Zagat Survey and one of the city's Trendsetting Restaurants by Wine Spectator, with matching acclaims for Colin's culinary skills and Renée's managing talents.

After seven years with only 24 seats, they expanded to Elizabeth Street (and now have 70 seats) in 2006, keeping the original 1st Street location as a wine bar and café. They met in the ICE® work-study program, washing dishes. After graduating from the culinary program, they worked at Michelin three-star Arpège in Paris, before returning to New York and working for a variety of restaurants, seeking to gain as much culinary, management, and wine experience to open their own place. The Main Course met them at the Tasting Room recently.

What prompted you to take the plunge and finally expand?

Renée Alevras: It was lovely on the small scale. But there is no area for growth either in financial terms of or in terms of staff. You can only support so many people. We had been looking at spaces for years; we just never found the right space. This location, although it's called a different neighborhood, is only four blocks away. Having the ability to go back and forth between the two places with a shopping cart full of fresh-baked goods is very easy for us. It's also where we live, where our children go to school. It's all very close. It allows us to just still live our lives, and be at work every day and make it reasonable.

How have your roles changed, with the expansion?

RA: As the owner and the face and whoever I am, my key roles have come down to mostly parties and public relations, although I still do the business end of things. I have somebody else doing the day-to-day operations and managing the staff and the floor. Colin is still the chef, and still cooking every night and putting together his kitchen crew. But again, whereas he used to do all the buying of all the food, and take care of all of the operations, he also has halted that as well. We have a wine director. Now that we're overseeing two locations, we went from having a staff of 14 to having a staff of 45, basically. So we have a much greater payroll, and a greater support system.

What major changes have you had to make, other than, obviously, the staff?

RA: We're working with the farmers also, on purchasing at a larger scale, finding the need for that many more fresh items from the farmers' market, from our cheesemonger, from all of that. I think they've been able to scale up with us, and it's been quite good. But you also have to be a little bit more creative with ordering just in terms of filling the walk-in here. We still do shop daily for ingredients, but at a scale like this you have to buy in a larger scale. But that is definitely a challenge. We can't just do it on a shopping basket's worth of food for our next service.

Colin Alevras: Just in quantity terms. It's always a little tricky. But not incredibly. It actually makes it a little easier to buy in larger quantities. Since we have good relationships with a lot of farmers, trying to give them more money isn't really going to upset anybody. It's always a challenge because as different restaurants grow, and guys leave, there is always a fair amount of competition for certain people's products.

RA: If you don't get there early enough in the day, that case of whatever it is is gone by somebody else.

CA: And there is definitely a pecking order.

RA: In who saves what for who?

CA: With different farmers, yes.

RA: And who has a good relationship?

CA: Who gets first choice and who doesn't. You'll see prolonged arguments starting over...

RA: Those are my ramps...

CA: Where did you get those from? Really?

RA: ...He said he didn't have any.

Have the changes affected the type of diners who eat here?

RA: We have always been really lucky with having regular guests coming back. On any given night, half of our guests have been here before. I know at this scale we get a lot more first-time guests because you don't necessarily have to plan a month in advance because there are more seats to be had. And so people aren't afraid about making a last-minute reservation a few days in advance instead of a few weeks in advance. It gives us a lot more flexibility in terms of people that don't like to plan or don't have, you know, don't have specific events that they are trying to plan for. So that's nice, too.

How did you prepare for such an expansion?

RA: You don't. You just do it. I don't know. Every time I fit one more thing into my 24 hours, I don't know where I'm going to get any more time to do it. You think you've maxed out everything you can do, and then all of the sudden you have to put something else in. What gives most is sleep. I'm down to about three to six hours a night of sleep. So, that's it.

For anyone who is considering opening a restaurant, how do you know that a space is the right one for you?

RA: There are certain rules that you should definitely follow. And then the rest is just gut reaction. You want to make sure you have a good lease, and a landlord that you can stand having a relationship with, that the building is in good condition, and that you like the neighborhood and your neighbors. Having a good relationship with the people on your block is very important. Set that up from the beginning. For example, when we found the space, it was outfitted like a Tex-Mex cantina, which was not our style. There were a ton of cactus plants here, so Colin gave them to our neighbors who collected cactus. You make sure you're not leaving your garbage, or that you're not making noise, or that your construction people are polite and don't block the sidewalk, and just making a good spirit.

Let the community board know who you are. We were very lucky, because the First Street café is in Community Board 3, which is the toughest community board in the city as far as we can tell. And we've always had a healthy and great relationship with them. They wrote us a very glowing letter to Community Board 2, where this is, to support our application for the liquor license, which in this city is very important right now.

So the lease and landlord, community board. And then with the space, making sure that it has the elements you need. Do you want to have a full liquor license? Do you have room for a bar area? Do you have some room for the wine cellars there? Or is the structure in place? Can you get a space that already has the ventilation system built? Because unless you realize that it costs $1,000 a foot to put in a new stack, you don't realize how big an expense you are saving yourself by buying it as part of the key money package in the beginning instead of waiting for it to be built, or waiting for permits. People find spaces and then they realize they can't run gas, and then they have to do electric. That's what happened with us at the First Street location. Luckily Colin is creative enough to have dealt with that space. But that could be hard for somebody.

CA: How much does it cost, is really all it comes down to. Can you put enough people in here to pay the rent? And how much money is it going to cost you to make it a restaurant?

How do you find investors?

CA: Beg.

RA: Our investors had come from the beginning, people that were interested in wine, that we met through wine and food events. At this point we've gotten a larger group of investors that have come from regular guests, people that were already in the investment pool that put in more money, and friends and family. I don't necessarily recommend it for everybody, because it's a very intense thing to have your family invest in your restaurant. But that's where it comes from.

We know how corporations deal with investors. But how do small business owners do it? Do you report to them? Do you have a meeting of all your investors?

CA: We try to issue quarterly reports of what's going on. A lot of our people are sort of spread out around the world. So it's not necessarily practical to get them all together in one place at one time.

RA: E-mail correspondence is very easy, and people are used to that now. Quarterly reports, and keeping them posted on how things are going and what you're looking at doing next, etc.

As a chef, you obviously have now a lot more people to train and have them execute your philosophy. How do you do it?

CA: As a matter of fact, it's hard. Every once in a while, you find somebody that gets it, gets it right away and are able to do stuff, and you feel confident that they are able to. And then there are people you have to work with for a long time to get them to the point where you trust that they're actually going to do it right. You have to look at people and go "Did you taste that? Did you taste it? You didn't taste it. Taste it. Taste it again. Did you taste that one? Did you taste that one? Did you taste that?" Just getting people to do that, and knowing they will, takes a while. While other people just automatically do it.

We have a sort of larger repertoire of techniques and things that happen because we have such a changing menu that people need to be able to make certain judgment calls sort of spontaneously throughout a service. That's the hardest thing to get people to do. It's easy to make somebody make something, the same thing, over and over and over again. But we don't do that. So that is where the challenge is.

So do you look for a different type of cook than you would in another type of restaurant?

CA: Yes. I need people who are quieter and smarter rather than real aggressive. It's not about volume. People still have to be able to work fast. But the hardest thing is just getting people who have the skills, who can actually get the work done. Because, no matter what, even if it's thoughtful work, it's still mind-bogglingly boring repetition, and constant pressure. Sometimes people come here and they think it's going to be easier because it's sort of calm in the kitchen. But it's calm because you need to focus on work. You get good at this. When you are good at this, you can do something else. To me, it's all the same thing whether you're picking herbs or gutting fish. It's all cooking. So either you get that it's all cooking, and it all requires the same attention to detail, or you're not a particularly good cook.

What made you go to cooking school?

CA: I went because I ran out of money for regular school, or university. I had no money, and I had been working as a carpenter and a contractor for a long time, and didn't want to do that anymore. It appealed to me as a trade.

RA: And something that you could do as you grew older. You said that.

CA: Yes. You could imagine getting old and doing it still, you could theoretically do it anywhere in the world. By the time I got to school, I had never actually been in a restaurant kitchen. I had no idea. I was like, heck, this is cool.

RA: But by the middle of the academic year we were both externing in a restaurant, and then we were offered jobs.

You met in culinary school, correct?

RA: Yes. We were both work study students, and we were washing dishes in the pantry up at 92nd Street [ICE®'s original location]. That's where we were. And I loved cooking, and I cooked for four years and then went to the front of the house because I really enjoy the dining room aspect of it. And also it was being in a relationship with Colin and wanting to do a place of our own, it was better to have the balance where we both had separate jobs, not both of us in the kitchen. So in order to put together the experience to open the restaurant, we both filled in our bits of knowledge that we needed, whether it was management or wine or running the dining room or running the kitchen, and we both sort of fleshed it out.

Had you mapped from early on that this was your end goal?

RA: In '96 we went to Paris to stage at Arpège. That summer, we wrote a business plan for our restaurant. And then the next year we got married, and really started putting things sort of rolling. But we didn't find this space and the investors until '99. It was quite a few years of work, and writing the business plan and learning about wine and eating and trying and exposing ourselves, and taking business classes.

CA: The idea behind it was just that we're already working as many hours as we could work for other people, so we may as well try. Because it's not going to get any easier.

Have you ever thought of having your own farm?

CA: Yes. But it's not appropriate. It would be nice to have a farm. For a restaurant this size, you'd need a fairly sizeable farm. It would probably be a couple hundred acres. If we buy from 20 farmers that have about 40 acres each, that's 800, 1000 acres a week that we're culling from. If you eliminated all the choice, then again instead of being a regional restaurant you're a one-farm restaurant. So if you've got a particular crop failure, or your soil isn't good for a particular thing, it's not that it wouldn't be interesting, and there would be a lot of neat stuff you could do. But I'd rather spend my time developing those relationships with other farmers.

What do you serve in the winter?

CA: Oh, no, no, no. This [late March] is the worst time. In winter, you still have all the storage crops. Now there is nothing.

So what's on the menu tonight?

CA: You buy whatever you can. And this week, I actually had to order some stuff from produce companies, because there is nothing. There is absolutely nothing there.

How do you deal with those types of compromises?

CA: Well, my thought is, it's modern air travel and farming practices in other places. It's not that there isn't good produce out there. I just don't think it's as good as, essentially, local fresh food. I'm probably more likely to go a little more exotic and just get things that are a little more interesting, like white asparagus and meyer lemons if I'm going to have to buy something. I'm not going to buy crappy carrots from Canada, or parsnips that are six months old, but from somewhere else. I'll buy nicer things.

How do you remain relevant, as a chef, as a restaurant that people still think is doing interesting things?

CA: For us, it's just that we're always changing. And we try to maintain a certain standard. We have a reputation for doing, you know, better purchasing and using better ingredients. And so, that is how we are able to maintain our relevance in that way.

How has the New York dining scene changed, since you first opened?

CA: I think there is more younger people interested in food, certainly, and in fine dining. The demographic has shifted to a lower age. You can have a fairly expensive restaurant that's not marketed to the over-40 crowd. People are definitely a little more adventurous, a little more aware of things like the farmers' market, and the idea of what are luxury foods? I think it's changed because luxury foods are not necessarily all truffles. There are other things that have perceived value in their rarity or their sheer quality.

Guest Chefs Culinary Arts Interview

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Interview with Chef Thomas Keller

suzanne.zuppello — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 20:27:41 +0000

Interview with Chef Thomas Keller suzanne.zuppello Wed, 03/28/2018 - 16:27 An ICE Exclusive May 1, 2016

By Anne E. McBride

From three Michelin stars for Per Se in New York and five Mobil stars for the French Laundry in Yountville to multiple James Beard awards for himself, his restaurants, and his cookbooks, there isn’t an industry award that Chef Thomas Keller hasn’t received. Both restaurants have been named among the ten best in the world and best in America, while his critically acclaimed Bouchon in Yountville and Las Vegas offer a more casual experience with the same standards of excellence.

Chef Keller began his career in the kitchen of the Palm Beach club managed by his mother, before traveling to France and working at Guy Savoy and Taillevent, among other similarly lauded places. In the late 1980s he opened Rakel in New York, but left for California a few years later. He found renewed success when opening the French Laundry in 1994, and hasn’t lost it since. The Main Course caught up with him at Per Se a couple of weeks before the opening of Bouchon Bakery in New York, his latest project.

How do you deal with being a bi-coastal, almost tri-coastal, chef?

You just get on an airplane [laughs]. I think the best way to deal with it is to really give up day-to-day control to people who have the same desires, the same ambitions, the same goals, who have embraced your philosophy and extended that beyond yourself, who understand the culture that we're trying to establish.

This is really how you do it. As much as chefs are kind of control addicts, because I think we are, and that's kind of in our nature, to learn to give that up is a difficult thing. But if you're really going to achieve a larger impact than a single restaurant, which, today, seems to be the direction that our societies take us to, having more than one restaurant is part of the evolution of a chef.

Is it more of an external expectation than something that you impose on yourself?

No, the opportunities are there externally. But the expectations are certainly real. You have to be able to analyze those opportunities and look within yourself, and around you, and see if you can accept those opportunities, number one, and then, if you can give those opportunities to other people.

I think that's really a wonderful thing to be able to do, is say ‘here's a restaurant in New York City, ladies and gentlemen. We have this opportunity to do it. We're going to take the opportunity, but it's really going to be your restaurant. You're going to run it. You're going to be part of that process.’ That is just really the thing to do.

Are the chefs de cuisine who work with you in these situations able to have their imprints on the different restaurants, or are they doing your cuisine?

Of course [they have their own imprints], very much so. We have to separate that. When you're talking about Per Se and French Laundry, which is really a personality cuisine, based on Thomas Keller's philosophy, there's a lot of flexibility in that, a lot of tolerance in that, as it relates to what they're allowed to do, as long as they're working within the philosophy of Thomas Keller.

How do you define that philosophy?

It's a collaboration. That philosophy began within me at the French Laundry. Well, not just the French Laundry, but certainly became more apparent there. The more success we had, the more the philosophy became apparent, and easier to track, which meant it was easier to teach, and for people to understand. It became part of the evolution of that philosophy.

How long do people typically work for you before you put them in charge?

There's no typical time period. It just depends on the quality of their work.

You could have someone as a chef de cuisine who's been with you for a year or less?

I don't say that. There's no really typical time that someone is with me to become chef de cuisine, because we don't plan things out and say, ‘okay, you're going to be a chef de cuisine in five years from now, and this is where you're going to go.’ It's not that easy, for many reasons. We don't really know what our opportunities are going to be. We're exploring them all the time. They're coming to us all the time. It's not something that you want to have mechanized, if you will, especially at this level.

A Bouchon Bakery, those are certainly different kinds of situations, where you can kind of start to apply timeframes, to say, ‘let's open a bouchon every two or three years,’ and starting to find your second, third generation chefs within your framework that you have today, to start to train them. And that's something we're doing, planning. We want to open a Bouchon in the next two years, possibly, in Los Angeles, for example, but we have a sous chef now who's been with us for five years who would really qualify to be a chef de cuisine at a Bouchon.

So, what do we need to do to for him to make sure that he has the quality that we need for him to be a chef de cuisine? He has the qualities of cooking. He understands our food. He understands the parameters. He understands the concept and the philosophy of Bouchon. Then, it gets to management, and financials, and human resources, and all these other elements that really are very, very important for a chef to understand.

Are people fighting to work for you?

I don't know. I don't think that people fight to work for you. What's happening today in the hospitality industry is really kind of scary, because the hospitality industry is exploding. It's just extraordinary. I think true hospitality comes from within. I think that you are almost born with the hospitality gene in you. You want to make people happy. As many people would want to be in the hospitality service industry, they're not really cut out for it, sometimes. Therefore, they don’t really follow through with that genuine kind of experience.

Unfortunately, the great hospitality people today are becoming fewer and fewer, but not because they're actually becoming fewer in numbers. They're just becoming fewer in the percentage of how many restaurants, or how many hotels, or how many service, how many hospitality outlets are opening today. It's just extraordinary, so there’s far more competition for employees. French Laundry and Per Se, it's a huge commitment.

What we do here really extends out to life itself. You have good habits because you have good habits. You don't have good habits only at work. You have respect because you have respect. You don't just have respect at work. You're responsible because you're responsible. What you learn here with us, you should be able to extend out to your life, and therefore become more successful at what you're doing.

Is that pressure hard for some people?

Yes. Some people just want to go to work and go home.
One article, when you opened the French Laundry, said that the only negative part of your restaurant is that your prix fixe made it a special event dinner.

Do you think that's still true today?

I think that's true with any restaurant, when you start talking about the amount of expense, that it becomes a special occasion restaurant. Certainly, the style of restaurants of Per Se and French Laundry's caliber is one that is special occasion. We want to give somebody an experience, and this is what we feel the experience should be. That in itself is defined as a special occasion or special experience. I think that fine dining should be something special.

When you left New York, close to 15 years ago, did you always have in mind to come back?

No. But if I was going to do another fine dining restaurant the choices for me were far and few between. I'm not talking because we didn't have opportunities, I'm talking about the choices I would make. And New York would have been my first choice, firmly was because of the relationship and the history that I had here, and being here for 10 years. I grew up in my career for a portion of it. A lot of my colleagues lived here, a lot of my friends lived here. I had alliances with press here. I had a lot of resources in New York. So, it was an easy decision.

How did you decide when you opened the French Laundry to go for that concept over something more casual?

The decision was made for me because that's what the restaurant’s format was. It was a prix fixe menu. They didn't offer any choices in their prix fixe menu. It was one menu. It was like Chez Panisse. Sally and Don Schmitt, who opened French Laundry, opened it about the same time that Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse, and it was just about ‘come to my house and have dinner. This is what we're cooking tonight.’ They offered a four-course menu at that time, and when we first opened, we offered a four-course menu, and then we added a five-course menu to it. And it just evolved from there, slowly but surely, then we eliminated the four-course menu, and we added a nine-course menu. We added a vegetable menu. The process of evolution. Then we changed the five courses to seven courses. So, little by little, it evolved to what it is today.

Is that the best way to experience your cuisine?

I think it’s the best way to experience anybody's cuisine who's in this group that I'm in, if you will, and I don't say that in an arrogant way, because I don't know [laughs]. I mean, the idea of writing a menu for me, now, is becoming obsolete.

But would you be able to switch to a non-menu format?

I hope so. That's my direction. If you come in tonight, you should have enough confidence in this restaurant, in this staff, in the chefs in this restaurant, and their ability to procure the best ingredients, and say, ‘okay, the chef is cooking for you tonight.’ You would say, ‘fine.’

And you don't think people trust you?

I think people have become accustomed to having way too many choices in our society and our cultures. It becomes confusing. Dining's about experiencing the person you're with and having a good time, and having really good food in a really wonderful, environment, with great wines, and service in the correct way. I feel most comfortable, and this is from my experience, going to my colleagues’ restaurants, and saying, ‘Daniel, just make whatever you want,’ because I know that you're going to do something great. And certainly, he does.

So when I start to think about this, this is very interesting, because I go to these restaurants. I don't order a thing. The wine comes. The food comes. I can spend time with the person I'm with. I enjoy the food. I don't really have the expectations that I have about what I'm ordering. To me, that's extraordinary. And that's the way it used to be. The original restaurants didn't have menus. You'd go in and they would feed you.

But as things evolved, people felt that they had to have choices. You look at wine lists today. Why do you have to have 2,000 choices on the wine list? To really look at the wine list, and study the wine list, in a way to be able to make a choice, you spend half an hour or 45 minutes. And what is your guest doing while you're looking at the wine list? You and I are out to dinner, and I'm going to spend 45 minutes with the wine list, and you're going to sit there and look at me? You're going to be kind of upset, no?

Probably!

Right [laughs]. So I'm going to say, ‘we'd like some really nice wine. Maybe a Pinot Noir, from California, or from France, and I want to spend around 300 dollars tonight on a bottle.’ The sommelier comes back with two choices. Okay, because I trust the sommelier. That's his job. He should know his wines in his wine cellar.

I think that a lot of people just want to be in control of what they're eating.

But what is the definition of pure luxury? Not to be in control. To go into an environment, and trust the environment, and just enjoy it. When I go on vacation, I don't want to go to a place where I have to have choices. I want to go to a place where everything is taken care of. I don't have to ask for something.

How big is your wine list here at Per Se?

Too big. It's ridiculous. I'm talking to my sommeliers about that. But sommeliers are saying ‘we need to have more wines, more wines.’ Forgive the phrase, but it becomes like a pissing contest. Who can have the bigger wine list.

But you asked about directions of the menus. Hopefully we’ll get to [abolish menus]. Like next door, at Masa. There’s no menu. You can go in there, and you have one of the most extraordinary meals of your life. Did you need to choose anything? No. He did it all for you. And in many ways, it’s such a relief, having that part done for you at this kind of restaurant.

How far are you from that?

I don’t know. Maybe a year or two.

Would you want to open a third fine dining restaurant?

I don't know. It really depends on not so much me as much as my staff, and their desires to do that. One thing I realized in opening this restaurant is that I didn't need to open it. My point is that I had already done one. I had done the French Laundry. And that was exciting and it still is very exciting and it was a challenge personally for me. This one, when we looked at the opportunity, it was very challenging and very exciting for me as well, but once it was done, I said, ‘that was wonderful. But I already did that once.’ So do I really need to continue to do it for myself? No. I've satisfied my desire to do something. So then, do we have opportunities to do another fine dining? Yes, we do. Where we would do it? I don't know. Who would do it is the bigger question.

My staff is certainly younger than I am. Some of them have never opened this kind of restaurant, so for them, it would be their first time. With my support, my knowledge and our resources, we could make it easier, because of our experience. But I don't personally need to open another restaurant. I don't have an ego that continuously needs to be fed with press. The financial rewards, I don't need that enough. Not to say that I'm rich but I also realize that no matter how much money I have, I still have a modest lifestyle. I'm not an extravagant person.

Would you have time for a more extravagant lifestyle anyway?

Right… My dream, at one point in my life, was to buy a nice sports car. Wow. Then I finally bought a nice sports car last year, but it sits in the garage. You kind of want to have the lifestyle that goes with it, you know, the commercials that you see. But you realize it's just not you. That's not you.

What new challenges do you have?

I'm challenged right now with trying to maintain my health, making sure that I'm working out, exercising, and making sure that I'm eating correctly, doing those kinds of things. And at the same time, trying to have an impact on my staff in a positive way, give them a real strong foundation for them to grow from and have some security in their jobs. And to have opportunities to go forward. If I can do that, that's kind of what I see as having an impact.

Having an impact on people is important to me. Leaving a legacy is important to me. So those are the two things that I'm trying to work on now as well as thinking about myself for a little bit. When I was in my late 20s, 30s and 40s, it was always about other people, trying to turn that around. I'm 50 now, I've done a lot of things and maybe I should start thinking about doing things for myself and making sure that I'm good to go, and, and part of that is giving up the control that I just spoke about at the beginning.

What are some of the things you'd like to do other than anything cooking-related?

I don't know. This has been a big transition for me this past year and a half, two years, opening Per Se, opening Bouchon Las Vegas, because until that point, I was in one place, and it was very much home. I didn't have to go anywhere. Walk down the street, two blocks, it was great. But since we have restaurants now outside of Yountville, we have to travel to them.

It's different for me because I'm not behind this job as much as I was before. I am part of that first generation of modern chefs. Up until our generation, you had one chef, one kitchen, one menu. Now you have our generations of chefs, you have more than one restaurant, you have more than one kitchen. Certainly, you have more than one menu, even if you only had one restaurant. Things have really changed. And there's no historical data based on well, what did the guy do last? What did that other guy do, in the last generation? So we're really establishing building blocks for the generations of chefs to come and that is a very wonderful thing to be thinking about.

So what is a modern chef?

A chef is not so much somebody who you own. Before the French Revolution, when you think about chefs and where they came from, they were always owned. The aristocrats, kings and queens and dukes, those were their chefs. After that, they took on the same kind of definition.

But the general public owned the chef. And if the chef isn't working, then I'm not going to the restaurant. Because that's my chef. And restaurants are treated a little differently than other service industries, or other entertainment industries, even differently than other entertainment venues, if you will. If you don't have a table, some people yell and scream at us. You have to have a table. You have to make room. You go to a Broadway play and they don't have a seat, you're not standing at the box office screaming at them [laughs]. It's different.

Chefs are treated differently than other people are. And I think it's time that we understand that chefs aren't necessarily in their kitchens all the time, or down in the markets buying the food all the time. It doesn't mean that they're not doing their job. It doesn't mean that they've cashed in, or sold out as some media says. It doesn't mean that it's a negative thing. I think it's an extraordinarily positive thing to be able to say that we are establishing a framework. We're establishing a foundation for culinarians, for service people, for wine people to really expand on what they do in a way that establishes exposure.

Is the change coming from the chefs themselves?

America has a very entrepreneurial kind of philosophy. You're always pushed to succeed and our culture is set up like that. So I think the modern chef is really part of the American culture. It has been exported around the world and you see that.

Do you think some chefs resent your success?

Well, envy's not a bad thing. I get envious, all my life, about what other people, what other chefs are doing. It only drives me to try and do a better job. So envy, if you look at it from a different point of view, can be a good thing. It's establishing goals by setting examples. Establish your goals and set the examples for other people to follow. My colleagues, I think that's exactly what they do. There's just this wonderful large loop that just keeps going around and around and around. It’s a spiral that continues to go up. So if someone does something that I like and then I interpret that and I do something, it just keeps going around and around. We all continue to set the standard for each other.

How do you deal with sustainability issues pertaining to caviar, or fish?

It's a good question. It's something that we're really starting to deal with right now. There is some real danger here. What’s going on with the caviar trade, since the fall of Russia, has certainly become paramount for us, and trying to find something of quality that's going to replace that is challenging. How does a chef deal with the sustainability of it? We can become part of that, but by the time it gets down to us, there have been so many other people that have had the opportunity to be responsible and step up to plate. All of a sudden, everybody looks at the chefs and say ‘okay, chefs, what are you doing?’ Well, excuse me, I have a small restaurant. Am I really supposed to be standing out there in the forefront, talking about the sustainability of food products? There are dozens of people in front of me who should have been there before.

They may not have your platform.

Governments? Come on. People look to chefs to be the policemen for the world? I'm sorry, that's not my job. Excuse me, I'm a cook. My job is to find the best products, treat them respectfully, and bring them to my guests to make them happy. You want me to be a policeman now? Well, that's not what I signed on for.

There's nothing you wouldn't serve?

We don’t serve Chilean bass just because we don't like it. But I don't think we would serve it now in light of what's going on. I think your question is, do I think it's my responsibility to make sure that the government or that the farmer or that the fisherman does things correctly? No, no, no, so we're looking for alternatives to the problem. Which really puts us now to the forefront of this, of the problems. We're going to try to find other resources for this. But right now, unfortunately, the commercial industries, whether it's the sturgeon farms in California or in Norway really haven’t got to the point where they're producing quality product.

So you probably say, we've had 40 years to do this? What the hell's going on with you guys? How come you can't get a consistent product? Sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's shitty. They have no answers for that. And what happened to the sturgeon that was in the Hudson River 100 years ago? Right here, outside our doors, they would give caviar away in front of bars so that you would go inside and have a beer. Norway, Germany, this is not something that just happened over the past decade.

This has been going on for a long, long time. The sturgeon fish has been on this planet since prehistoric times and it's been exploited for hundreds of years. It's a sad thing that now we're losing something that has such great history to it, great tradition to it, and all because of why? Because a few government, a few people, have been way too greedy, way too irresponsible. And I would hate to see that the chefs get burnt because of their notoriety. The government is now legislating what you can eat. It's a stupid thing. There's enough bad things going on in the world. Why do they want to tell us what to eat?

Do you travel and see things in other cuisines, in other countries, that might interest you?

Very little. We try to be inspired from within, rather than from without. We want to take what we know, what we do, who we are and interpret that ourselves, and be inspiring to one another, a very collaborative form. That helps maintain and grown the philosophy, rather than going out and saying oh, I saw something interesting in Japan, let's do that ourselves. Certainly, getting fresh Greek bottarga is very inspiring. You just serve it as that. It doesn’t become a component in one of your dishes.

So your dishes are basically simple.

Simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve.

How do you define your cuisine?

My food is American contemporary cuisine based on French classics.

What's the relevance of French cuisine today?

That's the most important cuisine in the world. Of course, if you went and said that in Japan or China, they would be upset. It's really the flavor profiles that the French have established that make it very important for me. I love the definition of the plates, how they are composed. In French cuisine, you would have a sauce. You would have a protein. I just like that. It doesn't always happen in cuisine.

Some people didn’t like Gordon Ramsay’s TV show Hell’s Kitchen it because it portrays the kitchen as a hostile environment, which is the antithesis of what you do.

The kitchen is violent and there's a race to what goes on there. Does it have to happen in a violent way? No. We're very respectful, but when you think about the kitchen, you think about the kitchen and the dining room. You try to define the two. Well, the dining room is luxurious and the kitchen is violent. Because you have 800 degree heat. You have knives. You have water. You have people. When you think about the power of that fire, it's very violent in a way.

But it doesn't have to be emotionally violent. And it's not. It should be very respectful and calm. But you see that perpetuation of that kind of image from the last generation, and it's easy to fall back to that. It's easy to go back to that place. I can go back to that if I want to, emotionally.

Were you ever a chef like that?

As a younger chef? I got emotional, sometimes. Overly stimulated emotionally [laughs]. But I've learned to get away from that. It doesn't mean that, every once in a while, I don't go back there. But I want, for my next generation of chefs, to have that experience less and less so that it doesn’t become a normal thing for them, so that when they become chefs, they've lost that, they’ve lost that emotional place.

Do you think that the rise of professional culinary schools is changing the way future chefs see their profession?

It's interesting because what's happening today is different than what happened before. There is a lot of conversation about the X generation, the Y generation, whatever generation it is, how their expectation of life is much different that my generation was. And the expectation is that they'll get promoted or they'll get offered jobs just because who they are.

The whole kind of thought process of, I really need to do my work and do it really well, to get promoted is kind of lost. There is a little bit of conflict. The work ethics aren't the same. And how to get back to those work ethics, lighting a fire underneath someone's behind, used to be the way to do it. It's not the way to do it anymore, but you have to have some way to get people to feel that sense of urgency that we talk about in the kitchen.

Do you have that sort of conflict here?

I can't generalize it. But work ethic is a problem sometimes.

Is there any way to teach that to somebody?

You teach by example. This is what you have to do in order to achieve the next level. This is the expectation. We're going to give you all the tools that you could possibly ask for, and in return, this is the level you have to achieve. If you're not willing to do that, we should realize that right now. Because neither one of us wants to go down that end of the road.

Is it hard to be you?

Yeah. Sometimes, I really want to be bad and do something terrible but I realize I can't do it anymore. I have the responsibility. You have to be strong enough to accept the responsibility. And strength comes with experience. So hopefully, I'll continue to be able to set the right example. But I guarantee you that I always won't. I mean, I'm a human.

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