Benchmarks Not the BMW

a few minutes ago david asked me if i knew who was introducing me and i said no i didn't but now i do and by the way i'll expect a royalty check in the mail it's an honor to be here and so thank you renee and alex and mark for having me here what's turning out to be one of the great experiences of my life so now just not to screw it up i wanted to talk about jungle to table cuisine especially about that chinese chef who originally died after having been bitten by the severed head of the cobra that he expected to have for lunch but they asked me to talk about something frivolous instead so i have chosen my career and how and why it was successful if it has any meaning for today and the future but i'll have to put these on in case the first time i gave a speech to cooks and chefs was at the culinary institute of america at hyde park in new york the dean had asked me to come and talk to the graduates to sort of give them some advice on what to expect going out and getting a job i told them if you come to work for me at stars the first week you'll learn how to prep lettuce actually everybody at starts got this the bartenders the waiters everyone just to show what the commitment was in the basement of the restaurant people getting ready for the day then i told them you will learn the next week you learn how to peel 20 pounds of tomatoes every hour and all this time you will work in the basement where all the ingredients are received and inspected and stored because you will also learn that if the ingredients don't get in the hands of the line cook in perfect condition it's all sort of worthless enough and means nothing so then i told them in my concluding remarks don't expect to be a sous chef within the first six months and put a down payment on a bmw half the room hissed the other half booed and i haven't given a speech in front of chefs and cooks since until now so it is with some trepidation that i stand here but looking around the room and seeing the company i'm in i realize it's not time to be timid so here goes even without a glass of champagne i'm not sure it's possible so who am i really i'm the white guy from harvard who would have gone down to take a look at ron's carrot if i'd known it existed so it is all about ingredients and my advice is still the same as it was to those graduates 20 years ago focus on ingredients and only dream about the car it has always been about ingredients was when i started and more than ever is now and i don't need the pedophile love thank you fulvio for baby vegetables and the menu current menu language of sweetie crunchy dairy and all that horrible stuff i'm not that obsessed with the past what was but just because the past is the past does not mean it's over no more than because the future is the future it hasn't happened yet and after all the future was made yesterday and if that isn't true we wouldn't be standing here holding mad in our hands but i do agree with david chang after his visit to san francisco restaurants [ __ ] every restaurant in san francisco is just serving figs on a plate do something with your food thank you david i mean let's face it we were just talking about it let's face it it nailed it to the wall that at that moment and san francisco has no sense of humor about itself so no wonder he's in such trouble for my first days at sheep as the chef of chaperones in berkeley in 1973 i was facing what not what to do with figs but with green beans by the way i'd never cooked in a restaurant before i'd never had a job and before that or up to that moment i was a failed architect the world had failed to realize what a genius i was for underwater architecture and so i was down to my last 25 dollars you can't blame those harvard professors for uh firing me out of out of the design school after i had summoned plankton like for raminifera to the to be the design for the structure of my underwater housing and then i designed an underwater vehicle that was fueled with sea water as i said they threw me out of harvard so i had to go over mit and the professors looked at me and said jeremiah redesigned the whale way too many drugs no wonder i was broke and answered the first job that i saw in san francisco this is the added shape and he's put in in the newspaper i showed up and they gave me the job just to show you how desperate they were my first morning at work the produce arrived at the kitchen door and the first box i opened was a crate of kentucky wonder jumbo sized green beans well i said no i'm not going to use those you know and the guy said you can't send produce back you never do and i said well we are now you know take them out of here 30 minutes later alice shows up with one of the silent partners who is a famous rock star lawyer so i was a little bit nervous and they said no you can't send produce back anyway that guy's a friend of ours i took off my apron which i'd had on for about 30 minutes i said okay you cook the [ __ ] beans i'm out of here hoping desperately that they wouldn't accept me because i had seven dollars at that point and i had to get back to san francisco and the bus fare was 525. so what to do in the following days i stole nasturtium flowers on the way to work dreamed of recreating a garden like my mother's in england it was a one acre vegetable and fruit garden but at first it was only a dream then one day a month later or something a guy shows up at the back door of the kitchen holding a great big king salmon that was obviously an hour out of the water and he said would you like to buy this i ran to him and grabbed the salmon and said buy it you kidding anything that comes out of that bay you bring here and i will buy it not that we had any money but i said i would when i started buying huge and ugly conga eels for a perfect bouillabath or mushrooms from the mushrooms from the local hills the word got out since we cooked a different menu every day and i never knew sometimes what the dinner menu was until about two o'clock i had no trouble going out into the dining room and saying you know the chicken just doesn't make the grade today you're gonna have to eat salmon it's four hours out of the water or telling them that the baby geese that we i had bought a few months before were now grown now confi and now in the castle in the ovens for that night and so on it went until people at the back door got the idea to set up small businesses to sell us our ingredients to our specifications so started the boots in the forest or the back of a beaten up old vm vw van to table movement my bean lesson though was when i was a teenager and my russian aunt who taught me a lot about how to cook one day in washington dc supermarket she said you know get me two pounds of green beans so i carefully chose all the great big ones you know and put them in the bag and she showed up and i handed them to her she said no darling no no no only the little unformed velvety ones so that was another 20 minutes of filling up the bag and a great lesson so years later i was ready for that lesson i was ready for the jumbo kentucky wonders coming in the kitchen of chapanese and to send them back that was my benchmark with beans at the california culinary academy years later after i left schaefer neath i gave lessons in benchmarks i wanted to tell the students to show them or for them to figure out by themselves that quality is only barely subjective to prove it i gave it blind tasting and chocolate i asked them i had you know 15 chocolates or something and i said it's okay what's your favorite chocolate and everybody said hershey bars at the end of the blind tasting lint came out top hershey was at the bottom everybody agreed so lynch became the benchmark until we found a better one then as i say so perfect ingredients were no mystery to me until and i thought i knew how to judge them and then one day the founder of connoisseur won imports in san francisco george linton introduced me to a new world of defining quality he gave me many lessons in the french growth called first why they were if they were and were they worth the price but the most dramatic lesson involved four each different vintages of latash and rominikanti side by side these days the price of a remedy county is 12 to 15 thousand dollars a bottle and latasha is three to four thousand is roman economy really worth four to five times la tosh we tasted them together a close race but what was that feeling that drinking the romani conti put one in a sensory realm that was previously uncharted at least for me unless of course wanted eaten with a spoon petrossian beluga out of a kilo tin with hot buttered english muffins or drunk a slight an old and slightly chilled shattered you cam with cold rose goose on a summer afternoon i'd done those once each so i knew okay we agreed the romney county isn't out there in a stratosphere of its own let me show you why george said drawing on his napkin whoops i wasn't putting my okay that's willy no i was right sorry sorry forward that's the kesley here is the benchmark scale the zero this is the scale we all know from zero to ten zero obviously in ten as i've been talking this is the scale that everybody believes is zero to ten with the belief that everything in this scale can be measured and proven it is also the realm of relativism an opinion that the idea that any opinion or taste is as good as another and where the homogenizing of humanity occurs and this in the world of ingredients is where tyson foods and monsanto are circling their wagons with us on the outside we're the indians getting shot at out there where they would like to exterminate us and this is where we're facing the extinction of the environment and its ingredients but i agree with alessandros and voltaire that taste is a matter of discernment so here is another scale i should thread in front of me in this scale as you can see nine's down there and george obviously made the point to me that the lattash is between zero and nine and the romany county is from nine to ten in that realm where nothing is proven but completely obvious when you've tasted it in this scale nothing can be proven at least to lab scientists it's just a matter of common recognition and agreement i find that anything tasted in a group in this scale everyone agrees that that is an ultimate experience it's in that realm where i would serve a glass of cheddar de chem with hot roast roast beef and aged beef and everyone will agree that that marriage is pushing us to a very instructive limit serve white wine a big chardonnay with cheeses and the initially apprehensive looks around the table turned to a new wonder for this in this realm the pinnacle of it for me is the from the le county would have to unfortunately tested only twice in my life but have a glass of that and all the chardonnays in the world will line up behind it it is here that we can make sure there is a future that we will find out what will be cooking next and what will trickle down to the public so they will say no more to tyson no more to monsanto and say yes to eating only healthful and joyful ingredients mad is addressing both realms but the nine to ten benchmarks are also our guide through trends and what we create today of the future we love trends especially when we start them ourselves but is our future really about one trend after another the holy grail being the list of the next trend and then the one that comes after that the future is not about trends even though it will be full of them renee thinks there's a big future in mexican cuisine which i do and i'm particularly excited about matching it with indian cuisine think of all those sorry mata i'll have to call them curry pastes and powders with the moles of oaxaca or the three ricardos of the yucatan the green pumpkin seed one the red achiote or anato one and the amazing one called chimoli which is made from black and carbonized chilies which is a world-class ingredient remembering that looking back to the future i think again of escoffier and his keep it simple faith sampler and wonder whether i actually ever followed that in my career and a little more of oscar wilde from earlier today where he said simple is the last refuge of the complex so let me talk about stars for a minute there i did keep it simple with the food cocktails and the wine program shadow became by the glass for example but the packaging of the message the restaurant itself was way over the top the main reason for star success is that we were a team and usually stayed a step ahead of disastrous mistakes despite my best efforts and here are some of the other reasons the opening motto of stars which i had to come up with on the first day when we opened for uh dinner when all the staff came to and said okay so what what are we doing here you know what's what's this restaurant all about i said it's everything from blue jeans less to black tie more johnny apple from the new york times called stars the most democratic restaurant in the united states there in the center is denise hale the top socialite of san francisco the woman who knew everyone who had slept with everybody and uh kept their telephone numbers she was the woman who could call nancy reagan when she was the president and the wife's president and everybody else in the world and she brought them all to stars so that's the photo of the two of us together in black tie but look at the photo above the head of the other woman that's the photo of the gay bull riders from the san francisco rodeo that stars had sponsored somehow everybody including denise got the point that they could be together there at stars and that was one of its most magical qualities as for the democracy of food at stars you could sit in the dining room and have a cut of braised sweet breads with truffles and hundred-year-old madeira or you could sit at the oyster bar and have you know a glass of bilika samoa with a dozen perfect oysters or you could sit at the main bar and have a star's hamburger and a glass of la feet really it was everything for someone more than something for everyone though there was that too the democracy of stars also included star power rudolph norief coming in after the opera giving me a huge kiss and doing a jette into his table next to denise hale the whole restaurant rising up in an ovation pretty good stuff then there was streisand and armani whatever president was in office and lots more pavarotti was the most difficult he insisted that everyone kept stay 10 feet away and he always had to have a napkin though i don't see it there a napkin on his head because of the drafts but it was the first time that the rich and famous and superstars were sitting in a public restaurant out in the open mixing with mixing with a government clerk from the courts across the streets the owner of the hot dogs stand across from stars and the groupies from all over town pretty heady stuff and quite definitely more is more but it wasn't all about star power either design had a lot to do with star's success specifically the tension created by putting a huge bar with 50 seats 50 stalls across from the then radically open kitchen with an oyster bar for single diners in between so there's the open kitchen looking at the oyster bar you can see the stools there one of the kitchen line looking at the bar and then the bar itself with that quote from louis pasteur at the top of the bar that wine is the most hygienic and healthful beverage known to man that event was julie child's birthday so we there was an ice sculpture we changed the you know the cocktails pretty much as often as the food the bar got the same attention that the food did as did the wine program but how do i get to all of that for being nearly fired for turning back shitty beans as the story goes if it had not been for a bunch of french cooks california cuisine would never have been born and i tell this story about marketing oneself and therefore once restaurant because of its two messages one always be alert for the moment that will propel you into success getting what you want and two be ever wary of getting it my moment when i first grabbed that galloping horse going by me was at lunch in 1983 for a hundred journalists at the astor mansion in newport the event was to introduce gui savoir to the united states press and he was cooking the dinner so they invited a bunch of kids in from california to do the lunch we showed up in the early morning to the kitchen and the french chefs told us to get lost you're not coming in i mean you know kids from california would have what it would why would they let us in that that was the moment and i looked around i said okay kids follow me we're setting up on the lawn we had six six foot grills you know they got us and we had a thousand pounds of charcoal that we brought in from california since there were only briquettes in the united states in the east coast and is that flashing zero so meaning i'm out of time uh oh okay couple more minutes so we set up on the lawn and cook this menu it ended up of course astonishing all the journalists because we had to cook everything on the charcoal grills but what really stormed their imagination is when we grill the dessert picture four cooks in white each with a saute pan full of berries for the dessert tossing as high as we possibly could without making fools of ourselves or wasting the dessert and a week later a hundred food sections appeared in the united states uh first for the first time in color and the first time full page and all the headlines screaming things like mesquite is it grilling is it now it's hard to believe that these were they were new at that time but they were and then for the first time the words california cuisine and enormous letters across the food section were spread all over the united states overnight we were famous and overnight a new cuisine was announced to the world in the plane back to california my cooks were ecstatic at our victory one of them looked back at me over the seat since i was sitting behind him and saw tears on my face he was horrified then puzzled no worries i told him it's just that we got what we wanted and god help us all from now on so why did i concentrate on stardom after that sorry fulvio but i did in the early 1980s as well as the food service the wine and the bar to get the message across that we were not servants relegated to the kitchen basement and the servants hall to show loudly and clearly the really important message that a successful restaurant did not have to be for the rich elite it could be great and popular in that true sense of the word as well but once on the road to fame and success it was hard to get off and the doers national billboard came in and hell broke loose soon time magazine said that i'd had more publicity than meryl streep as ludicrous as that sounds but a week later i did have my bmw and finally to answer renee's question to alessandra what keeps one going for me it's the ingredients when i wander you know after my coffee wander around a little town in italy or france or someplace and you see those huge squash flowers when i'm in galicia in the winter and there's an enormous storm you know coming off the atlantic and you see a big basket of pesabes at the entrance to the restaurant you know i just i'm getting goosebumps now mainly because they're so expensive i guess now so that always makes me want to get back in the business actually i hope to find an email today when i get back to the hotel that says i am but that's just breaking news but i do hate restaurant bureaucracy i have never lost my love for perfect ingredients i want to thank the team ali and gabe and mark and james and all of you at noma on both sides of the wall of the kitchen wall since no at noma there isn't one and by the way the teams who gave us those three pretty wonderful lunches but to close with i want to give you the advice from elizabeth taylor to me when the going gets rough put on your lipstick pour a cocktail and get on with it thank you