Timothy Cooper

A Conversation with Major Food Group

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 18:16:51 +0000

A Conversation with Major Food Group suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 14:16 Always Be Learning March 29, 2018

Major Food Group is headed by the trio of Chef Rich Torrisi, Chef Mario Carbone, and business partner Jeff Zalaznick. In 2010, the two chefs created the “New York Times” three-starred Torrisi Italian Specialties in NYC’s Nolita. Within a year, they’d had partnered with Mr. Zalaznick to create a popular sandwich chain, Parm.

Over the past five years, the group has also opened the high-end Italian restaurant Carbone (in Greenwich Village and Hong Kong); Dirty French (in The Ludlow hotel on the Lower East Side); Santina (coastal Italian beneath the High Line elevated park); ZZ’s Clam Bar (raw bar and cocktails in Greenwich Village), and Sadelle’s (bagels and smoked fish in Soho).

Carbone, ZZ’s Clam Bar, and the now closed Torrisi Italian Specialties all received Michelin stars, and both Carbone and Torrisi Italian Specialties received James Beard Award nominations for Best New Restaurant in America. Some of the group’s upcoming projects include revamping the Four Seasons space into multiple restaurant concepts under one roof, as well as opening a Carbone in Las Vegas.

Mario and Rich, you met at the Culinary Institute of America. When did you first know that food was going to be part of your future, and that you might study cooking in a formal way?

Mario Carbone: I always assumed that I would find a place in the industry, somehow. I was never really interested in school; I was never really a very good student. College—no. Work with my hands—yes.

Rich Torrisi: My story is a little similar. For me, it started very early with just eating. And as I became really obsessed with eating, the more obvious it became that I should consider a career in the kitchen. So as a young teenager, I took a job in the kitchen, and then I found that I really loved the environment. By the time I was probably about 15 or 16, I knew that I was going to be a chef.

Mario Carbone: Rich and I met at school [in 1998], and we eventually became friends. Then he wound up getting a job for Daniel Boulud. I was working for Mario Batali, and then I left and took a job at Café Boulud [in 2003], which is where he was. That’s where we sort of became legitimate friends, working together. Eventually we became roommates and then, while living together in 2006 or 2007, sort of hatched this plan of how to build something of our own. Then in the last couple of days of 2009, we opened Torrisi.

Jeff, how did you get involved with these two?

Jeff Zalaznick: I met them after they opened Torrisi. I was very, very passionate about food growing up as well, but was never professionally trained. I originally was in finance, and then realized that I needed to change my life. Since I was always around food and hospitality, I started working in different capacities in hotels, and started a couple of different websites that were based around restaurants and food [AlwaysHungryNY.com, and DinePrivate.com, for booking restaurants' private dining rooms, with restaurateur Joe Bastianich]. And what I realized was I wanted to create my own restaurants, that I want to be on the creative side of it. I sold my businesses right around the time they opened Torrisi. I was focused on Italian-American food as an idea, and they were doing Italian-American food.

You know, all three of us grew up with this kind of New York parenthood, so what they were celebrating played right to a lot of my interests. Then I just started eating there, and we started getting to know each other. One thing led to another, and then we ended up all partnering up.

Jeff, what was the first venture that you were involved in?

Mario Carbone: The next one, Parm, which we opened next door. Parm was essentially created at Torrisi. So we had two very distinctive concepts under one roof. In the daytime, we were a sandwich shop; at night, we were a restaurant. So after about a year of that and both of those ideas independently going well, the space directly next to Torrisi became available. So we took it and separated the two ideas. The sandwich shop got its own restaurant and the nighttime space got its own too, and Torrisi and Parm were separate.

Jeff Zalaznick: From early on, we always talked about the importance about having a different idea that we could roll out in multiple locations, along with having a fine-dining presence. Parm was set up as that vehicle, from a business perspective.

So you planned the expansion (to the Upper West Side, Brookfield Place in Battery Park City, and Yankee Stadium) that it’s seeing today? Do you plan on expanding internationally?

Jeff Zalaznick: For us, Parm was always a thing that we felt we could replicate and that we could expand on. Right now we're working on our initial New York expansion. We’re opening in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a couple of months, and then we’re going to start looking elsewhere. No limit to where we think we can put it.

You mentioned your love of Italian food and New York–style Italian. What else did you see in each other that brought you together?

Rich Torrisi: You know, we’re all New Yorkers. We all love the same things about restaurants, about food. We were all gunning toward Italian-American food. But at that point, it didn’t really get much love in the food media and the fine-dining world. And our plan was to go huge on the New York Italian-American lifestyle. That was what united us from the beginning.

Mario Carbone: I think we’re the epitome of a team. I mean, we all fight for a common goal, but you have to have different skill sets. You can't make a team of jump shooters. Everyone has to play a role and have a different skill set.

Going back to the first restaurant: What do you think set that apart and set the tone for what was to come?

Mario Carbone: Torrisi was a very unique restaurant and it had a very strong idea, but a lot of what we did and the ways that we went about doing it were out of necessity. Through that necessity, something really amazing and unique came out of it. We had to serve this one menu every night because we had five dishes we could make, and that’s all we could make, and that became its own thing. And this deli that we were passionate about needed some revival pretty badly, so the way that we went about it—Torrisi, as a whole, was a project that we really hadn’t seen yet in the States.

Local ingredients were a big part of that.

Mario Carbone: I mean, we made Italian food without any Italian ingredients. And I think that to make that statement on our first project said a lot about who we were, that we were not born in “the boot.” We were born in New York, and we were New York Italians, and we were going to celebrate it here. Some really interesting ideas came out of forcing ourselves to abide by those rules.

After Parm, your next project was Carbone. Tell me how you went from this restaurant that was super-accessible to Carbone, which was on the higher end.

Jeff Zalaznick: Carbone is really what brought us together, initially. We all had this dream of bringing back Italian-American fine dining, both separately and together. From all of our childhoods, there was this nostalgia for these types of restaurants.

This was the type of food that we would go out to eat and spend good money on, and it was never ever that good. We loved that type of food so much that we would eat it overcooked, underseasoned, from a can, however they put it out. And the idea was, “What if we actually made this really good? What if we use the best ingredients and cook it the best way? It was really well-done renditions of this classic New York dining experience that we all love so much.

Rich Torrisi: Taking Italian-American into the fine-dining realm.

And then Carbone received a James Beard Award nomination for Best New Restaurant in America, and a Michelin star. What was that like?

Jeff Zalaznick: The biggest thing for us and Carbone was getting three stars from the “New York Times.” When we created it, that was a really big goal that we set for ourselves. And I’d say that was the biggest achievement for us. There were lots of other accolades and achievements, but the “New York Times” felt like the biggest stamp of approval.

From there, ZZ’s Clam Bar came next.

Jeff Zalaznick: We got the space as part of the deal when we took Carbone. So we had this little space that we wanted to do something special in, that evolved in time into ZZ’s Clam Bar. And that opened about six months after Carbone.

What’s the inspiration behind that restaurant’s name?

Jeff Zalaznick: “ZZ” is my nickname. “Zalaznick’s” doesn’t sound so good—it doesn’t have the same ring.

Mario Carbone: It doesn’t say “raw fish and cocktails.”

Jeff Zalaznick: ZZ's was totally not Italian. Two of our favorite things to do, for all of us, is eat raw fish and drink great cocktails. We had this very cool 10-seat restaurant, and we decided to build something that reflected those passions, which was incredible raw fish and cocktails. So it became the kind of creative hub for what became a very large cocktail program across all our restaurants, and it also really celebrates raw fish in ways you don’t normally see.

All three of us love eating sushi, so how do we do raw fish without making it sushi? The approach that we took was breaking it down into all of the different components—carpaccio, cured, ceviche, crudo—and then building flavors on top of that, combinations you really don’t see anywhere else. So it’s a fun and interesting and exciting way to have a raw-bar experience.

Then you opened Dirty French, then Santina. How do you decide at each moment, “This type of cuisine is our next phase, or this type of space is what we want to fill?”

Mario Carbone: Just feel it out.

Jeff Zalaznick: Yes, everything has to be organic in some way. Whether it’s the space that informs the concept or whether it’s the other way around, everything has a reason and a purpose. We're not dart-throwers.

Rich Torrisi: Part of the difference between me and Mario is that we cook very different styles of food, we have different types of training, so that allows us to do different styles. That dramatically expands the bandwidth of what we can do as a concept.

Talk about the decision-making process when you’re creating a new dish. Do you develop a dish together, or does one of you come up with a concept and the others give notes on it?

Mario Carbone: It can come from absolutely anywhere. When we're working on a dish, we’ll start sooner on development than, I think, anyone else. I think that's one of our secrets and one of our strengths—how many times we work over it and do it again. We’ll take nearly a year in the development of each restaurant’s menu. And we’ve done it five or six times now.

Jeff Zalaznick: We’ll eat a dish 100 times and it won’t even come close to the menu. We do a lot of development; we spend a lot of time in the creation zone and iteration, iteration, iteration, iteration. This is valuable for people to understand—that it’s just as big of a win sometimes to not put something on a menu or to not do a certain concept. That helps us a lot—a constant desire to come to the best solution for everyone. “Your idea’s better? Great. Let’s do that.”

Mario Carbone: Usually, you find a person who’s just happy it was their idea. But for us, as long as the best idea was found, that’s all we care about. We don’t care who it is, as long as it happened.

Do you have particularly memorable sources of inspiration of late, like a specific country or a restaurant or a cuisine? What inspires you?

Mario Carbone: We're revamping The Four Seasons. We're right in the middle of it right now, and it’s just a huge source of inspiration for so many different reasons. We’re going to be doing a lot of traveling with that, and we’ve done a lot of research and we’ll continue to do a lot of research. For us, the fact that it’s a New York landmark and institution—it has all the things that really get us going when it comes to being creative.

Rich Torrisi: It's going to be Continental American.

Jeff Zalaznick: I think we’re all very open to finding inspiration everywhere. Every time one of us travels, whether together or separately, we get something. Whenever we go to a new place, we get something. We’re all constantly cataloging different things that we like. We like the vibe or we like the style or we like the dish, or maybe the idea behind it.

Mario Carbone: As we grow, we become more and more diversified.

Jeff Zalaznick: We have three Italian concepts, we have three non-Italian concepts. We’re pretty balanced in that regard. The first three restaurants were Italian, so it’s definitely where our roots are, but we all do take a lot of pride in not being that one thing. Having that range is very, very important. It keeps it exciting for us.

Rich Torrisi: Because we know we can keep doing Italian and we know that we’ll be successful, but for us, it’s so boring to think to do that again. We have to do something different.

Can you also talk about Sadelle’s, your newest restaurant in New York? You partnered with Melissa Weller, former head baker at Per Se and Bouchon Bakery. How did that partnership come about?

Jeff Zalaznick: Sadelle's is a bakery and a restaurant, and obviously has a kind of a New York-Jewish heritage. Someone brought us her bagels. They were the best bagels we had ever had, and we went out to find her. None of us could really understand why it was so hard to get a great bagel in New York, so we decided to all work together to bring that to people. And that evolved into Sadelle’s. It was kind of our take on that classic Barney Greengrass, Russ & Daughters–style restaurant, done our way and brought into the current day. It followed a similar approach that we had taken to restaurants in the past, which is kind of looking back at historical places that we love and bringing them back to life in one way or another.

It seems like you guys have had hit after hit. Can you describe what might account for your success rate, given the normal success rate of restaurants?

Mario Carbone: We don’t buy into fads, we don’t follow trends. We’re not here to make—

Rich Torrisi: Small plates.

Mario Carbone: Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to do descending dots of balsamic vinegar on a plate.

Rich Torrisi: No microgreens.

Mario Carbone: When you stop cooking for prizes and you start to just do things that you love, build restaurants that you love, make people happy, and you stop caring about medals around your neck, then things start to go your way. But you have to have a strong foundation, a strong base. We all put in the years, and the product shows. But then what do you do with your experience? Do you chase the next thing that’s really popular, or do you trust in yourself that what you’re going to build is going to be the next popular thing?

What do you still want to learn? What are you still aiming for?

Mario Carbone: With every new project, if you do something different every time, if we’re not stuck to being the one-trick-pony restaurant group, then all of a sudden, you’re reading books you wouldn’t normally read; you're experiencing places in the world you wouldn’t have known about; you’re referencing new foods, styles of cuisine, time periods, regions.

We do everything ourselves. We’re picking the music and the uniforms and the plates and the china. All of that needs research, and you’re learning along the way.

Jeff Zalaznick: If you’re not always learning and you think you've figured it out, you’re wrong, and you’re not going to do that well. Anyone successful can tell you that. That's how you stay creative and stay exciting, and how you’re able to stay relevant and continue to create great products. ABL: Always Be Learning.

What else would you advise for potential culinary students who think, “I like cooking, maybe I’ve worked in a restaurant or two, but I don't know if I should be putting both feet into this industry”?

Mario Carbone: That’s the answer right there. If you’re saying that to yourself, you should stop right now.

Rich Torrisi: If you don’t love it, stop right now.

Mario Carbone: If you’re not obsessed, infatuated with this, you should stop immediately and start something else. This is not a “liking” issue.

Rich Torrisi: Even if you do love it, it takes time to be good. Things don’t happen in just a few years. It takes you a really long time to really be good at something. So you need to have patience. Nowadays, you have people who come out of cooking school and they just want to jump into the business and start this thing, start that thing. You have to learn to cook first.

Culinary Arts Restaurant Management Interview Guest Chefs

Add new comment

People

Interview with Michael White

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 17:25:17 +0000

Interview with Michael White suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 13:25 February 1, 2016

By Timothy Cooper

Michael White grew up in Beloit, Wisconsin. While studying culinary arts at Kendall College, he started his restaurant career at Spiaggia, in Chicago. He worked and studied in Italy for seven years, at restaurants including San Domenico, in Imola. After returning to the U.S., he quickly earned the executive chef position at Fiamma Osteria in New York City in 2002.

Chef White opened two restaurants in New Jersey with Ahmass Fakahany in 2007. The duo then formed the Altamarea Group and opened Marea in 2008, which received a three-star rating from The New York Times and two Michelin stars, as well as receiving the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in 2010.

The Altamarea Group next opened Osteria Morini in downtown Manhattan and Ai Fiori in midtown, which received three stars from The New York Times and a Michelin star.  In 2011, Chef White opened Al Molo in Hong Kong, followed by Nicoletta Pizzeria in New York City’s East Village in 2012. In 2013, he opened Chop Shop, his first London location, as well as his first Istanbul location, Morini—not to mention Osteria Morini in Washington, D.C., and Ristorante Morini on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Among other recent openings, the Altamarea Group launched Vaucluse, a modern French brasserie, on Park Avenue, NYC, in late 2015.

Chef White has been nominated four times for a James Beard Award for Best Chef: New York. He has released two cookbooks: Fiamma: The Essence of Contemporary Italian Cooking, and Classico e Moderno: Essential Italian Cooking.

Where did you grow up?

I’m from Wisconsin. It’s very cold, so cooking and baking was very much a pastime for me, as well for my parents. We were always in the kitchen. It can be 20 below with windchill, and obviously, there's a tremendous amount of snow in the winter. Although we were not on a farm, I did gardening and picking weeds and learning how to grow vegetables at an after-school park and during summer camp.

Also, as a young person, I didn’t eat frozen vegetables. My grandparents were from Norway, so we were always eating good food. I was a big kid; I was always hungry. So I knew that if I was going to get into the kitchen, the fastest way would be if I got passionate about it. When I got into the kitchen, you got in for sheer passion because there was nothing to pull you in, other than reading Gourmet magazine or my mother’s huge stacks of Bon Appétit issues as a kid.

You left college for Kendall College’s culinary program?

I had a football injury in college and I was prepared to say, “I'm going to be a banker.” My father was a banker. And I said, “You know what, I'm going to take my chances and think about being a cook, a chef.” In that day and age, it was not very fashionable to do that, not like it is today. But it was something that I was passionate about and wanted to do. So one semester I just said, “I'm going to go to Chicago, to Evanston, where Kendall is.” And I did my first semester and just fell in love with it from there.

Then I was working at Spiaggia, in Chicago, at the same time, so I was getting lots of information and lots of training. So I was going to school in the morning, and in the evening I was working at the restaurant, so it was the best of both worlds—having school and on-the-job training at the same time.

That was 18 months total?

Yes. Then I went away to Italy in 1993 with the idea of staying for a bit and just getting my feet wet in Europe. So I did that, and six months turned into 11 months, and then, seven years later, I came back to America, in 1999, to be a chef de cuisine at Spiaggia.

Were you expecting to stay in Europe that long?

No, not at all. But being there, and working with the products, and learning a new language, and being part of that culture are really impressionable for a kid from the Midwest. Just being in another country, learning a whole new set of rules...I mean, you’re tasting fresh ricotta and cheeses—it’s just amazing, if you’re passionate about what you do.

That was a long period of time, working in the South of France. But then I got to New York. We opened up Fiamma in 2002, and since then I’ve been in New York City, pumping right along. And now we have 17 restaurants, but prior to that I did Convivio, and L'Impero, and Alto.

Had you had a French restaurant before Vaucluse?

No. Only at Ai Fiori had I delved into a bit of the South of France, and kind of Cannes, Nice, Liguria. It’s all very much homogenized.

What had attracted you specifically to Italy and Mediterranean cooking?

Italian is the ethnic food of choice for all of us in America, cooking what you grew up with. But Italian-American is very far from what, really, Italian food is about. Something like roasted chicken with porcini mushrooms, pancetta, and cabbage is extremely Italian—although it doesn’t sound very Italian because we all have garlic butter and cheese and those kinds of things. When the Italian immigrants came to America in the 1890s, the teens, the '20s, the '30s, they came here and there was no olive oil. There was no rustic bread that had a thick crust on it that was grilled on the grill. They were using hoagie buns. You couldn’t scratch garlic on a hoagie bun, so you would put garlic powder on it. There was no olive oil, so you put on butter or margarine, but if you wanted to look like it was abbrustolito, or grilled, you'd put paprika on it.

Basically, what we eat as Italian food has nothing to do with Italian food, just because it was a bastardization of it. You could travel throughout Italy and you would never see a lemon peel in espresso; it doesn’t exist. There was no such thing as espresso in America, so they would take Folgers crystals, or Maxwell House, and they would put it in a sauté pan and toast it, but it would become bitter. So when they would make their mocha, they would put a little spritz of lemon oil on it from the zest to calm it down, the acrid qualities.

So Italian food is what we grew up with; you’re growing up with the flavor-profile taste memory of garlic and oregano and tomato—but there’s so much more to Italian cooking than that. That’s what really got me excited about it.

So after you went back to Spiaggia, you eventually moved to New York.

I was at Spiaggia in Chicago, and I always wanted to get up to New York. I had worked as a stagiaire at Daniel, back in the early '90s—that’s how I got to New York. Steve Hanson was doing an Italian restaurant on Spring and Sixth Avenue. There was no name yet, but that was Fiamma Osteria, and that’s what I did with him. I came out and did a tasting and we made a deal on the spot.

That was was February 2001. I couldn’t acquire good cooks; nobody knew who I was. It’s very difficult for all chefs that come to New York City. If you’ve never been part of the fabric of the city, we are not the warmest people when it comes to an outsider coming in.

We obviously got through it. We got three stars at Fiamma, and that’s really what set the tone for my career. I got a Michelin star there the first year the Michelin book came out. It’s been a fantastic run.

What do you credit with how your food was received right from the start? Was it your training in Italy?

Yes, but also having the sensibility to know what people need to eat, what they want to eat, to impact flavors. You can't cook the way we cook in Italy or the way one used to cook in Europe or Italy with heaviness, because New Yorkers eat out every day. And if you eat one time in a restaurant and you eat very, very heavy, you’re not apt to come back there for a couple of weeks.

So I can't do that. I have people that come to my restaurants every other day for lunch—or every day, for that matter. So the customer needs to be able to navigate a menu and not have the fear of being too full. They always want to know that they can get their service the right way, that they can get in and out.

A simple approach to Italian food is so important. You let the ingredients speak for themselves without adding so many things that don’t need to be there, as well.

Do you have any specific examples of dishes that were new at the time when you were working at Fiamma Osteria?

 Whether it would be garganelli with prosciutto and cream— something like that is now happenstance around New York City. We made the quills one by one, prosciutto, cream, truffle butter. People make risotto at home now, but in 1990, when I started at Spiaggia, nobody knew what that was. Homemakers now say, “We do a soffritto with mushrooms and onions,” because Ina Garten is on television, or someone else is on television. So what’s happened is crazy.

Could you speak a little about your foray into Hong Kong, with Al Molo?

The Altamarea Group is a brand that obviously is fixed in New York City. At the same time, our customer clientele is on the move, traveling, and it’s a global city that we live in and a global world that we live in. But there are 5,000 people that work at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, and thousands of expats that live in Hong Kong. Then there is the business traveler. There's the mainland Chinese customer that we’re trying to capture as well, because there’s 1.4 billion.

So Al Molo is in Harbour City, a shopping center with 2.5 million square feet of retail, and a quarter-million unique visitors a day. It's a destination spot to go shopping for people from mainland China and for travelers from around the world. So the ability to be in that area and to have that much exposure is something that my partner and I were really looking for, because it can lead to bigger and better things.

Why do you think you and your business partner, Ahmass Fakahany, work so well together?  What does an Egyptian-born businessman from Cairo have in common with a kid from Wisconsin?

Everything. Because we’re passionate about food, we love hotels. He wanted to be a restaurateur/hotelier, but his father encouraged him to go to business school first. Thank god he did. He was the chief financial officer and co-president of Merrill Lynch until he got into restaurants. We’ve been together since ’07, and he works with me every single day. He has a passion for food and a passion for wine.

So when both parties are in a business together and we both have the same kind of scope and process, it works well. He doesn’t cook, and I don’t do what he does. We complement each other really, really well.

I’ve always wanted to be a part of something great. Being into restaurants is a team sport and it’s not a “me, me, me, me.” People get into restaurants for so many other reasons, too: People want to hang out or they want to be cool, they want to invest money so they can hang out at the bar and impress their friends and things like that.

This is all about business. You can't say, “Oh, we’re going to make a Michelin-starred restaurant.” It’s just not like that. It’s me being years in Italy, years in Europe. Having a multimillion-dollar pressure on your shoulders to succeed, you have to really like what you’re doing. You have to have internal drive.

Would you ever host a TV show?

I turn all that stuff down. Not that I don’t like it, but I have a fiduciary responsibility to myself and my team members. We’re 1,100 strong in the company now. I compete for market share on a daily basis in New York City. People ask, “Chef, why aren’t you on TV on ‘Iron Chef’?” Because I “Iron Chef” every day, whether it’s with my lease, with my people, with the $15-an-hour wage issue. I “Iron Chef” when I sleep.

Can you talk about the differences between when you started in this business and now, when you’re an owner and you oversee 1,100 people? 

Tenfold. Before, it was The New York Times and The New York Post reviewing restaurants and that was it. The massive amount of content that needs to be filled on the web every day now is insane. It has changed completely. People have that much more ability to say things that they like, that they dislike. Before, there were just three or four outlets, right? Well, there are a gazillion now.

But when there are 275 people in this restaurant, that's because of 15 years of hard work, shaking hands, knowing the people, knowing their son, going to their bar mitzvahs, their birthday parties. It doesn’t happen overnight. And that is why I will be here 20 years from now.

Do you ever reminisce about the earlier days?

No, because I’m a working chef. I hear young people that come into the restaurant ask, “Chef, why do you work?” And I say, “This is why we got into the business.” Many chefs, they just give you a recipe and they expect you to make it and they send it back to you if it’s not right. If you don’t show somebody and lead by example, how are you going to do your job? That’s why I have 17 restaurants.

What would you say to someone who’s thinking about entering the hospitality business?

 I think one of the most important things is that they get into it knowing that there is a distinct difference between cooking socially and cooking professionally. They’re both beautiful, but they’re different things. I also think it’s really important that he or she gets into a kitchen and hangs out a little bit. I think we’d be doing people a disservice if they didn’t feel what it’s like to be inside of a kitchen in July, when it’s 90 degrees. It’s sweaty, it’s hot, people are screaming. It doesn’t bother me.

What is the difference between you making a meal in one of your restaurants versus making a meal at home? 

It's totally relaxed, totally different. Very simple Italian-packed tuna, whole wheat toast. When I'm out of the restaurant, it’s my down time. I know how to turn down a little bit. But my wife is from Italy and she’s a very good home cook, so there’s always good food at home. That’s never a problem. But I’ll cook and hang out with my daughter and my wife.

What are some traits that you think are required to succeed in this business?

 You’re standing on your feet all day, it’s hot, people are yelling. So you have to really like what you’re doing. I have worked for 25 years because I love what I do. It’s not a stress to come to work, even though we do lots of numbers and there’s lots of business.

You have to like to eat. There’s so many chefs that are involved in the process of creating, but they really don’t like to eat. That’s the old adage, “Never trust a skinny chef.” And I have people that say, “Oh, I want to be on TV.” TV and stardom and all of that is a byproduct of doing a good job, first. We’re very much committed to that, to teaching people how to do things, so when they leave here, they can go off and be somebody as well—because it’s a feather in my cap. Promoting great food, keeping it going.

Do you have a philosophy about choosing employees?

I can teach anybody how to cook, if your mind is open to learning. If you can accept constructive criticism and you have this passion, those are really the major attributes of being a chef.

Because you think it’s about you, it’s personal—but it’s about the business. It’s not about Michael White. It’s about you sitting down here, you’re having a good experience, we’re creating memories. It’s because we’re cooking great food. That’s why I want people to be in my restaurants—great service, great atmosphere.

What's next?

I don’t want to let restaurants go. Meaning that many restaurants are becoming six appetizers, a couple of mid-courses, and six entrées. Because the weather and the atmosphere we’re navigating right now is so difficult—leases; young people are going into Brooklyn; people are leaving the city because it’s too expensive to live here. But people still want to get dressed up and have a really nice time in a nice space.

I want people to still be able to taste lobster with potato puree and truffles and a beautiful sauce. I don’t want to let fine dining go by the wayside. At Marea we plate in a certain way, like an abstract plating, modern Italian, kind of as it falls. But at Vaucluse we’re still thinking very round, center of the plate, pork chop with bone. It’s very classique. When you come here to eat, you will know what I am talking about.

Guest Chefs Interview Restaurants

Add new comment

People

Meet Michael Laiskonis

suzanne.zuppello — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 16:53:54 +0000

Meet Michael Laiskonis suzanne.zuppello Thu, 03/29/2018 - 12:53 The award-winning pastry chef runs ICE's bean-to-bar chocolate lab. March 29, 2018

By Timothy Cooper

Chef Michael Laiskonis began his career as a savory chef at bakeries and restaurants in Detroit, and was named pastry chef of Tribute in 1999, helping the restaurant earn a James Beard Award by 2003. In 2004, he began what would be an eight-year tenure as the executive pastry chef at Le Bernardin in New York City, where he helped the legendary restaurant earn four stars from The New York Times, as well as three Michelin stars

He was twice named one of America's Top Ten Pastry Chefs by Pastry Art & Design, was Bon Appétit's Pastry Chef of the Year, and won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2007. He also received the coveted honor of being IACP's 2014 Culinary Professional of the Year. He has written for Gourmet, Saveur,The Atlantic and many other publications. In 2012, he became ICE’s first-ever Creative Director.

Below, Chef Laiskonis discusses ICE's bean-to-bar chocolate lab — the first of its kind in a U.S. cooking school — in the school’s new facilities at 225 Liberty Street at Brookfield Place. The chocolate lab includes all of the equipment necessary to process cocoa beans from their dried state into a final chocolate product. Some of the state-of-the-art equipment in the 550-square foot facility includes a roaster, winnower, hammer mill, cocoa butter press, and ball mill refiner, as well as a tempering unit and enrobing line. The chocolate lab will be used by career students, recreational cooks, and professionals alike, to educate the cooking community in the art and science of chocolate production.

When did you first start to conceive of an in-house bean-to-bar chocolate lab at ICE?

The original idea was simply just to have a closet for a tempering machine, and that was the initial seed. But as the idea was kicked around a little bit more, I really have to credit the senior administration for thinking, well, what if we add this artisanal food production aspect to what we’re doing at the school? It’s very forward-thinking, and the vision to have bean-to-bar capability started to flesh itself out. So it was about a year ago that I actually test-drove all of these machines down in Florida, where they’re made. Ever since, I’ve had my head in every possible chocolate-making resource I can find — visiting factories, bugging people, begging people for small samples of beans to play with and understand them better. Which led us up to last week [early August 2015], when we finally got all this stuff turned on.

Chef Michael making chocolate in the lab

The possibilities of this lab are endless. We can obviously cycle our career pastry students through this room and have a lecture on how chocolate is made. They have context. Just having this resource in the building, where people can walk by and taste and see the process, will enhance the career pastry program. I’ve been doing guest lectures for the culinary management classes; this is kind of set up as a model for an artisanal food production business plan. So I can build a lesson around the food cost, the waste aspect, the regulatory aspect, the food-safety issues. All of these things can be applied — and you can make chocolate and eat chocolate at the same time.

For recreational students, I think people are really fascinated to see how these things are made. What’s great about all this equipment is that it’s not so automated that you flip a switch and walk away. You have to feed the winnower every 90 seconds or so, or it runs out of beans. So it’s actually nice from an educational perspective that these machines do require some hands-on interaction.

Perhaps the greatest potential value is actually as continuing education for pastry chefs already in the field, to really better understand the cause and effect of the chocolate-making process. For a lot of pastry chefs, chocolate is just something they use every day. They might have loyalty to a particular brand, which could be just due to marketing; it could be what their mentor used; it could be cost. So just getting pastry chefs to better understand the cause and effect could help them realize whether they are or aren't using the right chocolate for the right application.

And then there’s all the fun stuff. I want to use this as a venue for guest lectures. Because we’re commercially neutral, I can work with anybody. I would work with a smaller artisanal producer, and I can work with the large multinational that sources cocoa all over the world. I think there are insights at both ends of the spectrum and everywhere in between; anything chocolate- and confectionery-related.

Other pastry chefs, too: Come by and we’ll make a guest-chef-edition chocolate over the course of a couple days. So [James Beard Award-winning pastry chef] Johnny Iuzzini wants to come in and make chocolate with me, we’ll make a Johnny Iuzzini chocolate. He can take a couple pounds, and then the rest, we’ll use — just to foster that sense of community.

Then there's the research and development aspect. For a long time into the future, every time I use one of these machines, I’m going to learn something new. Every time I procure a new batch of beans from a new origin, I’m going to learn something new. Is it something that no one else has ever discovered before? Probably not, but a lot of this stuff is a closely held trade secret. We can take the information that we do glean and simply make better chocolate; and also teach that in a way that the layperson and the pastry chef who’s never going to make their own chocolate can understand and utilize.

With the cocoa butter press, I could press anything. I could make pistachio oil. There’s oil in coffee beans. What’s coffee oil like? I don’t know, but I’ll find out eventually. It’s on the list. I could probably make a pretty amazing version of Nutella in this refiner, but maybe make it with black sesame instead of hazelnut. The sky is really the limit.

Do you see chocolate-making as a subject that could warrant its own diploma program at ICE?

I think it could be a two- or three-week extended course. Because it’s an expensive pursuit, I think the audience is fairly small — but that is certainly an inevitability. This would probably be geared more toward those people who are considering doing it and investing in it.

For the recreational or nonprofessional consumer, how do you think taking a class here, taking a tour, or seeing a demonstration would help?

Already, even just that little grinder going fills the room up with an amazing chocolate smell. So people are just amazed, because they’ve never been exposed to it before. I teach a class called Fundamentals of Chocolate, and it starts off with history and process and a tasting of 20 different chocolates, which is probably way too many.

No such thing.

I think just the rarity of the experience in and of itself, and being able to say, “Oh, yes, I tasted something, and I saw it through every step of the process,” is interesting.

Are there misconceptions around chocolate — how it’s made or how it’s consumed?

It’s not about so much about good and bad, but it’s just different. Yes, sure, there is great chocolate, and there’s chocolate that’s not that great—but I’m really just starting to look at what makes chocolate different from the perspective of all the possible variables that can make it different, from the bean itself to the process.

The cocoa percentage is something that people see as being qualitative, and it’s really not. It doesn’t really tell us as much as we think it does. For example: If I add a little bit of extra cocoa butter to a batch, now we’ll say I have a 72 percent chocolate. If I started with 70 percent liquor and 30 percent sugar, then add a little bit of extra cocoa butter, that cocoa butter counts in that percentage. But I could also have started with 65 percent and added 7 percent to get that 72 — and those are going to be two very different chocolates, because of the proportion of the solids that give you flavor and the fat that gives you more texture. What it really tells you is how much sugar is in it.

But there are so many variables in processing. I’ve tasted a 65 percent dark chocolate next to a 70 percent and the 70 percent tasted sweeter. So it’s quantitative to a degree; it’s certainly not qualitative. Just because it’s a higher number does not mean it’s better. So I think a lot of people still don’t understand that; but I think it’s progress that it’s on so many labels.

What chocolates do you recommend?

People often ask, “What’s your favorite brand?” I like a lot of chocolates, so it would be kind of like, I imagine, picking a favorite child. They’re just different, and sometimes you want to use things for certain applications. But I encourage people to try to taste from that analytical perspective. Try to identify flavors that we don’t necessarily associate with chocolate, but are in there.

There’s 400-plus different individual flavor compounds that make up what we consider chocolate flavor, and all of those are influenced by every step of this process. I just encourage people to taste, even if it’s an impulse buy from the supermarket checkout. Those are decent chocolates, some of them. You don’t necessarily have to pay $15 a bar. I compare it to wine tasting or any sort of tasting where you’re just really focusing, and you end up getting a greater appreciation out of it.

How did you come to be ICE's creative director, and what does a creative director do?

I was a pastry chef at Le Bernardin for eight years. I moved to New York for that job from Michigan, and there was really no good reason for me to leave. I was pretty happy and successful, and it was great being part of, by the time I left, a 25-year legacy of a restaurant. Most 25-year-old restaurants are dinosaurs. They don’t evolve, like Le Bernardin does.

So it was a great place to be a part of, but — and maybe in hindsight I could have changed this — I found I was kind of doing the same thing every day. All of the ideas, all the notebooks I’d been filling for 10 to 15 years, were full of ideas that, at the rate I was going, I wasn’t going to make much of a dent in. In hindsight, what I think I really wanted was to create a situation where no two days were exactly alike, where I would have a little bit more time outside of the two hours between lunch service and dinner service, which I worked five to six days a week.

Not everybody has the honor of having their last day announced by the New York Times, in a good way. I knew that was coming out, and the day before is when I contacted [ICE President] Rick Smilow. I think more than any other school I’ve worked with in the city and elsewhere, I’d always been doing classes here at ICE, teaching CAPS-level stuff and some professional development classes throughout the year.

I’ve been revising the pastry curriculum little by little over the last few years. I also do two guest lectures for every pastry class that goes through the program. I’ve also started to do guest lectures with the management program. Everything I do now comes back to that educational core, which is important to me.

You mean, passing knowledge down to others?

I never worked for some big mentor. I didn’t go to school myself. I’ve never liked the self-taught moniker, but okay, maybe my studies were self-directed. But if it weren’t for the generosity of other chefs putting stuff in books or letting me into their kitchen for a day or two...you have to pay that stuff forward.

Perhaps more than most savory chefs, it seems like you are intensely science- and physics-oriented.

The ironic thing is, in high school, I took minimal math and science, which I’m kind of kicking myself for now. But I think pastry chefs are hardwired to think that way, just because there’s more precision. We scale things out.

In a lot of what we do, we have to predict the future. So if you’re making a soup from start to finish, you can taste it and tweak it and adjust it, and transform it from A to B. When making a cake, I have to put things together in such a way where, sure, it’s edible, but it’s not very edible; and I have to put it in the oven, and I have to know what’s going to happen 30 minutes later when I pull it out. I can’t pull it out halfway and say, “I think I’m going to add another pinch of baking powder to it.” So there already has to be that sort of measured, precise, predictive quality. The catchphrase for that is, “The pastry chef is the mad scientist.” I try not to refer to myself as a scientist, but I try to approach what I do with the curiosity of a scientist.

When you understand the classics, you can make creative leaps. Something as simple as roasted white chocolate, or caramelized white chocolate, was basically somebody understanding: If you overheat white chocolate, and it starts to turn brown, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Intuitively it’s scorched, it’s burnt; you throw it away. But if you do it in a very controlled way, you’re doing the same thing as if you’re making a caramel, or if you’re making dulce de leche. So if you can control that, you can make white chocolate that’s actually good. But you wouldn’t make that leap unless you understood what’s going on.

Was it that understanding, the scientific approach, that attracted you to pastry?

I bounced around, back and forth, between sweet and savory, for several years. My patent answer used to be, “Well, there’s more manipulation in pastry; there’s more creativity; there’s more science.” But also, in hindsight, I think subconsciously I appreciated the autonomy that the pastry chef has. I always had a boss, but I’ve also been sort of the ruler of this domain over here in the corner. I think a lot of pastry chefs are self-starters, self-motivated. So I think that slight bit of autonomy and being a specialist within the kitchen also spoke to me, even though I might not have realized it at the time.

Are there particular ingredients or processes or cuisines that are exciting you right now?

Certainly chocolate is, in a way that it hadn’t before. This is a rabbit hole I never thought I would go down. But ice cream is something I’ve been really passionate about the last few years. I’ve been doing multiple-day classes concerning ice cream, not only here but in other parts of the country.

One project that I’m working on is consulting on a corporate level for the Chef Jose Garces, who’s based in Philadelphia. I devote three or four days a month to that project — but in that three or four days, I basically retool one of their restaurant’s pastry menus. I’ve brushed up alongside some Latin-inspired desserts in my day, but part of the reason why I took this is for that challenge of learning something new. The last one we did for Chef Garces was his Argentinian steakhouse concept. There’s one in Chicago and one in D.C. I learned a lot about Argentinian desserts, and even uncovered something that the corporate chef who went to Argentina to do the research for these restaurants had never even heard of.

So it’s that sense of discovery, first and foremost — and then it’s creating something that still hits the notes of the original, but then is also new and accessible to more people. So, yes; Latin flavors. Another thing about Argentina is that when you think South America, you immediately go tropical. But when you’re that far south, you don’t have any of that stuff. The fruits they use are stone fruits and citrus. They don’t have all the bananas, guava, etcetera. So it’s kind of interesting.

I’m sure you’re always learning, like the people who are reading this. What are some areas that you still want to know more about or haven’t even delved into?

It’s interesting, because bread baking is what kind of got me into this in the first place. I am kind of an accidental chef in that I was doing something completely different, pursuing a fine arts degree. I took some time off of school to work in a bakery, and here we are. It was the process of bread that spoke to me, but over the years, I was always in restaurants and never really had to do it. I would love to come back to bread with a, for lack of a better word, scientific perspective, to better understand bread for myself.

Again, it’s one of those things like chocolate. You could apply a lot of science to it, but then you can also apply a lot of philosophical, metaphysical, cycle-of-life, birth-and-death things. There was a great TED Talk by Peter Reinhart, where he basically uses that circle-of-life analogy — the living grain that you kill; then you bring it back to life with yeast; then you kill it again; then it gives us life. It’s just bread, but I kind of like thinking about it in that big picture.

So bread is certainly something I want to come back to. I was just at a place in San Francisco that’s known for pasta, and now I want one of those Arcobaleno pasta extruders. I’ve made pasta before, but not serious pasta. So I'm actually branching a little out of pastry. Cooking is cooking, to me. Some of it has more or less salt or sugar, but it’s all cooking.

For people who are reading this and thinking about entering cooking school or the hospitality industry in general, what should they be thinking about?

Take advantage of all the resources that a place like this offers — all the volunteer opportunities. I think it’s more difficult now, because the food culture is so huge that we’re inundated. There’s a lot of static. When I was coming up, it was books and magazines; maybe the odd rerun of "The Galloping Gourmet" or Julia Child. But back then, I devoured anything I could get my hands on. At the time, I didn’t think it was sinking in, but years later I remember references to things that I read 20 years ago.

So really immerse yourself in it, and take advantage of all the resources. Constantly remind yourself that there is an opportunity to learn something new every day, taste something new every day, read something new every day. Think of a new idea.

Get hands-on experience in the chocolate lab in ICE's Pastry & Baking Arts program.

Chocolate Guest Chefs Interview Michael Laiskonis

Add new comment

People

A Conversation with Christina Grdovic & Nilou Motamed

suzanne.zuppello — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 20:53:52 +0000

A Conversation with Christina Grdovic & Nilou Motamed suzanne.zuppello Wed, 03/28/2018 - 16:53 There’s Never Been a Better Time to Eat October 1, 2016

By Timothy Cooper

Christina Grdovic and Nilou Motamed are at the helm of "Food & Wine" magazine, as publisher and editor, respectively. The two women are taking the magazine into its next phase, with new additions like the millennial food site FWx. They joined us in conversation about their careers and what we can expect to see from them and "Food & Wine" in the future.

Christina Grdovic has been the publisher of “Food & Wine” magazine since 2007. She’s been part of the brand for nearly two decades, initiating and leading numerous marketing programs, including the magazine's partnership with the Bravo Series “Top Chef,” and its partnership with the South Beach Wine & Food Festival. Prior to her first job with the company—directing the “Food & Wine” Classic in Aspen—she worked in advertising at Kirschenbaum Bond + Partners.

In February 2016, Nilou Motamed began her new role as editor of “Food & Wine,” one of Time Inc.'s flagship brands. This task includes overseeing all of the magazine's editorial content, managing partnerships, and facilitating the Best New Chefs program and the millennial food site FWx.

Ms. Motamed was host of the restaurant review show “Reservations Required” and Travel Channel's “Travel Spies.” She was Conrad Hotels' first director of inspiration, and the editor in chief of Condé Nast's Epicurious. As the features director and senior correspondent for “Travel + Leisure,” she covered hotels, shopping, culture, and other trends in luxury travel, and shaped the magazine's restaurant coverage and the brand's annual Food & Travel issue. During this time, the magazine was nominated for eight James Beard Awards. Born in Iran and raised in Paris and New York City, Ms. Motamed studied at Binghamton University and the Sorbonne in Paris, and is fluent in four languages.

Christina, for people not in the industry, what does being a publisher mean?

Christina Grdovic: You oversee all of the sales and marketing for the magazine, for the website and for the events that we do. And the sales and marketing go hand in hand, because you create the marketing to sell the advertising.

And Nilou, how did you get into this business?

Nilou Motamed: My entrée into the food world is a weird combination of passion and happenstance. I’m from Iran, so a very different food culture but very much a culture focused on food. Then I moved to France when I was nine, and I basically learned French through a combination of going to Berlitz and watching cooking shows in France. Michel Oliver was this TV cook, and I would write down the recipes; I would simultaneously translate them into Farsi so that my mom could make the dishes for me because I was too little.

We had a Vietnamese teacher’s aide, and she would come after school to my house. She would speak to us in French and teach us how to make pho. So I fell in love with Vietnamese food. And I realized very quickly that regardless of whether I spoke the language, regardless of whether I was comfortable in a new environment, food was the thing that would immediately pull me through.

So we moved to the States and I went to high school, with cooking always in the background. After college I took my LSATs, worked at a law firm, and worked for a judge. My father is an engineer. My sister’s a lawyer. My brother’s an engineer. So of course, I was going to become something very straightforward too.

But then I figured it out somehow. I started out at this magazine called “Manhattan File,” where I was a fact-checker intern. I sat in the magazine closet all day; people would come in all day long to microwave their lunches in my space.

Fast-forward to my lucky break in 2000, when I got hired as an associate editor at “Travel + Leisure” magazine. And at that moment there was no such thing as a food editor, especially at a travel brand, so I carved that niche out for myself. From there I became the food editor and then the features director. I started the first-ever food issue of “Travel + Leisure.” From there I went on to run “Epicurious.” Then three months ago, I got lucky enough to get the dream job of editor for “Food & Wine.”

Christina: People always assume that if you’re in the food industry, you grew up cooking with your grandmother. It turns out my grandmother was a terrible cook. While my mother was a perfectly capable cook and put dinner on the table every night, it was the same dinner at five o'clock.

My father had that gallon of Gallo on the floor. And he would pick it up and fill up his glass with half water, half ice, and the gallon of wine. That was my wine experience. So I definitely didn’t know there was a food world.

What are your most exciting plans for the future of the brand?

Nilou: We have a very robust social media following, about 9 million and growing. We have a very healthy footprint in digital, both for “Food & Wine” and FWx, our millennial-focused site. Video is clearly a great opportunity for growth. I learned how to truss a chicken not from my mom but from a terrible video online. So why can’t we create a much better interaction?

I love the statistic, “There are more 20-somethings cooking now than ever before in any era previously.” So these young people are so hungry for this content, and we can deliver it to them in a much more modern way than the way that we got it.

How do candidates for the Best New Chefs come to your attention? What makes them outstanding?

Nilou: This is a program that’s been going on since before the Food Network started, before the James Beard Awards. The talents that have come out of it are basically every boldface name in our world as chefs—Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Alice Waters, Nobu Matsuhisa, Tom Colicchio….

So the way that the editors approach this is diligent. We travel all around the country, all year long. We tap into former Best New Chefs, and our correspondents around the country to give us feedback. And then we go to those destinations.

Each chef has to have been running a kitchen for five years or less. But I love the fact that these chefs are already entrepreneurs. They’re already little empire-builders. A younger chef who’s not that established can already have multiple restaurants. The guys from Contra and Wildair in New York, Fabian von Hauske and Jeremiah Stone, they already have two restaurants. And that, to me, is a testament to how sophisticated chefs have become in realizing that this is both a labor of love and a business.

Christina: If you look back on the 1988 class, those were all fine-dining restaurants. But now everything has evolved so much. Roy Choi won when he only had a food truck. He was the first winner to not have a brick-and-mortar. David Chang won when he was at Momofuku. Momofuku would not have won in 1988.

Last year we had a guy in Indianapolis [Jonathan Brooks of Milktooth] who serves breakfast and lunch, but he doesn’t serve dinner. So a restaurant that doesn’t serve dinner winning as a “Food & Wine” Best New Chef is a big deal.

Nilou: As an example, Mike Gulotta won this year, at MoPho. He’s doing a very individual take on Vietnamese food in an up-and-coming part of New Orleans. These are very singular, very passion-driven restaurants. The criteria are ephemeral.

We want every single one of these restaurants to be pioneers in whatever it is that they are passionate about. So it’s not necessarily about the décor, the vibe, the food. It’s about all of it together, and this singular person who is the driving force behind it.

Some of the Best New Chefs' venues definitely wouldn’t have been on the list at the beginning, such as a food truck.

Nilou: If we looked at the list when it first started, I think there was a model that you had to pursue in order to get Michelin recognition, in order to get “New York Times” stars or whatever it is that you thought was the paragon. You have this image of the classic way of delivering excellence.

Now the definition of excellence has expanded in a way that’s really dynamic and fun for the diner. There’s never been a better time to eat—not just in New York or in the U.S., but around the world. It’s why we’re so obsessed with food, because it’s such a fun joy ride on your palate, emotionally and culturally.

There are so many outlets for food information—photographs, media about recipes, videos about food. What is your brand’s role in today’s food culture?

Christina: We have credibility because we’ve been doing this longer than everybody else. And we provide access. We have the “Food & Wine” Classic in Aspen, but we’re also involved with 15 other events around the country and in the Caribbean. So that’s good for our advertisers, but also good for chefs and wine experts, because we have a place to bring them and showcase all the talent.

Nilou: Editorially, we're authentic in what we do. So I think there’s a real engagement with what it is that our audience is looking for because we are that audience. Our recipes are rigorously tested in our amazing test kitchen.

Because of the proliferation of food content, I think that authority is sometimes lacking. People are just trying to create the next great list and sometimes that list may not come from a place of expertise. The fact that we have the expertise, we have the authority, those are great things. But I think it’s the authenticity that we have—people have that love for our brand.

What’s exciting to you right now in terms of cuisines, countries, or trends?

Nilou: I’m very excited about Iran.

Christina: Everyone’s excited about Iran.

Nilou: We just acknowledged Alon Shaya [of modern Israeli restaurant Shaya, in New Orleans] in our Best New Restaurants platform, and I do think that Middle Eastern cuisine is having a moment. Michael Solomonov [chef-owner of modern Israeli restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia, and winner of the 2011 James Beard Award for Best Mid-Atlantic Chef] has just opened Dizengoff in New York's Chelsea Market.

Chef Solomonov told me he's literally taking the train up to New York so that he can make the bread himself, because his favorite thing to do at Zahav is making the pita. He said, “There’s nothing better for me than the idea that I touched every single piece of bread that my guests are eating.”

It’s not just about being in the kitchen anymore. It’s about being on social media, coming up with event platforms, being a businessperson. But the fact is, Chef Solomonov still wants to do the most elemental thing—he wants to make the bread. That's really why chefs go into the business. They, and we by extension, are feeding people. And that is the most intimate and most genuine thing that I think anyone can do.

What about health consciousness as a trend?

Nilou: I’m really excited about the idea of chefs' awareness of the importance of eating healthfully. It’s a business, and you can’t burn the candle at both ends the way I think some chefs did 10 years ago. They’d get off after their shifts, and they’d be drinking to excess and then just pass out. And I’m sure plenty of that still happens.

But these guys who run these businesses, they have to be able to get up in the morning and bounce back again. It’s so hard on you to be in the kitchen all day, on your feet working. It’s so physical. So they’re really thinking about how they’re feeding themselves, but also thinking about how they’re feeding their guests.

Marco Canora is an example: he started looking at brodo [bone broth], which was an outcome of him thinking about how he could be more healthy. Now bone broth has become the latest big thing. It's very pho-like, very Vietnamese. I recently asked Jacques Pépin about trends and he said, “All the trends are what we used to do.”

Christina: What’s old is new.

Nilou: Pépin said that when he was growing up in France, he started cooking when he was 13 as an apprentice. He said, “We didn’t have refrigeration. We would just go to the market that day and get whatever and cook it and eat it. And the eggs came straight from the chickens.” So I think the fact that we are coming closer to where our food source is, being organic—and the conversations around GMOs, sustainability, less waste—those are all topics that we as a brand can help elicit conversation about. And I think chefs play a big role in that. Chefs are the new rocks stars.

Christina: Except for the most part, they’re nicer.

Nilou: I think rock stars have gotten nicer too. Chefs in people’s minds are the people to emulate. We talked to Gail Simmons, who’s part of the brand and works on “Top Chef” and is an ICE graduate. And she says people come up to her now and say, “I watched ‘Top Chef’ as a kid, and that’s why I became a chef.”

Christina: Or even if they’re just cooking at home. How great is that that more people are cooking at home because they’re obsessed with Gail or “Top Chef”?

Nilou: Little kids are cooking. I love the fact that now men are cooking more than ever, which is phenomenal. Not professionally, but men cooking as the primary cook in their family, which is very exciting too.

In your observations and travels, have you seen ways that we can make good eating habits and fresh produce more accessible, especially to people who might not be able to afford fresh food every day?

Nilou: Two Best New Chefs, Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson, have opened this healthy fast-food concept called Locol. They actually met through us. And they are really keen to put these restaurants in underserved communities. They just got a 2016 Best New Restaurant from us for that. Nothing’s over $6. There are no sodas, no french fries. They’re sneaking healthy stuff into the food. So there’s a burger, but it has tofu in it too. They’ve now opened in Watts, in Oakland and in other underserved communities.

Christina: Nine years ago we were celebrating the 25th anniversary of the "Food & Wine" Classic, and we wanted to do something philanthropic. We had always worked closely with Share Our Strength and Taste of the Nation and Second Harvest, helping to raise money. But we wanted put all of our efforts in one place, so we partnered with Michel Nischan’s Wholesome Wave.

Wholesome Wave is about teaching people about sustainability and trying to get good food into underserved communities. Ultimately, if we could teach people about this and help this happen, that would help the hunger problem. For example, Wholesome Wave works to set up farmers’ markets, which helps the farmers because they have to agree to go not just to the affluent communities, but to sell in underserved communities.

What would you say to people who are thinking about going into food, hospitality, or food media? How they can develop their voice, whether it’s their culinary or written voice?

Christina: Find people whom you think are really good at what they do, but whom you also respect and want to be around. If you surround yourself with people you like and you’re proud of, everything’s going to be better.
Grant Achatz runs an unbelievable organization in Chicago, but that’s not for everybody. And Union Square Hospitality Group is spectacular. I love every single person that I come into contact with there, but that’s not for everybody.

Nilou: There’s never been a more exciting time to be an individualist in food. You have an opportunity, whether you’re going to be a chef, or in food media, or in hospitality, to deliver a message. So my advice is to be yourself, because you can’t fake it. That, to me, is very much what our brand represents.

Be proactive and over-deliver. I think that those two things have been the keys to my success.
Just because you’re in contact with somebody who’s more senior than you or more seasoned than you, don’t be cowed by that. If you have an opportunity to engage with somebody, ask questions but be smart. Don’t waste anyone’s time.

Be proactive, over-deliver, and follow your passion.

Christina: You should get into this business because you want to be a “hospitalitarian.”

Nilou: That’s a Danny Meyer word.

Christina: Be a hospitalitarian. It doesn’t mean that you won’t be famous. It doesn’t mean that you won’t make lots of money. But in my opinion, the people who are the best at this are the people who want to serve others.
It’s funny, because in the hospitality world, I think a lot of people would say, “Oh, there are so many divas.” There are some divas. But the vast majority of people are, “Let me get you a drink. Can I get you something else? How can I help you?” I don’t think there’s another industry where you would have all these people coming together to help each other, entertain each other, serve each other.

Nilou: Being present for people is the best gift you can give to anybody if you’re in hospitality. Your job is to be engaged with them and to make them feel like they’re a VIP.

They walk into your restaurant, and they’ve had a terrible day, and you are going to feed them. You’re going to take care of them. You’re going to make them feel special, and they’re going to walk out feeling better. And they’re also not going to be hungry. That’s it.

Food Media Career Paths Interview

Add new comment

People

Interview with Chef John Besh

suzanne.zuppello — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 20:22:33 +0000

Interview with Chef John Besh suzanne.zuppello Wed, 03/28/2018 - 16:22 January 1, 2009

By Timothy Cooper

Chef John Besh has long been an ambassador for the culinary culture of his native Louisiana, but perhaps never more so than since Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005. In addition to his flagship restaurant, August, which opened in 2001, he owns three, soon to be four, restaurants that each uniquely represent the best that the Crescent City has to offer.

Chef Besh won the James Beard Award for Best Chef of the Southeast in 2006 and was named one of the Best New Chefs in America by Food & Wine in 1999, while Gourmet chose August as one of America’s Top 50 Restaurants in 2006. The following year, he was the runner-up in the Food Network’s Next Iron Chef competition. The Main Course talked to him about his life and work in New Orleans.

How is life in New Orleans today?

Life today resembles life prior to Katrina, with the exception of a vast number of houses that haven't been repaired or rebuilt. Housing opportunities for our staff have become quite limited because of just that. Our restaurant has experienced a record-breaking spring in 08, just as other restaurants have experienced, which is great news.

How do you explain that?

Good question. We had a surprisingly great year, and it was better than even years prior to Katrina. There are probably several different reasons, but one is that last year is really the first year that we’ve had visitors come back into the city. That, coupled with us just really staying out there, staying active in the community, has brought us a lot of goodwill by a lot of the locals. We’ve been able to maintain a great percentage of local clientele, plus capitalizing on visitors coming into the city.

That means that there’s money right now in New Orleans for people to dine out?

Yes. New Orleans is an old city and been here for centuries and will continue to be. There are people that have the ability to dine out with some frequency. Now, it’s not a large number, but we just rely on a very small group in an effort to keep us in business. So it doesn’t require that much of them actually. A small but very vibrant local community is just perfect for us.

How has the city’s food industry changed since Katrina?

Such as life, the restaurant community in the city has evolved in many ways. We learned after the storm that we need to focus on our local clientele and not rely so heavily upon the tourist community. In many ways we've made tremendous strides in preserving our culinary heritage due to our nearly losing it. Most of us recognize the fact that, if we don't maintain our city's food culture, we'll collectively fail, so it's become an important issue.

What makes the culinary heritage of New Orleans so important?

One that it’s one of the few treasures that we have. We’re not especially known for the best educational system in the world. We have oil and gas, and we have our fisheries. But our culture is the only sustainable thing that we really have that we know if we cultivate and protect, we’ll have it for generations to come. And so it’s really important to me, to all of us who have kind of experienced Louisiana briefly that we remain committed to this culture. I think our survival solely rests on it.

There are the people who live here only because they want to. Unlike many American cities, where people are forced to live because of jobs they’ve relocated for, everybody who lives in New Orleans, especially New Orleans, pretty much does so only because of their love for it and their family attachments, their heritage. It’s important to play upon these things, and we’ve seen how vibrant a cultural economy can be. So from the perspective of economics, it’s crucial because the hospitality industry, the cultural industry — the music, the food, the festivals — was really the first industry to come back. It’s still taking years for the oil and gas to come back where it was prior to Katrina. When it comes down to it, our human element, our human assets, are the greatest things that we have.

What are some of the strides you mentioned the culinary community has made in preserving that heritage?

I think that today, if you were to look at all of the New Orleans restaurants as a whole, you would notice that a lot of them are probably a little more true to their roots than they were several years ago. If you look at the fine dining community of New Orleans in particular, you’ll notice that there’s much more of a presence of a local flavor than there ever has been before. You have a move from chefs of my generation — myself, Donald Link, Susan Spicer, John Harris — chefs like us who are out there who, like never before, are using just local products. I see much more of an act of sharing. A larger share of all that we do is kept within the community. The way that we cook is also reflected as such.

Before Katrina there were fewer uses of local ingredients?

Certainly we used local ingredients and, to a large degree, the local flavors were similar, but I don’t think as vibrant. I think they were muddled. They were tired. If anything, the hurricane became a shot in the arm for a lot of us to say, okay, this is something worth preserving, because even though I love my country and I love America and blah, blah, blah, so much of America has become too homogenized and too vanilla and too normal. I kind of cling to the fact that we have something indigenous and special.

For a lot of us, it took the hurricane just to really wake us up and say, hey, wait a second…we’ve got something real. If August was in any other city in the country, it would be a good restaurant; but how relevant would it really be? Instead it’s really important because it’s in New Orleans, and a lot of us finally realized or were waking up to the fact that we chefs today are riding on the backs of many giants who came before us for centuries in New Orleans.

It woke me to a sense of stewardship, that I play a role now in the history of New Orleans. Not that I’m all that important, but I do have a role. And that role is chef of a vibrant restaurant, in one of the most vibrant culinary communities in the country, so it is very important to make sure we preserve the good stuff and we continue to evolve those things that need evolving as well.

With a role like that, a lot of responsibilities come along.

Sure. And a lot of people would argue if that role is even valid. There are a lot of old restaurants in New Orleans that have been around for years and years doing the same thing. And they may disagree. They may think that this old way is better. What happened in New Orleans is really interesting. For 50 years, things began to slow down and kind of muddle.

We had great food and great chefs, but our passion for what we were cooking had become tired, and we became enslaved to this idea that food can never progress and food can never change. This is my recipe, and I have to cook it like it was cooked before me. And instead maybe looking at, hey, how can I reinvigorate this? I don’t want to deconstruct the gumbo; I don’t want to deconstruct the Oysters Rockefeller. Some things are too important to trivialize by just making a mockery of these dishes.

Instead, how do we create new dishes and new flavors using what we have locally and at the same time paying homage to our heritage, to the French who settled here, to the Africans who came, both free and slaves, to the Native Americans that were here, to the Italians, to the Germans, and to all these different communities that really made New Orleans interesting? There’s some responsibility that comes with it, but that’s the fun part.

How do you go about updating traditional dishes while remaining faithful to the culture, or about creating new dishes within the culture?

You have to be careful with this because we all have preconceived notions in our minds, especially those New Orleans chefs who grew up here. I’m from here, and I will forever make a gumbo like my mother’s gumbo because that is the gumbo that I know and that’s the one I think is the true gumbo. Shrimp Creole for instance, we have these beautiful tomatoes now.

Maybe things don’t need to be cooked down in this rich, heavy roux, and maybe I can add just a little bit of lemongrass or a little bit of zing or a little extra spice to these beautiful heirloom tomatoes. Maybe I don’t cook them for three days. Maybe I cook them quickly, retaining all the great flavor of this tomato, and at the same time stewing the shrimp and allowing the seafood to really speak. There are numerous ways. There are maybe more responsible ways of cooking some of the classics. But at the same time, what is the gumbo without the roux?

So it can depend on which dish you’re making or on which type of dish?

Yes. And it’s also up for interpretation. I have my own ideas, and I’m sure other chefs have theirs. But to me the interesting thing is coming from a place with culture, and with food culture in particular. I enjoy the fact that this is how my dish is created and this is how my mother did it, this is how my grandmother cooked it, and this is how I’m going to cook it. And at the same time, it’s also fun to balance that with ingenuity and maybe a modern take on local flavors here.

What are common traits and differences between your four restaurants?

All four are steeped in the great culinary traditions of Louisiana, which have been shaped by those colorful cultures that settled here. August is a contemporary French approach to our indigenous food stuffs, inflected with elements of Spanish, African, and Italian flavors that make New Orleans unique. Lüke is a New Orleans version of the Franco-Germanic brasseries that speckled the New Orleans landscape along with its rich brewery history. La Provence is our French farmhouse restaurant, which is the continuation of my mentor's dream of 40 years, and our fun and gregarious Besh Steak builds upon the our rich New Orleans steakhouse tradition.

What prompted you to become a chef?

I love making people happy! Growing up with great food, in a house of great cooks, I realized early on that food makes people happy. My upbringing was one of hunting, fishing, family, and cooking. They all went perfectly together as they still do today.

Is there a moment in your career you can identify as pivotal in deciding of the direction you took?

At a young age, 9 years old, my father became a paraplegic due to a drunk driver hitting him while bicycling. A convalescence followed for a couple of years, during which I took full advantage of cooking for him. I guess he noticed that I had a calling in life to be a chef, so he encouraged it.

Who has had the most influence on your career?

Surely to note just one person wouldn't be truthful. The fact is that I've had various mentors who influenced me in various ways that have made me the chef I am today, some I worked for and others had befriended me later in life. Chef Chris Kerageorgiou of La Provence, in Lacombe, Louisiana taught me how to love and take care of both the staff and the customer, as you can't take care of one without the other.

Chef Karl-Josef Fuchs of the Spielweg in the mountains of the Black Forest taught me to be responsible to your community in particular the farmers and what sustainable cooking is all about, Mr. Rudy Baur of the Château de Montcaud in Bagnols-sur-Cèze, in France, taught me the business of the restaurant and Chefs like Michel Richard and Daniel Boulud continue to teach me to have fun while I'm doing all the above.

How would you define your cooking philosophy?

Simply put, my food is an extension of who I am and the life journey that I’ve taken. My food is rooted in indigenous products that are prepared in a contemporary style while pay homage to our beautiful past.

So who are you?

Who am I? It’s interesting. As we grow older, we still think of ourselves as who we were ten years ago, five years ago. You don’t feel any different…I don’t. I still feel like I’m 20 years old. I still have the same outlook. We have this one life, so let’s make the most of it. I’ve had different things that have impacted me; we all have. That kind of shapes who we are. So anyway, I’m Louisiana, because I’m born and raised here, and I live here and hunt here and I fish here, and I create here, I have this big family and I’m raising my four boys to do the same and to appreciate the same.

To me it’s really important to kind of continue that. That’s who I am. I’m not thinking that I’m this cutting edge chef and this and that and I’ve got to do this and do that and I need to create things that are smoking. I don’t need to really do anything other than just be myself on a plate and be myself in the dining room because as long as I do that and as long as I still remain faithful in my heart and who I am and let my food reflect how I was raised and how I came about being trained as a chef in Germany, working in Southern France, and then coming back to New Orleans and allowing these influences to shape the way that I cook, then I’m going to be okay.

Where I cook will be from the heart, and it will be true. And so that’s kind of where I’m coming from as far as that goes. It’s just all about me trying to, in my cooking, paint a picture of my heritage and my training without being boastful. As a chef it’s all I really want to do. And then at the same time, pay homage to this location that I’m in.

Do you think you would ever be able to do what you’re doing in another part of the country?

I’ve had opportunities to go to New York, Las Vegas, Atlantic City. One, the timing wasn’t right; and, two, what I truly enjoy the most I couldn’t replicate outside of New Orleans. It just wouldn’t be the same. But I have a restaurant named Lüke, on St. Charles Avenue. There have been a lot of opportunities, a lot of people from other parts of the country who like that real casual style. I think I would do that. I’ll never make another August, because August to me is just too personal. A restaurant like this, like Daniel, like French Laundry, in places that really reflect the person, it’s impossible to take it to any other location without losing something. It’s too important to me to try to replicate it.

But Lüke would be an easier one? Is it less rooted in the place, in New Orleans?

It’s rooted in the same things, but it’s maybe a little more approachable. It would work in other places. The way that I’ve decided to grow my business is investing in the people that made it successful to begin with. In other words, I have these chefs who have been with me for years and years and years, many of them returning to New Orleans just after the storm after losing everything, just gambling on making August a great restaurant again. They want to grow and have their own restaurants one day. I would make that a possibility for them. I offer them financial support, administrative support, marketing support. That’s allowing the cook to do what a cook does best. I see myself growing through these wonderful people that have helped me grow over the years.

We’re about to open an Italian restaurant called Dominica, and in part because of my time I spent in Germany and making Deutschmarks at the time, I was very, very poor; so on the weekends I’d travel to Italy, where I’d convert the Deutschmarks to lira and I could live like an Italian on Sundays. I fell in love with the attitude and the style of just eating and relaxing on Sunday in the Italian way. I always wanted a very approachable restaurant that really exemplified just that, just simple things, artisan pastas and good pizzas. Simple foods.

When you first opened August, did you think you’d open other places?

No. I thought that just one restaurant for me would be my dream in life. But the truth is that as an artist I feel the need to create things. In a way, as a chef, automatically you must have some sort of attention deficit disorder, because it’s very hard for us just to, one, follow a recipe, and two, remain focused at all times. So we do better when we’re really, really busy. I love August, but then there’s a large segment of the population especially down here that can never afford to go to August. So I’ve always wanted in the back of my mind to create something for the common person, and that’s where Lüke comes in. We can have great food, really approachable, and relatively cheap.

That will be our model again for Dominica. It will be the Italian version of that. Then I have the steakhouse, which is across the street. I was approached by casinos to go to Las Vegas and do this and do that. Why do that, when I can have my restaurant across the street, and then I can maintain a certain level of quality because I’m there? I can oversee it, and I’m just not selling my name or selling my soul. To me that was really important. But I never in a million years thought that I would have five different restaurants. It’s been so much fun, because now it’s providing opportunities for people who may not have had that opportunity if it weren’t for me. I feel almost responsible to help. They’re not just employees — so many of them become friends and family of mine. So I’ll continue to do that. We’ll continue to grow, but I for one would like to stay really focused on what I’m doing here in New Orleans.

You focus on local ingredients — why is that important to you?

It goes hand in hand with being responsible to our guests, to our farmers and fishermen, to our economy, to our region and our culture. What would my New Orleans be without our strawberries, crawfish, shrimp, crabs, trout, creole tomatoes and satsumas?

What are some of your favorite ingredients to use?

The season dictates what my favorites are, but I'd have to say the meat of our Jumbo Blue Crabs, nothing better than that. I like to say our crab meat is to our Lake Pontchartrain what caviar is to the Black Sea.

You’ve been appearing a lot on television recently. What is your relationship with the media, and what do you get out of these appearances?

I've been blessed to have a good bit of media attention over the past several years. It certainly isn't bad for business nor is it a bad thing for our region, which had suffered such a big blow after not only the physical disaster but the major public relations blunder by our city, state, and federal governments in the slow response following Katrina. I would also say that I've got a pretty good relationship with the media as so many of us had been through this together. Each of us taking on certain roles in an effort to see that we all do our share in this recovery.

What keeps you challenged?

Balancing being a father of four boys and a husband of one wonderful wife with the everyday needs of the restaurants and the 300 employees that support them. Working with a couple of grandmothers in Parma further learning the heart and soul of Italian cooking.

What advice would you have for young chefs?

Spend the next 10 years working for three chefs that you'd like to emulate one day without any regard for pay. Dedicate this time to perfecting your craft, while developing an understanding for the business of being a chef.

Culinary Arts Guest Chefs Interview

Add new comment

People

Interview with Andrew Carmellini

suzanne.zuppello — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 20:14:16 +0000

Interview with Andrew Carmellini suzanne.zuppello Wed, 03/28/2018 - 16:14 July 1, 2010

By Timothy Cooper

Andrew Carmellini is the chef-partner of Locanda Verde, an Italian taverna in Tribeca that opened in 2009. He is also in the process of opening a yet unnamed project on Sullivan Street in SoHo and working on his second cookbook, after the success of Urban-Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories from a Life in Food (Bloomsbury, 2008).

Carmellini was executive chef of Café Boulud for six years, during which he won James Beard Awards for Rising Star Chef in 2000 and Best Chef, New York City in 2005, after being nominated three times. His following venture, A Voce, received a Beard nomination for best new restaurant in 2007 (he left in 2008), as did Locanda Verde in 2010. Other than two years spent cooking in Italy and in France, Carmellini, who is from Ohio, built his career in New York. The Main Course met him recently to talk about his experiences in the culinary world and his future projects.

What differentiates your Italian restaurant from the other ones around?

Locanda’s is very different. It’s not traditional at all, even though it’s very rooted in Italy. I’ve been to Italy probably 30 times. I lived there for a year. I’ve been to every region. There’s an Italian culture, and an Italian-American culture, and there’s living in New York.

So it’s an amalgam of all those things put together. Locanda is also fun. I like serving very high-quality food, with high-quality ingredients, that’s very good but not too serious. It is a challenge sometimes because some people who were used to the restaurants where I was before were used to serious. It’s nice to play the music I want to play, be kind of boisterous, and see everyone having a good time. And we get to serve great food.

And great cocktails.

Naren Young, our cocktail guy at Locanda Verde, is very well known in the mixology world, and he does a great job. There was a little bit of challenge in the beginning when he started, because he never really worked in an Italian restaurant before, and I want to make sure that the drinks have an Italian spirit at least—either spirit in their simplicity or spirit in their flavor profile, so it gives you a narrower box to work with.

What are some of your signature dishes?

I always hated the signature dish scenario, because usually signature dishes let you down—or at least, they’ve let me down in my experience as a diner. You hear about this dish, and then you make the reservation or you travel across the world to get it and it’s like, “This is what everyone’s talking about?” But, I’ve also learned that it’s really important to have a signature dish or have those dishes that, as much as I hate it, people grow to expect, because people say, “We’re going to Locanda Verde. What should we have? We should have the ricotta, the lamb meatballs, the roast chicken, and the lemon tart.”

And they show up and that’s what they order. Then they want to come back, and maybe they’ll try one or two other dishes, but they really want to have one of those dishes that they really loved. At Locanda, we cook seasonally. If you’re an American chef these days, if you’re any chef, you’re always going to cook with the seasons in mind. Customers don’t always understand that, so in the springtime, you’ll make a great pea ravioli and they’ll show up in November and ask, “Where the hell’s the pea ravioli?”

With the type of people who go to your restaurant, you still hear that?

Yes. The word “foodie” never really existed 10 years ago. My parents loved to eat and loved good food, but they weren’t foodies. They didn’t go to restaurants. We had a garden in the back. They didn’t like food with preservatives in them or processed food. But still, that culture, a foodie culture, realistically, accounts for maybe 20 percent of people that come to your restaurant. That’s the reality.

Your grandmother sounds like quite the foodie though. In the introduction to Urban Italian, you talk about her giving you Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire.

I’m half Italian and half Polish so I have good cooking on both sides. My Italian grandmother, who was from Friuli, lived in Miami. Essentially, they lived in the South, even though Miami’s not really “the South” but still, there’s that influence there. She would cook Italian food, but she would make black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, and other southern cooking. She would make a meringue pie with sour oranges because they had sour orange trees in the yard. So there was this American South influence, too, in her cooking, which was interesting.

What made you want to become a chef?

Like most chefs or people in the business, you have some frenetic energy inside you all the time. There was no way I was going to be an accountant or a pencil-pusher. I didn’t have enough concentration to be a lawyer and I wasn’t good enough with numbers to work in finance. Something with some kind of creative outlet was the way to go. I loved cooking when I was a kid, even when I was really small, and I used to bake a lot. I cooked my way through Betty Crocker many, many times. This is before Food Network and before any of that kind of food media. It was basically Gourmet and Jeff Smith. Some of the books I used to look at were Jacques Pépin’s La Technique and Julia Child’s. That’s how I discovered that type of things. I’m also a musician, so I was either going to go to the Berklee College of Music in Boston or CIA. I ended up going the cooking route. It probably wasn’t until just before I graduated that I really decided I was going to be a chef. I was only 19 when I graduated because I went right after high school. I had also worked in the front of the house before I went to school and I had worked in the kitchen, too. I didn’t know what the wine world was about, so school was a way to learn about the business as a whole.

If you were to graduate culinary school today, are there things that you would do differently from what you did back then?

No. I was very lucky—and determined, I guess. There are so many more choices and opportunities now than there were then. I don’t want to sound like some 70-year-old grandfather; I’m 39. I’ve been doing this for 20 years in New York now, and there are so many great restaurants here. I just got done traveling all over the country. Everywhere. From Texas barbeque to po’boys in New Orleans, you name it, we’ve eaten it. I can tell you that the best food scene in America is in New York. The best restaurants in America are in New York. Hands down. There are some great, bright spots and I love traveling around the country, but overall, the quality of cooks, the best customers, the volume of customers—New York is the best.

So, coming to New York, I would never have changed that. When I left school, I thought I was going to come to New York for a couple of years, then go to Europe for a couple of years, and then travel through Turkey, Morocco, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, China, and I’d come back, at 32 and I would have worked all over the world. I kind of got stuck in New York, even though I lived in Europe for a couple of years and I’ve traveled all through Asia, but no, there’s nothing I would have done differently. I’ve made some business mistakes before. My restaurant before Locanda Verde was a business mistake, but that was a huge learning curve, on the business end of things, so it was a valuable experience in the end. You should never be afraid to make mistakes either.

How many more restaurants do you plan on opening?

I like the creative process and the crazy energy when you open up a new restaurant. This fall will be the first time I’m actually going to run two of them, so I’m trying to do that as smartly as possible. The most important thing for me is that it has to be personal. It’s going to be a reflection of how I feel about cooking in a restaurant. We’re going to pour our heart and our soul into this thing. I have no master plan, though. I’d rather have two great places than 10 places and one is great, another one is okay, and eight are mediocre. I do a lot of consulting also, for other groups. We’ve done some work in Asia too. But right now I have one restaurant and I’m about to open up a second one and that is plenty. We’re putting our own money into this restaurant—me and my two partners there, my operating partners from Locanda Verde, Luke Ostrom and Josh Pickard. We invested in Locanda; the one on Sullivan Street is just the three of us.

What is the concept of your new restaurant?

I’m not really talking about it just yet, but it’s still developing—even though we’re building it. Not Italian. I’ll be doing more Italian restaurants, but the next couple of restaurants probably won’t be. I’m very comfortable in other cuisines also, even though I love Italian food, so it’s always been my dream to do a couple of different types of restaurants, and not really be locked down to one type of thing.

Are you worried that people are expecting a second Locanda Verde?

No. I generally try to not worry too much about what people think because my philosophy has always been if I do what I believe in, if I have conviction in what we’re cooking and what we’re trying to portray or sell, or if I’m happy generally, if I’m super proud about it and I would be happy eating here, then I feel that other people are going to be happy also. I don’t know if I’m going to do super high end ever again. I like the idea that you can come to Locanda two or three nights a week, and you can get a bowl of pasta and a salad or a quick dessert and spend 40 bucks. Or you can come with a big group of friends and do the whole menu. You can come for breakfast one day. You can come for lunch one day. It’s a neighborhood corner restaurant and that’s what I want for our place in SoHo.

You’re talking about casualness and happiness. How do you define your culinary philosophy? Are those elements essential to it?

A lot of my cooks and sous chefs were working at Café Boulud with me. It’s a lot of the same guys, which I’m super proud of. It makes it very comfortable for all of us. It’s important to have people around you whom you trust and have the same philosophy that you do. We’re not cooking any differently now than we were at Café Boulud, when we were using caviar, foie gras and truffles. We’re cooking exactly the same. Before, to put a dish together it would maybe take us seven pans. Now we’re basically using the same techniques, the same ingredients—well, maybe not the truffles, foie gras and caviar—the same level of cooking, but we’re putting it in one pan. We’re putting one or two less ingredients and it’s the same: the same care, the same way we run the kitchen, just stripped down a little bit.

How did you decide to work with the people you’ve worked with, such as Gray Kunz or Daniel Boulud?

When I got out of school, I wanted to come to New York. I ended up working at San Domenico because I had great Italian food there, and then Tony [May] sent me to Italy. That was a big reason why I went to work there and I worked there two years. After two years working with Italians, I had had it. They’re great cooks, but they drive me crazy. I like a little bit more organization. I’m definitely too OCD to work in a 100 percent Italian kitchen ever again. I knew that to be more well rounded, I needed to work for the French. I went in and staged everywhere at the time. This is in ’93. All the big French restaurants.

At that time, Lespinasse was unbelievable. It was just before it got four stars. The line there was basically Scott Bryan, Floyd Cardoz, Rocco DiSpirito. Everyone was just cooks there, but the food was incredible. It was difficult to get a job there because a lot of people wanted it, so I tried pretty hard and had to wait a little bit, but finally a position opened and I got it. I ended up working there three and a half years. I started working there because I’d never seen anything like it. I was never really exposed to the southeastern flavors that he [Gray Kunz] was using a lot of at the time. And Floyd was only a couple of years in America at that point and was just starting to assert some of his [Indian] background into the cooking.

There were a couple of amazing cooks there at the time who helped influence Gray’s cooking and brought a lot of those other flavors. It was a great experience. Then I really wanted to go to France, so I did that for a year. I worked at Arpège in Paris and a bunch of bistros and brasseries in the south. When I came back, I was supposed to work for Jean-George when he opened up in Columbus Circle, but he wasn’t opening up for another nine months or a year, even though that’s the job I wanted.

I probably was $20,000 in debt and had zero money in the bank, so I needed the work right away. Le Cirque was about to open and they didn’t have a sous chef. I wasn’t even looking for a sous chef job at the time, because I didn’t think I was ready for it, but I was so in debt that I needed to make more money than just a cook’s job. And somehow at 27 years old, I took the executive sous chef job at Le Cirque.

So, were you ready for it?

No. The cooking, yes. That was a way too big step because I was running a brigade of 50 cooks and we were closing down the old Le Cirque and opening up the new one in the New York Palace. How we got four stars there, I have no idea. Chalk it up for another learning experience. It was big balls to take that job, but, frankly, I needed the money. I thought I did it pretty well. Then I had a chance to take the chef’s job opening Café Boulud. Daniel wanted someone American there to do it.

You were there six years?

Yes. I loved it. It was nice to be 100 percent focused on the food and the cooking and not have to worry about any of the business BS.

Do you sometimes miss those days?

I was not interested in TV and cookbooks and self-promotion. Even to this day, to be honest with you, I don’t really like any of it, even though it’s very necessary. I’ve become more comfortable in it. You see some people in the business now who only want to do that. That’s their own choice, and you definitely can make good money doing only that.

I love the cooking and business part too much. I never used to go in the dining room at Café Boulud; it just wasn’t my thing really. At a certain point, I needed to do something else. I wanted to be Daniel’s chef for all his restaurants, his chef who oversaw everything. I think Daniel wanted a French guy for that, though. Which I respect him for, because he needs someone who communicates in a certain way, so I understand that. But it forced me to get my act together.

Do you think it’s possible today to reach any type of success without doing interviews and being in the dining room?

Yes. I think that the worst thing that can happen is that it’s too much about self-promotion before you make sure your food is good, which happens a lot. Or you worry too much about self-promotion when you don’t have the team around you to assist you in executing your ideas. Just because a reality TV show is going to get your face out there doesn’t mean that your restaurant is going to be full every night. I’m not saying it hurts; I’m just saying that, in the end, you have to be able to deliver your product.

What helped make you decide to do a first cookbook and now a second one?

There’s something very tactile about holding a cookbook and cooking from a cookbook. Whether that is the future or not, I’m not sure. We did a book not because I had to have a cookbook out there. It was more because I had a story to tell. It would’ve been really easy for me to do the blah-blah-blah cookbook. Urban Italian is more about stories; every recipe tells a story. It’s a very personal book. If you pick up a copy and you read it, you’ll know probably too much about me, about who I am and why I cook, what my vibe is and what my food is.

I really wanted the recipes to work at home. Gwen [Hyman], my wife, wrote Urban Italian, which was very helpful because she knows who I am. We are doing the same process for this book, too: She sits at the kitchen table and I cook. We write the recipes as I do them. They’re all done at home, because if you test the recipes in the restaurant, it’s not the same. Urban Italian’s not really a professional cookbook; it’s an instruction manual for regular people to be able to cook at home. The next book is going to be the same. I have about 70 recipes done so far. It’s not Italian and I’m really excited about the flavors in the book and the stories we tell; it’s exciting.

Among chefs or restaurants today anywhere in the world, whose cooking do you find really exciting?

I’ve been trying to draw inspiration more from what regular people eat as opposed to what the big chefs cook. I love having higher-end gastronomic experience more than anybody, but I think that my inspiration comes from what is the most real version of food as possible. That’s always what I’m looking for, which is very hard to find sometimes.

Do you think that’s a reflection of where you are in your career or a sign of the times?

I think it’s a reflection of where I am in my career. When I was younger, I was definitely more obsessed with what the great chefs of the world were doing, because they were the chefs whose techniques I was trying to learn. When I was 22, I went a couple of times to Girardet, Robuchon, Pierre Gagnaire—all the great chefs of France and Italy.

I’ve done a lot of that, I’ve been to El Bulli four times, I’ve been to all those places in Spain a bunch of times, to the Fat Duck. I don’t do that type of cooking; I appreciate it and I understand it. The greatest meal I ever cooked was not in a restaurant. It was in someone’s backyard in France. I had bought the vegetables at the vegetable market, picked up some fish down on the dock, bought a side of baby lamb at the meat market. They had this amazing, old wood-burning oven grill in their backyard, some wine that this guy’s friend brought, homemade Vin d’Orange and homemade limoncello and amazing bread from the guy down the street.

The combination of the company, the weather, the ingredients that were unbelievable—I didn’t do much to them really: I really still think that that is probably the best meal I ever cooked in my life, because everything was so pure and it was amazing. I’m always looking for terroir wherever I’m going. We might hit the high-end place as a reference, but that morning we had noodles sitting on a low crate. You have to understand local culture and local food, and that’s what I try to get influenced by.

What’s a word of advice you have for someone graduating culinary school?

Just get the most experience you can. The absolute worst thing you can do is jump around too much, because you’re just short-changing yourself. It’s really important to find a good place to work and plan on staying there, even though it might be difficult and even though certain parts of it might be tedious sometimes.

How do you pick the right restaurant from the get-go?

Food is really important, obviously. You want to work with the food you want to do, but vibe is important, too. If it’s total chaos every single day, it’s going to wear on you after a while. You want to make sure it’s clean, organized, that the energy is good, that it’s a team environment—those elements are really important, too.

Culinary Arts Guest Chefs Interview

Add new comment

People

The Irrational Optimist

ohoadmin — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 12:30:06 +0000

The Irrational Optimist ohoadmin Tue, 12/26/2017 - 07:30 An Interview with James Beard Foundation President Susan Ungaro December 26, 2017

By Timothy Cooper

In 2006, Susan Ungaro, the former editor in chief of Family Circle Magazine, became president of the James Beard Foundation (JBF), a nationally renowned nonprofit foundation and culinary arts organization dedicated to celebrating, nurturing, and honoring chefs and luminaries in the culinary industry.

Since beginning her tenure, Ms. Ungaro has been instrumental in helping the foundation thrive, tripling its annual revenue from $4 million to $12 million and erasing a previous deficit of over $1 million.

Five years ago, she launched the Taste America cross-country tour. Other forward-looking initiatives she’s established include the annual JBF Food Summit, the Leadership Awards, and the JBF Chefs Boot Camp for Policy and Change, as well as structures to recognize women in the field, such as JBF’s Women in Culinary Leadership program and the Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership program.

Among other honors, Ms. Ungaro was named one of Adweek’s 30 Most Influential People in Food and one of Irish America’s Top 50 Power Women; she also received the Hope Award from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

She has appeared on Food Network's Beat Bobby Flay, Iron Chef America, Top Chef, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and many more. Recently, we caught up with Ms. Ungaro at the James Beard Foundation’s West Village headquarters to discuss her career and her work with the nation’s most celebrated food organization.

Tell us about your start and how you came to food and hospitality.

If you look around the room, I have little elements of my past life. For example, I have a bobblehead Ronald McDonald. That's where I got my start in the food industry—working my way through college at McDonald's. I was a communications major—radio, TV, and print journalism—and when I graduated, I got my master's from William Patterson, which was then a state college, in New Jersey.

I actually started an employee newsletter for the McDonald's franchise I worked for. I was slinging hamburgers, making shakes, frying fries, managing. By the time I left, I was a shift supervisor. I knew I didn't want to stay at McDonald's, so I sent out my resume and ended up getting a job as an editorial assistant at Family Circle magazine, a big women's magazine in New York City.

I was an editorial assistant, and eventually became a senior editor—I worked my way up. I was at Family Circle for 27 years. When I was seven months pregnant with my third child, my daughter, I became editor in chief. At the same time, I got married and bought my first house, learned how to decorate. I even learned how to cook from all of the magazine's recipes and the test kitchens. But I was in charge of the reportage—the articles department—not the food or home or beauty departments.

Still, 25 percent of our editorial was food-focused. You name a chef on television or a major cookbook writer—from Bobby Flay to Emeril Lagasse to Ina Garten to Rachael Ray—and they wanted to get their recipes featured in Family Circle, because we had over 20 million readers. When I left Family Circle, I knew I didn't want to be in publishing again—I had done that for 27 years.

I loved what I did, but during that time I'd also been on the board of trustees of a few foundations. So I knew I wanted to run a foundation, but the James Beard Foundation was not on my radar at all. I was much more involved in child health, homeless families, feeding the hungry, things like that.

But in life, and in cooking, timing is everything, as they say. So when I left, one of the Family Circle’s board of trustees, Barbara Fairchild, then the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, put me in touch with JBF’s board, and I ended up coming here in April 2006.

You've led the James Beard Foundation for 11 years. Has it been what you expected when you first arrived?

No. I don't think you really understand the job until you are in it. I came knowing JBF needed a turnaround. It was financially in a difficult position, losing money. And I didn't just want to come to the James Beard Foundation because it was known for the James Beard Awards and scholarships.

What I also loved was that James Beard was truly an everyman. He liked fried chicken and down-home cuisine just as much as he loved foie gras and haute cuisine. As an editor, you know how to create stories. We needed good PR, and that was part of the mission. I had an expression: "We're going to take it mass with class."

For example, Vogue is obviously the height of fashion, but its readership is mass. And I felt that the James Beard Foundation was the height of great food, but it needed to be more mass. More people needed to know how important a James Beard Award was, and what it meant for chefs to be artists.

Food Network had been on the air for just over a decade. Chefs were becoming the new popular celebrities, and I knew how to make sure they became even more popular and part of the culture, not just fine dining. Chefs are the great spokespeople today for food policy, and advocates for better nutrition and better school lunches—it has only grown. So we rode that wave too.

In a sense, you might say you're the manager of both a foundation and a restaurant.

That first week, somebody was coming to visit me here at the Beard House. The front reception area can get kind of messy until right before dinnertime, with boxes and things being delivered, so I wanted to make it look a little nicer. Albert, our night kitchen manager, was sitting and reading the Post.

So I went downstairs and said, "You know, Albert, I’m expecting some company. Can you clean up this room?" He looked at me and said, "I haven't clocked in yet." I had this aha moment—I was back in McDonald's, where people had to clock in. That was really the moment when I realized I was running what would now be called America's first pop-up restaurant. The Beard House is a place where the restaurant, the menu, and the chef change every day.

What does bringing the James Beard Foundation experience on the road via the Taste America tour entail?

We're celebrating chefs in the cities that we're visiting. In Boston last weekend, we were celebrating Karen Akunowicz [2015 and 2016 James Beard Award Nominee for Best Chef Northeast] and several other local chefs. Then we bring a chef from outside the city, so we have local stars, and what we call our All-Star, a national star.

So in Boston, we had Daniel Boulud. He came and they created a beautiful dinner together. It's always a big fundraising dinner with auctions, a cocktail hour, and a five-course menu. Then the next day, we went to Sur La Table stores, where we had two free cooking demos and book signings with the two chefs who participated the night before.

So Daniel Boulud showed people how to make this incredible lobster in a chilled broth called homard en gelée, and Karen Akunowicz's demo was scallops with a Thai salad—really interesting. In Chicago the week before, we had Michael Voltaggio, who has a restaurant in San Francisco, and won Top Chef. He was our visiting star. Our Local Star was Stephanie Izard, of Girl & the Goat, the first woman to win Top Chef.

How do all these activities carry out the mission of the James Beard Foundation?

We spread culinary knowledge. For example, we grant scholarships to students all across the country. Since 1991, we have awarded over $7 million in scholarships. When I came, the average annual amount of scholarships awarded was $150,000 to $200,000. Now it's more in the $700,000 range. Plus we're taking the Foundation's name on the road, featuring rising chefs, so people know that these chefs have something to do with a man who was considered the godfather of American gastronomy.

James Beard wrote over 24 cookbooks. One of the things I am proudest of is that more and more people know who he was and what he stood for, because we've made the Foundation's footprint national. Bringing the Beard House experience on the road makes us more “mass with class.” This spring, the PBS series American Masters did a Chefs Flight series—four chefs, four one-hour documentaries on PBS: Jacques Pépin, Alice Waters, Julia Child, and James Beard.

The documentary on James Beard was called America’s First Foodie. I'm really proud of that, because it means we're getting his name out. People know who he is. When they walk into a restaurant and they see a James Beard Award medal or certificate on the wall, they know, that means something.

Tell me about what the James Beard Awards mean and why they matter.

The James Beard Awards are the most coveted awards a chef can get in this country. Obviously, Zagat and the Forbes Travel Guide are different honorifics, but Michelin is only in four cities. It's only in New York, Chicago, D.C., and San Francisco. But the James Beard Awards are national.

Many chefs will say publicly that a James Beard Award changed their life because all of a sudden, reservations were up in their restaurants; someone wanted them on TV doing cooking demos, just like James Beard used to do on the old Today show in New York City; and they might even get a book contract. It's an affirmation by their colleagues.

Yes, there's an open call for entries, but ultimately you are voted on by a jury of your peers and journalists. My first awards in 2006 were at the Marriott. It was a great celebration, but publications like the New York Times had referred to it as the Oscars of the food industry, and it didn't feel like it.

So the next year, we moved it to Lincoln Center. It became a red-carpet event, a reason to dress up. It elevated the awards, the chefs, the restaurateurs, and the media. And a few years ago, we moved the awards to the Chicago Lyric Opera House. It is still the most glamorous night for the food industry in America.

Can you talk about moving the awards to Chicago?

There are 10 Regional Best Chef Awards, for 10 regions of the country. They're national awards. Even though the Beard House is in New York City and the awards had always been in New York City, it was good to move out. We also moved the nomination announcements to different cities. The day the nominees are announced is a big day around the country. That’s why we visit other cities to do the announcements. [Ed. Note: In 2017, ICE hosted the James Beard Foundation’s annual Chefs’ Night Out celebration, to give chefs, nominees, presenters, and their supporters a chance to mingle before the big awards ceremony.)

Is there a consistent trait you see in the chefs who win a James Beard Award? What makes them outstanding?

Number one, obviously, is that they're getting great reviews in whatever city they hail from. Their peers are looking to them as leaders in whatever they're doing culinarily, in their restaurant, in how they're presenting their food. There may be some trends that they are expanding on, or maybe they're just doing something that is so beautiful and different that they're being held up by their colleagues and voted on.

Which chefs stick out in your memory?

To me, every chef who comes and cooks at the Beard House. For many of them, it's their New York debut. Julia Child said this, not me: Bringing a chef to cook at the Beard House is like inviting a singer to come and perform at Carnegie Hall. It has been such a treat to meet some of our country’s iconic chefs. Jacques Pépin—it's just so special to be with him. Charlie Trotter, who sadly passed away—we had some memorable times honoring him at the James Beard Awards.

For our 30th anniversary, Marcus Samuelsson was basically the keynote, because he came and cooked at our 30th anniversary dinner at the Beard House, and it happened to be his 25th time cooking here. [The dinner will be featured in 30 Years: A Celebration of the James Beard Foundation, on ABC.] All of these chefs are special in their own ways. How do you choose your favorite children? You can't.

What might surprise people about what the Foundation does?

We are a place where anyone can come to dinner. We even have a student membership, for $25. Anyone can go online and see who is cooking at the Beard House. In general, a dinner costs $175. That includes everything: tip, wine pairings, champagne, and cocktails. And if you're a member, you're paying less—generally $135. To have an incredible dining experience—to go out to dinner in New York with five courses with wine pairings—is going to cost a whole lot more than that. And we have our “Foodies Under 40” program, called “JBF Greens,” in New York and Chicago. Membership is $75, and those events are also fantastic.

What’s something that young or aspiring chefs might not realize about this industry?

Chefs are actually kind, nurturing people, despite what the public image might try to make of them. Sure, it takes all kinds to make this world, but in general, I've always felt that chefs, whether they're men or women, are like mothers. What do they want? They want to feed us and nurture us.

The majority of chefs that I've met—even the ones with big, bawdy reputations—want to create the next, best generation of chefs. So you should be looking for role models who fit your ideals. When you go work in a place, if it doesn't feel right, leave and go somewhere else. In these times, that's even more important.

Tell me about how you overcame some of the major challenges you've faced as head of this foundation.

I didn't look back. I looked forward. When I took this position, my oldest son was in medical school. It was the white-jacket moving-up ceremony at Mount Sinai, and they had a pediatric cardiologist from Texas giving the keynote to these wide-eyed, ambitious, and idealistic young people who want to be doctors. This doctor's job was to do heart surgery on babies, on children. And he said the children who did the best were the ones that had parents who were irrational optimists. I'd never heard those two words put together before—irrational and optimist.

I realized that's what I'd done, because I had been at the Foundation for just a year and a half, and things were already turning around. If you are an optimist, try to keep those other voices—“It can't be done, it's never been done”—out of your head. Think that you can do anything—that really does help you succeed. It's easy to be an optimist when it's a sure thing. It's not easy to be an optimist if it's not that rational at the time.

You’re stepping down as president at the end of 2017, at the conclusion of the Foundation's 30th anniversary year. What's next for the Foundation, and for you?

Well, I'm not calling it retirement, but a “rewiring”—because honestly, I don't know. It's nice to be able to say, “I'm going to see what comes to me.” I had some time off between Family Circle and the James Beard Foundation, and at the time, all I knew was that I wanted to do something to give back. That’s what I know now as well. I can imagine myself helping other foundations that need my help, but I'm also looking forward to not working “36/7.”

And for the Foundation, we're poised for even greater things to come. We'll be giving out more scholarships. We'll be doing more in the areas of food policy and advocacy, in which we've taken a big leap. We've been working very hard to create a more diverse restaurant and food world. And our Women's Leadership Program is growing and having an impact; we want it to be even better than it is right now.

Do you have some final words of wisdom for people entering this career?

I'll use something that I used even before I came to the James Beard Foundation: The ten most important two-letter words are: ‘If it is to be, it is up to me.’ Ultimately, in every aspect of our lives, we're in charge of ourselves—no matter what’s happening around us. That's a really important life lesson to take, no matter where you go. And I'll give you one other bit that my father used to say: Be like a tea bag. You get stronger the longer you're in hot water.

Ready to launch your career in the culinary arts? Learn more about ICE's career training programs.

Culinary Arts FAQs

Add new comment

People

'You Have to Be Hungry' — An Interview with Padma Lakshmi

ohoadmin — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 11:00:25 +0000

'You Have to Be Hungry' — An Interview with Padma Lakshmi ohoadmin Thu, 07/13/2017 - 07:00 July 13, 2017

By Timothy Cooper

Padma Lakshmi is perhaps best known as host and executive producer of Bravo’s Emmy Award–winning “Top Chef,” currently in its 14th season. But prior to that position, she was also an actress, food expert, model, and award-winning author.

Born in India, she grew up in America, graduated from Clark University with degrees in theater arts and American literature, and worked as a fashion model in Europe and the United States. Early on, she hosted two cooking shows on Food Network: “Padma’s Passport,” where she cooked dishes from around the world, and the documentary series “Planet Food.” She also wrote the best-selling cookbook “Easy Exotic,” and a second cookbook, “Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet.”

In 2016, she published her memoir, “Love, Loss and What We Ate,” as well as her new culinary compendium, “The Encyclopedia of Spices & Herbs.” For her hosting and judging role on “Top Chef,” she was nominated for an Emmy. Her line of culinary products, called Padma's Easy Exotic, includes frozen organic foods, spice blends, teas, and more.

In 2009, she cofounded the Endometriosis Foundation of America to bring attention to the disease she'd suffered from for years. In addition to helping launch a research facility for the disease, she helped get a bill passed in the New York State Senate to expand teen health initiatives throughout the state.

Photo Credit: Inez & Vinoodh

You've already had such a varied career, in areas including acting, modeling, authoring, TV hosting, and more. How did that develop into a focus on food?

My earliest memories are all about food, actually. They occurred mostly when I was a toddler in India. I still remember being on my grandmother’s cool marble floor in her kitchen. I wasn’t allowed to really cook back then, but I could still shell peas out of their pods or break the ends off of beans. From very early on, I associated cooking with womanhood. All the fun stuff was always happening in the kitchen.

Now you can get everything everywhere, but when I was a child there were certain delicacies that you couldn’t get in the south [of India] that we would have relatives bring us from the north. So just being covetous of different ingredients from different places started very young for me. I have been hunting and gathering ever since. My new spice book is definitely an offshoot of that lifelong passion.

Those ingredients you coveted—were a lot of them spices and herbs, or did they span the gamut?

In the case of coming from north India to south India, I remember my uncle used to always bring us something called aam papad, which is like a slightly thicker version of fruit leather. There’s sour mango, and there’s also sweet. I always liked the spicy, sour kind. So they weren't necessarily all spices. But a lot of times, we were transporting things from different ends of the country, like dry lotus root from Kerala that was dehydrated and refried to accompany some rice dishes.

The spices that my mother uses—luckily they were all available at Kalustyan’s [in NYC's Murray Hill neighborhood], but that’s because we lived in a major city. I think a lot of people experienced a sort of culinary homesickness. So what I’m describing is not that uncommon.

It sounds like Kalustyan's was a major access point for the ingredients you longed for.

Yes, definitely. For several generations of immigrants in New York, Kalustyan’s was a real godsend. When I was growing up, there was only Kalustyan’s; and certainly when my uncle and my mother first came to this country, they didn’t have much else. Kalustyan’s started out as an Armenian shop. It wasn’t even Indian.

Then over the years, as the neighborhood changed, the store changed along with it. And because they sold a lot of Eastern ingredients, meaning Armenian or Turkish, a lot of Indian people started going there to buy some overlapping spices. Now it’s become this gourmet ethnic food store that just covers the whole world. Every student should make a trip to Kalustyan’s. It’s very inspiring.

How did the concept develop for your latest book, “The Encyclopedia of Spices and Herbs: An Essential Guide to the Flavors of the World” (HarperCollins)?

It’s actually an encyclopedia. It is an A-to-Z compendium. It’s a reference book. There are some recipes to make teas or tisanes [herbal infusions] or oils. There’s a section on how to roast spices, how to keep them fresh and store them. It’s cataloging every single spice on earth and telling you where it comes from, how it’s traditionally used, what cultures use it, if it has any historical significance, how to use it, what flavor notes are in it, how to store it, how much of it to use—all of that.

It’s meant to be a guide that a cook, whether novice or professional, will reach for every day. I was always curious about spices from other countries and how to change up my cooking and learn about other cultures through how they eat. I wanted one place I could go to.

Of course you can go and Google anything these days, but it’s wonderful to have a tactile book in your hand—that pleasure of leafing through the pages, seeing a beautiful, vibrant picture. I was also itching to do something scholarly—something very empirically, scientifically accurate that wasn’t subject to taste or anything else. This book seeks to be that.

At what point did food media, food hosting, and culinary publishing start becoming a career for you?

I always loved to cook. I did a movie that I had to gain weight for, but aside from that, I had never tried to lose weight in my life. I was still in my 20s. So I really discovered how to trim the fat out of the food I ate and make it more healthy, and a book naturally came out of that. Nobody thought the book was going to do very well, but it did do well; it won a prize in Versailles. So I think people were surprised by that. I really fell into it by accident.

I went on Food Network as a part of my book tour to publicize the book. After I was on there twice, they asked me again, then they offered me a development deal, which is how I started. But before we get into food media or food hosting: Everybody wants to be a star these days by the time they’re 25. Sure, that happens to a lot of people, but you have to educate yourself.

Whether it’s culinary school or working under a great chef that you admire or traveling with your backpack, going and literally tasting the world—or all of those things, hopefully—that will start to establish in you a point of view that is unique. Ask yourself, “Well, why do I want a career in this?” It’s not good enough to say, “I’m interested in food.” I’m interested in dance, but that doesn’t mean I should be a dancer. What you want to think about is, what can you add to the food culture that already exists that is different?

There are so many cookbooks. There are so many young people out there that say, “Oh, I want to be a chef, or I want a food show.” Well, why? Cooking is actually manual labor. It’s hard work. The hours are horrible. Just ask any chef! But if this is your passion, then I strongly suggest you live a little. Go and eat at great restaurants. Educate yourself. Buy books to gain knowledge.

You just have to be hungry for information and experience. I was recently working with a young person who was assisting me. They were testing a recipe with me, and they made the recipe to see if it worked. Then they said, “Well, I don’t know what this is supposed to taste like.” Of course they don’t—in this case, it was a spice blend, baharat.

So they’ve led a particular life, and they haven’t had the chance to go to Turkey. But I think you owe it to yourself to go to a Turkish restaurant, if you can’t fly to Turkey. It’s a wonderful time to be young these days, because you have the Internet. You have mail order. The good news is, of course a rack of lamb is going to cost you a lot of money, but spices, for the most part, are relatively inexpensive and require little effort. It’s a great way to open your horizons.

When I was a kid, there was a guy on TV named Jeff Smith. They had a show on PBS called “The Frugal Gourmet.” Jeff would pick a country every show, and he would make all the dishes from that country. Through those recipes and talking about the ingredients, he would tell you about the history of that country, what grows there, the climate—all this information.

You really got to immerse yourself, just within that half-hour, in the culture through the food. It’s what I tried to do with “Planet Food,” these hour-long documentaries I did over a decade ago. Tell me what somebody eats, and I will tell you who they are. So I think those young people who want a career in this business—it’s important to set yourself apart. It’s important to develop skills and tastes, and develop a palate, and really challenge yourself; really think about what your unique point of view is.

If you were to open a restaurant, why should somebody invest in you? It costs a lot of money to open a restaurant and to keep it going. Most restaurants in New York fold within the first year. Even if you don’t want to be a chef, if you want to be a writer, now everyone’s blogging about every other thing. You have to sharpen your literary skills, your writing skills, and your food skills, because every person with a computer is your competition now.

Through hosting “Top Chef,” I imagine you’ve seen many examples of people with a distinct culinary point of view. How can chefs start to recognize and develop their own voice?

I think a lot of people who have succeeded have a particular voice and a point of view that is instructive. I think Ina Garten is great because she's very straightforward and in command of what she’s doing. She believes in common sense. That shows through. It’s simple recipes; but they work, and they’re very crowd-pleasing. They’re very elegant but still approachable.

So that is her particular métier. Somebody like Diana Kennedy, who’s English—she’s not even Mexican—has devoted her life to researching Mexican food, its heritage, its nuances, its regional differences; where things grow, why things grow. So she’s coming at it from a particular point of view. She’s so committed that she moved to Mexico years ago.

Even with Yotam Ottolenghi's vegetarian cookbook “Plenty”: I think the reason that “Plenty” did so well is because there were a lot of people who were eating like that, and there weren’t a lot of vegetarian cookbooks or recipes that were colorful and interesting and that didn’t feel like substitutes for meat and were full of flavor.

Where Yotam comes from—I used to live right around the corner from his little gastropub in Notting Hill. So I know how he prepares his food. I’m a big fan of it. It’s got a beautiful point of view. It’s always very herbaceous, always very fresh, always has a lot of pomegranate and za’atar, these beautiful ingredients from the Middle East, but it’s not traditionally Middle Eastern. It’s much more contemporary and cosmopolitan than that, because he’s from London. So you have to know what audience you’re talking to.

For me, my audience is always me. Whether it’s a piece of jewelry or a recipe, I’m creating that for me or my friends. I don’t want to create or make anything that I wouldn’t feel really enthusiastic and proud to either use myself or give to someone else. So you can’t phone it in. You have to think about pockets of the culinary landscape that maybe haven’t been explored as much.

When I first started, people were saying, “Wow, people aren’t really into global cuisine. Sure, you’ve traveled, but not everybody’s interested in using all those strange spices or whatever.” But I think now the world has caught up to me. I probably seemed exotic in 1999, but I think everybody eats like me now.

Can you talk a bit more about how what were once considered niche cuisines are now going mainstream, or becoming targets of fusion with American or other cuisines?

The world is getting bigger and smaller at the same time. The possibilities and opportunities to taste different kinds of foods are much more prevalent today than even 10 or 15 years ago. At the same time, because people are traveling, in spite of certain parts of the world that are dangerous, you do get to try more things. With the Internet and Instagram, you get to know about all these funky dishes. If you have an interest, there is a portal for you to see that interest now where there wasn’t necessarily any before.

For somebody like me, social media has been a huge boon, even though it is kind of tiring to always keep it up. But it’s important to remember that there are people out there who share your likes and passions. If you can tap into those people, then you’ve got something. My thing is, I always like to take classic dishes like macaroni and cheese, or chicken pot pie—very classic American comfort food—and then turn them on their heads; make them a little more modern, maybe slightly healthier.

In my last cookbook, there’s a recipe for Mexican macaroni and cheese. Just by adding two or three ingredients, like Mexican oregano, shallots, and pickled jalapenos, it does change the character of a dish. Subtle changes like that are also easier for people to explore certain new flavors with.

What do you personally like to make at home?

Well, I think one thing to do is just pick a handful of spices that are probably already in the spice rack. They kind of came with the kit, so to speak, and there they are, still sitting there. Herbes de provence is a good one, because you can use it in everything from pasta sauce to ratatouille to poultry and fish and roasted potatoes or sautéed vegetables.

Curry powder is another—it doesn’t have to be spicy if you don’t want it to be. I think a nice way to use these spices—and these are just two—is that I would make a compound butter. You just basically let the butter come to room temperature, and you just smash in some salt, some pepper, some curry powder or herbes de provence, and a little bit of pureed garlic or ginger, then just whisk that together and let it set in a ramekin. You can get fancy and make a log to slice. Once you’ve done those two compound butters, you can take a nice, healthy pat of it, melt it in a frying pan, and toss some shrimp in it or sear off a chicken breast or a duck breast, or do some fish.

Something like that you can use as an all- purpose weapon to flavor your food. Another spice blend is ras el hanout, which is a Moroccan or North African blend that has a lot of different spices in it. And keeping a jar of preserved lemon is great; you can just remove the seeds and cut half a lemon up into small chunks. All you have to do is sauté that with some shallots and some parsley, and you can sauté any vegetable you want, from green beans to zucchini to parsnips and carrots and potatoes. You can do any kind of protein, like veal scaloppini.

I think people get intimidated by spices because they don’t understand them. They don’t want to measure. They don’t know how to mix it or what to use it with. So just pick one spice. Start small so you’re not overwhelmed. You mentioned traveling and expanding your horizons, especially for young people. Do you have particular recommendations of destinations that changed the course of your life or your palate? I think we really don’t have any clue about Mexican food. What we get is guacamole, but Mexican food is so layered and so elaborate. The spices are really beautiful. The more you go into the Yucatan and to Oaxaca, you can see how complex the cooking is. It’s quite sophisticated, and there are just so many flavors that never trickle up to us in the north.

But you have to get out of the resort towns and go to Merida, places like that. The regional food of Spain is also quite fascinating. And Turkey—while they’ve had some political unrest, I think Turkish food is really beautiful and delicious. I think it’s going to have its moment soon, because there are a lot of vegetarian dishes that are full of flavor and are not step-downs from meat dishes. They’re just holistically and proudly vegetarian dishes. Also, lentils and pulses and beans—all that kind of peasant food around the world that we haven’t really paid much credence to—deserve a deeper look.

What's some advice you’d like to leave people with, especially those who are working on expanding their culinary horizons or even exploring a career in hospitality?

When you go to sleep at night, you should know something you didn’t know that morning—whether it’s going on the Internet for 10 minutes, picking up an old cookbook, going to an ethnic market, trying a different culture’s food, or watching a different show than you would normally watch. Whatever it is, you should try to always educate yourself.

My grandfather was hired as a civil engineer when he was 16, but after he retired, he went to law school. I think that thirst for information, that thirst for skill, should never cease. You should always be a lifelong student, because those are the people that not only have interesting lives, but continue to evolve and have stage two and stage three and stage four of their careers.

This interview originally appeared in ICE's Main Course newsletter.

Ready to follow in Padma's footsteps and launch your own exciting culinary career? Click here for more information on ICE's career programs.

Interview Guest Chefs

Add new comment

People

A Conversation with Chef Dominique Ansel

ohoadmin — Mon, 04 May 2015 20:16:09 +0000

A Conversation with Chef Dominique Ansel ohoadmin Mon, 05/04/2015 - 16:16 May 4, 2015

By Timothy Cooper

Chef Dominique Ansel is the chef/owner behind New York City’s Dominique Ansel Bakery and Dominique Ansel Kitchen. Best known for his famed croissant-doughnut pastry, the Cronut—which was named one of the “25 Best Inventions of 2013” by TIME—he ranks among the most talked about chefs in the world. Other accolades include a 2014 James Beard Award for “Outstanding Pastry Chef” and ranking among Vanity Fair France’s “50 Most Influential French People in the World.”

Prior to opening Dominique Ansel Bakery, Dominique was the executive pastry chef at Daniel for six years, helping lead the restaurant to receive three Michelin stars, a James Beard Award, and its first four-star New York Times rating. He had previously worked at Parisian bakery Fauchon for seven years, leading its international expansion to Russia, Egypt, and many other countries. His first cookbook, Dominique Ansel: The Secret Recipes, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2014.

You grew up in the town of Beauvais, 45 miles north of Paris. Was that where you first became interested in the hospitality industry?

My parents didn’t have much money growing up, and I’m the last child from a family of four. Very early on, I had to find a job. So at 16, just coming out of school, I found a job in a restaurant called Cour et Jardin. There was a free culinary school in my hometown, Beauvais. So I went through their apprenticeship program—going to school for a week, then going to work for three weeks. I did this for three years overall: two in a savory kitchen and one year in a bakery.

Did you already know that you preferred pastry?

Yes. It was more precise, more scientific. It was refined and required precision; that’s what I liked about it.

You joined the army after that?

When I was 19 years old, military service was mandatory. After I did my service, instead of just staying in France, I asked to go to a different country. I eventually ended up living in French Guiana—in South America, just north of Brazil—and I stayed there for a year. I was part of the community teaching program, and was placed in the kitchen teaching locals how to cook with the skills I learned in school.

Did teaching other people help your career?

Yes, I learned a lot. I was very, very young— 19, 20 years old. That was my first time leaving the country, so it was very exciting. I knew I had a lot more to learn, so I came back to my hometown. With all of my savings—barely $2,000—I bought a car. I started driving back and forth between my hometown and Paris. I would drive there every day with resumes that I printed out at home. I had a map—an old fold-over map, because we did not have these magic cell phones. I didn’t know anyone in Paris, but I knew there were the best bakeries there.

So I'd go into Paris, pull over to the side of the road, and drop off resumes in various bakeries. After just a few days, I had eight job offers. Everyone was looking for staff. It was one of those times where the city was kind of booming. Eventually I worked for Pâtisserie Peltier, one of the oldest pâtisseries in Paris. It was a very old-school French shop, over 100 years old. I stayed at Peltier for a year, then went to work for Fauchon in Paris for almost eight years.

Tell me about your time at Fauchon.

I was hired as a temporary worker, between September and December, to support the bakery for the holidays. They tripled or quadrupled the production volume during that time, so they needed to hire 25 to 30 extra people. At the beginning of the season, they called us all into a room and told us they would keep three people at the end of the four months. It was like a competition. Then, a few days before the end of December, they alerted us that they were keeping only one out of the original 30.

A few days later, they called me into the office and said it would be me. I stayed at Fauchon for eight years. I started as a pastry cook, and after six months, I got promoted as a chef de partie, so I was in charge of a station with eight people working under me (though they were all older than I was). I learned a lot very quickly, and I had a lot of responsibilities very early on. When I was 24 years old, I became a sous chef, and then we expanded from one shop to twelve shops in Paris. At that point, I was in charge of a team of close to 100 people in the kitchen. At the same time, I was also overseeing the opening of new shops internationally, including traveling to many different countries.

When did you come to New York?

In 2006, Daniel Boulud called me and said he was looking for a pastry chef. I told him, “That's interesting, but I have no experience working in a fine dining restaurant.” He asked me to come to New York to talk and see his operation, so I came and did a small tasting for Daniel—like six desserts. I remember, after the second dessert, Daniel looked at me and asked, “When can you start?”

Eight weeks later, I was in New York with two suitcases. That’s all I had, other than a couple hundred dollars in my bank account. I wanted to work hard and to show Daniel that I could take this position and do something great. Three years later, we won three Michelin stars and got a four-star review from the New York Times. We also received the 2010 James Beard Award for “Outstanding Restaurant in the U.S.”

What did you have in mind when you opened Dominique Ansel Bakery?

I wanted a place that was chill, comfortable. Not a French bakery where you see gold and sculpture and chandeliers everywhere, but more of a place where there’s a good vibe, nice music playing. The idea was to be like a New York coffee shop: a relaxed atmosphere, beautiful pastries, a place where you can feel free to sit. It combined a Parisian spirit, when it comes to quality, with a New York energy.

How did you create your menu?

I remember before opening the bakery, people were telling me, “Don’t open a French bakery, it will not work. New York City is not ready for it.” People were telling me to do cupcakes and cheesecake, saying that’s the only thing that sells in New York. I remember stepping back and thinking to myself, “That’s not me. It’s not who I am. It’s not what I believe in, and it’s not what I’m trying to accomplish.” I did not listen to anyone. Instead, I did what I thought would be great, meaning creating new things all the time, changing the menu very often. But it's also about creating an emotional connection with people.

For example, everyone talks about the Cronut. The Cronut is great, but right after the Cronut, during the heat wave, I launched the Frozen S’more. It’s a S’more but the marshmallow is made with honey, not sugar, so it’s a lot less sweet and it’s very flavorful. We serve it on a smoked applewood branch, so you have the scent of a campfire. Inside, there’s vanilla ice cream and a chocolate wafer, and we torch the marshmallow to order so that the outside shell caramelizes. It’s thin, almost like a crème brûlée. You bite into it. It’s warm, it’s chewy, it’s crunchy—but it’s also cold, and it’s just amazing. It’s one of our best sellers.

I still love it and eat one once in a while. That’s what I mean when I talk about an emotional connection. The S’more is not something I grew up with. I didn’t even know about it before coming to the U.S. It’s something I discovered, something I had to learn about. Even though it’s not my childhood, I want to understand it and I want to connect people with our food. That is how I created the Frozen S’more.

Did you know that the Cronut would blow up like it did?

Who can imagine something going viral in the way that it did? Who can think of a pastry getting so popular, not only in New York, not only in the country, but worldwide? Even the best chef with all the money in the world, with all the marketing strategy, as much as you try to do that, you can't. You can’t force people to like something.

So would you ever consider licensing something like that?

It’s not something you can mass-produce. It only has a shelf life of a couple of hours, and I don’t want to kill my creation. I don’t want to kill the product and our creativity as well. We’re not just about the Cronut. After the Cronut, we created so many pastries that were almost as popular as the Cronut, but received less buzz. It’s not everything. If Picasso only had one painting, no one would know about him. He changed his style, he tried different things, and he evolved a style of painting. He changed.

Tell me about your creative process when you're inventing a new product.

It starts with an idea. Very often it’s an emotional connection, or sometimes we work off a flavor or texture. But most of the time, we want to make sure that people connect with the food and the food has a reason to be. From there, I work in the kitchen with the team, trying out different variations on a product. We look at it together. It’s a very open conversation. We all talk about it, and we all criticize each other, so if something is too sweet, if it’s too big or ugly, we’ll tell each other right away.

In your cookbook, you have some philosophical essays. One is titled “Never Run Out of Ideas.”

It's like I was telling you about Picasso and painting: You shouldn’t hold on to an idea and keep it for later; it will be too late. That’s what the chapter talks about: never run out of ideas and never think you have an idea that’s too good to be shared with the world. As soon as you have it, use it and move on to something else. That’s what we have done with the Cronut. I love the Cronut, but we’re moving on. We’ll move on to a Frozen S’more, to a Cookie Shot, to every other creation after that.

What's a typical day like for you?

On a typical day I arrive at about four in the morning and go to bed at one in the morning. That’s my regular day. I want to push myself to work harder every day and I don’t take anything for granted. I usually start by finishing the baking with the overnight team. I work through the day, work a little bit on the new creations, work in the office, and then I will go and spend some more time with the team in the afternoon, then more office work. Why? Because I have a shop in New York, right on Spring Street. I’m opening another one in the West Village very soon, and we’re opening a shop in Tokyo as well.

What can you tell me about the Tokyo shop?

Tokyo is going to be a futuristic version of what we have here in New York. We’re going to have a pop-up window at the entrance of the building, with a set where people can take photos for social media. We'll change the background artists all the time.

Japanese people love taking photos, and we want to give them a chance to do a fun photo with us. The interior design is going to be very silicon, with cleaner lines to match with the local market. Japanese shops are very clean and slick. We’re not just a New York bakery that's coming to Tokyo. We’re a New York bakery that wants to embrace the Japanese culture and be a part of it.

Can you discuss any of the specific ingredients?

I’ll use things like flax sugar—that is very Japanese. Hokkaido milk, which I love. It’s so good, so silky and flavorful. Even if you've had fresh farm milk from France, that's not comparable. I might do something using green tea. I love wagashi, those little sweets that are made out of bean paste, which they eat with green tea in the afternoon. I’ve been to Japan many times now. I do think there’s a connection between French cuisine and Japanese cuisine: the dedication that people have for food. Chefs there don’t think about a career change or doing anything else; it’s pure dedication, and that’s all you’re going to do.

What about Dominique Ansel Kitchen, the shop you just opened in the West Village?

The shop in the West Village is focused on made-to-order desserts, so 70 percent of the menu will be made to order. Think of a chocolate mousse. Typically, you have to make the chocolate mousse, put it in the cake, then put it in the fridge or in the freezer and then eat it later. It’s still soft, but it’s set and often very dense. Here we will have chocolate mousse that is actually folded to order.

You will have a choice of the intensity of chocolate you want to have, and the chocolate you want us to use as well, and we will fold it to order. When we give it to you, it's smooth and creamy, with a delicate texture. It’s very special when you’ve just made it; when you let it sit and eat it later, it's a different experience. Think of coffee, for example.

A few years ago people were going to a deli, drinking coffee that was in a thermos, sitting there for hours. Now people want fresh-brewed coffee, freshly ground coffee. People will wait 10 to 15 minutes for good coffee. That hasn't been explored before when it comes to pastry, and I think there’s a lot to do there. I’m hoping to reach people and give them something they’ve never had before.

How many staff do you have at the bakery, and at your other locations? Here we have over 35 people. At Dominique Ansel Kitchen, we’re going to have at least as many people. And in Japan, we’ll have close to 100 people. It’s a much bigger shop. It’s 5,000 square feet. It’s going to be in Omotesando Hills [a shopping complex in Shibuya], which is really like the Soho of Tokyo. It’s the perfect neighborhood for us.

What are some attributes of outstanding team members, people you want to keep working with? Passion and dedication. That’s everything for me. I don’t mind taking someone that has very little experience or even zero experience, so long as they’re passionate, dedicated and willing to learn. If they’re not flexible, if they don’t understand what we do or why we do it, it just doesn’t work because my entire team is passionate and dedicated.

You received the 2014 James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef, among many other awards. What was your reaction to that honor?

I feel very lucky and fortunate to have a chance to reach out to people, and on top of that, to be recognized for what I do. It’s very flattering—but it’s never just me. It’s the entire team behind me. It’s never a one-man show. I couldn’t do what I do without my team.

I have to ask about your work for Food Bank for New York City, among other charities.

It's good that you started the interview by asking where I’m from, because when people think of France, they think of this beautiful small town, with flowers and nice people, but it’s not like that everywhere. It’s like every country. I grew up in a poor neighborhood. My dad was working in a factory. My mom was taking care of four kids. In France you get paid once a month; it’s tight when you have six people to feed.

Growing up, sometimes my mom didn’t manage the money very well, so at the end of the month we were not eating well or going without food. I remember two years ago, someone tweeted me saying that the soup kitchen line was much longer than the Cronut line. I looked at it and thought, “Yes, that’s true. If I can do something about it, I will be happy to.”

So last year I worked with a few different charities, like City Harvest's Bid Against Hunger auction. I raised over $100,000 by auctioning off 24 Cronuts; the entire amount was donated to charity to support the Food Bank for New York City, God's Love We Deliver, City Harvest, and others. It’s something that’s always been very important for me, to be a part of the community. I’ve never forgotten where I’m from.

To end our conversation, what does baking mean to you?

It’s not a job; it’s my life. It’s what I do, and it’s what I will be doing forever. Baking is bringing happiness to people—happiness and emotions—and hopefully having them spread it around.

Click here to learn more about ICE's School of Pastry & Baking Arts.

Interview Pastry Arts Desserts Guest Chefs

Add new comment

People

A Conversation with Wylie Dufresne

ohoadmin — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 21:47:58 +0000

A Conversation with Wylie Dufresne ohoadmin Thu, 06/19/2014 - 17:47 June 19, 2014

By Timothy Cooper

It was recently announced that Chef Wylie Dufresne, one of the leaders of the country's modernist cooking movement, would be closing down the acclaimed, 11-year-old wd~50 on New York City's Lower East Side. Dufresne has gained national recognition for his cutting-edge creativity, receiving awards including the 2013 James Beard Award for "Best Chef New York City" and a Michelin star, which he has maintained every year at wd~50 since the founding of the Michelin's first American edition, in 2006.

The restaurant's closure is a set-back that we are sure will open up many new opportunities for the famed chef, who, prior to striking out on his own, served as sous chef at Jean Georges in New York City and chef de cuisine at Prime in The Bellagio, Las Vegas. Today, Dufresne also oversees the kitchen at Alder in New York City's East Village, a restaurant that reflects a more approachable interpretation of his modernist leanings. Earlier this year, we spoke to Dufresne about his influences, his unique perspective and what's next for him as a chef.

How your passion for food translated into a career in this business?

I think my joy of eating has translated into a curiosity about how things are made. You know, whether I’m eating sushi, and I wonder how that piece of fish is cut or butchered, or want to learn more about the rice-making process, or I’m at a diner and am fascinated by the short-order cook and what he or she is doing behind the counter.

The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know anything. I’m a curious person, so it’s been exciting to me to realize that cooking is an opportunity for continuing education; it will never end....No one will ever know everything; it’s mathematically impossible. I was in Mission Cantina the other night eating Danny [Bowien]’s food. And I’m not a particularly good student of Mexican cooking...But, you know, the fact that he’s making his own tortillas and the nixtamalization [cooking corn to prepare it for masa dough] that’s involved...There are times when I certainly can figure out how somebody did something. But I don’t know how exactly one makes corn tortillas, and, while it’s a simple thing that’s been made by simple people for centuries, it’s still fascinating to me because it’s something that I don’t know how to do.

You got your degree in philosophy at Colby College. What led you to cooking?

I went through life as an average student. It wasn’t until I found a love of cooking and was able to really apply my curiosity to it that I excelled. No one at Colby College remembers me for my academic achievements. When I stumbled upon the kitchen, I realized that I had found something that I wanted to do. I had learned how to learn [with philosophy], so I just transferred that onto the subject of cooking. I take a very academic approach to cooking, but it was accidental that I was drawn to cooking.

Do you know what it was that initially made you start applying yourself and wanting to learn everything about food?

I realized that playing team sports and working kitchens were very similar, and cooking was the closest I was ever going to get to playing professional sports. There’s a lot of similarities between the kitchen and sports. The life lessons that you find in sports, you find in kitchens, and the experiences that you find in team sports, you find in kitchens. The physical aspect, the mental aspect, the hierarchy, the layout.

The fact that there is a chef and a coach overseeing a sous chef and a team captain—and practice players are sort of like prep cooks. The first half of the day is preparing for the second half of the day, which is a lot like going to practice before the big game. There's an anxiety level, the redemptive quality, the fact that you missed a layup, or you struck out. Or you overcooked a piece of fish, but you’ve gotta do it again and again and again....Each time, you have a opportunity to try and do it better than you did the time before.

You thought you could excel in this career.

I didn’t think I could excel; I hadn’t done anything that I enjoyed as much. I hadn’t done anything that moved me. I was slated to go spend a year as a ski bum in New Mexico. But I blew out my knee skiing in college, so I couldn’t go. And I started thinking, “Well, why don’t I go, you know, go be a cook?” Because it’s the only thing that I’ve done that really moved me the way playing sports had. I mean, I would be a professional athlete if I was as good at sports as I am at cooking.

How have you changed since you first started out in the kitchen?

Well, I was always committed, but I was green, and I’m no longer green. I have 21 years under my belt of professional cooking, so I’m more comfortable. Back then I had a different role. I wanted to be the best line cook I could be, I wanted to be the best cook in the room. I wanted to be better than everybody else.... I had the mindset of an athlete, like, “I’m going to be better than all the people here, I want to be better”. “Who’s the best one in the room?” “I’m going to size that one up. I’m going to try and do whatever he or she is doing better than they’re doing it. Whatever it is they know, I want to know”. And I became a voracious consumer of knowledge. Early on in my career, I spent all my money on cookbooks....I still continue to invest in them.

Did you have any particular mentors?

Early on in my career, I was lucky to work for Jean-Georges [Vongerichten]. He was probably the person that’s left the deepest impression on me. I’m lucky he’s still a partner in this restaurant; I was on the phone with him yesterday. He’s someone who I consider a mentor, but now I consider a friend as well. Still to this day, when I think about food, whether consciously or subconsciously, he’s very much a part of my process.

What are some of the lessons that he imparted that stuck with you the most?

Simplicity. He showed me the value in taking away, taking things off of a plate. He always talked about two, three, four elements on a plate. That’s it. The more you put on the plate, the easier it is to hide. The more you take away, there’s nowhere to hide—it has to be good. More than just about anyone I can think of, he has done a great job sort of melding traditional European style with some of the Asian influences. He took traditional French food and lightened it. He took all the cream and the stocks and replaced them with juices and oils. It’s still, to this day, very compelling to me.

Wylie Dufresne in the wd~50 kitchen. [Photo from newyorkkitchen.net]

Tell me about the reality of running a restaurant versus working in restaurants earlier in your career.

Well, it’s very different. I think it goes without saying that it’s easier to be an employee than it is to be an employer at times. When you become a manager, you’re responsible for more people. As a line cook, you’re responsible for your own sort of small, little world. As an employer, obviously, you have a bottom line, you have investors, you have to somehow try to make a profit. You just take on more weight as you move up the ladder. You have to see a much larger picture as you become a restaurant owner.

So not only do you have to think about the little things, but you also have to think about the larger things and all things in between. But if the myth of Sisyphus is compelling, if you don’t mind pushing the rock up the hill—if you can find the joy in the doing, as Camus said—then it’s great; you don’t mind moving that rock. But you feel a responsibility for other people. I have, between the wd~50 and Alder, 55 employees, and I have to look out for them and worry about them and make sure that they’re okay, as well as the clientele. But I see all of those things not as a burden but as a joy.

What brought about the second restaurant? What was the opportunity there, or were you looking?

We can take wd~50 and put the restaurant in a place that’s not as hard to get to, because we’re still a destination. Like, you could come to Alder for just a bite and a drink. Or a drink and a bite. It’s not as much of a commitment. You don’t have to come for a tasting menu. It’s not as expensive—you can get in and out. The average check is $55 [for Alder] versus $165 [for wd~50].

Like I said, I surely don’t favor one over the other; obviously, they’re both very important to me, and Alder doesn’t exist without wd~50. So Alder is hopefully standing out for the quality and the approach. It’s a boat in a pond full of other boats; wd~50 is in a pond all by itself.

Are there any particular restaurants, chefs, or cuisines that are inspiring you right now?

I’m on a bit of a Japanese kick right now. We don’t know much about Japanese cooking as a culture, even as cooks, and the more I learn about Japanese cooking techniques, the more intrigued I am. It’s very labor-intensive and very complicated stuff that is presented in a way that’s very simple. So you don’t see the labor behind it, and that’s what I find beautiful. It seems effortless, but yet there’s layers and layers behind it.

I’m always intrigued by what the Spanish are up to. Andoni Luis Aduriz, the chef at Mugaritz in San Sebastián [in Spain], is probably one of the smartest and more clever chefs in the world today. Whatever Heston Blumenthal is up to I find compelling. And then, of course, I always return to France, because that was sort of my first love and where I started in terms of cuisine and the cooking styles that I was drawn to initially.

Dishes of wd~50. [Photo from chefhermes.com]

How much stock do you put into restaurant criticism and awards and stars?

I think that there’s always going to be an interesting relationship between those that do and those whose job it is to critique those that do. Whether you’re a writer or an athlete or a painter or a chef, there’s going to be people whose job it is to critique what you do because that’s the nature of the beast. Maybe it’s the philosopher in me that sees it that way. But there is inherently an unease between them. You go into it knowingly. Very few of us are blindsided by the fact that suddenly, we’re reviewed by the New York Times.

Or that we did or didn’t get a Michelin star. You can’t say, “Well, that’s not fair.”, you can’t stomp your feet. You signed up for it. This is the name of the game. When a restaurant gets an award or a star or recognition in some sense, it’s an acknowledgement that the team is really working on all cylinders, the team is being effective. So yes, it’s nice for me personally, but it’s more satisfying for me because it’s acknowledgement for a lot of people who are often anonymous in the process. You can’t say that this is a four-star restaurant or a three-star Michelin restaurant without acknowledging that there’s a bunch of people whose faces you’ll never see, killing themselves for you. It lets those anonymous people know that, in fact, people are seeing the details.

You've been on Treme, Top Chef, MasterChef, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and more. Do you have a favorite experience after being on so many different shows?

It’s not something that I ever expected to come my way; it was very serendipitous. I do think that Top Chef, which I’ve done the most, has been really enjoyable. But I feel lucky, you know, whether it was Treme or Top Chef or local news. Again, it was never a goal, it was never something I set out to do, so I feel fortunate that it’s been an unexpected part of what I do.

Do you have a current dream, goal, or mission you’re working toward or that you could envision?

I have a couple more ideas that I’d like to sort of spring on the world and see if they’ve got legs, but I don’t have like a plan for world domination or something. You know, I’d like to continue to grow. I’d like to continue to take the restaurants that I have and operate and continually make them better.

I’d like to continue to improve. Hopefully as an individual, as a parent, as a leader, as a chef, as a restaurant owner. Take better care of our customers, better care of our staff. Just see how we can make it a pleasurable place to work. Make it a good organization to be a part of. That sort of thing.

What are you looking for when you’re hiring?

I’m just looking for somebody that has the right attitude. That has a willingness to learn. I just want people that are willing to think. And I mean that in a broader sense—people who don’t want to just charge ahead but stop and say, “Why am I doing it this or that way?”

[photo from thebraiser.com]

For people who are studying culinary arts now or thinking about getting into the industry, do you have advice?

It’s harder than people think it is. I think to excel at anything or be good at anything, there has to be a lot of personal sacrifice. A good support team around you, whether that be family or loved ones. Whether you want to be the greatest, you know, stamp-licker in the world, or an Olympian or a painter, you have to be willing to make some sacrifices. You have to be willing to love the miles.

Any last words for students who are just starting out in the restaurant world?

Don’t email your resume. Drop it off in person. If you didn’t take the time to walk in here, I’m not going to take the time to read it. If you take the time to walk into the restaurant with your resume, somebody from the kitchen will walk out and shake your hand and look you in the eye. But if you email it to us, it won’t even get to us.

Learn more about ICE's award-winning career programs.

Guest Chefs Culinary Arts Restaurants Career Paths

Add new comment

People