A Diner's Confession on The Flavor of Fantasy

wow thank you so much it's so exciting to be here i had a dream i had a fantasy i was fearful i had a vision these words very often begin the narrative of aspiring young chefs and successful chefs and they're always thrilling to hear um it always really moves me especially when you know as we just heard from tatiana it ends with this incredible success story but what about the diner the pesky guest what about their dreams and aspirations and fantasies um so i was very excited when um the wonderful mad team invited me to speak from the other side of the table to represent the diner in their dreams but before i go into my a little bit about my professional here's history and my impressions i wanted to tell you about the dream that my mother had for most of her life we um we come from the south from the former soviet union which means uh you know a country that not banished from meps which means we we we lived for the longest time uh without access to foreign travel or foreign cuisines if you don't count socialist bulgaria or slovakia and even that was rare so my mom had this dream and i knew it from her face when she would sit on my bed you know with this kind of sad desperate eyes she dreamt that she turned into a bird or fly and she flew over the border no one asked her for documents she escaped from the iron curtain and she ended up in paris and my mom was a very cultured lady she still is she read balzac she grabbed spruce she dreamt of paris and she knew that she could never see paris because for soviet citizen it was impossible to travel and here she is circling as a beer fly she's circling over this beautiful cafe that is so achingly recognizable to her from literature and from painting um she smells some delicious smells she sees people you know sitting uh outside uh she's desperate desperate to be inside and to see what it's like and at that point my mother always woke up uh woke up you know on the wrong side of the door woke up you know behind the iron curtain woke up knowing that she would never be able to experience what what she fantasized so much about and i remember my mother watching my mother uh with great difficulty grind you know the really really tough grizzly goulash meat into this little meatballs um she slowed them in broth it was very very humble and she would say oh this is potash prantagnier or she will get a can of thin meat called tushanka that you all took to the ducha and she would say i made an olya podrida i read about it in cervantes oh i made potafa and i remember that these words you know these names filled us both with us just incredible romancing longing uh when we completely run out of money which was on sundays uh because my mom just lived on the alimony my mom would crack a couple of eggs into a skillet and she would tell me some magical fairy tale about the king's chamber and golden eggs um and suddenly our drab in a little apartment was transformed for me and this is when i understand that cooking could really transfigure reality that could transport you to a different place that it could elevate us from our drab soviet grind into into into a different reality and i often wonder whether i became a food writer because or despite of my socialist childhood anyway back to restaurants my first one of my first assignments was going around i was in the mid 90s was going around french three-star restaurants to see you know the state of french cuisine and our first stop was a very famous uh restaurant in paris run by a very famous chef who's still very famous and we arrived there and the lazy the the reception kind of rattled her pearls and said oh we cancelled your reservation because you weren't staying at the hotel because we were staying at some like bad around this month with with relatives of friends but she said okay we have a table for you follow us and we got kind of stuck in this like horrible corner space next to the bathroom and then we encountered the smirking sommelier and the smirking somalia sold as some horrible expensive bottle of wine which he would not come to replenish but when i reached for the wine i almost got i almost got this and then the pigeon arrived of course i wanted it rare just remember you know the blood gushed out onto some kind of potato and here i was you know at the plate full of blood not being able to pour my own wine there was this distinct feeling that we were trespassing uh the rest of the adventure went you know in the same fashion although there were moments of absolute brilliance i'm still so grateful that i got to taste freddie girardez cooking before he retired uh there was you know adventure foraging with with mark vera but i came out of this month-long thing understanding very distinctly what cooking should not be because the whole thing was like exercising and being trapped i realized that cooking you know cannot be the sort of fossilized overcodified over-bureaucratized ritual that you know leaves the diner essentially victimized by the chef's ego ego and by all the protocol and then in 1995 um i went to an assignment in catalonia and people started whispering to me about this incredible chef that just got three stars so finally someone made the reservation and it was el buey it was lunch it was completely empty other than another journalist who was there that was 95. um and people often ask me what it was like to eat at albury you know back in those early days and all you can say was really life-changing i'm not going to talk about the dishes and the techniques because these are well-documented and alberta's right here but it made me um appreciate and understand that there could be another whole dimension of cooking that cooking could have the polemical force you know the iconoclastic energy the wild creativity of a real cultural avant-garde and soon you know it spread all over spain you could go to asturias or you could go to uh you know the bundex in andalucia and they said deconstructed gazpacho or you know a trump loyal tavada it was absolutely thrilling and there was this thing that while it radically radically altered what was on your plate it did not change the relationship between the kitchen and the diner if anything it made the experience more authoritarian even though it was in the fun way even when the cuisine was brilliant and witty um it came with explanations you know inhale through your nose exhale through your ear catch it midway uh you know cut it with a knife in the air you know you give it exactly three seconds and the other thing um it you know like like every avant-garde or art you know which is difficult it required this incredible cognitive engagement you know you had to concentrate so again you know there was a sense of feeling kind of trapped um and it also you know the whole kind of publicity of feranas the mad genius even though he's a sanes person you have i mean it legitimized the figure of chef as author uh as artiste you know and it gave even more power in a sense to the kitchen um and the diner you know it expected engagement from the diner and the engagement was one way you were supposed to engage with the food but what about you so i began to seek the different kinds of experience and it's a sort of experience that i still really love um it's going you know for sunday lunch the sort of a neo-traditional bourgeois restaurant somewhere in spain and italy where the maitre zero the chef helps you create the fantasy as you go along you know where you negotiate for real where you say oh the anchor is just around arrived oh how about a couple of anchovies oh how about one and a half past portion of pasta and maybe another one portion of ravioli just for the table and then he says well i think it's too much well maybe just italia tina or some little thing followed by a salad so the kind of process of creating your own meal i just find incredibly pleasurable well you know fine dining is in a difficult place right now um you know people clients you know those pesky clients are you know defecting to to dives to um to food trucks because you know eating at the food truck you know surrounding other people creates a sense of community and you know chefs spend a lot of time and a lot of calibrations and calculations uh before opening the restaurant they try to figure out you know the best kind of music they spend a lot of effort in into the logo how the menu reads you know the typeface the wine list everything but in all these calibrations uh i feel that what gets forgotten is what tatiana just said so so beautifully is that the point of cooking is to nourish to feed it is to create a fantasy of a life that is better than in reality where everyone as my friend daniel patterson once said as where everyone is happy to see you where everything tastes better than it should in real life where everything is perfect and whether it's a modest restaurant or an ambitious one and we need ambitious restaurants more than ever because you know a great restaurant uh sets an example great restaurant is a laboratory from which ideas and techniques trickle down to more casual places great restaurant great chef like renee or alex they create national cuisines they inspire other young chefs you know it is really important not to lose the experience but what i would like to urge um all the all the young chefs or all the young talents is to leave just a little room in their fantasy for the diner and it's a very humble proposal and finally i want to end with uh the fantasy that i myself had when i just was in modena doing a piece with massimo bottura uh the brilliant massimo from australia francescana it was saturday night the place was completely booked out there's no way i could get a table and i was hungry and tired and was raining outside and massimo said you know just just come into the kitchen and you know at least i'll show you a little bit of what i was doing so uh we were just kind of standing there like this squeezed you know there was no space everyone was just like rushing through and massimo would appear every once in a while with a tablespoon or a little plate of something he just created and you know it was just like it would go like this you know you taste the thing and there was just absolute visceral primal thrill in being actually fed by a great chef you know it kind of made me without any intermediaries without any kind of bureaucracy without the maitre d and the sommelier and the whole thing it it really made me reconnect with restaurant cooking in the most incredible way and i said to massimo uh and i said to myself wow wouldn't that be amazing if if restaurants like francescana like noma restaurants that are really expensive for average people restaurants where it's really hard to get reservation if they would just put a little bench in the back somewhere and maybe sell tickets you know to students to young chefs you know to people who otherwise you know have no access and just bring up you know five six little dishes at a time for people to have i know i'm sure it's logistically impossible uh and i'm sure the chefs would howl and protest but i can't get the idea out of my mind and so i thank you for your time