Episode 850 - Tom Colicchio
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck nicks what is happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast wtf today on the show i talked to tom colicchio the top chef guy you know i'm the chef guy the from top chef i think we just wanted to chat i i'd like chefs i haven't talked to a chef in a while i in another life i wanted to be a chef i i i
Marc:I believe I could do it.
Marc:But anyways, there's a couple things I want to tell you about, if I could, because I have the platform here to do it.
Marc:If you want to come out and see me and Brendan McDonald as we are out and about with the new book, Waiting for the Punch, we have events in New York and San Francisco so far up to this point.
Marc:That's where we got.
Marc:In New York City, we'll be at the Union Square, Barnes & Noble on Tuesday, October 10th at 7 p.m.
Marc:You don't need tickets for that.
Marc:In San Francisco, we'll be at the Alamo Drafthouse on Friday, October 13th as part of Litquake.
Marc:You do need tickets for that one.
Marc:Go to litquake.org to get them.
Marc:And if you want to win a king-size Casper mattress or get a brand-new luggage set from Away or get some signed posters from me, pre-order Waiting for the Punch and then upload your proof of purchase to enter our sweepstakes.
Marc:Go to markmarinbook.com to pre-order now.
Marc:All right?
Marc:You want to do that?
Marc:Can you do it?
Marc:So, you know what?
Marc:I wanted to bring this up because...
Marc:You know, Pete Davidson was on the show on Monday and it was an amazing conversation.
Marc:It was a very candid conversation, a very forthright conversation about mental health, his mental health issues, mine to a lesser degree.
Marc:We talked about his borderline personality disorder.
Marc:And here's the fucking fucked up thing about our culture is that the interview...
Marc:got turned into a lot of clickbait by all the usual places, all the garbage outlets, the portals of psychic garbage that we are allowed into our fucking brain through our eye holes.
Marc:And the headlines were almost all sensationalistic, making it sound like he was in a crisis or something.
Marc:And it just it wasn't the case.
Marc:He was having an honest, respectful conversation with me about mental health, which is something people in this country are hesitant to do because the shitty tabloid culture stigmatizes it and makes it seem wrong.
Marc:It's just a shame that people would take it out of that context and sensationalize it.
Marc:You know, that it was just an honest conversation.
Marc:And it's just, fuck it, man.
Marc:It's the opposite of helpful.
Marc:It makes people less likely to get help, less likely to feel like they are okay.
Marc:It's just fucking irresponsible.
Marc:And I just wanted to put that out there.
Marc:Because Pete did a brave thing, and he's a good kid, that Pete.
Marc:And he's doing all right.
Marc:That's what I got to say.
Marc:All right?
Marc:People got to talk about mental health.
Marc:You keep hiding shit, then everything is a lie.
Marc:All the entire cultural dialogue is a big lie.
Marc:And everyone's afraid to talk because they're going to be exploited or bullied or ripped apart or ostracized.
Marc:Man, are we going to make this experiment work?
Marc:Can we be a fucking community of humans in this country?
Marc:Is it possible?
Marc:All odds are against us right now.
Marc:But...
Marc:I got some feedback on the size of my new feral, friendly feral stray cat's face.
Marc:I told you about Big Head.
Marc:I told you about that he has this huge head, but he also has this huge set of balls, which needs to be taken care of, and I guess that's on me.
Marc:I don't know if he's domesticated, but he's pleasant sometimes.
Marc:He's an odd cat.
Marc:He looks like he's got this big old head and these big old balls, and his body looks like a bicep, like he's just this little monster.
Marc:And I like him all right, but he's a little erratic.
Marc:You can touch him.
Marc:You can pet him.
Marc:But sometimes when you're petting him, he hisses.
Marc:You don't know if he's hissing in pleasure.
Marc:Generally with a cat, it's not pleasure.
Marc:And he attacked me the other day.
Marc:And I went out.
Marc:Sarah the Painter, my girlfriend, thinks it had something to do with my balls.
Marc:Because I went out there naked to feed him, which I do sometimes in the morning out back.
Marc:No one can see me.
Marc:I'll go out naked and put the food down.
Marc:And that little fucker big head attacked my leg and bit my leg.
Marc:He bit my fucking leg out of nowhere.
Marc:As I was walking away, after I picked up the bowl to fill it with food, he attacked me, bit my leg.
Marc:And Sarah's like, well, that's because he saw your balls and he saw you as a threat of his territorial threat.
Marc:We had a little cockfight.
Marc:I had a cockfight with the cat.
Marc:And I did not attack him back.
Marc:I let him win that one.
Marc:But...
Marc:To the question about the connection between balls and head, I got a few emails sort of putting it together.
Marc:But this was the first one from Allison.
Marc:Subject line, cat balls.
Marc:I was listening to today's podcast and I had to stop what I was doing.
Marc:Juicing prickly pears.
Marc:There's magenta shit all over my kitchen.
Marc:To answer your inquiry about the relationship between cat cheeks and testicles, I'm a vet who works at an animal shelter, so I have the pleasure of working with a variety of cat testicles of all shapes and sizes.
Marc:The answer is...
Marc:That Sarah the painter is right, of course, in parentheses, cheek slash jowl size is a testosterone dependent trait in male cats.
Marc:Cats who are neutered before one to two years of age will never develop jowls.
Marc:And if they are neutered later in life, the jowls will stay, but will get saggier once the testosterone disappears.
Marc:Isn't that the way with everything, though?
Marc:Anyway, basically, there's a direct relationship between the size of a cat's balls and the size of its cheeks.
Marc:Get that majestic beast neutered.
Marc:Thank you for everything you do for your outdoor colony.
Marc:Keep telling cat stories.
Marc:Boomer and deaf black cat for E forever.
Marc:Got it.
Marc:I just had to figure that out in real time for E forever.
Marc:For E is forever.
Marc:Well, thank you, Allison, for clearing that up.
Marc:Now we know why I have jowls.
Marc:It's because of my balls.
Marc:Oh, wait.
Marc:No, I meant the cat.
Marc:I meant that's why the cat had jowls.
Marc:There's another email here that I'd like to read you because I think it's encouraging and important and I believe it's real.
Marc:Sometimes I get emails that are not real.
Marc:They're just people fucking with me.
Marc:But this one sounded real, and it sounded, I don't know, it was encouraging.
Marc:I don't think it's going to take the country by storm, but it would be nice if it would.
Marc:This is from William.
Marc:Bill, subject line, I'm sorry.
Marc:I've made a huge mistake.
Marc:hey mark i just watched too real on netflix that's my special by the way which you can watch on netflix i must admit this is the first time i've ever watched a comedy special great job it was very funny i guess i owe you and the country an apology so here it goes i'm sorry i voted for trump i'd take it back if i could as gob from arrested development frequently says i've made a huge mistake
Marc:I'm 44 years old and I was a conservative talk radio Fox News junkie since high school.
Marc:After 25 plus years of living in the echo chamber, I finally broken free.
Marc:The Donald has managed to do what no one and nothing else has been able to do.
Marc:I'm off of conservative talk radio and off of Fox News.
Marc:Just couldn't listen to one more sycophantic broadcast praising and or excusing inexcusable positions, policies and tweets.
Marc:I've been amazed at how much more open and receptive to new views and opinions I've become since stepping back from the spin machine.
Marc:I'm not ready to vote a straight Democratic ticket, but I no longer dismiss news and views from the other side.
Marc:Your WTF podcast has been an important part of this transition for me.
Marc:It's been super healthy to get new views from someone I enjoy listening to.
Marc:My brother-in-law introduced me to your podcast this past spring.
Marc:A couple of highlights for me have been the Al Franken interview and the President Obama interview.
Marc:Keep up the great work.
Marc:Thanks, Bill.
Marc:See, that's basic logic without even being political, is that when you see people that you've grown to trust, support behavior and ideas and actions that are heinous, you have to question the whole goddamn operation, don't you?
Marc:Well, Bill, I appreciate that.
Marc:I appreciate you sending that, and I believe you.
Marc:And I have to assume that others are somewhat sensing that.
Marc:It's a real shit show.
Marc:It's a real...
Marc:history changing, brain bending, completely terrifying shit show, a fucking circus of corruption and greed and racism and violence.
Marc:Hey, but cooking's great.
Marc:I love to cook.
Marc:I want to get better at cooking.
Marc:Occasionally, I'll have a chef in here, get some tips.
Marc:But, you know, you can go look that stuff up.
Marc:I love to cook because it takes me out of me.
Marc:And like sometimes when I have time off like I've had over the summer, I'll spend a lot of time doing food prep, doing cooking, making things I enjoy.
Marc:I'll spend hours and hours cooking.
Marc:making beautiful food that I like to eat that's healthy, hours and hours of prep, days of working on the food, and I will eat it in minutes, in fucking minutes.
Marc:And I cannot seem to not do that.
Marc:Oh, did I mention today is my birthday, which will be yesterday when you hear this?
Marc:I recorded this Wednesday, and if you're listening to it Thursday, I will have turned 54 already.
Marc:I'm 54 years old.
Marc:I woke up 54 this morning, and I feel all right.
Marc:I feel okay.
Marc:I don't make a big deal out of it.
Marc:I'm going to dinner with Sarah the Painter.
Marc:Got some nice calls.
Marc:Appreciate all the well-wishers on Twitter and email.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:I made it another year.
Marc:I've had 54 in a row now with no breaks.
Marc:Got close to taking a break.
Marc:But I stayed, I kept at it.
Marc:I kept at this life thing.
Marc:So look, let's listen to me and Tom Colicchio, the top chef guy.
Marc:He's a Jersey guy.
Marc:And as you know, I'm genetically Jersey.
Marc:So this is me and Tom talking.
Marc:Alright, you just walked in, you're talking about a restaurant down, where is it, Necco Park?
Marc:No, Silver Lake, Squirrel.
Marc:I've been there I think once, I don't know.
Marc:But I have to assume that when you walk into a restaurant, they're like, holy shit, Tom's here.
Marc:How do you pronounce your last name?
Marc:Colicchio.
Marc:Tom Colicchio just walked in, so there's panic in the kitchen.
Guest:No, so last night we did a 10th anniversary party at Kraft, my restaurant here in Los Angeles.
Guest:I've been there.
Guest:And Jessica Caslow, who owns and is a chef at Squirrel, she cooked with me last night.
Guest:Johnny and Vinny as well and Ludo.
Guest:You're dropping names, Johnny and Vinny.
Guest:They're your guys over there?
Guest:No, no, the guys that own Animal here in town.
Guest:I've been there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, you know, Jessica knew I was coming, and so, yeah.
Guest:But that does happen, I guess.
Guest:You don't ever drop in just to drop in?
Guest:I do.
Guest:A lot of times, I don't want to be known.
Guest:I just kind of drop in, you know, just kind of try to sneak in and just have it.
Guest:Because, you know, the problem is we chefs...
Guest:We go into each other's restaurants and we get what we call food fucked.
Guest:You know, just too much food starts coming out and you feel obliged that you have to eat it all.
Guest:And before you know it, you're rolling out of there, you know, 10 pounds heavier than when you walked in.
Guest:You feel like shit.
Marc:It is a little, you just, that's happened to me.
Marc:and i'm not a chef right right right if i go to like i i like alex carnicelli right so i go to a restaurant and she'll know i'm coming and then they start you know doing chef's yeah yeah table kind of stuff and you're like oh my god and before you know it you're just like nine desserts i'm ill yeah it's like what are they trying to kill me is you trying well i imagine with you it's like i know what's happening they're trying to kill me they're trying to kill me exactly get me out of the way uh-huh yeah but uh oh so what's her name over there at squirrel
Marc:uh jessica coslo now what makes her like i'm just curious because like i can cook but i'm not a chef and i i'd like to be but i i didn't go that way usually i usually after that you get well you know i'm not a chef but i have a wok yeah i don't know i do i don't i have a wok pan right yeah and because it's easy to saute and not because i walk cook but like when you say what like what is what makes her stylistically interesting you know i
Marc:As a chef.
Guest:She's doing food that I think, at least that I want to eat now.
Guest:You know, there's a certain freshness to it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:A certain immediacy to it.
Guest:And it's just damn delicious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, she does this rice salad with this egg on it, this crispy rice salad with an egg on it for breakfast.
Guest:And it's just, I can eat it every day of the week.
Guest:Oh, that sounds good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But now, that's not something you would think of.
Guest:No, no, it's not the kind of food that I cook.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And that's probably why I like it.
Guest:She did this thing last night that was so cool.
Guest:She did cabbage.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And braised cabbage, and so it was kind of seared a little bit, and a big wedge of cabbage.
Guest:Braised in what?
Guest:Well, she basted it, so she seared it first in a lot of butter, and then started basting it in sauerkraut juice.
Guest:And then took dehydrated sauerkraut juice and used it as a garnish and then some chive blossoms, garlic chive blossoms and fried preserved lemons.
Guest:It was just absolutely delicious.
Marc:Now, just saying that, I understand the logic of it and the aesthetic of it and that it's like a mildly crowded cabbage, braised cabbage with lemon and whatever.
Marc:But do you just marvel at the ingenuity of that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, actually the simplicity of it.
Guest:This is, you know, when you get down to it, it's a wedge of braised cabbage.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it's just, it's not about how, it's always about what.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Or not about what, it's about how.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's not that you braised cabbage, how did you braise it?
Guest:Right.
Guest:What did you do there?
Guest:You did something a little different.
Marc:But it seems like creative, like it seems like outside the box.
Marc:I mean, dehydrated sauerkraut cheese.
Guest:Yeah, listen, it's absolutely creative and out of the box, but at the same time, really simple and basic too.
Guest:Now, where'd you grow up?
Guest:New Jersey.
Guest:Where?
Guest:Elizabeth.
Guest:You know, my grandfather is from Elizabeth.
Guest:My uncle said everybody's from Elizabeth.
Guest:If you search back and you go back, someone in your family is from Elizabeth.
Marc:Why is that?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Do they all come in that way?
Guest:Yeah, I think from Ellis Island, if you went left on the river, you went to New York, and you take a right, you went to New Jersey.
Guest:And you're right there.
Marc:You're at Elizabeth.
Marc:But it wasn't a nice place.
Marc:How old are you?
Marc:55.
Marc:You have family there still?
Marc:No, I think I have one cousin left.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But what was it like there when you grew up?
Marc:What was the business?
Guest:My father was... Well, he had a barber shop when we were young, and then he... In the house?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, no, not in the house.
Guest:No, he had a shop.
Guest:And then I think...
Guest:I think he lost it paying a gambling debt.
Guest:I think.
Guest:Something they didn't talk about.
Guest:Some gangster got to shop.
Guest:Yeah, I don't know.
Marc:Something like that.
Guest:But anyways, he was a correction officer in a county jail.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's heavy.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Coming home from that.
Marc:He went from barber to corrections officer.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:In the county?
Guest:Yeah, I think it was one of those things where he was still young and it was 20 and out.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then he did that his whole life?
Guest:He did, and he actually passed away before he retired.
Guest:He was 52 when he passed away, so it was 28 years ago.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah, he was young.
Guest:Of what?
Marc:Lung cancer.
Marc:Oh, smoked?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:A lot.
Marc:You just grow up with that, I guess.
Marc:You know, that's the world that you lived in then.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He started smoking when he was a teenager probably, and he was good for a good two to three packs a day.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Did you ever do it?
Guest:I did.
Guest:You know, it's funny.
Guest:My first trip to Los Angeles, I wasn't crazy about it, but I was 24 years old, and the only good thing that came out of it is I never smoked a cigarette again after that trip.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I was 24 years old.
Guest:And you'd been smoking?
Guest:I'd been smoking probably a good pack a day.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was here.
Guest:I was working just for a couple weeks, and I was standing in a motel somewhere, and I had to walk up two flights of stairs, and I was out of breath.
Guest:I was 24, and I was like, fuck this.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:I got to stop this.
Guest:I never smoked a cigarette again.
Guest:It scares you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:So what do you mean just out here working for a couple weeks?
Marc:You weren't a chef then?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was a sous chef in a restaurant in New York called Quilted Giraffe.
Guest:And we had three weeks off in August.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And so I asked the chef there that I was working for to get me out to Los Angeles to cook.
Guest:And so he sent me out here to work at a restaurant called Rex, a big old Italian restaurant.
Guest:And I spent about a week in the kitchen and said, I got to get out of here.
Guest:And so I took whatever money I had and ate around and then hightailed it back home.
Marc:So, like, when you grew up, how many siblings do you have?
Marc:Two.
Marc:I have an older brother and a younger brother.
Marc:Okay, so there's three.
Marc:You're Italian, full on.
Marc:Your mom is, what does she do?
Guest:My mom, you know, she just took care of us when we were young, and then she, you know, in the first job she had at the house, she worked at, like, a photo store or something like that, you know, processing, helping process film.
Guest:But then she started working in a school cafeteria.
Guest:She managed a school cafeteria.
Marc:So they're straight-up working class.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I shared a bedroom with my two brothers.
Guest:For the whole time?
Guest:Oh yeah, until I left when I was 18, exactly.
Marc:I was talking to Frank about it.
Marc:Frank's an Italian kid from New Jersey, my part-time assistant guy.
Marc:And it seems to me that there was a time where you could go anywhere in New Jersey and Philadelphia, in that area, where you can find a pretty good Italian restaurant almost every other block.
Marc:You're a Jersey guy, right?
Marc:Well, I mean, my mother's Pompton Lakes, my father's Jersey City, but I didn't grow up there.
Marc:Got it.
Marc:We were out by the time I was six, but yeah, genetically, I'm Jersey.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So, no, in our town, there was an Italian restaurant that was there forever called Spiritos.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's where we would go.
Guest:My father would take us there on Fridays.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He would play softball, and then we'd go there.
Guest:And they had decent pizza.
Guest:They had great veal cutlet and ravioli.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It wasn't veal cutlet parmigiano.
Guest:It was just fried veal cutlet with sauce and then ravioli on the side.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's what we ate.
Guest:We had an Italian salad.
Guest:And if they felt like splurging, we would get the imported provolone cheese, not the domestic stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But it was good, right?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:The restaurant's still there.
Marc:It's still there.
Marc:It's still there, yeah.
Marc:Now, what is the difference?
Marc:What do you think?
Marc:Okay, let's talk Italian food here.
Guest:I don't go to too many restaurants here, but I'll give it a shot.
Guest:I don't know restaurants here that well.
Marc:No, I don't either, dude.
Marc:But, I mean, I'm of the belief that we don't have top-notch Italian here.
Marc:Well... Angelini's Asteria is good.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I guess Mario's place is good.
Marc:Moza, you know.
Marc:But, I mean, I only ate there once.
Marc:Right.
Guest:But, like, there's no... Like the old school, like, Dentana and places like that.
Marc:Yeah, I guess that's right.
Guest:Yeah, it's kind of old school Italian.
Marc:Yeah, but I don't know if there was a huge Italian contingent here like there was.
Marc:Like, they were all in Jersey and Philly.
Marc:Well, they were in San Francisco.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:They're all up north.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So that's where the Italian is?
Guest:Yeah, I think so.
Guest:I'm sure there's a million people now that are going to be jumping down my throat going, what do you mean?
Marc:How do you not eat there?
Guest:We're good Italian restaurants.
Guest:There are great Italian restaurants here.
Guest:That's probably true.
Guest:Yeah, there are.
Guest:I just don't know them.
Marc:So how do you go?
Marc:What drives you to cook?
Marc:Did you love it when you were a kid?
Marc:I mean...
Marc:I was... Do you have a knack for it?
Guest:Yeah, I did, actually.
Guest:I was about 13, 12 or 13, and I started cooking and doing simple stuff.
Guest:Like, I watched my mom make pancakes and said, well, that's pretty damn easy to do.
Guest:I think I can handle that.
Guest:It's kind of fun, though.
Guest:It's immediate kind of... And then I was...
Guest:God, about the best job I ever had.
Guest:I was 13 years old, and we belonged to a swim club, an Italian-American swim club in Clark, New Jersey, called the Grand Centurions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they had a snack bar type thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the guy hired me there to scoop ice cream and run the cash register.
Guest:And within a week, I was cooking.
Guest:Doing like grilled cheese and burgers and steak sandwiches and sauce, stuff like that.
Guest:And I just loved it.
Guest:This guy was paying me $275 a week under the table.
Guest:And I work in a pair of flip flops, shorts and a flip flops, maybe a shirt sometimes.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:Because you're on the grill.
Guest:Yeah, I just loved it.
Guest:And so I found it was easy.
Guest:It's engaging though.
Guest:It was very easy.
Guest:I understood it.
Guest:And I had a problem with dealing with recipes, looking at recipes and trying to figure out recipes.
Guest:I most likely would have been diagnosed with ADD.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I kind of just stumbled upon them.
Guest:And then I got this book, I think I was about 15, and my dad came home, and he said he got it in the library, so I'm not sure what the hell this book was doing in the jail's library.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was Jacques Pepin, and it's a book called La Technique.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he just talked about how cooking isn't about recipes, it's about techniques.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And once you learn techniques, you can throw the recipe book out and just do whatever you want.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:It freed me up completely.
Guest:Listen, it's like playing guitar, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Before you get creative on a guitar, you have to know the basics, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then once you understand how to, you know, if you can get one, one, you know, pattern down for.
Guest:You learn a couple scales.
Guest:For scales, yeah.
Guest:Once you get, you know, if you can play a pentatonic scale, I mean, you can do a lot.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:That's exactly right.
Marc:But like, so, okay, so what are, so you're 15 and you read that book?
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And what are the basics?
Guest:Well, the basics were, how do you cook a green vegetable?
Guest:It's the same, no matter what green vegetable it is.
Guest:How do you make a good stock?
Guest:How do you make a couple of mother sauces and then you can go from there?
Guest:How do you butcher a few things?
Guest:And you get some basics and then you can kind of do whatever you want.
Marc:How do you cook a green vegetable?
Marc:You blanch it.
Marc:Well, yeah, exactly.
Marc:In boiling water, you don't cover the pot.
Marc:You make sure it's salted.
Marc:Those are basics.
Marc:Keep it quick and then you can saute after that.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Do you blanch broccoli, Rob?
Guest:Yes and no.
Guest:It all depends.
Guest:It depends on what I'm doing with it.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But it depends.
Guest:Do I want that roasted flavor or do I want a fresh green flavor?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So if you're roasting it, you just roast it.
Guest:If I'm roasting it straight up, I'll roast it, but then I'll be getting a different flavor.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But that's, you know, that's exactly right.
Guest:So how do you treat each thing and what's the effect that you're looking for?
Guest:I just want to throw a very specific question.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so it's, you know, I just found that cooking was easy.
Guest:It came easy and I enjoyed it.
Guest:And my dad, I guess, suggested and wasn't, I listened to him that often, but he suggested I become a chef.
Guest:And I was like,
Guest:All right.
Guest:Sounds cool.
Marc:If he's into it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:If I got his support.
Marc:But you know, because I did some grill cooking when I was younger.
Marc:I was not good at it and I couldn't handle, like I fucked up a few times in restaurants, but I liked the excitement of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, I did too.
Marc:Like you got all those dupes up and you're just sweaty and you're like- There's nothing like it, man.
Guest:When it's busy, you walk into a busy kitchen.
Guest:I have a steakhouse in Vegas and I walk in there and it's a busy, busy place and I walk in and just kind of, all right, guys, keep doing what you're doing because I can't figure it out.
Guest:Really?
Guest:It's insane.
Marc:Yeah, there's just what?
Marc:Has it got a big line?
Marc:Like there's a line in back?
Marc:Well, there's two.
Guest:We have side by side.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's just a pile of me cooking at any time.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:It's awesome to see.
Marc:Which restaurant is that?
Marc:It's called Kraft Steak.
Marc:Kraft Steak in Vegas.
Marc:Which hotel?
Guest:The MGM.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But okay, so you got the knack.
Marc:You got the basics from Jacques Pepin.
Marc:Is that how you say his name?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Do you go to school?
Guest:No, I plan on going to culinary school.
Guest:And at the time, you had to work in two restaurants before they'd accept you.
Guest:And so, you know, I fill out the application and the whole bit.
Guest:For which one?
Guest:Culinary Institute of America.
Guest:And then I started working around.
Guest:And I think it was my fourth restaurant job.
Guest:I finally decided to take a shot at cooking in New York.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was at the Quilted Giraffe, which was a four-star restaurant, considered one of the best in New York.
Marc:The Quilted Giraffe.
Guest:The Quilted Giraffe, yeah.
Guest:And within four months, I was a sous chef there.
Guest:And at that point, I was like, I'm not...
Guest:So you just get a gig.
Guest:You get the job as a what?
Guest:Well, my first serious restaurant job was at a restaurant in Elizabeth called Evelyn's.
Guest:It was a seafood restaurant.
Guest:We would do 1,000 covers on a Saturday night.
Guest:It was just insane.
Guest:But it also, you know.
Guest:Fresh fish.
Guest:Well, kind of.
How?
Guest:And it, but it also opened me up to the restaurant world.
Guest:You know, I was a 17 year old kid and there was a lot of like older, older waitresses around.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:They were older, like 23, 24 going to college.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there was a lot of, a lot of, I had a lot of fun.
Marc:And just that kitchen too, right?
Marc:There was nothing like it.
Marc:I mean, it's just.
Marc:When I used to tell a story about that, when you've just gotten through a lunch rush or a dinner rush and you're out back just covered in grease, smoking a cigarette.
Marc:So good.
Marc:Yeah, that was it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we, you know, I was going to the, then the drinking age was 18.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, you know, you'd go out with your friends after work and just, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, just get totally inebriated.
Marc:Yeah, manage to wake up.
Marc:Break into the restaurant to eat.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:There's stuff like, yeah, exactly.
Guest:Yeah, you've been there, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, but anyway, so that was the first job.
Guest:And then from there, I moved to, and I worked on the line.
Guest:I worked in the bakery.
Guest:I worked in prep kitchen.
Marc:So you understood it all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I ended up going to a red sauce Italian restaurant in Union, New Jersey.
Guest:And then from there, went to a hotel to try that out.
Marc:Red sauce Italian restaurant?
Marc:What is it?
Marc:That's a way of, that's a certain type of Italian?
Marc:Yeah, it's the red sauce Italian.
Marc:Not that northern Italian stuff.
Guest:Not the whiter sauces.
Guest:Or just oils and fish.
Guest:We didn't do a risotto or anything like that.
Guest:It was veal parmesan, chicken parmesan.
Guest:There you go.
Guest:Spaghetti and meatballs.
Guest:All set.
Guest:Franchese.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Um, so, um, and then from there I went to a hotel and God, I was there for a couple of weeks and they made me the night chef.
Guest:So I was in charge of the kitchen at night and I was so over my head.
Guest:At a hotel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I would go and look at books and do dishes.
Guest:In the city?
Guest:No, this was in Secaucus, New Jersey.
Marc:Oh, Secaucus.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We used to drive by that.
Marc:My grandmother used to say that it was all pigs.
Marc:It used to be.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Pigs.
Guest:I mean, you know, back then in Meadowlands, you used to go by Meadowlands and see pheasants, you know, back in there.
Guest:Yeah, it was like just swamplands and it stunk.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was a smell to it.
Guest:Well, it was all the sulfur coming out of the ground.
Guest:Is that what it was?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That was natural?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It was Jimmy Hoffa decomposing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:A lot of Jimmy Hoffas.
Marc:That's what they told us.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And then I worked in a decent restaurant.
Guest:I'm doing new American cuisine.
Marc:Well, wait, tell me what happened when you were over your head.
Guest:So you're working on a motel.
Guest:No, I would work on these dishes and just kind of nothing.
Guest:I mean, they all loved it.
Guest:To me, I'd look at it and go, no, this isn't right.
Marc:You had to make the menu?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I was in charge of the specials.
Guest:So I would come up with two or three specials a week or whatever.
Marc:And all along the way, you're picking up skills.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:You're learning shit.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You can make a good meatball.
Guest:Yeah, I could do that.
Guest:My mother taught me to do that when I was a kid.
Guest:So anyway, but then I ended up going to this restaurant called Evelyn's, I'm not Evelyn's, 40 Main Street.
Guest:And it was a good restaurant.
Marc:Where is that?
Guest:This was in Montclair, I'm sorry, Milburn, New Jersey, Short Hills, Milburn.
Guest:And I was a cook there.
Guest:And that did really well there.
Guest:It was a good restaurant.
Guest:We got three-star New York Times review, the whole bit.
Guest:Italian?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:It was like New American.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And we changed the menu every day.
Guest:And so we all sat together and just kind of contributed to the menu.
Guest:And it was a blast.
Guest:And then I left to go to New York at the Quilted Giraffe.
Guest:And then went back to 40 Main as the chef.
Guest:Oh, after.
Marc:That was my first chef's job.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, tell me, what are the ranks?
Marc:Because what does a sous chef do exactly?
Guest:Well, this is the way I put it.
Guest:People always ask, are you still cooking the kitchen?
Guest:No, cooks cook in the kitchen.
Guest:Sous chefs cook a little less.
Guest:Chefs cook, we really don't cook, but it's our recipes.
Guest:It's our style of cooking.
Guest:It's our management style, the whole bit.
Guest:So you give up the addiction?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:It's still there.
Guest:So if you go to see a classical piece of music, right, you go to see an orchestra play, who gets top billing?
Guest:The conductor, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're playing a piece of music that was probably written a couple hundred years ago.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You don't expect that conductor to jump in the pit and pick up the oboe and start playing or something.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:No, it would be just chaos.
Guest:I don't even know if he knows how, though.
Guest:They may.
Guest:They probably can play instruments.
Marc:I'm sure he can play piano or something.
Guest:I don't know if that's true.
Guest:Probably.
Guest:They probably can.
Guest:We don't know that.
Guest:But the chef, you're in the kitchen expediting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're coordinating everything.
Guest:If you have to go back there and jump behind the line and start cooking, everything comes to a screeching halt.
Guest:So you want the chef out there at least coordinating things to a certain extent.
Marc:Managing everything?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So that's the big payoff is you get to not be dirty anymore?
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:Yeah, you don't... Where's the Monty Python?
Guest:How do you know he's the king?
Marc:Because I went over, like, years ago, I've interviewed, like, I guess you're the third or fourth chef, really.
Marc:It depends whether you consider Bourdain a chef.
Marc:So I talked... I don't know if he does.
Marc:No, he probably doesn't.
Marc:Not anymore, anyway.
Marc:He used to be.
Marc:Well, he claimed that he was sort of a shitty chef.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I've talked to Scott and Alex.
Marc:And I went to Scott's restaurant and he cooked the famous spaghetti for me.
Marc:It's butter.
Marc:It's butter.
Marc:It's what the difference is.
Marc:That's the magic.
Marc:A little butter and a tomato.
Marc:That's good, though, right?
Marc:Yeah, it's fine.
Marc:It's good.
Marc:I mean, again, simple.
Marc:How simple is that?
Marc:It's so simple, it's maddening.
Marc:It's all about timing, though.
Marc:Because you eat at the restaurant, you're like, oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is insane.
Guest:But that's all timing.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:It's Wendy put the butter in.
Guest:Wendy, you know, once that pasta is cooked,
Guest:And you mix and you put it in with the sauce and you're finishing it with the sauce.
Guest:It's just the timing of getting it all right where it's just the consistency of the sauce because the starches of the pasta really play into that as well.
Guest:Because you use some of that pasta water.
Guest:That has to go in there.
Guest:And so a combination of the tomatoes, the pasta water, fresh herb, and a little bit of butter and some olive oil.
Guest:And there's a certain moment where it all just comes together and they have to eat it at that point.
Guest:You got to eat it right then.
Guest:It doesn't keep.
Guest:No, no, no.
Marc:It doesn't hold very well.
Marc:So do you do that, though, like when you go to someone else's restaurant and you're like, how the fuck did he make that?
Guest:There are times, yeah.
Guest:So there was a great chef who, you know, his name was Pierre Gagnard.
Guest:He still, he had a restaurant in a little town near Lyon called Saint-Étienne.
Guest:And I would go there.
Guest:Where?
Guest:Saint-Étienne.
Guest:It was in France.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And I used to go there.
Guest:And this guy was one of the early guys where I'd look at and go, hey.
Guest:how the hell did he do this?
Guest:And then I'd go and try to reverse engineer and figure it out.
Guest:But- Was it simple?
Guest:No.
Guest:No, a lot of it was, so you know- French is complicated though, right?
Guest:I remember looking at this one, yeah, but this was kind of avant-garde stuff.
Guest:I remember looking at this one dish and it was a lemon consomme and-
Guest:But I'm looking at it and saying, well, this is interesting because lemon's not clear.
Guest:Lemon juice isn't clear.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Guest:But this is crystal clear.
Guest:So how do you do it?
Guest:And so I figured out, well, you clarify consomme with egg whites.
Guest:So can you clarify lemon juice with egg whites?
Guest:The answer is yes.
Guest:Oh, you can.
Guest:And so, yeah.
Guest:And assuming that's how I did it, that's how I ended up doing it.
Guest:It's egg whites or egg shells?
Guest:Egg whites.
Guest:Well, you could put shells and stuff in, but, you know, just the proteins from the whites, you know, collect all the fat and stuff.
Guest:So that's how you... Yeah.
Guest:And so, yeah, and so it worked.
Guest:And so, but he was fantastic.
Guest:Still is a fantastic chef.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So you teach yourself, you end up at the Quilted Giraffe.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you're back at the other place.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Where you do your first head chef job.
Marc:Yep, yep.
Marc:And as a sous chef, you're working alongside the chef to sort of execute the shit.
Marc:You're still cooking?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Sous means under, so it's just an under chef.
Guest:So you're sort of in charge of the kitchen, still getting dirty.
Marc:Yeah, you're still getting dirty.
Marc:And a cook's a cook.
Marc:Cook's a cook.
Marc:You tell him what to do, and he should know.
Marc:All he needs to know is technique.
Guest:No, a cook is you tell them what to do, but they always know better.
Guest:And so they want to do it their way until one day you scream at them enough, and they finally realize it.
Guest:And then they quit and become a chef.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, something like that.
Guest:So I opened a restaurant a couple months back, and my whole thing is I think cooks often, the heat's too high, the pans are too hot, and you got to slow down.
Guest:You don't need to cook on high heat, but everybody's trained to cook on high heat because they think that's going to cook the food faster, and they got to get the food out.
Guest:And so after, you know, day after day saying, lower the flames, lower your oven, doesn't need to be on 500 degrees.
Guest:And I went, I pulled a plate out of the oven and burnt the hell out of my hands.
Guest:I just had a fit, started screaming.
Guest:So the next day, all of a sudden, I noticed the flames were all down, the ovens were all down.
Guest:And a couple days later, the cook, the young woman, she came next to me, she goes, you know, you're right.
Guest:You're right.
Guest:Thanks.
Guest:It really doesn't make a difference.
Guest:Yeah, it does.
Marc:So when do you really start to come into your own as a chef?
Marc:So it's not out in Jersey.
Guest:No, it wasn't.
Guest:So I left that restaurant.
Guest:What was it called again?
Guest:It was called 40 Main Street.
Guest:And that was in Jersey.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I left that restaurant.
Guest:And I was actually a co-chef with a buddy of mine, Jerry Bryan, who was from Virginia Beach.
Guest:And he ended up going back to Virginia Beach to open a restaurant.
Guest:And he opened a restaurant in Portsmouth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was near Norfolk.
Guest:And I was kind of between jobs.
Guest:It was right after the holidays.
Guest:And he called me up.
Guest:He said, I need help.
Guest:Can you come down here?
Guest:So I figured I'd go down there for a couple weeks and help out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I ended up staying for seven months.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Right.
Guest:In Virginia Beach?
Guest:Yeah, and just helped him out.
Guest:I had a great place on the beach that one of the guys that owned the restaurant- But you didn't have a family yet?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I was 25.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One of the guys who owned it had a condo on the beach.
Guest:He gave me that to live in.
Guest:It was a blast.
Guest:I had a good time.
Guest:And so-
Guest:Then there was a guy who I knew in New Jersey.
Guest:His name was Dennis Foy.
Guest:And he had a restaurant in Chatham, New Jersey called The Tarragon Tree.
Guest:And he was opening a restaurant in New York.
Guest:And I was in New York at a party for a mutual friend.
Guest:And the guy took Dennis aside and said, this is the guy who should have to run your kitchen in New York.
Guest:And he pointed at me.
Guest:And so he called me up, asked me to come.
Guest:And at the time, I was ready to go to France.
Guest:And I had six months set up in two different restaurants in France.
Guest:To learn?
Guest:Yeah, just to go in stage.
Guest:We call it stage.
Guest:You go there in three months at one restaurant, three in the other restaurant.
Guest:And so I said no.
Guest:And right after that, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and we knew that he only had about three months to live.
Guest:And so I decided to stay close to home, not go to France.
Guest:I took the job.
Guest:My dad passed away, so I was out of the restaurant for about a month.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I came back and started working there, and I didn't care for it at all.
Guest:I didn't like what he was doing.
Guest:What was the restaurant?
Guest:It was called Mondrian.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:Why didn't you like it?
Guest:I didn't like what he was doing.
Guest:He's a good chef.
Guest:His style of managing the restaurant wasn't for me.
Guest:Ex-military guy wasn't my thing.
Guest:I left and I ended up going to France.
Guest:I got a call from the owner of the restaurant saying, come back.
Guest:We want to talk to you.
Guest:So, long story short, I took over the chef's role in the restaurant and started doing my own thing, and within, I think, three or four months, I got a three-star review from the New York Times.
Marc:At the Monroe.
Guest:Yeah, and that put me on the map.
Guest:And three star is the highest?
Guest:No, four is, but three at the time was tough.
Guest:It's tough to get three.
Guest:So that's what you're gunning for as a chef.
Guest:Yeah, four, you got to be a lot fancier.
Guest:Like Danielle.
Guest:Yeah, it wasn't something that I was ... I was a 26-year-old kid from New Jersey.
Guest:I didn't know three from four.
Guest:Three would have been great.
Guest:Two would have been good, too.
Guest:I got three stars, and that just put me on the map.
Marc:It's interesting, because that world, it's an insulated world on some level, the food world, right?
Marc:Back then, even more so.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Pre-internet and ...
Marc:Yeah, so it was like, you know, it was like a play opening.
Marc:You know, who's this kid?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Colicchio.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He's got the touch.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's like, you know, you stand up.
Guest:You know, there's young guys out there and someone's going to, you know, you're going to hear about someone next year they'd never heard about before.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the funny thing about stand up and not unlike chefs is that, you know, over time they end up doing the same shit over and over again.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We do the same thing.
Guest:I know.
Guest:I carry the same recipes around.
Marc:I've carried around for 30 years.
Marc:You do have 30 year old recipes?
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So now you're a three-star chef in New York City.
Marc:And now is there a scene?
Marc:Do you guys know each other?
Marc:Like, did you know Bourdain?
Guest:Well, no, I didn't know Anthony.
Guest:I knew the restaurant that he was working.
Guest:I didn't know Anthony at all.
Guest:But this was, you know, just going back, this is 1992, I think.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what I noticed is all the chefs that I knew and admired started coming to the restaurant.
Guest:Like Daniel Ballou and Jonathan, remember Jonathan Waxman coming in?
Guest:Just the other chef, Gerard Pango was a French chef in town.
Guest:All these chefs started coming in to see what I was doing, which was really cool.
Guest:What were you doing?
Guest:I was doing my own thing.
Guest:Which was what?
Guest:It was hard to explain.
Guest:I was using the green market.
Guest:So it was kind of farm to table before there was even a notion of farm to table.
Guest:Union Square?
Guest:Yeah, I was going down there and filling up a truck full of food three times a week.
Guest:I would hit the fish markets and...
Guest:On your own, you were doing?
Guest:On my own, yeah.
Guest:And so I was doing this real sort of produce forward food.
Guest:So on Sunday, you'd go down to the Union Square Market?
Guest:No, Saturday.
Guest:We'd go Monday, Wednesday, Saturday.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And then I'd start working with farmers that would bring food to me directly.
Guest:And you had fish guys down at where?
Guest:Yeah, Fulton Fish Market, yep, yep.
Guest:That's why I show up in.
Guest:Yeah, it was, but it was worth it.
Guest:And so I was doing my own thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a lot of the early reviews were saying just that.
Guest:It was a new kind of food.
Guest:I wasn't following anybody.
Guest:And right now, I think that's the problem with the internet is that you don't have to travel to see someone's food anymore.
Guest:You can just kind of make a few clicks and try to understand what someone's doing so trends fly around very quickly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so the restaurant...
Guest:It wasn't a commercial success.
Guest:It was a bad business deal restaurant.
Guest:So we ended up closing the restaurant.
Guest:And in 1991, I was awarded Best New Chef Food and Wine Magazine.
Guest:And Danny Meyer's chef at the time at Union Square Cafe, he was awarded Best New Chef at the same time.
Guest:There was 10 chefs every year.
Guest:I remember that.
Guest:that place that's still there yeah still well he moved recently yeah so i met danny and uh the following year i saw him again in aspen and said listen i gotta talk to you when i get back home so i called him up he said what's up i said well and i knew he was a fan of the restaurant yeah and so i saw him closing the restaurant we should do something together and he's like no i don't want to open a second restaurant and a week later he called me back and said yeah let's talk yeah and i asked him why did he call back and he said we had a mutual friend who was a a wine distributor who had a wine company and he's danny said hey do you know tom right yeah and
Guest:So he called me and wants to do something together.
Guest:And he said, well, I'll put it this way.
Guest:If Sandy Koufax called and said he wanted to play baseball for your team, you'd probably say yes.
Guest:So we ended up traveling together before we decided to work together.
Guest:We took a trip to Italy together.
Guest:We figured if we could travel together, we could work together.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:You and this other chef?
Guest:No, it wasn't a chef, no.
Marc:He's a restaurateur.
Marc:Oh, he's a restaurateur.
Marc:He's a guy who opens restaurants.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And he had Union Square Cafe.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So, you know, you go to Italy and what do you do?
Marc:You walk around and eat?
Guest:We just travel around, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he knew Italy really well, spoke Italian, and his father had a travel business.
Guest:So when he was a kid, he used to go to Italy quite often, Italy and France, and eat around.
Guest:And, you know, just loved food.
Guest:Wanted to be a chef, but decided it was too hard and decided he wanted to work in the front of the house.
Guest:And he's considered probably the best restaurateur in the country.
Guest:Is that true still?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, he also started Shake Shack and made a million dollars doing that.
Guest:And that's pretty recent.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So we took a trip together and ate around and just really talked about, we didn't really talk about what we wanted to do.
Guest:We talked about what we wanted out of our careers, out of our restaurants.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that sort of led to Gramercy Tavern.
Marc:Now, where was that?
Marc:Because I think I've been there.
Guest:Grammar Street Harbor is on 20th between Park and Broadway.
Marc:It's still there.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And when did that open?
Marc:94, I think it was.
Marc:And that was your restaurant?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He and I did it together.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the approach was, you're going to go to the market.
Marc:Well, the market was there.
Guest:It was American food.
Marc:It's close.
Guest:Sort of high.
Marc:Oh, I know this place.
Guest:Right down the street.
Guest:And it was more high concept.
Guest:But we had this idea that we wanted to do something that was very comfortable, something that people understood.
Guest:And this idea of a tavern always kind of, you know, we talked about.
Guest:I've eaten there.
Guest:I ate there not too long ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so we talked about this idea of, you know, a tavern being a place where you can get great food.
Guest:But you go there for various different reasons, whether to have a great meal or whether to just talk about, you know, the politics of the day.
Guest:or whatever it was.
Guest:So the concept was sort of a watering hole.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But with great food and great service.
Marc:And is there rifts, is that like, was that part of this sort of like elevating old standards kind of thing?
Marc:Yeah, kind of.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In a way.
Marc:That became pretty popular, that whole idea.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Kind of hot, rotting, boring shit.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:There was always that.
Guest:And for me, it was taking the best of this French technique that I learned, taking this Italian sensibility that I had, and it's also American sensibility and fusing that all together and seeing what came out of that.
Marc:What's an American sensibility?
Marc:Hot rods, man.
Marc:Okay, right.
Marc:I know what you're saying.
Marc:Guitars, fenders.
Marc:It's not a chef sensibility.
Marc:It's just an agricultural sensibility.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:Whereas the Italian and the French were actually chef sensibility.
Marc:Yes, yes.
Marc:So you stay with that for a while.
Marc:So that's your first restaurant.
Marc:That's a big deal, and it was a big deal, and you did good.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you partnered up with that guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I don't understand.
Marc:I don't know if I talked to Alex or Scott about this specifically.
Marc:Maybe I did.
Marc:That's the road that you're on.
Marc:If you can become a good enough chef to open up several restaurants, that's it, right?
Marc:That's a new model.
Guest:But the old model used to be, go back to the most iconic New York chef growing up when I was coming up through was Andre Soltner who had Lutece.
Guest:He lived above the restaurant.
Guest:He was in the restaurant.
Guest:If the restaurant was open, he was in the restaurant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was the model.
Guest:And it changed, and it kind of changed not in America.
Guest:It changed in France when these three-star Michelin chefs started doing their brasseries and their bistros.
Marc:Oh, they got their upscale restaurant?
Guest:And it's like, for you regular people, they just want a sandwich?
Guest:No, it wasn't even that.
Guest:It was a way to capitalize on their notoriety.
Guest:And they were able to bring in other investors.
Guest:You didn't want to do another three-star restaurant.
Guest:It takes too much time and too much effort.
Guest:But let's do these other smaller restaurants where you can make the food great, but you don't have to...
Guest:spend millions of dollars creating atmosphere right and you know yeah yeah artwork and shit like that so yeah so it was actually let's bring you know better food to the masses sure right sure so the so the model changed from living above your restaurant to doing multiple to getting on a plane going to your restaurants
Marc:There used to be a restaurant I went to.
Marc:I think it was on Hudson in New York.
Marc:Some old Italian guy owned it.
Marc:He brought wine in from Jersey that he made.
Marc:I forget the name.
Marc:Really?
Marc:I wish I remembered things.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Because I would have told you.
Marc:I just want to...
Marc:I was impressed with the guy, but I was mad at him because I wasn't regular enough for him to treat me.
Marc:Got it, got it, got it.
Marc:You know there's that line you gotta cross?
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Where you're like, I've been here, why am I waiting?
Marc:Hey, how are you, Mark?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, you gotta go a few times.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Marc:You gotta be regular, man.
Marc:That's what it's about.
Marc:It is.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:Are you kidding me?
Marc:That's what people, like my mother's boyfriend in Florida, that's what they live for.
Marc:They don't even care if the restaurant's that good.
Marc:If you can just be the guy that walks in like, how are you, John?
Marc:Hey, cheers, man.
Marc:You want to go where everybody knows your name, right?
Marc:It's true.
Marc:That's right, yeah.
Marc:But you guys are aware of that.
Marc:So when you're in a partnership with that guy, the restaurateur, what's his name again?
Marc:Danny Meyer.
Marc:Yeah, so that's part of it, right?
Marc:In your mind, you're like, who are the guys that are coming in every week?
Marc:Who are the families that are coming in every week?
Marc:And you do that.
Marc:You make the rounds, and you're like, how?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, you're there all the time.
Guest:If you're working on a dish and you know a few people that you can try it out on, you test drive it on a few people, yeah, you're giving stuff away, you're being generous.
Guest:Yeah, but I think that spirit of generosity is, I think, what makes a restaurant work.
Guest:I mean, you have to create regulars if you want to have a successful restaurant.
Marc:So how do you do that?
Marc:Right.
Marc:With good food, right?
Marc:And hospitality.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Saying hi.
Marc:Saying hi.
Marc:Being known first names.
Marc:Yep, exactly.
Marc:Acting excited to see people.
Guest:There he is.
Guest:I was always terrible at that.
Guest:I'm not that kind of guy to blow smoke up someone's ass.
Guest:No?
Guest:No, it's just not my style.
Guest:You're sort of intense.
Guest:Probably because I can't stand it when it happens to me.
Guest:That's why I try to keep a low profile if I go to a restaurant.
Guest:I'm not that guy to have my assistant call up and make a big deal when I'm coming in.
Guest:I just want to kind of sneak in.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:All right, so you're sort of ahead of the curve on the farm-to-table idea in a way, but it seemed like a lot of people picked up on that, right?
Marc:Yeah, I guess so.
Marc:Well, no, just because of like, you know, because I remember by the time I was in New York, well, I was there for a long time, but, you know, chefs were going there.
Marc:They were going to the market.
Marc:But they still were able to find shit that was better than I could find.
Marc:Or maybe they just knew what to do with it.
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:We had farmers.
Guest:We were regulars for the farmers.
Guest:So you got to be regular with the farmer, too.
Guest:They got the stuff.
Guest:They saved you a good shit.
Guest:Yeah, we got the stuff.
Guest:I would collect seeds and bring them to farmers and say, can you grow this for me?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, back then, yeah.
Guest:And back then they would do it.
Guest:Now I grow my own shit.
Guest:Where did you collect the seeds?
Guest:What do you mean you collect seeds?
Guest:Back when there were seeds and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, if you go to Italy, you find some kind of- Tomatoes or something?
Guest:Chubisano or something like that.
Guest:Yeah, a special tomato and seeds.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they do it for you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you had success in that?
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:Growing a special tomato?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And you grow your own shit now?
Guest:Now I do, yeah.
Guest:Where?
Guest:I'm a gardener.
Guest:I have a house- Oh, for your house.
Guest:Yeah, I live in Brooklyn, but I have a house on North Fork on Long Island.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I garden.
Guest:And you do, like big?
Guest:It's getting big.
Guest:It's work.
Guest:But do you can?
Guest:I do, yeah.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I pickle, I can, yeah.
Guest:For yourself?
Guest:My wife calls me a depression-era housewife at heart.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:So pickling's fun.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What do you pickle?
Guest:Well, there's cucumbers and then there's green tomatoes or beets.
Marc:But there's a science to it, right?
Marc:That's almost like chemistry, right?
Guest:Yeah, I don't care.
Guest:There is a chemistry to it and I'm not that focused on the chemistry.
Guest:I know if it's high enough acid and you put it in the jar and you seal it properly, you're good.
Marc:And has it worked out?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I'm still here.
Marc:Well, I didn't think it was going to blow up.
Guest:You're going to die in a pickling accident.
Guest:You're going to poison yourself.
Guest:So far, it's been good.
Guest:I draw my own tomatoes and the whole bit.
Guest:What do you mean, draw your own tomatoes?
Marc:Oh, jar them.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I make sauce and jar it.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:So is this the next wave?
Marc:The product's coming?
Guest:No, for me, no, maybe.
Guest:Well, not that I'm growing up.
Guest:Not in my backyard, anyway.
Guest:But...
Guest:No, I, you know, I just, for some reason, and I think, you know, my grandparents had, both sets of grandparents gardened, and, you know, small.
Guest:My grandfather had used to garden in five-gallon buckets, and it worked.
Marc:And so- Pickle things, you mean?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I had this property that's about three acres and houses on it and there was one great area to garden in that was kind of on the back of the house.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so finally I just bit the bullet and put some boxes together and started gardening and I just, there's nothing like it for me.
Guest:It's just so relaxed.
Guest:I get out there at six o'clock in the morning.
Guest:It's relaxing.
Guest:I can take my time.
Guest:And what's cool about the garden is it starts to grow.
Guest:You just start noticing things different every single day.
Guest:You're like, oh, there's a little zucchini and two days later it's, oh, it's grown.
Guest:How did that happen?
Guest:Yeah, how did that happen?
Marc:Last night that happened.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:It almost looks like something you could have watched happen.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:If I had just gotten to the right time, I would have just seen this thing blow up.
Guest:It's just amazing.
Guest:And so there's something about just getting in the rhythm of having things grow and knowing when it's time to weed and water and when it's time to, you know, when all of a sudden you're looking and go, what is going on with my zucchini?
Guest:They looked great two days ago and now they're all wilting.
Guest:What's going on?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you crack open the stalk and there's a worm the size of your pinky sitting there.
Guest:Oh, you're dealing with the bugs.
Guest:Yeah, dealing with the bugs.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But then there's those days where it's like, I got too many zucchinis.
Marc:I got too many tomatoes.
Guest:I have a restaurant for that.
Guest:I can always bring it to the restaurant and go, there you go.
Guest:That's perfect.
Guest:But we use most of it ourselves.
Guest:At home?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We do dinner parties and stuff.
Marc:Oh, see, that's nice when you're- It's fun.
Marc:So you cook for those, right?
Marc:I cook at home.
Guest:I cook at home a lot, especially in the summer.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, so you're saying your grandfather actually had a garden in a five-gallon bucket.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Out back.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Or whatever.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Like a tomato plant.
Guest:He would actually put the, yeah, in a five-gallon bucket.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And at that point, it's like, because I always look at people with gardens, I'm like, it looks like you're going to go through that in a day.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Or your kale came up, so that's one meal.
Guest:That's one, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I have kale that, so I, um...
Guest:Actually, it's another green called Spigarella.
Guest:It's an Italian green related to broccoli, and I just decided to just cut it all down the other day, and I had to blanch it all and then put it in bags and freeze it because there's no way I can eat it all.
Marc:Yeah, you can blanch and freeze?
Guest:Blanch and freeze, yeah.
Guest:That green anyway, it's really hearty, so yeah.
Guest:Oh, so it's not going to get all mushy?
Guest:No, not at all.
Guest:No, it'll hold up.
Guest:Oh, so you look at that.
Guest:In fact, after you take it out of the freezer, you probably still have to cook it.
Marc:Yeah, because I got two bunches of Rob the other day and I blanched them and I sauteed them with garlic and red pepper and then the pressure was on.
Marc:I got to eat that shit.
Guest:But now that also, you can blanch that and freeze that too.
Marc:Right, because it's hardy.
Marc:I like broccoli Rob.
Marc:It's a seasonal though, it seems.
Marc:Yeah, there's a season for everything.
Marc:I know, but you think that they get things from all over that those seasons are over.
Marc:Yeah, but that stuff doesn't grow when it's too hot.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Oh, the Rob doesn't?
Guest:That's what the deal is?
Marc:So it's more of a fall?
Guest:It likes to be a little cooler, yeah.
Marc:All right, so now tell me how, so you get done with the Gramercy Tavern, and how do you leave something like that?
Marc:Because this is the question.
Marc:There are restaurants that I'd go to, and I'm like, what happened?
Marc:Well, the chef left, the menu's still there, but the heart of the thing's gone.
Guest:Yeah, so what happened was Danny and I, he opened a few other restaurants and created his group.
Guest:Restaurant group.
Guest:Yeah, and I was keen to continue to work with Danny, but I wasn't happy with some of his partners that he brought in.
Guest:And so I opened up a second restaurant called Kraft,
Guest:And so we decided to work together the best we could.
Guest:Gramercy was a jointly owned restaurant, and then he was gonna do his thing, I was gonna do my thing.
Guest:And at a certain point, it just wasn't working out.
Guest:And I actually worked out a deal where I was buying the restaurant from him.
Guest:And then last second, I said, you know what?
Guest:Here's my number.
Guest:Gramercy.
Guest:Yeah, and so I sold my shares.
Marc:And then you went all craft.
Marc:I went all craft, yeah.
Marc:What year was that?
Marc:Because I sort of remember that happening.
Marc:Um...
Marc:Because then the craft thing as a brand, it was popping up.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Guest:Yeah, we had craft, craft bar, and then witchcraft, and then craft steak in Vegas, and then we did a craft in LA.
Guest:So yeah, we did.
Guest:We kind of stumbled into the brand.
Marc:What was the angle on that?
Marc:So this is your big vision.
Marc:The Gramercy was a collective vision with Danny, right?
Marc:Is that his name?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So here's the thing.
Guest:So when I was at Gramercy, I had the food that I was doing, and it was all plated and somewhat intricate.
Marc:During that time... Plated, you mean like fancy liquid?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You were Bobby flaying it a bit?
Guest:No, I wouldn't go that far.
Guest:But when I say plated, you got... And this is important because of what Kraft was.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was five things on a plate.
Guest:Yeah, got it.
Guest:And so then Kraft...
Guest:It was right around the corner from Gramercy, so I couldn't do the same food I was doing there.
Guest:And I didn't have a Thai restaurant in there or something like that.
Guest:And so I was looking at where I thought the industry was going, and there was so much talk about farmers using farmers.
Guest:So I said, okay, let's really honor these ingredients.
Guest:So if you want broccoli, Rob, can you get a plate of broccoli, Rob?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not broccoli rabe with veal, just broccoli rabe.
Guest:For me, it was peas.
Guest:When peas are in season and they're great and they're sweet and delicious, you may have them on three different menu items.
Guest:Well, they come in one day and they're starchy.
Guest:What do you do?
Guest:You change all three items, most likely just kind of go with the starchy peas.
Guest:And I was like, you know what?
Guest:When peas are in season, I want a bowl of peas or morels.
Guest:I want a bowl of morels.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just simply roast it and that's it.
Guest:You can't get that.
Guest:There are garnishes everywhere.
Guest:Ah.
Guest:So then I said, okay, how about we do a restaurant where if it's fish, it's simply roasted, olive oil, some fresh herb, done.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No garnish.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The garnish, so everything is a la carte.
Guest:So if you want your fish and then you want those peas morels, you order that way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the idea was that this restaurant was more about the craft of cooking, less about the artistry of cooking.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:And we really wanted to honor those single ingredients and that's how it started.
Marc:Sort of like you got to do a kind of family style with the, right?
Guest:Like you're going to get a big thing of mushrooms.
Guest:Well, that was it too.
Guest:So that's what I was saying.
Guest:So instead of plated, it was family style.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And you kind of moved the stuff around and everything seemed like it kind of charred.
Marc:In a good way.
Marc:In a good way.
Marc:Yeah, no.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:Who was burning the food that night?
Marc:No, but it seemed like that was part of the angle, the roasting business.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Like everything just, it's all simple, though.
Marc:Yeah, very simple.
Marc:Yeah, and well, I like that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so how many, so where's the empire at now?
Marc:You know, we're- How do you determine this stuff?
Marc:So craft, because I'm looking at the list of stuff you have.
Marc:Are you on a website?
Marc:No, I'm just looking at the list on Wiki.
Marc:Oh, on Wiki.
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:That's probably not up to date.
Marc:Well, no, it's funny.
Marc:They don't take things off.
Marc:They just cross them out.
Guest:It's just closed.
Guest:Yeah, closed.
Guest:Closed.
Guest:Great.
Guest:Yeah, we closed a few restaurants recently.
Guest:You know, the real estate in New York is tight these days, and so the landlords are charging crazy rents, and, you know, when your time is up and they want to charge $60,000 for a- A month.
Guest:Yeah, a month for a 120-seat restaurant, it's time to leave.
Yeah.
Marc:That's crazy.
Marc:Yeah, it's crazy.
Marc:It seems like a lot of the restaurants are gone that used to be in New York.
Marc:So they're all closing because of rent or other stuff.
Marc:So how do you determine, what do you make of that, though?
Marc:Is it hard to close a restaurant when it's just in the sense that, do food trends change?
Marc:Do good restaurants survive forever?
Guest:Yeah, until the rent knocks you out.
Guest:But you know what?
Guest:I mean, yeah, it sucks when you have to walk into a restaurant and tell 60 people that they're losing their job.
Guest:Right, of course.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:That's what sucks.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it's not usually the food that's doing it.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Nowadays, it's rent.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, the restaurant was busy, but at that point, we would have- Which one?
Guest:It was called Kraft Bar, and based on the numbers that we were doing, if we had to pay that kind of rent, we would have lost money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At that point, it doesn't make sense.
Guest:So what about some of these other places?
Marc:What's Fowler & Wells?
Guest:Well, Fowler & Wells just changed.
Guest:We changed the name of Temple Court.
Guest:Fowler & Wells.
Guest:Yeah, we just changed the name.
Guest:That restaurant opened about eight months ago.
Guest:It's in the Beekman Hotel.
Guest:And as it turns out, Fowler & Wells, they were two publishers that worked in... The building was built in 1835.
Guest:And so these two... We named the restaurant after these two guys that worked there.
Guest:We kind of did a little history research.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they were publishers and they published journals of psychology and a few other things too, but they were also phrenologists.
Guest:Feel the head for the problems?
Guest:Yeah, something like that.
Guest:But phrenology was used for a lot of different things.
Guest:It was also used to try to prove that the Africans were a separate race.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I knew that, but it was this debunked pseudoscience and I figured, you know, what the hell.
Guest:I knew it was also used by abolitionists to prove the opposite.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Black writers of the day used to prove the opposite.
Guest:But as it turns out, the Fowler of the Fowler and Wells was the guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So we had to change the name of the restaurant.
Guest:You got flack.
Guest:We got in a review from the New York Times.
Guest:They kind of- Said it's a little insensitive.
Guest:A little insensitive.
Guest:And I, you know, the following day decided to change the restaurant.
Guest:It took about eight months to-
Guest:come up with a new name and the work changes.
Marc:And what's your menu there?
Guest:It's called Temple Court.
Guest:Temple Court.
Guest:Well, that's a restaurant where we were, where I went back to, at least when I started cooking, where food was more based on sauces, you know, stocks and sauces versus vinaigrettes and things like that.
Guest:Got rid of the microgreens, got rid of the swooshes and, you know,
Guest:And it's a little more basic where it's sauce, garnish, meat, fish, whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then also we reworked a lot of the classics.
Guest:So Lobster Thermador we reworked and Oysters Rockefeller and things like that.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:How do you rework Oysters Rockefeller?
Guest:You take it out of the shell, number one.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:uh we use what is it spinach well we use watercress and santa spinach um lightened up the sauce and got rid of the cheese huh um so it's just a lighter version watercress is good yeah and same thing with uh with the lobster thermidor we just kind of you know the sauce doesn't have cream in it yeah lightened it up um how's it going it's going great yeah yeah it's going really well wait so you've got it you've got two restaurants in vegas
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's heritage steak and craft steak.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they're both you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What's the difference?
Guest:Not a whole lot.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What is it about- A little bit.
Marc:How do you treat steaks?
Marc:What's your angle on steaks?
Guest:Simple salt, pepper, just roast them up and that's it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Buy good meat.
Guest:That's it.
Guest:You got to buy good meat.
Marc:Double porterhouse.
Marc:Double porterhouse is great.
Marc:You got to buy good meat.
Marc:You know who used to have a good double porterhouse?
Marc:There's another place that closed down the meatpacking.
Marc:Marcellaria?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That closed it?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Man.
Guest:Yeah, that was good.
Guest:Right?
Guest:I moved out two years ago, so I don't- Oh, yeah, they did the rob.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And just a double porterhouse.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:The best.
Guest:Yeah, it's good stuff.
Guest:So just buy good meat, high heat.
Guest:Buy good meat.
Guest:High to start and then turn it down.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, I always say high heat's not your friend.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, what do you think about the classic state?
Marc:Do you ever go to Luger's?
Guest:i haven't been in a while yeah yeah it's very specific isn't it yeah i mean i like it but i haven't been in a long time of course not but like is it do you respect it yeah yeah yeah well and why not they've been there for 100 years you have to butter right this butter has butter plays a big part in that yeah they get they get great meat butter plays a big role yeah yeah i like the fact that they do one thing warehouse that's it yeah it's yeah and get away with that you know it's good
Marc:And what about the nature, is it like, we'll get to TV in a second, but like, because you're out here for the Emmys, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Are you nominated?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, we're nominated.
Marc:For what?
Guest:Best reality show.
Guest:Oh, for Top Chef?
Guest:Yeah, it's a primetime nomination.
Marc:It's been on forever now.
Marc:15 seasons.
Marc:It's a lot.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:15 seasons of you tasting things and hurting people's feelings.
Guest:Well, a little bit.
Guest:Also, you know, we launched a lot of careers, too.
Guest:I know, I know.
Marc:But, yeah, 15 seasons.
Marc:So, but, oh, what about the, you guys got to be competitive.
Marc:Chefs?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:Yeah, yes, there is competition, but it's friendly competition.
Guest:It is?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But you never, like, sit around and go like, ah, Jeff's a carrier.
Marc:It's like, I don't know.
Marc:Jeff's a carrier.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:He's wearing his bow tie.
Marc:Yeah, no, that's his thing.
Marc:It's fine.
Marc:He's a good guy.
Marc:No, he seems like a good guy.
Marc:But I did eat at his restaurant in Florida when I was on a real chopped craze.
Marc:So I would go to, you know what I mean?
Marc:Okay.
Marc:No, I was watching it.
Marc:He was teaching me how to cook, in a way.
Marc:In a way.
Marc:But I liked it, and I liked the personalities, and I went to his restaurant in Florida, and I was like, this is not good.
Marc:I didn't have a good meal.
Marc:And I'm like, I gotta go to the one in New York.
Marc:I never did.
Marc:But who was your generation?
Marc:Is it like Bobby?
Guest:No, no, I'm a little older than Bobby.
Guest:My generation was Alfred Portale.
Guest:He's a little older than I am.
Guest:Thomas Keller.
Guest:Daniel Ballou.
Guest:Daniel's your generation?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:He's slightly older than I am, but I was, because I kind of made it, you know, when I was 26, I was pretty young.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:I mean, Bobby's younger than I am.
Guest:Jeffrey's my age.
Guest:Jeffrey Zakarian.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you guys knew each other coming up?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, you know, working in New York, we kind of all know who, you know, you sniff around.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We know who everybody is.
Marc:And do you compliment each other?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, you're like, he has a good job on that.
Marc:Like, you taste each other's shit.
Marc:Because, I mean, like, that's the one thing that those kind of shows, I don't know, does Top Chef do it?
Marc:Well, you do do it.
Marc:Well, you're sitting there with chefs and you're tasting shit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you can appreciate things.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, it's nice, right?
Guest:Yeah, you know, I think that...
Guest:I appreciate everybody.
Guest:There's a lot of people doing great stuff that you'd never hear of.
Guest:Chefs like Jonathan Beno, Marco Canora.
Guest:These are chefs doing great food in New York, but they're not on TV.
Guest:There's a lot of people that are just doing amazing stuff that you just don't hear of.
Guest:So yeah, but there's a respect that we all have.
Guest:There's not a whole lot of sniping.
Guest:Some stuff, sometimes you walk in.
Guest:The problem right now is with, things have changed.
Guest:It used to be when we were coming up, there were gatekeepers and certain people, mostly magazine editors and things like that and writers who you didn't hang out with.
Guest:And if they decided that they liked you and that you were doing some great stuff, they'd write about you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so you got buzz and it was worthwhile.
Marc:There was a handful of people.
Guest:Nowadays, buzz is generated for a lot of different reasons.
Guest:And so a lot of times you go to a restaurant and you hear this amazing buzz and it's like, you go there and go, really?
Guest:This is it?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Not that it's bad, but this is what everybody's going crazy about?
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Like, I can't say, you're going to go there, your mind's going to be blown.
Guest:You go there and go, now my mind's not blown.
Guest:It's good, but I'm sorry, but it's food.
Guest:It's just food.
Guest:I think maybe after a while you're so jaded and you go, it's just food.
Marc:No, I don't know if that's true.
Marc:I think the point is that people can generate buzz that is not solely based on the critical palate of somebody you respect.
Marc:Yeah, of course.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Those guys are gone, really.
Marc:but i think it's just it's that we need someone the internet needs someone to talk about and someone to you know that's gonna be hot for the next three months right or yeah right and that's it that's it but but you're you're you're true it's true that cultural criticism on all levels you know whether it be food or you know uh painting i don't know so much about painting but but uh but just uh you know film yeah it's just diminishing as a there's no the standard bearers are kind of gone right and there's
Marc:all user-generated reviews now.
Marc:Yeah, it's it.
Marc:Yeah, it's just... I guess it's more democratic, but what do the people know?
Marc:Wait, you need a few snobs.
Marc:You do need a few.
Marc:Just a few.
Marc:Not a lot of few.
Marc:Yeah, just a few respectable snobs to determine the... Yeah.
Marc:So the TV thing...
Marc:so that feeds everything else how many do you know how many restaurants you have open right now yeah we have uh eight restaurants okay and those are ones that you that are your your thing yeah mine are our licensing deals of the hotels and stuff like that yeah yeah so when you have a licensing deal like is that a deal at the mgm is that a licensing deal but you what what is your responsibility
Guest:Well, we design the restaurant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We design the kitchen.
Guest:We put the menu in.
Guest:It's my food.
Guest:It's my management style, but they build it and they own it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, but you got to check in occasionally?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Make an appearance?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:More so when we first opened up.
Marc:Right.
Guest:When I was there, when we first opened up, I was there for pretty much three months straight through.
Marc:Like, are you in contact with the chef?
Marc:Oh, yeah, sure.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Does he have problems?
Marc:Is there a problem sort of like- No.
Guest:The guy, the chef there is funny.
Guest:Michael, he was our first grill cook.
Guest:I remember the first day I looked and said, this guy's going to last about two weeks.
Guest:Your first grill cook where?
Guest:At the restaurant when it first opened up.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So this was 12 years ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I really said, this guy's going to last two weeks.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's a chef now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's fantastic.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:He's just, you know, he's just one of these guys.
Guest:He's kind of quiet that, you know, always did his job.
Guest:And, you know, I never said much, but, you know, I couldn't tell whether he was excited about cooking because he was just kind of quiet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's just fantastic.
Marc:And how is Vegas as a market now?
Marc:It's great.
Marc:It's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It holds up.
Guest:We're back to, you know, pre-recession levels.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We're finally back there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the economy's good, despite what we're being told.
Marc:The economy's good.
Marc:I mean, the rest of the world's going to shit, but the economy's great.
Marc:Well, that's the other thing.
Marc:You were in New York for so many years.
Marc:You must have dealt with Trump when he was just a character.
Guest:Yeah, he wasn't a foodie.
Guest:I always knew who he was.
Guest:Oh, he never came to the restaurant?
Guest:No, he wasn't a food guy.
Guest:I would get calls every now and then from his organization saying, we're doing a project and we'd love you to come there.
Guest:And I would say, you're building a restaurant, right?
Guest:Oh, no, no, we're the best.
Guest:You're going to come.
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Marc:We're the best?
Guest:We're the best.
Guest:You kidding me?
Guest:This would be the greatest hotel in the world and you got to come and you should be honored to open a restaurant and spend money in our place.
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah, it's... It's, I don't know.
Marc:Relentlessly scary.
Marc:I see you're engaged with it.
Marc:Yeah, a little bit.
Marc:But it's the righteous thing to do.
Marc:You got to push back.
Marc:But like, okay, so the TV show...
Marc:Like, that's been good for you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And here's a question.
Marc:Okay, you've started a lot of careers.
Marc:You like the people you work with.
Marc:Are you a producer on it?
Marc:You are at this point.
Marc:What is it about the cooking an egg?
Guest:That's kind of open-ended.
Guest:What about cooking an egg?
Marc:But I mean, it's like, you know, there's all this talk about the perfect egg.
Marc:Yeah, because it's hard to cook.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yes and no.
Guest:Yes and no.
Guest:It can be.
Marc:They did it on one of the other shows.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Iron Chef.
Marc:What's a guy from Cleveland?
Marc:Simon.
Marc:Michael Simon.
Marc:He's a good chef.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:His sous chef has a great fucking restaurant right next to his.
Marc:It's called the Green... Oh, what the hell is it called?
Marc:Greenhouse Tavern.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There you go, Jonathan Sawyer.
Guest:Jonathan Sawyer, of course.
Guest:Jonathan's a great guy.
Guest:Jonathan actually, he's really supportive.
Guest:I have an organization I co-founded called Food Policy Action.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we are routinely up in D.C.
Guest:on the Hill, meeting with representatives, trying to push
Guest:this idea of better food.
Guest:We fight the fight for people that are hungry in this country, for better farming practices, more transparency in the food system, and Jonathan's one of the guys who actually comes and works with me up on the hill.
Marc:I didn't realize that.
Guest:You spent a lot of time in Washington doing that?
Marc:More than I want to, yeah.
Marc:And what does that entail?
Guest:We're a C4.
Guest:I'm an unpaid, unregistered lobbyist.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we don't have clients.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so we just go and meet with house members or other staff.
Guest:And usually around Farm Bill or School Lunch, we're heavily involved in labeling.
Guest:Not that I'm anti-GMO, but I'm pro-labeling.
Guest:And very active around School Lunch, trying to get more money for School Lunch, higher quality food for School Lunch.
Guest:working really hard on, my wife is a filmmaker, and she co-directed a documentary called A Place at the Table.
Guest:It came out about four years ago, five years ago, about hunger in this country.
Guest:And that gave me a real platform to sort of go and talk with representatives about making sure that we have robust nutrition programs in this country.
Guest:And have you engaged since this president?
Guest:Yeah, the problem right now is you go there and you'll meet with staff members and stuff, but there's no one.
Guest:So for instance, this was confirmed just two days ago.
Guest:I was with Secretary Vilsack, who was the head of the USDA, and Sonny Perdue, who's now the head of the USDA.
Guest:There's no one under them.
Guest:They haven't appointed anybody.
Guest:So there's no one to talk to.
Guest:So there's no one writing policy right now.
Guest:So it's just bizarre.
Guest:The government's just not functioning because no one's there.
Marc:And those are jobs that he needs to fill, the president.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so what happens is usually when you're running and you win the nomination, I'm reading Hillary's book right now, and for months they were saying, who's going to fill these positions?
Guest:Because they knew how many positions, it was like 500 plus positions that he could fill.
Guest:But they're doing it on purpose.
Guest:I don't know if they're doing it on purpose or they just didn't think about it because they didn't think they were going to win.
Guest:He's not someone who knows how to govern.
Guest:He's not how government works.
Guest:There was never a thought of ... It was really interesting.
Guest:Jared Kushner, when he was taking a walk through, asked,
Guest:How many of these people are staying?
Guest:None of them.
Guest:You didn't just take over a company.
Guest:These people are all gone.
Guest:You've got to fill these roles.
Marc:I wonder how much of it is on purpose to hobble the government and how much of it isn't.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think so.
Marc:So there's literally no one to go address issues with.
Guest:There's no one to talk to right now.
Guest:That's bizarre.
Guest:So you could talk to the members of Congress, and they're involved in writing policy as well, but there's- No policy coming out of these agencies.
Guest:Nothing coming out.
Guest:And that's a good thing, though, because there's nothing happening.
Guest:They can't get anything done because there's no one to actually write policy, so that's fine.
Guest:All right.
Guest:As long as, yes.
Guest:Right?
Guest:It's not getting worse.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:In that one area.
Guest:It's getting worse.
Guest:I think there's a lot of stuff going on with the EPA that I actually think they should start calling the IEPA, the Industrial Environment Protection Agency, because that's the only environment of protection.
Marc:Or the anti-environment.
Guest:It's the only environment that protection is industry.
Guest:It certainly isn't the environment.
Guest:It's not the earth's environment.
Guest:That's for sure.
Guest:Back to the egg.
Marc:Back to the egg.
Marc:I don't remember what show it was on, but why is it so important that there's this idea about the egg?
Guest:A lot of chefs, especially the old school French chefs, said that's like Andre Saltner, going back to Andre Saltner, if you were cooking one of the job in his kitchen, he would say, okay, make an omelet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there's a way to make a French omelet.
Guest:And then there's two kinds of omelets.
Guest:There's a country omelet and a classic omelet.
Guest:How are you with those?
Guest:Yeah, I can do them.
Guest:I can handle that.
Guest:But a classic omelet doesn't have any color on it.
Guest:But it's all cooked and fluffy.
Guest:It's all about timing and about knowing how to do it.
Guest:And a lot of people are just never trained to do it properly.
Guest:So you tell, you know, 15 contestants that come in, like, make an omelet, and most of them will screw it up.
Marc:Basic omelet, we need no color.
Guest:It's not brown.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because that toughens the egg.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so it's just this beautiful, you know, yellow mass of eggs that are perfectly, you know.
Guest:Nothing in it?
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Typically it's not.
Guest:Typically it's just maybe some fresh herbs and that's it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's not.
Guest:I mean, the American omelet's more of a stuffed omelet.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And then what's the other kind?
Yeah.
Guest:There's a French country, there's a classic, and then the country.
Guest:What's the country?
Guest:The country omelet has, there is a little color on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, anyway.
Guest:But that's it.
Guest:I mean, it's, you know.
Guest:My son, my eight-year-old the other day, we have chickens out and run around, too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:dad i gotta learn how to cook an egg yeah so i taught him how to cook an egg and and he said i need another one and yeah so four eggs because he wanted to cook them which is fine yeah so he wants the eight-year-old wants to cook an egg but did he was he coming at it in the same way i was or he just wants to learn how to cook he wants to learn how to cook an egg i think it's just like you didn't like i know if i bring him through the omelets no no it was like if no it was fried he liked them over easy so yeah okay oh good good good you didn't break them
Guest:He broke a few.
Guest:You got to break a few.
Guest:You got to break a few, yeah.
Guest:So now is the show coming back?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We shoot usually May through June, and we're in Colorado this season.
Guest:Why Colorado?
Guest:We try to go to different locations every season, and we hadn't been to Colorado.
Guest:So yeah, we're in Denver, Telluride, and Aspen.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And yeah, it should be a good season.
Guest:It's a big foodie culture in Aspen probably, right?
Guest:And Denver.
Guest:Denver's actually come a long way.
Guest:There's some great restaurants there now.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I got to go.
Marc:Yeah, there's a place called Mercantile I like a lot.
Marc:Well, by the time I guess we put this up, Mercantile.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:By the time we put this up, we'll have won or we'll have lost.
Guest:You know, I'm practiced just happy.
Guest:This is our 11th nomination.
Guest:We won one.
Guest:We won one.
Guest:But you're happy that you come out and you see everybody.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:It's not my industry.
Guest:And what I find really interesting is that there's a whole group of Hollywood-type people who love the show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm always just shocked at who comes up to you.
Marc:Oh, yeah, who comes up to you.
Guest:Oh, my God, I love the show.
Guest:It's like, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You watch this?
Guest:It's great.
Guest:Like, Lee Shriver, you really watch this?
Guest:It's great.
Guest:And he's like, yeah, I really watch it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's great.
Guest:And so it's pretty cool.
Guest:I get that, too, with this show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I'm always sort of like, wow, you're listening to it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like on your way to work?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So no, it's a blast because I don't consider myself part of the industry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And yet I am.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:And part of the Hollywood industry.
Marc:And so it's kind of cool.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And do you drop by the restaurant?
Marc:Or you did last night.
Guest:Yeah, I was there last night.
Guest:And tonight we're doing a charity event on the beach.
Guest:And so I'll probably go and hang out with my guys and do that.
Guest:Well, you're cooking on the beach for charity?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It seems like an ordeal.
Guest:It's like one of those walk around events.
Guest:Nah, we have it figured out.
Guest:Yeah, we have a station and people walk around and we're doing that.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Well, great talking to you, man.
Guest:Good luck tonight.
Marc:Yeah, thanks.
Marc:Good guy.
Marc:Solid dude.
Marc:So I'm going to plug my gold top directly in to the champ with the wah-wah pedal again because I enjoyed it.
Marc:And you can listen or you can't or don't.
Marc:It doesn't matter.
Marc:I'm going to play.
Marc:I'm going to fucking play.
Guest:.
Guest:.
Guest:.
Guest:.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Boomer lives!