Knives at Dawn, about the 2009 Bocuse d'Or USA team

Apologies for sneaking this in during the dwindling minutes of the week, but I just had a fun idea: With the Bocuse d’Or USA on tap for this Sunday, I thought it might be cool to have a look at one of the finalists, Richard Rosendale, who appeared in my book, Knives at Dawn, about the 2009 US squad. Rosendale didn’t win the team selection event, held at Orlando’s Epcot Center in 2008, that time out, but he came in second and was, by far, the candidate with the most competition experience. (I was also able to profile another of this year’s finalists, Danny Cerqueda, when he competed in the Bocuse d’Or USA in 2010; the organizers’ profiles of all four 2012 finalists here.  My recent interview with 2013 team coach Gavin Kaysen here.)

OK, here you go, some quick-cut images of Rosendale, via excerpts from Knives:

Here he is discussing the value of culinary competition:

Richard Rosendale, then chef-owner of Rosendales (also in Columbus) and a member of two International Culinary Olympics teams, sees even more value in the competition experience. “In my opinion, one year on the Olympic team is the equivalent of five years in the industry,” he said. “In doing the team you have obligations to push yourself and research more and do more and learn more than what you normally would . . . I’ve competed in Germany three times, Luxembourg twice, Basel, Switzerland, twice, and all over the United States. Seeing these other countries and the food they’re putting up really makes you open up your mind and see food a little differently. There’s no boundaries.”

Some background on Rosendale, and his relationship with 2009 Team USA coach Roland Henin:

Henin also encouraged Richard Rosendale, chef-owner of Rosendales restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, to apply. Rosendale, who has a large, flat nose and dark black hair combed back into a near-pompadour, had more culinary competition experience, exponentially more, than the rest of the field combined: a member of two United States Culinary Olympic teams, Rosendale had participated in two three-year apprenticeship programs in his young career, including one at The Greenbrier, the fabled hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. [Toqueland note: Since the book's publication, Rosendale has returned to The Greenbrier as executive chef.] As part of his education there, he was expected to do competition-like exercises after work such as mystery baskets (cooking spontaneously from an unannounced selection of ingredients) or putting up buffet platters. These sessions lasted until about two in the morning, and included a critique by his supervisors, who offered no leniency. “The expectation was perfection all the time,” said Rosendale.

Though the next installment of the Olympics was set to start on October 19, just a few weeks after the event in Orlando, Rosendale was attracted to the opportunity presented by the new Bocuse d’Or USA. “I really want to see an American win,” he said. “We have way too many talented chefs not to have placed any higher than we have.”

Rosendale could have been channeling Kaysen when he said that the reason the United States hadn’t done better in the past wasn’t the candidates, but the resources. “People underestimate how much it takes, not just the commitment from the candidate but financial resources. When you’re trying to figure out what one of your garnishes is going to be and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay for that via a fundraiser, [it’s] a very difficult thing to do. Plus your day-to-day job.”

How Rosendale prepared for Orlando in 2008, as contrasted with the preparation of Top Chef champ Hung Hyunh, who was a fellow competitor that year:

Asked what he had done to prepare a week before the competition in Orlando, Hyunh—who was working in the kosher restaurant Solo in midtown Manhattan while its owners got a new project together for him—cackled gleefully. “I’m not!” he said. “This is a kosher kitchen . . . I’m competing against Thomas Keller’s guy, Charlie Trotter’s guy. They have all the resources in the world. Here I am, I have two vinegars—red wine and rice wine vinegar—and some vegetable stock.” He shrugged. “It’s very hard.”

“I know what I’m going to do,” he explained. “But I haven’t had time to perfect it. I’m just going to bring ingredients down there . . . and I’m gonna go . . . I’m gonna cook, with proper techniques, and I’m going to hope it tastes good. I don’t know if it’ll be the most perfected dish of my career— definitely not I would say—but given the circumstances I’m in now and given what I can do and get out of it, I think it’s going to be excellent.”

“I cook best under pressure,” he said, snapping his fingers. “And at the moment. Shit’s gonna go down. Things are gonna burn. Things are gonna break. I’m gonna go with the flow, and do what I do best. Cook!”

Clearly, this was not the ideal preparation, but in many ways, Hyunh’s attitude exemplified the ideal of culinary competitions: He embraced the experience.

By the week before the competition, Richard Rosendale, who had been practicing overnight alongside Seth Warren, a string bean of a cook who worked for him at Rosendales, between overseeing the build-out of a new restaurant and trips to Rye, New York, to train for the Olympics, had stopped rehearsing.

“All of the hard work should have already taken place,” he said. “Right now, as we get ready for next week, it’s a lot of packing and going through pack lists, making sure shipping addresses match up, all those little things.”

Did Rosendale feel like the favorite going into Orlando? “Absolutely not. I know . . . from competing over the years, you can never underestimate any of your competition . . . I hope that I’ll win, but I also know there’s some very talented people that I’m going against. . . . It’s any given Sunday. Anything, and I mean anything can happen that can really just throw your game in that five-hour period. The Olympics is a perfect example of that. Four years of preparation comes down to spilling a sauce, or scorching something, or overcooking venison loins.”

Rosendale took about twelve hours to pack his toolbox, which was about the size of a chest freezer, in the most efficient way, and the tools and equipment would be set up very precisely according to when and where he’d need them in the kitchen in Orlando, all with an eye toward maximizing time.

“Every second counts,” he said. “If you go to reach for something and you bring your hand back without something in it . . . you lose precious seconds . . . you add that up and by the end of the competition you have lost five or ten minutes . . . that might not seem like much, but if that’s your window [to present your platter] …

“Packing is huge.”

A platter (not Rosendale's) being paraded before the judges at the 2008 Bocuse d'Or USA (photo courtesy Nora Carey)

Rosendale contrasted with Kevin Sbraga, who would go on to win Season 7 of Top Chef a few years later:

Three thunderclaps, in quick succession, rang out in the lobby, shattering the calm. It was Sbraga, smacking his hands together violently, then plunging them deep into the pockets of his sweatshirt. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he had earphones in, flooding his cranium with the hip-hop group Wu‑Tang Clan’s greatest hits. Sbraga’s high-school wrestling team used to spark up the CD on a boom box before meets, but it was a strangely appropriate selection for this day as well; just as many rap and hip-hop songs are about the rhyming prowess of the singer, cooking competitions—certainly one with a visual component like the Bocuse d’Or—are about the chef ’s showing off his skills, making lyrics like “I be tossin’, enforcin’, my style is awesome,” the perfect underscoring of what was about to go down at the World Showplace. As others watched Sbraga, he again yanked his arms free of the sweatshirt and clapped his hands loudly, looking fierce, ready to rumble.

Just a few feet away stood Richard Rosendale. His overnight preparation was different from Sbraga’s: after touring their kitchen the day before, he and Warren convened in Rosendale’s hotel room. Working off a digital photo he’d snapped at the Showplace, Rosendale sketched out how they were going to rearrange the equipment to create a more optimal layout. (He’d also taken the step of speaking to one of the electricians to be sure he wouldn’t trip a circuit breaker and to see if there’d be enough cable, although he’d brought plenty of heavy-duty extension cords along, just in case.) Then Rosendale quizzed his assistant, quick-firing questions about the sequence of tasks he had to execute over the five-and-a-half-hour battle. If Rosendale noticed Sbraga’s theatrics, he didn’t let on. And even if he had noticed them, they would not have made an impact. Rosendale was in familiar territory, and his philosophy was that it’s all about what you do in your own kitchen that wins the day. Any energy directed outside those four walls was wasted.

Judges’ perceptions of Rosendale during the competition:

Judges, in their whites, began filing in around nine o’clock. With coffee and Danishes in hand, they strolled around the kitchen, watching their young colleagues toil, often admiringly so. Georges Perrier took note of
Rosendale’s technique of soaking the cod for twenty minutes in cold salted water, which would cause the notoriously watery fish to firm up, making it easier to manipulate. “Very smart,” enthused Perrier.

As 10:00 a.m. approached, all of the kitchens were in full swing, with proteins being boned, liquids being stirred, vegetables being chopped, but to what end nobody knew. In this regard, the Bocuse d’Or resembles the American version of the television show Iron Chef in which narrator Alton Brown can often be heard attempting to deduce what the two competing teams are preparing, but usually fails to put it all together until the final minutes. So it is with the Bocuse d’Or. Through much of the five and a half hours, the chefs and commis are creating pieces for a puzzle known only to them. The end result isn’t clear to the audience until the cooks are barreling down the homestretch.

And his moment of truth:

Rosendale put the platter in the window. Titled “Modern Cod and Seafood Preparations,” it was a quintessential competition display with lots of layers and work on it (more than thirty individual recipes had gone into its production): the centerpiece was an imposing cylinder of gently cooked cod wrapped in a lobster coral mousse flecked with bits of dill and saffron; behind the cod, arranged along the short rear side of the triangle were a half-dozen scallop croquettes, a saddle of fern-colored celery gelée flopped over their centers. In formation along one long edge were blue prawn timbales topped with cabbage and, opposite them, charlottes of white asparagus velouté ringed with alternating segments of green and white asparagus. All was accompanied by a prawn Américaine sauce.

I’ll leave it there, except to say that I can’t wait to see what all the finalists cook up this weekend.  I’ll be live Tweeting from on-site. See you all then!

- Andrew

All passages from Knives at Dawn © 2009 by Andrew Friedman, used by permission from Free Press/Simon & Schuster.

It’s turning into one of those weeks: One late night after another, each morning bringing a painful reentry, a test of the restorative powers of a hot shower and pot of coffee, the eternal question of why I pony up for that monthly gym membership. But I’ve been powerless to stop it. Such is the lure of great food and drink, the reassuring presence of old friends, and the giddiness of meeting new ones.

Oddly, unpredictably, delightfully, the past two nights have both conjured thoughts of New Year’s Eve. Here’s why:

Remembering Chanterelle

What happens when chefs order: one "course" of dinner for three at Legend.

“Too much food!” cried our waitress at Legend, a Chinese restaurant on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea.

She didn’t know who she was dealing with: David Waltuck of the dear, departed Chanterelle and Harold Dieterle of Perilla and Kin Shop. And a culinary writer always happy to follow their lead.

Both toques are Chinese food enthusiasts, who first met last year, when the Waltucks (David and his wife Karen, former goddess of Chanterelle’s dining room) and I had dinner at Kin Shop.

The two chefs had long respected each other from afar. Both also love Asian food. So it was decided that the three of us would connect for a Chinese dinner. By the time we got around to scheduling it, the two had gotten to know each other a bit by participating in a few of the same charity events, and by David and Karen’s visits to Harold’s restaurants, both of which are in their West Village neighborhood.

We met Harold after service at Kin Shop, around 9:30pm Tuesday night. Given the hour, rather than a Chinatown spot, David picked Legend, which he first discovered by way of a New York Times review last year. We made the five-minute walk and settled into a banquette just past the bar. Despite the fact that this is Chinese New Year’s week, the hour was late and the restaurant was nearly empty, save for a few diners in the subterranean space below.

Sitting with these two guys, I didn’t even bother offering an opinion as to what we should order when our waitress arrived, pad in hand. Harold, in turn, deferred to David: ”You go and I’ll fill in.”

It’s always fun when a chef orders for a family-style meal–tapas, sushi, Chinese food–there’s an implied license to go for broke and select anything that appeals to both taste memory and curiosity with little or no regard for whether or not all of it will actually be eaten.

Off David went: fried lamb with curry, spicy garlic eggplant, double-cooked pork, Dan Dan noodles.

“Those are spicy!” warned our waitress, her eyes widening.

“It’s ok,” he said.

Then it was Harold’s turn: Tea smoked duck, red rabbit.

Another warning, this time about the rabbit: “Lot of meat, no sauce.”

“It’s ok.”

This brought a skeptical look.

“Really. It’s okay.” Moving on: ”Chengdu prawns.”

Then came the warning about the quantity–”Too much food!”–as if we were about to drive a car off a cliff.

“It’s okay,” Harold said, smiling a charmer’s grin. ”I eat a lot. I’m a hungry boy.”

This brought a shrug.

“And pork dumplings in chili oil.”

“Oh, those are good,” said David, sounding as though he’d meant to include them in his opening salvo.

(Neither ordered the dish misidentified, at least I hope so, as “Crispy fried whole red Snapple” on the menu.)

These days, David is the executive chef for Ark Restaurants, a position that’s been held in the past by such fellow notables as Jonathan Waxman and Larry Forgione. His duties include shepherding the coming Clyde’s restaurant on Tenth Avenue into existence, and keeping tabs on other Ark restaurants in New York City and around the country. And Harold, of course, is readying his The Marrow, in Hotel 718 in downtown Brooklyn for an opening. The two traded notes on the usual: number of seats, staffing up their respective kitchens, which meat and fish purveyors they like (and don’t), and so on.

Harold Dieterle, left, and David Waltuck after dinner at Legend.

But for all the talk of the future, eating Chinese food with David, especially this week, couldn’t help but remind me of the past, specifically one of the great traditions of Chanterelle: For the last several years of its life, he and Karen closed the restaurant the Sunday of Chinese New Year’s week and invited a massive group of friends and family to enjoy their hospitality via a Chinese banquet: linen-draped tables were set end to end across the center of the room, and periodically David would emerge from the kitchen, a platter of freshly cooked food aloft. One of his cooks would bang a small, hand-held gong and as the sound echoed in the air, David announced the dish and set it down on the table, which was loaded with two columns of platters by the afternoon’s end.

Another feature of the banquet was a karaoke machine, which prompted a wide-ranging line up of guests to take to the microphone and sing their hearts out. Though it wasn’t in use Tuesday night, the fact that there’s a karaoke stage downstairs at Legend triggered a discussion of the old days, which really weren’t that long ago, Chanterelle having just closed in 2009 after an incredible three-decade run. (Time doesn’t allow for it at present, but one day I hope to write a nice, long post about just what made that restaurant so special to so many people.)

“What’s your go-to song?” Harold asked.

David didn’t have one. I don’t either, really, but I’ve always thought that, with the perfect amount of alcohol in my system, and supportive friends around, I could do a mean version of Elvis Costello’s Allison. Harold’s, it turns out, is Wonderwall by Oasis. Go figure.

Anyway, it was a memorable night with two chefs I’m privileged to know outside the kitchen. We agreed to do it again, perhaps even often, and always over Chinese food, all of which would be a very good thing, as much for the new memories it’ll mint as for the old ones it will surely continue to evoke.

A Burns Supper at … Marea?

New Years came up again Wednesday night, albeit in an entirely different way, when I learned that Robert Burns, the Scottish poet whose birthday is celebrated on January 25, penned a version of the New Year’s staple “Auld Lang Syne.”

Burns was feted at, of all places, Marea, the preeminent Italian restaurant of the moment in New York City, where my friend Joel Buchman inspired a Marea-style Burns supper.

Joel Buchman, foreground, enjoys a plate of haggis at the latest dinner he's dreamed up.

Joel’s one of the most passionate foodies I’ve ever met; we got to be pals in Lyon, France, while I was covering the Bocuse d’Or competition for my book, Knives at Dawn. An attorney by trade, Joel was and remains the secretary of the Bocuse d’Or USA. But that’s the least of it: Generally speaking, he’s a passionate, menschy cook with a Peter Falk rasp in his voice, who can’t get enough of the world of chefs and restaurants. Sensing a kindred spirit, chefs like him, too: He counts among his best friends Daniel Boulud, whom he got to be pals with twelve years ago when Joel’s wife Joyce arranged for him to spend some time cooking in the kitchen at Daniel as a birthday present. Daniel offered to do a series of sessions, to teach Joel something about every course, from amuse bouche to dessert. After a few formal lessons, Daniel gave Joel a jacket and apron and told him to just show up anytime and jump in with the cooks. To this day, more than a decade later, as his law practice allows, Joel still gets into the kitchen at Daniel about three times a month.

Joel and his friend Bob Grimes are well known, individually and as a bit of a dynamic duo, to a certain caliber of chef and restaurateur around town. Not only do they frequent top spots on a regular basis, but they host regular, intimate wine luncheons to which they invite a small rotation of chefs, sommeliers, wine reps, and writers to join them and talk shop. The lunches culminate in a grand finale every December when they throw a large-scale holiday luncheon that serves as an annual reunion of sorts for those who are a part of it.

But, just as Mick and Keith recorded their own albums in addition to functioning as Rolling Stones, Joel also pursues his own, independent culinary passions. Specifically, he delights in reviving and/or extending culinary traditions: he’s been the inspiration behind game and grouse dinners at Daniel and the pressed duck that the restaurant offered for a time a few years back; he even purchased two two old-fashioned duck presses for the restaurant to make the dream a reality. And if you’re wondering why matzoh is available during Passover at all Dinex restaurants, you can now hazard an educated guess as to whose fingerprints are on that development.

Just as I could go on and on about David and Chanterelle, I could continue to rhapsodize about Joel. But for now I’ll have to leave it at a brief description of his latest concoction: the Marea Burns supper. Technically a Marea special event, but unmistakably Joel’s brainchild, the genesis of the evening was that George Barber, who often commands the podium at Marea, is a Scot. One thing led to another and the next thing anybody knew, Joel was urging Marea’s chef de cuisine Jared Gadbaw and general manager Rocky Cirino to create a Marea-style Burns supper.

Marea's George Barber in his kilt

It was an intimate evening, in the smaller of Marea’s two private dining rooms. We started with sherry, then moved on to ale followed by an array of whiskies to sip with the food: Scottish langostines, served raw in the style of the restaurant’s crudo, atop cucumber slivers; a hearty cock-a-leekie soup, the broth poured over the cubed meats and such at the table, a quenelle of prune alongside to sweeten it, if desired; and then, of course, the requisite haggis, served with neeps and tatties, or turnips and potatoes, both of which were whipped on this evening.  (All of this was delineated on a specially designed menu presented in an elegant, folder, with Burns’ “Address to a Haggis” featured on the left side.)

For all the horrid regard in which haggis is held here in the United States, the version served up at Marea was actually quite palatable. Apparently the kitchen refined it over three tastings, upping the amount of lamb belly, dispensing with the lungs that are a part of the original recipe, and so on. Paired with the whipped potatoes, it reminded me of a slightly grainier shepherd’s pie, with a peppery undercurrent that pleasantly surprised me. I had seconds.

Some of the whiskies sampled at the Marea Burns supper.

George, decked out in a kilt for the occasion, and seated at the head of the table, schooled attendees on the traditions of a Burns supper, encouraging us to read poems, and especially to tell personal stories. We were also privileged to have another Scot, the accomplished correspondent and author Matt McAllester at the table.  (Matt’s wife, Pernilla, an art advisor, somehow found herself the lone woman at this gathering, but toughed it out admirably.) Matt recently edited the book Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar, about foreign correspondents and their food fixations. How’s that for a great idea, and however did I miss it? I’m ordering mine today.

It all passed too quickly. Just one of many highlights: As we took turns reading poetry stanzas, George and Matt showed up the rest of us by unfurling their mellifluous Scottish accents. Nonetheless, Joel manned up and read “Auld Lang Syne” all by his lonesome from start to finish, a rather touching rendition, I might add.

Dinner wound up with cheeses, then gingerbread topped with vanilla ice cream and a Drambuie custard sauce, then the usual Marea petits fours. We all signed each others menus, then I shared a taxi back to Brooklyn with the McAllesters. There was talk of dinner plans in the near future. These things often don’t come to pass, but having partaken of a Burns supper together, at Marea of all places, how can we fail to follow up?

By the way, did you know that Robert Burns died at 37 years of age? Reminds me of an old joke I once heard: “By the time Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for three years.”  I’m not a composer, so I’ve always found that line rather funny. Burns having been a writer, this one is harder to swallow.

- Andrew

Gavin Kaysen has one more go at the gold, this time as coach (photo by Gary Payne, courtesy Cafe Boulud)

I haven’t focused very much on the ramp-up to the Bocuse d’Or USA, which takes place at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, this weekend. But having written a book about it two years back, and having just re-launched this website less than two weeks ago, it seemed the responsible thing to dust off that part of my brain that houses knowledge about platter presentations, scoring formulations, and Bocuse d’Or backstory, and pen a preview post. I’ll also be trekking up to the CIA on Sunday to watch the action and talk to a few key leaders and participants.

With all that in mind, I checked in with Café Boulud’s Gavin Kaysen Monday afternoon. Kaysen, who I should mention is a friend of mine, competed for the United States in 2005, was the catalyst for Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud getting involved (along with Jerome Bocuse) in the Bocuse d’Or USA in 2008, and played an unsung coaching role for the 2011 team. In a logical and to most observers’ minds, inevitable development, Kaysen will now be the official coach for the squad that competes for the Stars and Stripes in 2013.

It’s difficult to explain the logistics of the Bocuse d’Or USA without lapsing into an extended exhibition of inside baseball. Suffice it, then, to say that the format of this Sunday’s competition, in which the two-person 2013 American team who will compete in Lyon next January will be selected, will more closely resemble what goes on in France than did the 2010 team trials, in which the 5 1/2 hours of competitive cooking was divided over two days. That said, the notorious platter presentation that largely defines the Bocuse d’Or will only be mandated for one course; the other will be presented on plates. (According to Kaysen, the Bocuse d’Or committee in Lyon has signaled such a change will “probably” take place at the mothership competition in 2013, which would shock me. He says the committee will let the competing countries know in about a month.)

I asked Kaysen if it was intentional that none of this weekend’s four finalists come from Michelin-starred restaurants such as The French Laundry or Eleven Madison Park, from which the last two teams hailed. To my mind, this would have been a smart evolution; sous chefs from those restaurants have the goods to compete, but have been saddled with demanding schedules that have proved a distraction the last two times out. (The French Laundry’s Timothy Hollingsworth placed six out of 24 teams in Lyon in 2009; EMP’s James Kent finished 10th in 2011.)

While that may be so, Kaysen said there was another, less negotiable reason: Nobody from such a restaurant applied. Despite the impressive roster of chefs on the Bocuse d’Or USA’s culinary council, none offered up a candidate this time out. “We still have to gain traction with those types of restaurants in the United States,” said Kaysen. (Many culinary council members did put forth candidates for a “commis” competition on Saturday that’s meant to interest possible future USA contenders in the Bocuse d’Or.)

I should note here that none of this is meant to slight the four finalists, a roster that includes Le Cordon Bleu instructor Bill Bradley; Hartford, CT’s Jeffrey Lizzote, a young veteran of the kitchens of David Bouley and Eric Ripert; and two returning Bocuse d’Or USA candidates: Danny Cerqueda, a seasoned American Culinary Federation competitor, and accomplished Culinary Olympian Richard Rosendale, executive chef of The Greenbrier.

Kaysen also sees it as a potential plus that none of the candidates are based in New York City, which he thinks might help by allowing the selected team to find its own motivation and “be ready when we get there [for tastings and other visits]. When you check up on people over and over, you can start to micromanage a bit; perhaps I did that a little last year.”

Pack Your Bags: This weekend's winner will be training here, at the "Bocuse House" in Yountville, CA, in less than a month.

As for what will happen after the team is selected this weekend, Kaysen is determined to get the candidate and commis (assistant) on track almost immediately. For all of the focus on the financial support and media attention Keller and Boulud have been able to generate over the past few years, the teams they’ve fielded have ended up racing against the clock down the home stretch. Kaysen is determined to head that problem off at the pass.

“Last time, we let the team concept through the first two months after January,” said Kaysen. “This time, after two weeks, we’re going to drop them right in. We’ll be out at the training facility in Yountville from February 15th to February 25th. It’ll be a bit of a shock: We’ll set a schedule, and get the nerves, the anticipation, the meeting with Thomas—get all that out of the way right away.” Kaysen hopes that front-loading the schedule like this will help the team meet its goals later in the year. “If we can get the platter design down by X month, and know we can have a mock platter by October, so we can practice from then on, that’s very important. It’s crucial.”

Kaysen has also set up a few strata of advisory capacities for the culinary council: Two members, Chicago’s Grant Achatz and The Modern’s Gabriel Kreuther, will comprise a new “coaching board” and along with Kaysen, will be a part of every official tasting.

“There won’t be fifteen people at every tasting like last time,” Kaysen said. The two tasting board members were selected to represent the modernist (Achatz) and traditionalist (Kreuther) points of view. Other council members will participate in about a half dozen tastings over the one-year preparatory time.

Kaysen says the coaching board idea grew out of his interactions with Achatz around the 2011 team. “Last year, we called him to ask for advice and ideas, and he said, ‘I’d like to help you, but it’s so late in the game. What advice do I give? I wish I were part of it from the beginning.’ I went back to him a few weeks ago, asked him to join the coaching board, went over it with him, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m in.’” To facilitate idea sharing, Kaysen plans to set up an electronic bulletin board on which members of the team and coaching board can post ideas and photos, from anywhere, at any time to keep the dialogue fluid.

That’s it for now. I’ll be filing a report shortly after the 2013 team is selected. I’ll also be live Tweeting from on-site, commenting on the action, and sharing whatever news I can extract from all the chefs who will be on hand. Should be a fun weekend.

And, finally, on a personal note: To all the candidates, who I’m sure have been working tirelessly: Best of luck with your final preparations and may you all put your best foot forward on Sunday.

- Andrew

Emily Luchetti rose to prominence as the executive pastry chef of San Francisco’s late, great Stars restaurant and now oversees the dessert programs at Farallon and Waterbar. She’s also the author of six cookbooks, most recently The Fearless Baker.

Toqueland has a confession to make: We don’t know as much about the sweet science of pastry as we do about what goes on over on the hot line. With that in mind, we picked Luchetti’s brain at length recently. (She also laid a copy of The Fearless Baker on us and we highly recommend it for its supportive tone and powers of demystification.)  A longer interview will follow before too long, but for the time being, here’s a little snack to hold you over, our sophomore edition of Toqueland Ten:

Emily Luchetti (photo by Gene Kosoy; courtesy Waterbar)

1. Caramel. “Caramel. Caramel sauce. Caramel anything. (You have to make caramel, but once you make it, I consider it an ingredient.) It’s a flavor that goes with every other pastry ingredient, whether it’s chocolate, whether it’s nuts, whether it’s citrus. It can be a subtle flavor or can be really strong, dominant, driving flavor.” You don’t have to change the recipe for to achieve the different effects, says Luchetti: “It’s how you deploy it.”

2. Bittersweet chocolate. “If I had to pick one, I’d pick something around 64 percent [cocoa], because that’s really generic and you can use it in just about anything.”

3. Unsalted butter. “You can’t bake without butter and I always bake with unsalted butter just because it allows you to control the amount of salt in a recipe. I’m not that picky about the brand of butter I use, but the amount of salt in salted butter changes from brand to brand.”

4. Salt. Don’t think of salt as a pasty ingredient? Think again: “It’s crucial to desserts because it brings out the flavors, the same as it does in savory. I use Diamond Crystal kosher salt. A lot of pastry chefs use sea salt, which I think is kind of silly because kosher salt is so much cheaper.” Things would be different if she were talking about finishing salts, in which case she might recommend Maldon or French sea salt, but “I’m just talking about a workhorse salt that goes into cakes and things.”

5. Lemon. Two reasons for this one. The first: “Sometimes you just want a little bit because you want acidity in something; for example, if you’re doing any kind of berry, lemon juice and salt helps bring out the flavors.”

Reason #2: In the bigger picture, lemons offer a window into the menu-writing challenges pastry chefs face at this time of year: “Lemon is a great flavor to have in a dessert, especially in the middle of winter when you’re trying to put a dessert menu out and everything is brown and chocolaty and nutty because there isn’t that much [in season to work with]. So you put something with lemon or citrus on there and it really pops up the menu and gives it a lightness and some color that balances it out much better.”  (By the same token, Luchetti doesn’t use lemons as a primary flavor in the summer because there are so many great, bright flavors to choose from; see number 6.)

Luchetti's latest: The Fearless Baker

6. Berries. “I group them all together. When summertime comes and I’m doing menus I order raspberries and blueberries because those are my favorite. But if you can get the real, good small strawberries [I get them, too]. In California, we also get olallieberries, which are in the blackberry family but they’re bigger and plumper and juicier and sweeter. They’re not as tart and sweet. Sometimes when you mix a blackberry into other berries you get a blackberry in your mouth and it’s like getting a SweeTart candy. I like to use combinations of them when I do desserts in the summer. It’s such a quintessential summer dessert. You can use them with a shortcake and lots of things.”

But not anything: “One thing I never do, is put berries with dark chocolate. I hate berries and dark chocolate together. White chocolate’s okay because it’s softer, but for me when I put dark chocolate and berries in my mouth, it’s too acidic; there’s no smoothness or roundness in my mouth. It’s just too intense, even if you have cream or something in there. There aren’t many pastry chefs who don’t like that combination.” (Toqueland confessed that we like to pair berries and Toblerone bars at home and Luchetti gave us a pass. “I’ll allow you to do that,” she said with a laugh. “It’s a milder chocolate and the nuts smooth it out.”)

7. Almonds. “Being in California, we get the most amazing almonds. Peter, my husband, drives up to Sacramento a lot for business and he’ll stop at those big roadside stands where the almonds are grown and you get them for $3.99 a pound and they’re this year’s almonds and I just roast them. It’s such a neutral nut where something like a hazelnut or a pecan is stronger. Everybody likes almonds because they’re not quite so heavy and oily. Most chefs, especially French chefs, will use blanched almonds because they don’t want the skin on, they don’t want that color, they want that pure white. But I like that color contrast. If, say, you’re doing a financier cake, I like that color in there. I don’t like that blondness. I’ll either use a sliced almond or I really like whole, natural almonds that are just toasted because if you chop them up you just get those chunks of texture and crunch, but it depends what you’re using it for.”

For the final word on this subject, Luchetti offers this wonderfully unpretentious for-home tip that weaves together a number of her top ten picks: “One of the best desserts around is vanilla ice cream (you can even buy Häagen-Dazs), put warm, chopped nuts on top, and chocolate pieces, and a little bit of caramel sauce. If you need a last-minute dessert, that’s so easy.”

8. Apricots. “I think apricots are kind of the unsung hero of the fruit world. What’s sad, especially in California where they’re grown, is so many people are pulling out apricots for the past ten years and putting in grapes or other things. When you eat an apricot by itself it doesn’t taste that great, but it just needs a little bit of love and attention. Once you cook it or pair it with something else, the flavors are unleashed and it’s perfumey and delicate and it’s just a great fruit.”

9. Vanilla. Not one for snobbery, Luchetti will use either the bean or the sometimes maligned extract: “I use both. It really depends what you’re going to use it in. If you’re making cookies, vanilla extract is the way to go. It’s easier and it’s cheaper. You’re not going to scrape out a vanilla bean to put in a bunch of chocolate chips, but at the same time you want that background.”

She also has a special appreciation for vanilla when it’s front and center: “If you add vanilla bean to a crème brulee or a panna cotta, without it, it’s just cream and sugar and milk and (in the case of a crème brulee) eggs, but you put vanilla in and all of a sudden it’s this sophisticated thing. Also, I think vanilla ice cream is the hardest ice cream to make; it’s like ice cream unplugged. If you make Rocky Road, or something like that, it’s all about all the stuff in it; you can have a crappy base but it’s got all this stuff in it that makes it taste good. With vanilla, you have to have the right amount, and a lot depends on which beans you pick because there’s Tahitian, there’s Madagascar. There’s nowhere to hide.”

10. Pear. “I would pick pear over apple just because I think pears are under-appreciated. Pear has a sophistication that apple doesn’t. When you roast a pear, more than poaching, it concentrates all those flavors in there and you can use it on top of a dessert or you can use it as a dessert. One of the things we did for New Year’s Eve at Waterbar is we had a honey-vanilla pound cake and we put a honey-roasted pear on top, a whole pear, and we wanted some cream in it, so where the pear was hollowed out to be cored, we filled it with vanilla cream. So when you took that first bite, you saw that there was all this cream inside.”

- Andrew

Tom Valenti (photo courtesy Ouest)

As readers of this website know, I’ve been far removed from everyday cares up in Yosemite National Park this week. So I barely got to focus on the Paula Deen announcement that she has Type 2 diabetes (lucky me). But before the weekend descends, I wanted to touch base with Tom Valenti, chef of Ouest restaurant in New York City, a man with Type 2 diabetes, and the coauthor (full disclosure: with me) of You Don’t Have to Be Diabetic to Love This Cookbook, a recipe tome for people with diabetes.

I asked Tom to share a few thoughts on this week’s news and on diabetes in general:

TOQUELAND: What was first thing you thought when you heard the news?

VALENTI: I wasn’t surprised because I think that the style of cooking speaks for itself. Diabetes is an epidemic. Heredity has a big role in it for sure, but if you look at how she cooks it’s not surprising.

TOQUELAND: How did you feel about the fact that she waited three years to share the news?

VALENTI: I think it’s a complicated question. On the one hand, health is a private matter. On the other, if moms are trying to emulate her in the kitchen, or if children are asking their moms (or dads) to cook for them based on her show, with no boundaries, then I think they were entitled to that information. Otherwise, it’s a bit of a fantasy.

TOQUELAND: To what extent do you think chefs or food personalities are responsible for what they cook, serve, or show to their public?

VALENTI: It’s all relative to your audience. I feel like my audience is very small and fine dining is the exception rather than the rule to eating and we should be paying attention to what we eat all the other times.

As for Paula Deen, I don’t think we should be judging her, notwithstanding the fact that she waited three years to tell the public. Should she have taken some responsibility over three years with what she was pushing? I don’t think so, actually.

If you’re going to go after Paula Deen, it’s a slippery slope. What about soft drink companies? What about the bottomless pasta bowl at a chain restaurant? What about anyplace or anybody who doesn’t serve utopian cuisine? I don’t want to go there.

TOQUELAND: How old were you when you were diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes?

VALENTI: 34.

TOQUELAND: What was your reaction?

VALENTI: At first, it was denial, but we have it in our family so I wasn’t totally surprised. I didn’t really change my eating habits initially, but then I started noticing that they had a physical effect on me, most particularly on energy levels. It was happening before I was diagnosed but I never attributed it to anything specific.

TOQUELAND: What’s been the biggest revelation of living with diabetes?

VALENTI: That it’s manageable, for those who are able to do something about it. I’m very fortunate in that within the context of my profession, I have great quality food surrounding me. I have the knowledge necessary to prepare it according to my restrictions. So I’m at an advantage. Is it an occupational hazard? Well it can be, but it’s not as bad as it is for most of the American public in that a lot of people can’t afford to buy the greatest quality ingredients nor do they have the luxury of time in their schedule to shop and prepare them. So they’re at the mercy of mass-produced food. That’s why the commerce of prepared food has exploded in America and that’s partially why diabetes is an epidemic and why our children are obese.

Look at a simple calculation: In a lot of cases, you can buy two or three boxes of macaroni and cheese for less than it costs for a head of broccoli. That’s a problem.

Real food for people with diabetes

TOQUELAND: In our book, we made a point of not using any of the fake or substitute products that are marketed to people with diabetes and other diseases.

VALENTI: I think that was very important. A lot of these alternate things masquerade as healthy when in fact they’re not; they just have less sugar. I was doing an interview yesterday and the same subject came up and I mentioned our approach to those nasty specimens. [Note: We tasted a number of popular artificial products before we began testing recipes for the book, and dismissed the entire category immediately.] I mentioned that rather than agave nectar or Stevia, we elected to use granulated sugar because it’s what people have in their cupboards. Getting back to the macaroni thing, agave nectar is very expensive. People who use sugar and white flour as an economic measure, should be allowed to continue using them. We tried to show them how to use less.

TOQUELAND: Our publisher, Workman, hired a diabetes educator to help us on the book by advising us and doing the nutritional analyses of the recipes. What did you learn from her that you didn’t know already about the disease?

VALENTI: Well, we all know that you have to watch your intake of salt, but I didn’t realize how modest a portion of salt the USDA recommended on a daily basis. [Note: This is because people with diabetes are at increased risk for heart disease and other maladies.] What was alarming to us during the recipe-testing process was how high the salt content was in many canned and jarred things, even unadorned products like canned tomatoes, which have a lot of naturally occurring salt. That was a real wake-up call.

Animal fat was another revelation. Just the amount of fat in what we in this country consider a standard serving of protein is astounding. I was really enlightened in terms of portion sizes, so the recipes in the book include, say, a 3- or 4-ounce piece of steak instead of a 7- or 8-ounce piece. When you mention steak to an American, an image pops to mind of a big sizzling love fest, when in fact, a piece half that size, with veggies alongside, is plenty for a meal.

TOQUELAND: What kind of feedback have you gotten on the book?

VALENTI: People love that the recipes aren’t just watered down versions of pre-existing things. I look at our fettuccine with asparagus, where shaved asparagus stands in for half the pasta. So you get an allowable amount of carbs plus a vegetable that bulks up the serving size and makes it very healthful at the same time. A lot of our recipes were specifically engineered to work on their own terms, not a watered down version of something else.

- Andrew

I’ve had Marco Pierre White on the brain lately, mostly because I’ve been working with Paul Liebrandt on a book project. Coming of age when he did in London, Paul was heavily influenced by Marco, who towered over the dining scene there in the 1980s and 1990s. The first book that ever moved Paul was Marco’s classic and brilliantly titled White Heat, and for his second “proper” cooking job, Paul tried, and succeeded, in snagging a job at White’s celebrated The Restaurant Marco Pierre White at the Hyde Park Hotel (now a Mandarin Oriental).

Before opening that eponymous establishment, Marco made his name at Harvey’s, and while there, the BBC shot and aired a fascinating miniseries of sorts in which the chef cooked for, and then dined with, four kitchen masters for whom he had once worked: Pierre Koffman, Albert Roux, Nico Ladenis, and—most memorably to my mind—Raymond Blanc, the eternally childlike optimist who ran then, and still runs today, Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons.

Featured below is the third and final segment of the half-hour episode. The first two segments are here and here, and mostly concern Marco and his brigade preparing dinner; in other words, for two-thirds of the program, it’s a cooking show. But then, about 1 minute 15 seconds into part three, Raymond comes to lunch and you could cut the tension with any one of the knives just off camera in Marco’s kitchen. (The episodes featuring the other chefs are easily found on You Tube as well, and I recommend them all.)

Here’s the clip, with my time-stamped commentary below… if you can watch this just once, you have a lot more discipline than I do:

:38: Historical footnote: That plate is the Villeroy & Boch basket weave that become a darling of chefs in both London and the US around this time. Prior to its popularity, you’d have had a hard time finding oversize plates, so common in restaurants today, anywhere in the United States, not even at a restaurant show.

1:23: Sign of things to come: Raymond, full of enthusiasm, lifts his glass for a toast. Marco corrects him: “You’re supposed to do this at the end, Chef.” And away we go.

2:25: How far we’ve come.  Marco’s commentary on how ignorant his customers are of the sacrifice chefs make: “It’s not glamorous, it’s dirty, it’s sweaty.” Ten years before Kitchen Confidential, Marco himself would put an end to all that in White Heat, which features gloriously gritty black and white photography by Bob Carlos Clarke. It was a game changer in how chefs and their work are perceived.

2:55: This has nothing to do with chef-dom, but kudos to the camera-person for a marvelous, spontaneous cinéma-vérité-worthy zoom as the camera pushes in to capture Raymond’s revelation of the price he’s paid in the name of his craft, namely, that his “family life has been pretty much destroyed.”  The guy, who has come off as Mr. Sunshine up to that moment, reveals something totally unexpected and deeply private.

3:25: Marco goes on about how wives always feel secondary to your work.  Some things haven’t changed.

4:00: His hands are off camera, but note how Marco mops  the residue off Raymond‘s plate with (I assume) a piece of bread, then licks his fingers clean, and Raymond doesn’t seem the least bit bothered or offended. For all the tension between them, they are brothers of a sort, no?

4:27: Having said that, check out the nanosecond of unbelievably awkward silence that precedes the next course.  It’s a very quick cut, so must have been deliberately included by the editor, and it’s priceless. When there’s no food before them, they have nothing left to talk about.

4:45: Just hilarious, though you have to listen to catch it. Marco, singing the praises of Pierre Koffman’s pig’s trotter dish, says it’s the one dish he’d like to have before he died. Blanc responds that he doesn’t think about death and Marco (this is what you have to strain to hear) says, “I think about it every day.”

5:20: “At the end of the day you can’t reinvent the wheel.  The wheel has been invented and all we can do is put our own hallmark on it now.” For all his bluster, Marco was not only talented, but also wise at his young age. We’d have been spared a lot of silliness if all chefs, especially in the 1990s, understood this notion.

5:41: That chamber music, combined with the gourmet food and Marco’s threatening demeanor, always puts me in mind of the moment in Silence of the Lambs just before Hannibal Lecter eats the prison guards in Baltimore.

6:05: Regarding dessert, Blanc comments that, “When you taste it you want more.  Always a good sign.” A simple concept, but I love the phrasing.

6:20: Blanc’s observation that Marco’s food no longer “lies” is truly insightful and the kind of appraisal that probably could only be made by a fellow chef.

6:58: Marco: “It’s that little something which you can’t write into a cookery book. That inner feeling that comes from within, that feeling of what you’re working with.”  There will always be a gap between what chefs do and what the rest of us do. This was summed up well by Thomas Keller in The French Laundry Cookbook: “The idea of cooking and the idea of writing a cookbook are, for me, in conflict.  There is an inherent contradiction between a cookbook, which is a collection of documents, and a chef, who is an evolving soul, not easily transcribed in recipe form.”

7:00 to end: What’s this? A Hollywood ending? All of a sudden, the tough façade drops and Marco tells Raymond that he’s the one who first made all this clear to him, even though he was too ignorant to understand at the time.  (Bonus sign of the times:  Marco smokes at the table for the tv camera.) Note Marco’s broad grin at 8:00 when Raymond toasts him; it’s truly touching.

8:04: Yep, that’s a young Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen with Marco and the boys.

Last line: “You try every night.”  The chef’s life, in four words.

- Andrew

Having written a single, summary piece of my first session at the Ahwahnee this week, I’ve decided to try something different for the next two days: As the chefs (Jimmy Bradley, Jesse Cool, and Rick Moonen) conduct demos and Moonen prepares a five-course dinner for Thursday night, I’ll periodically update this post with glimpses of the cooking demos, socializing, and cooking as it all unspools.

(NOTE: I’m not sure which version of this will be sent out to email subscribers by the automated system, so if you’re reading this post via a subscription, you might want to visit the actual site page for the latest update.)

Here goes:

Wednesday Morning, 10am: Stalking the Green Papaya

We actually begin our adventure with a little ingredient drama from Tuesday, when Rick, who showed up a few days early with his girlfriend Roni Fields and his chef de cuisine from rm seafood in Las Vegas, Chris Starkus, realized that there wasn’t enough green papaya in the house for both his cooking demo today and the gala dinner tomorrow. (Hey, these things happen: happy diners who were moaning over Chef Peter Chastain’s dinner last night would be shocked to learn that the perfectly poached and chilled lobsters we were chowing down on at 7pm hadn’t been delivered to the kitchen until 4:30pm. These kinds of things happen to chefs, and are recovered from, every day.)

Rick Moonen in the Ahwahnee Kitchen, Tuesday afternoon.

The Ahwahnee, located as it is in the middle of a national park, couldn’t procure the necessary papaya on such short notice, so the other toques did what any respectable chefs would do in the same situation: they broke out their cell phones and bailed Rick out.

The final solution: Emily Luchetti, who was part of the Chefs’ Holidays session that wrapped up last night, had her San Francisco restaurant Waterbar order a crate of the precious cargo, which was set to arrive by 9am today in the city. At 10am, Jimmy Bradley, of The Red Cat, is to swing by the restaurant on his way out of town, put the crate in the trunk, and haul it up here for arrival this afternoon. (Can you hear the Mission impossible theme as you read this? No? OK, maybe it wasn’t that dramatic.)

rm seafood chef de cuisine Chris Starkus in the Ahwahnee kitchen, Wednesday morning, 9:20am

Meanwhile, Starkus picked up around 9am today where he and Moonen had left off with their prep yesterday: I caught up with him as he was filleting Arctic char that will be brined, cold smoked, seared crispy, served over onions, and finished with horseradish cream and paired with crispy potato at Thursday’s gala dinner.  (That’s tomorrow night’s second course; the first is the green papaya salad.)

Starkus' prep list and Arctic char, before and after the knife

During the day Tuesday, Moonen and Starkus did some other prep work: the green papaya salad for today’s cooking demo, the fennel silk (a sauce for the cod dish that will be course number three tomorrow night and the second dish Rick will demo this afternoon), the above-mentioned horseradish cream, and dessert: sticky toffee pudding, as well as the rum sauce that will infuse it and the coffee-caramel sauce that will finish it.  They also made vanilla ice cream to go alongside.

More soon; I’m off to interview Peter Chastain, who’s recovering from cooking last night’s sensational feast but has allowed me to join him for breakfast.

Wednesday Afternoon, 12:15pm: This Chef’s Holiday Has Truly Begun

Chef Peter Chastain in the dining room at the Ahwahnee, relaxed and officially off the clock.

Just wrapped up a two-hour interview with Peter Chastain, a fascinating chef with a proud and not unhealthy aversion to the spotlight. I found Peter, who pulled a marathon day in the kitchen here yesterday, sitting in the center of the dining room, a bloody Mary before him, steak and eggs on the way, the very picture of decompression. We had a long and wide-ranging discussion of his life and career, which has taken him from Berkeley, California to the East Coast to Japan, Europe, and back to the Bay Area. Along the way, he worked for Ferdinand Metz (who would later go on to become a legendary president of the Culinary Institute of America, leading its transformation into the school we know today), and alongside a young Michael Mina and Mario Batali at the Four Seasons, San Francisco. Over the years, Peter has developed a strong sense of who he is and the kind of restaurant he wants to live and work in, which he’s created for himself at Prima Ristorante in Walnut Creek, CA. All of that will turn up in a profile post sometime in the near future.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the Ahwahnee’s executive chef, Percy Whatley and executive sous chef Simon Lewis (who’s leaving the hotel next month for Joël Robuchon’s Las Vegas outpost) have joined the charge, and all three are busily butchering and portioning fish for the coming demos and tomorrow’s dinner:

from l to r: Percy Whatley, Chris Starkus, and Simon Lewis

At 2pm, Rick Moonen will be kicking off this session of Chefs’ Holidays with a live demonstration; I’ll be moderating.  Write up to follow.

Wednesday Afternoon, 4pm: The Man in Black

Rick Moonen took to the stage here at 2pm, and was in fine form, a well-tuned demo machine who makes a moderator’s life remarkably easy. Rick’s been cooking in front of live audiences for a long, long time starting at schools like De Gustibus at Macy’s in New York City back in the 1980s and for a network of representative chefs enlisted by Cervena Venison in the 1990s.  More recently, of course, he’s been a presence on both Top Chef and Top Chef Masters and has learned to funnel his restless energy and strong point of view into a thoroughly entertaining stage presence.

Rick Moonen on the demonstration stage at the Ahwahnee (photo by Jessica Abdo)

Rick, decked out as he always seems to be these days in a stark black, tapered chef’s jacket, broke the ice by making a joke out of the central irony of his professional life: that he runs a fish restaurant in the middle of the dessert (rm seafood in Las Vegas). But what’s a guy to do? Rick rose to prominence at Oceana, which for years was one of the preeminent seafood temples in New York City, then relocated to Vegas about seven years ago to plug into the thriving restaurant scene there.

Well, actually, here’s something a guy can do: turn sustainability into a personal cause, which Rick has done. Each of the hundred or so spectators today found placed before them, along with the chef’s bio and promotional material for his restaurant, pocket-sized cards from the Monterey Bay Aquarium titled Seafood Watch (visible online as well), that offer guidelines for best practices when it comes to choosing fish that’s (a) farmed in environmentally friendly ways and (b) isn’t at immediate risk of being over-fished out of existence. As Rick pointed out, not everybody defines sustainability quite the same way, but this is the one that he adheres to, and he’s pushing its tenets to anybody who’ll listen.

Behind the scenes, rm seafood chef de cuisine Chris Starkus plates a Thai green papaya salad for guests to taste after the demonstration (photo by Jessica Abdo)

Rick spent the first five or ten minutes of the presentation describing all this with an expert’s ease, and then launched into the cooking, for which he blended science, technique, and detailed explanations of the different flavor and textural marks he tries to hit in a dish. He demonstrated how to quick-brine fish to firm it up and delineated what goes into fish sauce and other ingredients, and then encouraged guests to not be too bound to his recipes; for example, you can top his Thai green papaya salad with shrimp, or sliced scallops, or whatever you damn well feel like. Although the house was full of foodies, questions were scarce; not for lack of interest but because Rick’s done enough of this to anticipate what his audience is wondering.

Afterwards, Rick and Chris returned to the Ahwahnee’s main kitchen to pick up on their prep for tomorrow night, retrieving their cod from its brine and smoking the Arctic char.  At 6pm, we’ll meet the attendees of the Chefs’ Holidays series up close and personal at a welcome reception, then a few of us are having dinner. It ought to be a fun night: we’ll be joined by Jimmy Bradley and the hotel’s executive chef Percy Whatley. If I don’t refresh this post again until the morning, you’ll know where I disappeared to.

Thursday Morning, 8am: One Hundred Folds Edition!

Chefs Jimmy Bradley, Jesse Cool, and Rick Moonen met the dining public last night in a welcome reception. After mingling for a bit, we all ascended a spiral staircase to a second floor landing from which we each said a few words. Rick Moonen showed Toqueland a little love by asking the audience if they knew what a toque was.

“A chef’s hat,” yelled about half the people in attendance.

“Right! Do you know how many folds it has?”

There was a long silence, before a voice piped up: “One hundred.”

“Right!” said Rick. “Do you know why?”

“Because that’s how many ways you can cook an egg,” said the same voice.

Turns out the savvy guest down below wasn’t a guest at all; it was Percy Whatley, the executive chef of the hotel. Guy knows his stuff; in fact, he’s studying for the Certified Master Chef exam, something I hope to write more about in this space in the months to come.

A short while later, I was to interview Rick, but ended up with Jimmy Bradley in tow. No way that interview was going to happen:  We visited Rick’s guest suite here, where he and girlfriend Roni Fields where hanging and sipping wine. The visit soon turned into a reminiscence session about chefs and restaurants back in New York, some still in business, some long gone. Get two guys like that together and the number of cooks, owners, restaurant spaces, and other assorted history they have in common can be staggering. Fun fact: Rick once ran the kitchen at Chelsea Central, in the space that is now home to Jimmy’s The Red Cat. As Rick himself said the other night, “The older I get, the smaller the world is.”

The chefs at dinner in the Ahwahnee dining room.

We all made our way to dinner downstairs, by which time our group had grown so large they had to set a new table: Along for the meal were Jesse; Percy; Rick’s chef de cuisine Chris Starkus; Carlos Canada, the chef of Jesse’s Flea Street Cafe (clearly very sweet guy who I scarcely got to talk to); and Peter Chastain, who was still at the hotel and now flying solo, his crew having headed back to Walnut Creek.

It was a fun dinner, with surprisingly little shop talk. There was however a running gag: Jesse is in love with the hotel’s sticky buns, which are only available here in the bar, which serves as a cafe by day, and she mentioned them every chance she got. Because the hotel picks up our meals, I’ve been maxing out the arrangement by breakfasting from the buffet in the main dining room, where there’s everything my heart could desire waiting for me every morning; little did I know what I was missing.

The meal passed quickly, and before knew it, the waiter was asking: “Would anybody care for dessert?”

Nobody took him up on the offer. “Typical chefs,” laughed Jesse. “Nobody wants dessert.”

We did want something else, however, and a bunch of us found our way to the hotel bar for a nightcap. The place, just an hour removed from closing time, was empty, save for the waitstaff. Espying an elevated platform at the back of the room, Rick demonstrated that you can take the man out of Vegas but you can’t take the Vegas out of the man: “Can we sit in the Champagne Lounge,” he asked. “Or is that bottle service only?”

Gotta run. Jesse’s demo is up in an hour, and I need caffeine before taking the microphone to moderate. And, of course, I gotta get me a sticky bun!

Thursday, 12:30pm: Eye of the Storm

The guests for this session of Chef’s Holidays have it pretty swell: they were treated to Rick Moonen’s high-octane demonstration yesterday, and this morning they enjoyed the hug-like warmth exuded by Jesse Cool, the queen of Menlo Park’s dining scene. Jesse’s the one chef here I’d never met before, although we’re going to make up for lost time with an interview this afternoon. Known for her adherence to organic food, sustainability, and the like, she’s also a one-woman wrecking ball to the stereotypes many people attach to “hippy chefs,” as she describes herself: yes, she wants you and everybody else to buy locally sourced food, eat “real” ingredients (not that processed junk), and to not waste anything (e.g., availing yourself of all usable parts of vegetables and animals). But she also loves herself a good piece of meat, a gin cocktail, and–of course–sticky buns.

Jesse Cool explains it all for you.

In other words, Jesse’s a prophet but not a preacher, and that was the underpinning of her entire presentation this morning. She’s also a seasoned teacher, and knows enough to keep it simple when taking to the demo stage. “All my recipes are dump and mix,” she told me when I leaned in for a pre-demo powwow.

Jesse’s been coming to this event on and off for more than two decades and I’m sure it says a lot about her and the regard in which she’s held up here that a posse of area chefs, women all, showed up to watch her demo and visit with her afterwards.

Meanwhile, here’s what two days of advance prep work will get you: Moonen and Starkus are locked and loaded for the big dinner tonight, which I discovered when I headed into the kitchen to check on their progress and instead found Chris in his civvies, headed out to do some sightseeing. They’ll get back in there after lunch, and not come out again until the last course has been served, some time around 9:30 this evening.

Enjoy it while you can: Chris Sarkus catches a breather before the big push tonight.

I’m off to get a coffee and catch up with Percy Whatley, and then to Jimmy’s demo. After that, it’s an interview with Jesse, over gin cocktails, naturally.

Thursday, 3:30pm: We’ve Been Slimed!

Jimmy Bradley took to the demonstration stage at 2pm to teach two of his dishes: a pork sausage and clam stew dish inspired by the Portuguese fishermen of his hometown of Narragansett, Rhode Island, and an Arctic char tartar. Both are highly versatile: The components of the pork and clam mashup (featured in our The Red Cat Cookbook) can be served up individually or together, and the tartare can be presented on the chips that adorned the plated version as a passed hors d’oeuvre.

Jimmy Bradley, ready to go on the demo stage (photo by Jessica Abdo; courtesy Ahwahnee Hotel)

The demonstration stopped for a spell when Jimmy, expanding on his expression that “to be a good cook, you have to be a good shopper,” described how to select a fresh piece of Arctic char at the market. Unlike most fish, he explained, char’s skin should be a little slimy. This caused a bit of a stir among the audience, who wondered if maybe he meant to use a different word. He didn’t, and to illustrate his meaning, Jimmy sliced off a piece of the fish and sent it round the room on a plate so people could drag their finger through the filmy coating for themselves. They were a little grossed out, but edified, and the tasting that followed the demo had everybody singing the praises of both the product and its preparation, including the servers in the staging area who let no morsel of it go to waste.

Thursday Afternoon, 4pm: T-Minus 150 Minutes

I dropped by the Ahwahnee’s kitchen shortly after Jimmy’s demo to find Moonen, Starkus, and the Ahwahnee cooks going full steam with final preparations. You need to know when to stay the hell out of the way in a kitchen, so I snapped a few pictures and made for the exit:

Moonen and Starkus confer as the Ahwahnee team help prep the dinner.

Moonen and Starkus whip up one of the many sauces that figured into Thursday evening's menu.

(Note: Amazingly, Rick made a few minutes to give me an interview before the dinner; write up to follow later this week.)

Thursday Night, 9:30pm: Shift Drink!

Rick’s dinner was served up in the Ahwahnee’s cathedral-like dining room. The five-course feast: green papaya salad topped with shrimp; seared Arctic char with cucumber salad and horseradish crema; Alaskan black cod with citrus ragu, fennel silk, and shaved apple; venison with Brussels sprouts, wild mushrooms, stuffed cippolini onions, and pear butter; and that sticky toffee pudding for dessert.

After the dinner, all the guest chefs and their friends, along with Percy and his cooks, gathered in the hotel bar for a decompression session. Bottles of wine were out in the center of the table and visiting chefs and hotel staff hung out and drank together for a good 90 minutes. It was a terrific demonstration of the camaraderie among cooks; some of the people at the table were television personalities, others toil anonymously at a kitchen in the middle of a state park, but everybody was on equal turf:

Members of the terrific Ahwahnee kitchen team chill out after service.

That's a wrap: Guest chefs and the hotel team enjoy a final few hours together.

Thursday Night, 10:30pm: Flop Chef

One of the organizers of the Chefs’ Holidays series showed up with a big smile on her face, having just secured the last of the chefs for the final two sessions of the series. Of course, the roster had been set months ago (I committed back in July, for example). The final two sessions were to feature chef-testants from Top Chef, but guess what happened? Three of the six pulled out, leaving the organizers high and dry. This is the height of lame: if a guy of, say, Rick Moonen’s stature and schedule can manage to keep his commitments, I’d love to know how these guys justified the pull out, to the hotel, but also to themselves. (To their credit, the show’s season 5 winner Hosea Rosenberg is keeping his word, as are Top Chef alums Tre Wilcox and Ariane Duarte. I’m sure it’s no accident that these three chefs all run businesses or restaurant kitchens of their own rather than simply marking time on the party circuit.)

Ultimately, this works out to the benefit of those who will attend the last session of Chefs’ Holidays who will get to soak up the wit and wisdom of some bona fide chefs including Adam Mali of the Pat Kuleto Group in San Francisco, Parke Ulrich of San Francisco’s Waterbar, and Brandon Miller of Caramel, California’s Mundaka.

Thursday Night, 11pm: Et Tu, Jimmy?

After the bar shut down, Rick and Roni invited me and Jimmy to join them and Starkus up in the suite the three of them were sharing. With a fireplace roaring, the three of us killed a bottle of Bonny Doon Le Cigare Volant. Jimmy and Rick dropped right back into their New York state of mind from the day prior, talking about a place I hadn’t thought of in years, the Chefs Cuisiniers Club, a spot on East 22nd Street that Rick opened back in the 1990s along with his buddies Charlie Palmer and Frank Crispo, in part so toques would have a place to hang after hours.

Rick also treated us to some memories of Le Cote Basque, where he worked early in his career, when a growing number of Americans were becoming interested in serious professional cooking.

Rick has a jumpy energy (he often seems like a man itching for a fight) and he was getting into a real lather as he recalled how few French chefs were open to yanks working in their kitchens when he and his contemporaries first started out, Le Cote Basque being a notable exception.

“Jean-Jacques Rachou!” he bellowed, naming the establishment’s chef and shifting around on the sofa. “He was the only one. The ONLY ONE. THE ONLY ONE who said, ‘YES, the Americans, the young Americans can cook. Hire them!” He turned to me: “That’s the truth! And you should look into it!”

Oui, chef!

Then Roni, a professional photographer, treated us to a slideshow of nature shots from the morning she and Rick spent in nearby Mariposa. At one point, Rick made a mildly crude and hilarious joke that a scribe like myself can’t help but want to share with the masses.

“Can I have that for the site?” I asked.

“You want it?” asked Rick.

“Yes.”

“YOU WANT IT???”

“I WANT IT!”

“YOU REALLY WANT IT?”

“I REALLY WANT IT!”

We were so worked up that I half expected him to reply, “You can’t handle the truth!” but instead, he said, “You can have it! On the record! You got it!”

I can’t lie: This made my night. But then Jimmy, who I consider one of my best pals, showed that the bond between cooks trumps the one between cooks and writers.

“Rick, man, you’re better than that,” he said. “Why do you want that joke out there?”

“Naw, it’s fine,” Rick said.

“No,” said Jimmy. “You’re Rick Moonen. You’re a badass chef. Why do you want people quoting that?”

At which point I waved them both off and said not to worry about it, not wanting to be a drag on the evening, something Toqueland has to be careful of, lest we alienate our friends.

Friday, On the Road Again

The next morning, I meet up with Jesse for a breakfast interview (life got in the way of our planned meet-up on Thursday), then packed up the SUV and headed down to San Francisco with Jimmy.

Jimmy Bradley takes a shift behind the wheel.

We had dinner at Park Tavern, a North Beach hotspot owned by Jimmy’s old friend Anna Weinberg, who used to work for Jonathan Waxman at Barbuto in New York City. The meal was terrific, the perfect way to end the week. When it was time to head for the airport, a violent rainstorm had broken out. The ride to SFO was harrowing, to say the least. We thought about sticking around another night, but Saturday flight options were limited so we recognized that it was time to go. This trip, like all good things, had come to an end.

- Andrew

Sean Baker introduces himself to Chefs' Holidays attendees. (photo by Jessica Abdo, courtesy Ahwahnee Hotel)

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, JANUARY 17, 2011—It’s not right to generalize but I’ve long felt that it’s a victim-less crime when you do so in a positive way, like when you say that you love Italians (which I do) or Australians (guilty, again) or that you never met a meanie from Seattle (seriously, the CEOs in that city will give you a lift to the airport).

I know too much about the cooking trade to believe for a second that all Northern California chefs are nice guys and gals, but the three I’ve been with since Sunday night—Sean Baker, Peter Chastain, and Emily Luchetti—tempt me toward that conclusion nonetheless. The four of us just wrapped up Session 3 of Chefs’ Holidays at the Ahwahnee, a magnificent hotel in Yosemite National Park, where the chefs conducted cooking demos and I acted as moderator and host.

Having arrived in San Francisco on Saturday, the “work week” (yeah, right) began for me on Sunday when Luchetti, executive pastry chef of Farallon and Waterbar, picked me up at the Huntington Hotel, perched high atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill. Emily and I had never met before, but she was kind enough to give me a lift from the city up to Yosemite.

The four-hour drive passed remarkably quickly. Not only was it a beautiful, sunny, unseasonably warm day, but we had the benefit of being total strangers. We discussed everything from the restaurant scene in our respective cities to writing books (Emily has penned six) to the Beard Foundation (Emily recently served on the board; I was married at the Beard House in Manhattan) to the French Culinary Institute (she’s currently a dean; I studied there).

Emily was also kind enough to consent to a lengthy interview in which we discussed everything from the pastry arts in general to her individual career path; she walked me through the formative days of Stars restaurant, one of the most important American dining establishments of the past 40 years, the place where Jeremiah Tower reached full flight and became one of our first celebrity chefs. Emily was part of the opening team of Stars as a line cook, but tired of the savory slog, and with Tower’s support, began transitioning to pastry, eventually becoming executive pastry chef.  Wasn’t it nice of Jeremiah to encourage such a drastic change?

Emily Luchetti signs copies of her latest book, The Fearless Baker (photo by Jessica Abdo; courtesy Ahwahnee Hotel)

Sunday night, the hotel hosted a Meet the Chefs cocktail reception, where my first order of business was to introduce the toques to the 180 or so guests, addressing them from a balcony, and inviting each chef to say a few words. When I observed that all three chefs were from Northern California, a huge, prideful whoop went up from the crowd. A lot of them have been to these chefs’ restaurants and are fans. Many attendees had ruddy cheeks in January and their wine glasses dangled like bracelets at the end of their arms, embodiments of an idealized California lifestyle that at some point in every visit out this way causes me to email my wife that “We should move here!” It’s an unavoidable impulse, but it passes.

The chefs’ remarks were natural, organic, if you will. I was especially struck, moved even, by Sean Baker, a slim, tall (6′ 4″), bearded young buck who’s gotten a lot of buzz at Gather in Berkeley. Sean took the microphone in hand, bowed his head, almost as though in prayer, and shyly explained that he loved connecting with people, like the farmers he collaborates with, and looked forward to connecting with the guests here as well. It was such a sincere and unguarded moment, and the crowd received it so warmly, that it stayed with me for hours.

Minutes later, as the reception wound down, I asked Peter Chastain, chef of Prima Ristorante in Walnut Creek, what he was doing for dinner that night and he told me that his sous chef was here with his family and they were all going to dine together. But I was welcome to join. Seriously. It’d be no problem. He meant it, he assured me. By this point, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he would have extended himself like that, even though we’d never met before, because it had become clear to me that something special was unfolding here, and that it was no accident that all three of these chefs, each of whom had touched me in some way over the past few hours, lived and worked in Northern California, as did a majority of the guests.

Peter’s demo Monday morning was a rousing success, a perfect balance of passion for the task at hand and offhand jokes delivered with the finesse of a stand-up veteran. The only screw up came when I, acting as moderator, chimed in that when purchasing extra virgin olive oil, you really should seek out a good imported brand. Remembering where I was, I quickly added an altogether insufficient qualifier: “usually.” Later that afternoon, a softspoken couple, Susan Hermanson and Larry Robinson, approached me in the hallway and politely suggested that I should have emphasized that there’s plenty of great extra virgin olive oil produced right here in the USA. Turns out Susan and Larry own Victorine Valley Farms, where they produce—wait for it—olive oil.

Mortified, I apologized profusely, and they gave me a gracious pass. What did you think they were going to do, chew me out? Of course, they wouldn’t do that; they’re Northern Californians. Oh, no, there I go again, generalizing.

Monday afternoon, it was Emily’s turn to perform a demo, but before she did, Percy Whatley, the hotel’s executive chef and an old friend from when I covered the Bocuse d’Or USA, in which he’s competed twice, surprised me by taking the mike and giving me a very generous introduction. He’s such a nice guy. Wonder why that is?

Emily’s demo wove together technical information with professional and personal anecdotes and gentle, supportive advice. (When a guest asked for tips for low-fat desserts, Emily delivered her quite-serious and helpful suggestion of eating smaller portions without a hint of irony or humor, cutting any possible laughter off at the pass.) Sean’s demo, on Tuesday afternoon, was marbled with the stories about the farmers he hinted at Sunday night. As he mentioned their names, he smiled at the thought of them, as though they were being remembered across a span of years rather than just the half-day it would take him to get back home Wednesday.

Peter Chastain, prepping dinner in the Ahwahnee kitchen.

After his demo, Sean and his wife, Reneé gave me some time for an interview; in fact they gave me all the time they had before supper: Each two-day session of Chefs’ Holidays concludes with a gala dinner in the hotel’s dramatic and soaring dining room. This session’s was prepared by Chastain and it was an ambitious, generous, five-course affair brimming with Italian flavors served up in huge but elegantly plated portions, well beyond what anybody had any right to expect of a chef operating far from his native kitchen.

Afterwards, most of the guest chefs gathered in the Ahwahnee’s bar, along with Percy and many of his cooks—they took turns buying rounds, hung out with guests, swapped business cards and offers of taking care of one other in faraway restaurants.

Goodbyes took longer than they usually do at these kinds of things. People got up to leave, stood and visited a few minutes longer with their table-mates, then reluctantly shuffled off into the night.

- Andrew

PS I’m going to try something a little different for the next session here, which begins on Wednesday, by (sort of) live blogging it. Look for a running summary of two days with Jimmy Bradley, Jesse Cool, and Rick Moonen starting sometime Wednesday. If you aren’t already following me on Twitter, go ahead and do that as I’ll be refreshing/re-posting with each addition to the dispatch.

Jimmy Bradley, left, and I at Nopa restaurant.

When I relaunched this site a few days ago, one of the things I wanted to do was give you a seat at the table for some hang time with chefs, which inevitably produces something worth sharing, whether it be a nugget of industry insight, or simply a war story, anecdote, or memorable quip.

So, here’s the first: I spent Saturday in San Francisco with my good pal Jimmy Bradley, chef-owner of The Red Cat and The Harrison in New York City. During an evening divided between drinks at the Hotel Huntington bar and dinner at Nopa restaurant (both with a civilian friend along for the ride) we lapsed into a running discussion of the distinct challenge of cooking meat to its proper doneness, and the madness to which it can drive toques.

Can’t remember how or why it came up, but Jimmy told the story of how, years ago, while working the sauté station at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, he tried to warn the kid on the meat station next to him that he had been cooking various cuts to the wrong degree of doneness all night long.

And how did Jimmy, standing several feet away, know this?

“As with anything that’s blue collar and repetitive in nature, you learn things over the years,” he said. “Meat starts out red and ends up gray; in between, there are shades of both, and of brown.” But the answer goes beyond that: Most seasoned chefs will tell you they can just look at a piece of meat and tell what doneness it is, or at a piece of fish and know if it’s cooked through or not, but none can quite put words to what they see, beyond color cues, that reveals this; it’s an intuition that must be earned personally.

Anyway, the guy didn’t heed Jimmy’s warning, and put up three pieces of overcooked filet mignon, their shortcomings as apparent to the chef as they had been to Jimmy. Already reeling from the mounting pressure of an intense service, the chef went ballistic, chucking piece after piece of meat right at the cook’s head.

This, in turn, reminded me of a story, witnessed firsthand while trailing in a South Beach, Miami, restaurant many years ago, that involved a customer who couldn’t get no satisfaction with a rack of lamb. After it had been sent out to the dining room, a waiter returned the lamb to the kitchen, reporting that the guest wanted it more well done. Though slammed, the meat cook was happy to comply, slipped it under the salamander (broiler) for a bit, and sent it back out.

Minutes later, the lamb again came back, and the exercise was repeated.

When the lamb returned a third time, the chef snatched the plate from the waiter, stomped to the pastry station, and took the brulee torch (used to melt and burnish the sugar atop a creme brulee) in hand.

“I’ll show you fucking well done,” he growled, and proceeded to torch the poor meat into submission.

And that was that; the lamb went back out, and the demanding diner, presumably elated with the incinerated protein, was never to be heard from again.

The dining room at Nopa.

Ironically, we didn’t eat any meat at Nopa as we loaded up on a parade of starters from the daily-changing menu: Nantes carrots atop a bed of hummus, paired with a radish salad; a pile of “little fried fish,” pretty enough for a photo shoot, with a small dipping bowl of romesco; poached farm egg, Tasso-spiced ham, lacinato kale and acorn squash roasted and served with a bit of the skin intact, making true the restaurant’s promise of “urban rustic food;” a salad of mixed chicories, garlic croutons, cauliflower, pimeton and paltaleo (an aged goat cheese), the pimeton incorporated via a rust-hued dressing that hugged the chicories. This last one was addictive and delicious, and the thin shavings of cheese on top struck me as a casually brilliant inclusion. (Jimmy loved it but found the decision less bold. “Don’t you know that cheese makes any salad better?” he chided.)

These and other dishes were all just terrific, enjoyed from a second floor perch that gave us a generous view of the dining room and open kitchen below. Service, too, was wonderful, and our crack waiter, who’s been at Nopa since it opened six years ago, buttered up us New Yorkers when he DIDN’T ATTEMPT AN UPSELL ON THE WATER! “Do you want a few minutes with your menu?” he asked. “Want to order a drink, or should I just go get your water?” This almost brought a tear to my eye.  ”Should I just go get your water?”  What a simple, charming, downright humane notion. There was no insulting reference to “tap,” no need to confer with my tablemates. “Should I just go get your water.”  This was as memorable to me as “I”m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” or “E.T. phone home”—a classic line that will be forever etched in my memory, a seven-word paean to a bygone era of hospitality and hydration.

Speaking of memorable one-liners, Jimmy offered up another one before the night was over: a few years back, he and his now-ex-business partner, Danny Abrams, opened a restaurant called Pace in Tribeca. I italicize the name because it’s the Italian word for “peace,” which was the co-owners’ intended pronunciation and meaning. But most customers didn’t get it, using the American word rather than the Italian PAH-CHE. This became a bit of a sore point between Jimmy and, well, everybody involved, because he was the only one who liked it. “If you can’t have a name that encourages world peace,” he said in his self-defense Saturday night, “then that’s just sad.”

Anyway, the place never caught on. As the customers dwindled and signs of life diminished, Jimmy found himself standing around aimlessly with Danny at the door one night, waiting for somebody, anybody, to come in for dinner.

Finally, a lone woman customer pushed the door open. The boys were delighted to see her, until she laid a new and theretofore undiscovered mispronunciation on them:

“Is this place passé?”she asked.

Without missing a beat, Danny deadpanned: “Give us a few weeks.”

I left Jimmy in San Francisco Sunday morning, and made the drive up to Chefs’ Holidays at the Ahwahnee Hotel, where he’ll join me on Wednesday. Between now and then, I’ll be moderating cooking demos with chefs Peter Chastain, Emily Luchetti, and Sean Baker… we’ll see what stories they might have to share in the coming days.

- Andrew

Harold Dieterle (photo courtesy Perilla)

Harold Dieterle and I are in the early, kicking-it-around-in-coffee-shops stage of conceiving a book project that we hope to write together in the near future.  (Read a little about our backstory here). Originally, Harold wanted to do a book about Thai food, but we recently decided to write a more general cookbook putting forth the style of food he serves up at Perilla, which draws on American, Thai, Italian, and other influences… in other words, his own personal brand of that thing we desperately need a new name for: contemporary American cuisine.

The challenge at this stage of the process is coming up with what I refer to as the “bridge” between what home cooks do and what chefs do. One exercise I use to help get to the core of what a chef is all about on the plate is to ask him or her to name ten favorite ingredients and explain the choices. (Writing this post, it occurred to me that this is a revealing thing to do with any chef, so I’ll be sharing more Toqueland Ten interviews soon, and indefinitely.)

Herewith, the inaugural list, from Harold Dieterle:

1. SALT. Hadn’t heard this one before, and at Number 1, no less. Of course, salt might be the most important ingredient, but a favorite? Not only does Harold appreciate salt (“It’s what it all starts with,” he said.), but he enjoys using different salts for different purposes: Kosher salt on meat; fine sea salt on roasted fish; coarse sea salt on raw fish, and so on. He also has a special fondness for the ceremony of presenting whole roasted fish in a salt crust to a table of guests, and the cracking and portioning that follows.

2. CRAB. “When I was a kid on Long Island, we used to go crabbing,” says Harold. “On vacation, my parents would pick out restaurants based on which ones had crab on the menu. They always made me order from the kids’ menu in our hometown, but on vacation, they insisted I treat myself to the adult crab dishes. There’s just not another protein that makes me so happy.”  His favorite varieties, in order of preference: (i) King, (ii) Dungeness, (iii) A tie: Blue and Snow, (iv) Stone, and (v) Peekytoe.

3. MOZZARELLA CHEESE. Harold hails from a half-Italian, half-German household where mozzarella cheese was omnipresent. Accordingly, he’s not a mozzarella snob: “Fresh, buffalo, burrata, shredded Polly-O on lasagna—they all have their place,” he insists. “It’s another childhood thing. I grew up eating a lot of American-style pizzas. My family made a lot of it, and one of the first things I ever made as a kid was an English muffin with mozzarella and sauce, in the toaster.”

4.  BLUEBERRIES. One last childhood souvenir: “My favorite fruit. We had a bush in our backyard and there were so many berries that we couldn’t eat them all, so we froze them and had blueberries all year. We made muffins and buckle and, when I got older and began having house parties when my mom was out of town, I started putting the frozen blueberries in cocktails.” But the true source of Harold’s nostalgia may have been the last one he named: “One of my first moves to get girls to have sleepovers was by making them blueberry pancakes in the morning.”

5. DUCK. “I love its versatility. You can have a breast of duck cooked medium rare and it’s delicious, and have it well-done and crispy, like Peking duck, and it’s equally delicious. And I love what you can do with the fat; only pork fat comes close.” (Case in point: the duck fat popcorn available at the bar at Perilla.)

6. DOVER SOLE. “To me, it’s the epitome of celebration food. I only have it once or twice a year, like when my wife and I go out to BLT Fish for our annual holiday dinner.” N.B.: He doesn’t serve Dover sole at Perilla or Kin Shop, a nod to the realities of commerce. “It’s hard to make money on it,” he says. “It’s expensive.”

7. BARBECUE. More a category than an ingredient, it nonetheless makes the list because Harold’s wife, who grew up in Atlanta, turned him on to the real thing during visits home. “I’m a ribs guys, or a beef-brisket guy; I’m not a huge pulled-pork guy. I like the meat to pull away from the bone, but not fall off. I like my barbecue cooked low and slow, with a tomato-based sauce, and maybe a little vinegar.” Like Dover sole, Harold doesn’t serve barbecue in his restaurants: “It’s just an eating thing.”

8. SUNCHOKES. “I just love the flavor. Raw, roasted, pureed. It’s sweet and artichoke-y. It’s also the only vegetable I know other than mushrooms that is meaty.”

9. NUTS. In order of preference: (i) A tie: Marcona almonds and hazelnuts, (ii) regular almonds, (iii) pecans, (iv) cashews, (v) pine nuts, (vi) peanuts. “I like them in salads. I need that protein to fill me up.”

10. RIB EYE. “My favorite steak cut. I’m happy to have a whole-roasted rib eye, prime-rib style, or a charred, grilled rib with butter on top. I also like it plain or with a little jus on top. I’m not a big fan of sauces like Bordelaise.”

There’s a lot there to be examined and followed up on. But the thing that struck me immediately was that there were no Thai ingredients, nor any Asian ingredients at all, with the arguable exception of duck. Two weeks ago we were going to write a Thai book. Harold’s love of Thai food is undeniable. So where are the Thai ingredients? What does it say about his creative process that they are omnipresent in his food, but not on this list?

Is it because ingredients like kaffir lime leaves (that they would have been Number 11, he says, but this list doesn’t go to 11), fish sauce, and lime juice are crucial to his cooking, even at Perilla, but rather than standing alone, they are used in harmony with other elements to create background music to the proteins that make up about half the list? Or is it simply that dishes begin with proteins for him, and the rest flows from there, rather than vice versa?

We’ll try to get to the bottom of all that next time we connect, and then see how the findings might dictate the structure and information that will shape our book and its contents.

We have more questions than answers right now, but moments like these are where cookbooks come from.

- Andrew