Chef's Table (2015) s01e02 Episode Script
Dan Barber
I believe strongly that good cooking is physical.
It demands a kind of conditioning.
Because of the drudgery and the hours and the exhaustion that this kind of work demands it does attract people who are attracted to a certain kind of abuse.
It's exhilarating, and the challenge is sort of, "How much of it can you stand?" And is that the way to live, you know, a happy life? I don't have the answer to that at all.
I wonder.
There's a real advantage to creating a cuisine, a menu where the vectors don't all point at you, at the chef.
Where the food you're eating or the place that you're at points out to something larger a restaurant that has an overriding message and purpose.
It's about something.
Dan is really a model of who the modern chef is Welcome.
Nice to have you.
Here we go.
We'll start right now.
whose goal is to do more than just feed people a delicious dinner in their restaurant, but wants to change his community and, ultimately, the world.
That's a very different place for a chef to be than a chef has ever been before.
The ecology, the profitability for the farmer, the sustainability What makes Dan different is that he is an investigative reporter.
The fascination of eating in Blue Hill, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, is everything that comes out there, you can look so deeply into.
Okay, white pepper egg with cheddar cheese.
With Dan's cooking, you taste things that just taste better than any pea you've ever had before, any radish you've ever had before.
A carrot that is, like, the carrotness of carrot.
He's looking for the "a-ha" moment where you go "Oh! This is what this tastes like? Tell me about this.
Why is this so great?" That's a new notion of who a chef is in the world.
So your next course is a is a piece of bread.
It's a piece of toast, but it's a very special piece of toast because it's a new wheat.
He did start out just wanting to be a chef and wanting to serve delicious food, but he's got such a restless mind and such a curious imagination that he always asks the next question, "Why is this better?" What's new? What's good? What's different? When you question everything, you very quickly get to the ethics and to the biology and to the deeper questions.
"How do we use the planet? What are our responsibilities to our neighbors? What are our responsibilities to the future?" Dan asks himself all those questions as a chef, but he started with the very basic, "I just wanna cook good food.
" We opened Blue Hill, New York in the spring of 2000.
The idea came up that we could open a NYU bistro, a sort of neighborhood place.
I figured, you know, if we can break even and cover the rent of this thing and have a showcase for Dan's food and start to build something, it'll lead somewhere, and that is kind of the way that restaurant opened.
I think the food was good.
I don't think we opened with great food.
We'd been open a couple months.
We were tired and it was grinding along.
It was deep into asparagus season and I had come back from the farmer's market with a couple of cases of asparagus, and I opened up the walk-in refrigerator and there were just cases lined to the ceiling of asparagus, and here I was with four more, and I just I lost it.
I was just like, "How the fuck is this thing on the market list?" So I did this kind of edict thing where, "Every dish is getting asparagus tonight.
Every goddamn dish has asparagus.
We're gonna do asparagus ice cream.
Every single dish.
" It was one of those things where it was like, "This is ridiculous.
" I was just like, you know, "We're gonna freaking embarrass ourselves tonight.
" But I was so dug in to my damn position that there was no way I was going back on it.
I felt like this was a test I couldn't afford to fail, and so I went with it.
Two hours later, Jonathan Gold, the most important, respected restaurant reviewer in the country, walks in the door.
What was clearly a very stupid decision on my part played itself out in the worst possible way.
I just thought we were gonna get skewered.
Jonathan Gold doesn't show his emotions on his sleeve.
So I had no goddamn clue what the man thought of the meal until the article hit.
He loved it.
He defined us before we really knew who we were.
He named us the new epitome of farm-to-table, a restaurant that was not shy about advertising a product that was at the height of its flavor.
It's not as if that idea was a foreign concept to us.
We opened Blue Hill, naming after a family farm.
But people who read the review wanted to work here 'cause it was an up and coming idea.
That was very important, the level of interest in wanting to carry a message forward.
Broth for, uh, mushroom here, please.
Hey, one new egg, please.
Okay, broth, yeah.
Is that on the go? Make two eggs going to 23.
Getting on that broth.
Eggs, 23.
Pick up.
Uh, 54.
Dan became the voice of the "farm-to-table" movement very consciously.
He cooks with the seasons.
He uses what comes from the farm today.
Farm-to-table is exactly what's in season right then.
- First of the Crispino.
- First of the Crispino, yes.
From the greenhouse to 21.
Yes, Chef.
It's an old way of eating.
I mean, it's the way our ancestors ate until there was refrigeration and air-freight, but we've completely turned that on its head in the 20th and 21st centuries where we just think, "The world is our oyster.
We can have everything we want all the time, and it doesn't matter how good it tastes.
" We're a nation of immigrants, and when we came here, we had abundance like no one had ever seen.
Imagine entering the Garden of Eden.
You've got everything you could ever dream of.
Why become a culture of great cooking when you have the abundance to make steaks and eat tremendous amounts of meat? But most of the greatest cuisines of the world came out of hardship.
They were all forced into a negotiation between peasants and a landscape, and that landscape was not producing the abundance that we associate with American abundance.
That was never a problem here, and so we didn't adopt the more difficult, less-coveted cuts of meat or varieties of vegetables and grains because we didn't need to.
That's a real tragedy of our history.
You have the recipe for what is American cuisine today, which isn't really a cuisine.
Not great ingredients in large abundance, that's sort of that's the story.
How do you get out of that? How do you get away from that? What Dan has understood is, it doesn't matter how good your technique is, if you don't have good ingredients, you can't make good food.
I'm not an activist.
You know, I wouldn't put that on my business card.
But what I've come to understand, and I have yet to find any example that flies in the face of this, that when you are chasing after the best flavor, you are chasing after the best ingredients, and when you're chasing after the best ingredients, you are in search of great farming.
My grandmother often talked about the mesmerizing beauty of Blue Hill Farm in the 1960s.
With the sun over here, this is beautiful.
Every summer, all I wanted to do was be at the farm.
I remember working really hard in the fields, really long hours, and lifting heavy bales of hay and loading them into the barn, and I found it very exhilarating to be a part of that.
It's very purpose-driven work.
Remember it took, like, three weeks to do just this, these two fields.
When my grandmother took over the farm, she understood that you needed to have cows on the land to get the nutrients from the cows and produce good grass, which ended up being good hay.
But when she died, we had 20 years of no animals on the land and a yearly haying operation and we ended up seeing a wholesale decline in Blue Hill Farm.
There was a sense that there wasn't gonna be pasture, it wasn't gonna look like anything we had remembered, if we didn't do something.
My brother and I were thinking, "How do we preserve what my grandmother wanted to preserve, which is open landscape, and how do we make the farm and the landscape productive?" What was needed was animals.
And so, dairy was a great way to think about that.
And if I want great milk, I have to support the continuing improvement of the pasture.
Well, now we're in the chicken business.
Because what better way to break up the manure from these dairy cows and spread it in the fields? Chickens.
Okay, we're in the chicken business and we're getting lots of eggs.
But there is a serious problem, as there always is, with encroaching forest.
We're surrounded by dense, thick forest that continually wants to encroach on the field.
And so how do we push it back? Goats.
Goats will eat this bramble, the things that cows won't eat, and so, all of a sudden, we're in the goat business and I'm figuring out how to cook with goat.
Blue Hill Farm goat shoulder, Blue Hill Farm.
And then when you start pushing back the forest, well, you've got the opportunity to do pigs, and so why wouldn't we be in the pig business? As you get deeper into these symbiotic relationships, you're only improving the grass, and if you're improving the grass, you're improving every bite that the dairy cows are taking, and if you're improving every bite the dairy cows are taking, you're improving the milk.
To support the continual improvement of the whole system is the goal for better flavor which, in another sense, is all going to support the vision that our grandmother had to preserve the open space.
It's not just the support of the open landscape, not just support of the dairy, it's the support of better flavors.
One and the same.
Stone Barns Center's more than just a working farm.
We're a farm laboratory, so we do a lot of projects with different universities and seed companies, and we also have a really strong educational focus, so we're able to have this kind of inter-disciplinary relationship between educators, farmers, engineers, health care practitioners, chefs.
We wanna show really good farming practices, the best farming practices, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns is a restaurant companion for this organization.
The magic of Blue Hill at Stone Barns is first of all, you pull up to this gorgeous location.
You're in the country and you pass these fields and you watch the light fade and you're in this beautiful room.
You're given the menu.
It's just a list of what they've reaped from the farm.
Then they bring this profusion of foods out that are beautiful, that are seasonal, that are completely delicious.
It's an amazing experience.
I wanna make sure that the diner is understanding where this ingredient is coming from, and usually there's a lot of interest for people who come here on, "What am I eating? Where's it from? Who's growing it? How's it getting to me and what's this about?" And that's a starting point for a conversation.
We're gonna start here with weeds from the farm, tomatoes on the vine.
It's another idea of what a restaurant can be because it aims to educate people.
Heirloom tomato with basil seed, followed by Jim Myers' Indigo Rose experimental tomatoes and smoked goat cheese.
Great.
Looks nice.
Thank you.
Plates are pretty simple.
I do that so that we don't lose the overall idea of what we're doing.
You want the feeling of the meal and the holistic idea of the meal to resonate with you long after you leave.
It's not just about the dish.
It's about what the radish represents.
It has to add up to something larger than a plate of food.
Vegetables from the farm.
Thank you.
Single-udder butter comes from the milk of one single cow.
This is from three cows at Blue Hill Farm.
Invite you to taste each individual butter and see the differences you find.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
I've always been an admirer of Dan's philosophy.
Looking at it as more of a relationship with farmers, with agriculture, thinking of utilizing the whole farm, instead of, you know, just buying always the product that you want.
Getting creative with the product that not everybody wants.
organizes this.
This we're thinking about.
This we have to really think about, 'cause we got three cases.
This we gotta start thinking about.
This is for this week.
Next week, we have, um We have the dogfish.
We gotta figure that one out.
- I was thinking we could do the dogfish - Okay.
fried today in Adam's beer batter and then serve it with phytoplankton.
- Fish and chips? - That's good, actually.
We could slice it thin and almost do, like, the tacos but fried fish.
That and they can swipe it through the phytoplankton.
Whoa.
Like a Baja fish taco, like the fried fish taco.
- That's great.
Great.
- Okay.
It's so easy just to eat high on the hog.
I mean, the artistry in cooking comes not from taking a chop and throwing it on the fire, but from knowing how to make sausage, how to make head cheese.
That requires real knowledge, and one of the things that Dan is doing at Blue Hill is using everything.
- Pig face, rib and blood.
- Pig face, rib and blood with Crispino.
We need to redefine our definition of fine dining to help lead us in a redefinition of everyday eating.
That's gonna take some wit, you know, and creativity and some technique.
But that's the challenge and that's part of the craft of cooking, which is why I keep coming back to cooking.
I don't see how this movement continues its advance without real culinary application.
He has two different briefs right now, and one is, as a chef and restaurateur, to please his customers and make that a really wonderful experience for people.
- Hello, good evening! How are you? - Hi.
Good.
Welcome.
Nice to have you.
On the other hand, a responsibility to be an ever-curious and ever-vigilant voice for ethical, sustainable food.
We did something a little bit different this year.
I think that chefs play a really key role because we have this power now that we never had.
Not that long ago, chefs were in the dungeons of the kitchen and they were never heard from.
That's changed, for the good, whether you believe that chefs should have the celebrity status they have now or not but to use chefs as the canvas to broadcast these ideas is the right way to think about it.
This is a buttercup squash.
Great.
Super exciting.
It's bigger than Dan.
None of this works without the collaboration of a lot of people, and those people need to be like-minded in the sense that they're trying to change the status quo, and that's where he can be a really inspirational leader.
Very exciting experiment happening at Blue Hill Farm.
As you know, we The biggest challenge of working with Dan is we're always moving, pushing, looking for something new, looking for a new angle, looking for a way to rethink what we're doing.
I've never felt like we've arrived, and I don't think we ever will arrive.
There are times that can be very difficult and frustrating.
I'll be totally honest.
It can be quite frustrating, but it's also incredibly exciting to be a part of something like that.
We got our work cut out for us this fall to bring this message to the dining room and share the excitement.
Friend of mine said, "The world needs more zealots," referring to my brother.
It's true.
You need somebody who's gonna keep driving, devoting their life to their pursuit and Dan is about change.
Okay, guys, we gotta go to work.
Thank you.
- Thank you, Chef.
- Let's go do some good.
And the volume of that responsibility and the ripple effects are intoxicating.
Are you cool for this or you got it already? It's all yours.
I've never worked with a chef that is in the trenches with you.
From our menu meetings in the morning to running around all service long.
Yeah, let's do this together, no? He's in there, cooking with us every single day.
Now we wanna do toast, right? People who don't give up get other people's attention, and I think that determination with Dan runs through every vein.
I mean, he just does not quit ever.
We're plating four pig, right? Four pig, yes? Yes, Chef! - Behind that, eight duck.
- Yes! You know, it's inspiring, but it's also daunting to watch them throw their entire life behind the pursuit of being better, being more knowledgeable, being more thorough.
If it's not gonna be perfect, don't do it.
I think people really just think he sits and writes a lot and is a thinker, but he's truly a working chef this far into his career.
A lot of other chefs aren't doing that.
He's there all the time.
Too much for his own good, but that's just me.
That kind of drive or devotion to what you're doing is expensive.
What's the cost? He has a daughter.
He started a family.
He's got an 18-month old.
So I hope that that proves a joy and a reward for him.
You know, I hope that there's a balance.
- Tonight, we have beet salad with plums.
- Beets? Yum.
Thank you.
Want a little plum, baba? You want plum-a? You want me to have it? That's for Daniel? Okay, that seems fair.
As I reflect back on him as a kid, he was a relatively quiet kid.
You know, he wasn't bursting with talent.
My mother died when I was four.
She had cancer, so I ended up doing a lot of cooking for myself, and that's probably where this all started.
I think we were consciously and unconsciously quite protective of one another and making sure that things went as best as they could at the time.
He was always observant.
He was articulate but not outspoken, and he was a good learner.
He was a good studier.
It took a disproportionate amount of his time, and people would question, "Do you really wanna spend that kind of time reading? Do you really wanna spend that kind of time working on your writing?" Like, "What's your goal?" And I think along the way, he was deciding what he was gonna put his efforts to.
His first love in food that I was aware of was bread.
I came to visit him at college and he had, like, six bags of bread and he had me tasting all these different breads and wanting to know what I thought and why I thought this was different and what he liked about this or that, and I was like, "What's with the bread?" He's just like, "I don't know.
I think when I graduate, I wanna bake.
" I moved to LA to work with Nancy Silverton and La Brea Bakery which was, at the time, considered the best in America and one that was sort of redefining how we think about bread.
I figured, "If I'm gonna learn how to bake bread, I wanna go with the best.
" Drove down to LA and showed up at her door and just begged her for a job, and that's how I got in there.
But I was really not talented at all.
I was not a good baker, and there was a big account, and I mixed 1,300 pounds of rosemary dough.
But for this particular day, I forgot to add the salt in the recipe.
I just remember looking into the ovens and we saw this bread going up, and then just like as if the crescendo of a concert or whatever, they all fell flat like pizza and just in that one moment, I was like, "Jesus, man.
" Nancy was there, talking to her manager, and she was just like, "I can't let this kid ruin my business.
" It was my first time I ever got fired from a job, so I learned a lot through that.
When Nancy Silverton fired him, it became a challenge.
"Let me figure out how to make the best bread.
" This one is amazing.
So Smell that.
Fucking beautiful.
I mean, beautiful.
When we think of Western civilization, you start to realize it was built from wheat.
Grains represent 65% of our agriculture.
Vegetables and fruits are about 6%.
We eat more wheat than just about anything.
The problem is that we don't eat true, whole wheat.
We eat wheat that's dead and denuded.
So it'll last.
It's shelf stable.
Part of the reason that it has absolutely no flavor is because agri-business is looking for crops that can last a long time in travel or last a long time in your refrigerator.
They're not looking for flavor.
They're not looking for nutrition.
The real disaster is that in all of this, we lost the taste of wheat and we lost all the health benefits, and for something that we eat so much of, it's really a true disaster.
If we're gonna change the food system, we have to change how we grow and consume wheat.
I've never really met another chef like Dan.
He's just endlessly thoughtful.
Taking it back and back and back and back until he gets to the soil.
If you think of soil like a bank account, many of the crops that we love require a tremendous amount of soil fertility, which is to say they require a big withdrawal from the bank.
Every time we eat, we are withdrawing from a communal bank.
The question is, "How do you make a deposit into this bank account?" These two are rye.
This was triticale.
You need to return fertility back to the soil to get another crop.
So you can't count on the idea that soil will continue to give you a harvest, 'cause it won't, unless you're using chemicals like most conventional American agriculture.
One of the responsibilities of organic farming is to return fertility without using chemicals.
Actually, we just stepped over something here.
Red Dock.
Red Dock means that there is a shortage of soluble calcium in the surface.
Now, we don't have a lot of Red Dock, so I know this field has enough calcium.
One way to do it is to use rotation crops.
Plant actual crops that create a lively community of microorganisms in the soil that will ultimately translate into your tasting something more delicious than a plant grown in denuded soil in chemicals.
You're planting soy.
You're favoring doing it after rye? - Yes, based on what we're seeing.
- That's what you're seeing.
You cannot taste great flavor unless the soil's a fully active biological community, and the mechanics of that are difficult to explain.
I've spent a long time researching.
I've talked to a ton of people.
All we know for sure is that the more life there is in the soil, the more potential you have for the creation of flavor.
You have to stick to the rotation here because you have to have a crop following its most suitable predecessor.
Organic farmers have to do it.
They have to return that fertility back to the soil.
And what we've become accustomed to is that they're going to plant these crops at a loss and they'll make up the difference with a wheat crop or a crop that we covet.
What we ought to do is be encouraging them to grow these rotation crops not just to feed the soil, but also to feed us.
It seems like everywhere you turn, rye is such an important crop.
Yeah, that's right.
How much would it help you if people were eating more rye and creating more of a market for your rye? It would help a lot.
I'd like to give an economy to the farmer.
I'd like to give an incentive to the farmer to grow more rotation crops.
In front of you is a risotto of sorts, but instead of rice, - you have a variety of legumes and grains.
- Thank you.
And that's the challenge here.
How do we put the pieces together and celebrate the Hudson Valley in a way that supports good agriculture and good farming? So that's what we're after.
I wanna think about ways to upend people's expectations and there's a little bit of tension on the high wire act.
Gaga, where are my flowers? The chef I used to work for, David Bouley, always said, "If you're not about to maybe fall, then you're not really working, you're not really cooking, you're not really creating," and I believe in that.
Come on, we gotta move! I like the tension.
The tension is where I think you can really achieve some excitement.
That's it.
That'll cook while it's sitting in there, man.
That's like Come on, dude.
You don't have to Just That's enough.
It's cooked.
It's cooked.
When I was in my early 20s, I got an internship at a restaurant called Michel Rostang in Paris, and I ended up getting inculcated in this rigor and the history of French cooking and the tradition around food and the obsession with quality, and that's when the bug, I think, hit.
Ordering Farmer's Feasts for two.
Two tomatoes.
Two lobster.
Two duck.
Ending, two pig.
Yes! All French chefs of the old school had huge tempers.
I've adopted from those experiences, a temper that I'm just not proud of at all.
What is this? Just the one I made with chicken.
Well, forget it.
Throw it away, man.
Just forget it.
Throw the whole thing away.
You know, to shout at cooks mercilessly, it's not a good way to be successful.
I know that, but I do have a temper, and a really bad one and one that I regret.
It looks like, just It looks like shit.
Look at your fucking station.
It's easy for me to say, "Well, look at my history.
It's the language that I learnt.
" And to a certain extent, I believe that, but I really do have to think about this because I don't wanna be the kind of chef that intimidates and acts in a way that's, uh you know, that's just abhorrent.
That's all, it's just abhorrent.
So I'm working on it.
Don't bang the pots, okay? Yeah, okay.
Don't bang the fucking pots.
Where is he? Ordering VIP ticket.
Two tomato, two lobster, two goose, two carbonara, two lamb belly, and, ending, two pig tasting.
Yes! Last night, a chef came in.
We were quite busy and I hopped off the line to talk with him for a second.
He's like, "Wow, man.
You still cook?" The off-the-cuff response is, "Of course I'm cooking.
That's what chefs do.
" And the other thing is like, "He had a point to make.
Why haven't I set up two kitchens where they truly run on their own?" I mean, Michael here, along with Adam and the rest of the team, they're very good.
Extraordinarily talented and driven themselves.
So why is it that I haven't figured out a formula where I've extricated myself from the daily rigors of the restaurant? I think there's something there that's driving me.
It's not just because I wanna drive the team.
It also fulfills something in me that I need, apparently.
There's one way to look at my life as really exemplary in the sense that we have two restaurants that have been very successful, and then there's another way to look at it.
It's quite sad.
A lot of this work is the attempt to fill some kind of sadness or something that I didn't have in my life that I wish I had.
Filling a void.
I don't know that a mother dying when you're that age ends up ever getting filled.
Are we doing a lot of this because we had this void in our life we're trying to make up for? We build a restaurant.
There's always this unconscious thought of, like, "Who's gonna come into the restaurant?" So is building a restaurant a way to get our mother back to the table, so to speak, you know? That could be part of it yeah.
Isn't our life one attempt to fill a void after another? I don't know if I'm succeeding or not, but I'm trying hard.
Who knows where this stuff originates and where it ends and I don't know.
There's a lifetime to work out here.
Oy.
I started farming about 13 years ago.
I wanted to know more about food and where it comes from.
So I bought some meat chickens and it sort of grew from there.
The average age of the American farmer is in the 60s or something like that, which is a little bit ridiculous.
The toughest challenge is always gonna be how to do what feels right and what tastes good and isn't just about the bottom line.
We have this great milking operation going, and suddenly, we have males born on the farm.
They may go right past you.
Now, I knew what a veal calf is, but I never put together that if we have a dairy, we're gonna have to eventually deal with the males that are born.
They're not gonna be milked That's not your mom.
and either they're gonna become an asset to the farm or they're gonna become a liability, and from a dairy perspective, the last thing you want is a male sucking down your profits.
Yes, the veal business and the dairy business are Other than the fact that the veal calves come from a dairy, they're completely disconnected.
The reputation of veal is terrible.
It's of a tortured animal, and for good reason.
What most people do, 99%, is you take the calf off the mother and you feed it, you know, junk, and it gets very sick and you have to intervene with antibiotics.
Conventional veal's white.
It's blanch white because the calves are anemic.
I can't eat that kind of veal.
I mean, I just like Ugh.
So I started to realize, "Okay, I gotta get with this veal if I really wanna support the farm and the milk.
" And what Sean and I decided was to push this for the menu, to create a revenue stream for the farm and to humanely raise a truly delicious, extraordinary veal.
He's kept these calves on their mother throughout the course of the day and they have free-choice milk.
Conventional veal versus veal that's on pasture and on its mother it's a different product.
It's another world.
The highest order of humaneness produces the best flavor, and it pushes me and the chefs here to reinvent the menu constantly.
My hope is that people will start to recognize flavor and they're like, "Oh, my God, I didn't realize that food could taste this good," and they change the way they eat and it's a life-changing experience.
Pick up, two toasts! Yes! - Two marmalade on the fly, now! - Yes! - Forty-two.
- Forty-two.
- Exact, okay.
- Right.
Thirty-two.
Come on, come on, come on, come on! Pick up! We're headed to Mott Street.
I haven't been to this spot in yeah, 15 years.
I sort of stayed away because I think it brings back bad juju.
In 1997, when I ended up coming back from France, I had this catering company started.
I was doing an event every week.
I was desperately trying to make a go of it, of the catering.
I was preparing a wedding for 300 people.
I was in this ridiculously illegal kitchen in Chinatown, just below ground, had no ventilation for the stove.
Right down in here.
It's, like, the most illegal kitchen in the history of the world.
To ventilate, I kept the thing open.
This was a snail-cleaning operation.
So every time he washed out the snails, to clean the dirty water, it would just completely flood my kitchen.
It was so fucking crazy.
It was, like, 4:00 in the morning and I was just making the dessert soup, and I was like, "I'm gonna run out and just get a snack at the corner.
" I closed the door to my kitchen downstairs, I went up to the sidewalk and I realized that the door had locked behind me.
Then I started having, like, these visions of firefighters coming.
My whole mindset was that this was so illegal.
"I'd be in jail," that's what I kept thinking.
So I was just like, "Who the hell am I gonna call? Who am I gonna scream to because of the illegality of it?" I just I like I had, what I guess one would say I lost it.
I just, physically, I lost it and I got this itching attack.
It was just the weirdest physical manifestation of pain.
I was in this, like, crouched position, itching, itching, itching, itching.
Nothing could have been worse.
All of a sudden, this guy touched me and was like, "You okay, man?" Like, "What's going on?" I think I was crying.
I've not felt more depleted or low in a moment.
Every chef I know that's successful has had moments of just really intense failure.
Failure is very important.
It introduces you to an idea that you don't ever wanna return to.
Hang on a second.
No, no, no, no.
Real nice, man.
Real nice.
Okay.
Forty-three's first pick up.
Yes.
Yes.
Where did this start? What are you doing? What's going on? So, the two things we try to do are to either remove the heat completely or to be able to just set an upper threshold limit.
We need to look at modernity and science when it comes to flavor.
That is the future of really great cooking and really great farming.
And so, what we are working to do is take some of these paprika types and cross them with peppers that really excel here, - that ripen really early.
- Nice.
It might be hot.
Okay? Is it a hot one or a sweet one? My mouth is a three-alarm fire right now.
Okay.
Can you show us the red peppers you're developing for these special eggs, these red pepper eggs? We came up with the idea of pureeing peppers and feeding them to chickens.
Mike wanted to breed us a pepper at a concentrate.
The diet for the chicken would allow for the yolk to be truly a red egg yolk.
They'll have about 10 times the red pigment.
No shit.
No shit.
God, that's awesome.
The famous Michael Pollan expression is, "You are what you eat, but you are what you eat eats, too.
" We have the opportunity here to put that into action, to get people to think about not just what they're eating but what they're eating is eating.
Why would you waste a perfectly great pepper on a chicken instead of feeding it to people? Peppers evolved to be eaten by birds.
So all the really hot ones - They can't taste the capsaicin.
- Yeah, they can't taste it.
So it's actually It's the natural system of birds eating peppers.
- Whoa! - It's the natural system.
Which came first? I love that.
Mike came here for dinner.
I had a butternut squash.
I was like, "Mike, why don't you breed a squash that has a lot more flavor and shrink the thing and get the water out of it?" He looked at me and I'll never forget it.
He adjusted his glasses like this, he looked up to me and he said, "In all my years of breeding, no one has ever asked me to breed for flavor.
" It's something that really, as a breeder, you're really discouraged from working on.
Everything is supposed to fit this one uniform size, this conception of what the produce should be, and so this relationship, the beautiful thing is it's really set us free.
Yeah, he ran with it and then four years later, here we are with this new variety of squash.
It's just amazingly delicious.
The flavor's more concentrated.
It's sweeter.
It's more complex.
It's not just sweetness.
And it just blows away people in the dining room.
I look at my challenge as creating that cuisine around the things that I believe in.
I want the pieces to come together and I want more farms and more diversity.
I'd like to keep pushing.
How do we think about this 20 years down the road and how do you put this together in a way that speaks to a true Hudson Valley cuisine? That's where we're headed.
It's a lot of work.
A lot of work.
It takes a lot of time and a lot of devotion.
I was 43 when I had Edith, my daughter.
Anyone can have a family and raise children.
The question is You wanna do it in a way that, like people are reasonably happy.
Part of that requires time and investment in the same way that the kitchen does.
One more slide and then we gotta go.
Oop! Okay.
Ready? I was attracted to cooking 'cause it's so beautiful when you look at it from afar.
What I didn't understand when I was looking at the beauty is just how torturous it is, and and that's a lesson learned late.
It's still so difficult.
I still feel the sort of sadness.
I feel this extreme sadness when I'm not with her on a Sunday like yesterday.
I know that I'm not gonna get that time back.
It's prosaic to say that, but it's When you're actually living in it, it feels I feel a lot of pain.
Bye, Edith.
- Bye, Daddy.
- Bye.
First time she's putting words together, and starting to form a sentence, you're like, "Fuck, I missed that, dude!" Anyway I'm gonna spend some time with her tomorrow.
It's really the existence of being a chef.
You have this crazy life.
This is an absolutely crazy life, the hours, intensity, pressure, and the brink of failure that is just constant.
Being a leader, there's a high expectation and I think that became a calling that made it clear to him that the work he had in front of him was probably vastly different from what he might have imagined when he started cooking.
This breeding experiment is not about us just tasting something.
"Oh, I like that wheat," or, "Oh, I like that squash.
" I think the more productive use of our time is to go straight to the breeder and help them realize our goals.
That's the trick to all of this.
He has very knowingly taken on the responsibility of becoming the voice for the ethical restaurateur.
I'm here to introduce your next course.
Chefs play a huge role.
We have this power now that we never had.
We can introduce change for the good.
A breeder by the name of Steve Jones is breeding some of the best wheats of the future for flavor.
Which is why I'm so excited about wheat as one of the answers to looking at this holistically.
We need to breed the bran for flavor and for functionality.
That's where it's at.
They drunk off that.
This is new.
This is like This is the future.
Revolution.
I'd love people to leave here and think that they've connected with nature, and it sounds fucking weird when I say that, but I really mean it.
Well, it's 100% whole wheat.
This isn't, "Oh, whole wheat croissant, it's 10%.
" 100%.
And so here, we gotta pass this around.
Grab a bite of them.
The role of the menu is to put the pieces back together, and we can do that through what the land provides.
Right? It's good.
- Really.
- Wow! I'm blown away.
That's delicious.
It's not at all what I expected.
That's the gift of nature, really.
When you treat nature well, it gives you the gift of great food.
I am actually very hopeful about the sustainable food movement.
We now have a generation of young people who understand that eating is an ethical act in a way that no previous generation ever did.
So I feel like the challenge for this whole deal, for my lifetime really, is turning our expectation for dinner on its head.
How can I create a dish around veal or Mike Mazourek's squashes The future's gonna be great.
or Klaas' lowly grains and leguminous crops? There's likely to be a very impressive crop here.
How do you create dishes like Rotation Risotto that become important to someone to repeat? Well, that's it.
What if you had, like all cuisines, 200 of those kinds of dishes? And what if people started requesting them over and over again? Does it become a cuisine in my lifetime? I don't know, but as Wes Jackson likes to say, "If you're thinking about an idea that you can solve in your lifetime, you're thinking too small.
" That gives me great hope and also great energy because I don't know where else all of these ideas come together.
If you're a nutritionist, you're looking at this from a very myopic view.
It's an important one, but it's myopic.
If you're an agricultural economist, you have a different view of it.
If you're an ecologist, you're preserving the open space, you have another view of it.
Where is the connection? Plate of food.
And that's the power of the chef.
It demands a kind of conditioning.
Because of the drudgery and the hours and the exhaustion that this kind of work demands it does attract people who are attracted to a certain kind of abuse.
It's exhilarating, and the challenge is sort of, "How much of it can you stand?" And is that the way to live, you know, a happy life? I don't have the answer to that at all.
I wonder.
There's a real advantage to creating a cuisine, a menu where the vectors don't all point at you, at the chef.
Where the food you're eating or the place that you're at points out to something larger a restaurant that has an overriding message and purpose.
It's about something.
Dan is really a model of who the modern chef is Welcome.
Nice to have you.
Here we go.
We'll start right now.
whose goal is to do more than just feed people a delicious dinner in their restaurant, but wants to change his community and, ultimately, the world.
That's a very different place for a chef to be than a chef has ever been before.
The ecology, the profitability for the farmer, the sustainability What makes Dan different is that he is an investigative reporter.
The fascination of eating in Blue Hill, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, is everything that comes out there, you can look so deeply into.
Okay, white pepper egg with cheddar cheese.
With Dan's cooking, you taste things that just taste better than any pea you've ever had before, any radish you've ever had before.
A carrot that is, like, the carrotness of carrot.
He's looking for the "a-ha" moment where you go "Oh! This is what this tastes like? Tell me about this.
Why is this so great?" That's a new notion of who a chef is in the world.
So your next course is a is a piece of bread.
It's a piece of toast, but it's a very special piece of toast because it's a new wheat.
He did start out just wanting to be a chef and wanting to serve delicious food, but he's got such a restless mind and such a curious imagination that he always asks the next question, "Why is this better?" What's new? What's good? What's different? When you question everything, you very quickly get to the ethics and to the biology and to the deeper questions.
"How do we use the planet? What are our responsibilities to our neighbors? What are our responsibilities to the future?" Dan asks himself all those questions as a chef, but he started with the very basic, "I just wanna cook good food.
" We opened Blue Hill, New York in the spring of 2000.
The idea came up that we could open a NYU bistro, a sort of neighborhood place.
I figured, you know, if we can break even and cover the rent of this thing and have a showcase for Dan's food and start to build something, it'll lead somewhere, and that is kind of the way that restaurant opened.
I think the food was good.
I don't think we opened with great food.
We'd been open a couple months.
We were tired and it was grinding along.
It was deep into asparagus season and I had come back from the farmer's market with a couple of cases of asparagus, and I opened up the walk-in refrigerator and there were just cases lined to the ceiling of asparagus, and here I was with four more, and I just I lost it.
I was just like, "How the fuck is this thing on the market list?" So I did this kind of edict thing where, "Every dish is getting asparagus tonight.
Every goddamn dish has asparagus.
We're gonna do asparagus ice cream.
Every single dish.
" It was one of those things where it was like, "This is ridiculous.
" I was just like, you know, "We're gonna freaking embarrass ourselves tonight.
" But I was so dug in to my damn position that there was no way I was going back on it.
I felt like this was a test I couldn't afford to fail, and so I went with it.
Two hours later, Jonathan Gold, the most important, respected restaurant reviewer in the country, walks in the door.
What was clearly a very stupid decision on my part played itself out in the worst possible way.
I just thought we were gonna get skewered.
Jonathan Gold doesn't show his emotions on his sleeve.
So I had no goddamn clue what the man thought of the meal until the article hit.
He loved it.
He defined us before we really knew who we were.
He named us the new epitome of farm-to-table, a restaurant that was not shy about advertising a product that was at the height of its flavor.
It's not as if that idea was a foreign concept to us.
We opened Blue Hill, naming after a family farm.
But people who read the review wanted to work here 'cause it was an up and coming idea.
That was very important, the level of interest in wanting to carry a message forward.
Broth for, uh, mushroom here, please.
Hey, one new egg, please.
Okay, broth, yeah.
Is that on the go? Make two eggs going to 23.
Getting on that broth.
Eggs, 23.
Pick up.
Uh, 54.
Dan became the voice of the "farm-to-table" movement very consciously.
He cooks with the seasons.
He uses what comes from the farm today.
Farm-to-table is exactly what's in season right then.
- First of the Crispino.
- First of the Crispino, yes.
From the greenhouse to 21.
Yes, Chef.
It's an old way of eating.
I mean, it's the way our ancestors ate until there was refrigeration and air-freight, but we've completely turned that on its head in the 20th and 21st centuries where we just think, "The world is our oyster.
We can have everything we want all the time, and it doesn't matter how good it tastes.
" We're a nation of immigrants, and when we came here, we had abundance like no one had ever seen.
Imagine entering the Garden of Eden.
You've got everything you could ever dream of.
Why become a culture of great cooking when you have the abundance to make steaks and eat tremendous amounts of meat? But most of the greatest cuisines of the world came out of hardship.
They were all forced into a negotiation between peasants and a landscape, and that landscape was not producing the abundance that we associate with American abundance.
That was never a problem here, and so we didn't adopt the more difficult, less-coveted cuts of meat or varieties of vegetables and grains because we didn't need to.
That's a real tragedy of our history.
You have the recipe for what is American cuisine today, which isn't really a cuisine.
Not great ingredients in large abundance, that's sort of that's the story.
How do you get out of that? How do you get away from that? What Dan has understood is, it doesn't matter how good your technique is, if you don't have good ingredients, you can't make good food.
I'm not an activist.
You know, I wouldn't put that on my business card.
But what I've come to understand, and I have yet to find any example that flies in the face of this, that when you are chasing after the best flavor, you are chasing after the best ingredients, and when you're chasing after the best ingredients, you are in search of great farming.
My grandmother often talked about the mesmerizing beauty of Blue Hill Farm in the 1960s.
With the sun over here, this is beautiful.
Every summer, all I wanted to do was be at the farm.
I remember working really hard in the fields, really long hours, and lifting heavy bales of hay and loading them into the barn, and I found it very exhilarating to be a part of that.
It's very purpose-driven work.
Remember it took, like, three weeks to do just this, these two fields.
When my grandmother took over the farm, she understood that you needed to have cows on the land to get the nutrients from the cows and produce good grass, which ended up being good hay.
But when she died, we had 20 years of no animals on the land and a yearly haying operation and we ended up seeing a wholesale decline in Blue Hill Farm.
There was a sense that there wasn't gonna be pasture, it wasn't gonna look like anything we had remembered, if we didn't do something.
My brother and I were thinking, "How do we preserve what my grandmother wanted to preserve, which is open landscape, and how do we make the farm and the landscape productive?" What was needed was animals.
And so, dairy was a great way to think about that.
And if I want great milk, I have to support the continuing improvement of the pasture.
Well, now we're in the chicken business.
Because what better way to break up the manure from these dairy cows and spread it in the fields? Chickens.
Okay, we're in the chicken business and we're getting lots of eggs.
But there is a serious problem, as there always is, with encroaching forest.
We're surrounded by dense, thick forest that continually wants to encroach on the field.
And so how do we push it back? Goats.
Goats will eat this bramble, the things that cows won't eat, and so, all of a sudden, we're in the goat business and I'm figuring out how to cook with goat.
Blue Hill Farm goat shoulder, Blue Hill Farm.
And then when you start pushing back the forest, well, you've got the opportunity to do pigs, and so why wouldn't we be in the pig business? As you get deeper into these symbiotic relationships, you're only improving the grass, and if you're improving the grass, you're improving every bite that the dairy cows are taking, and if you're improving every bite the dairy cows are taking, you're improving the milk.
To support the continual improvement of the whole system is the goal for better flavor which, in another sense, is all going to support the vision that our grandmother had to preserve the open space.
It's not just the support of the open landscape, not just support of the dairy, it's the support of better flavors.
One and the same.
Stone Barns Center's more than just a working farm.
We're a farm laboratory, so we do a lot of projects with different universities and seed companies, and we also have a really strong educational focus, so we're able to have this kind of inter-disciplinary relationship between educators, farmers, engineers, health care practitioners, chefs.
We wanna show really good farming practices, the best farming practices, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns is a restaurant companion for this organization.
The magic of Blue Hill at Stone Barns is first of all, you pull up to this gorgeous location.
You're in the country and you pass these fields and you watch the light fade and you're in this beautiful room.
You're given the menu.
It's just a list of what they've reaped from the farm.
Then they bring this profusion of foods out that are beautiful, that are seasonal, that are completely delicious.
It's an amazing experience.
I wanna make sure that the diner is understanding where this ingredient is coming from, and usually there's a lot of interest for people who come here on, "What am I eating? Where's it from? Who's growing it? How's it getting to me and what's this about?" And that's a starting point for a conversation.
We're gonna start here with weeds from the farm, tomatoes on the vine.
It's another idea of what a restaurant can be because it aims to educate people.
Heirloom tomato with basil seed, followed by Jim Myers' Indigo Rose experimental tomatoes and smoked goat cheese.
Great.
Looks nice.
Thank you.
Plates are pretty simple.
I do that so that we don't lose the overall idea of what we're doing.
You want the feeling of the meal and the holistic idea of the meal to resonate with you long after you leave.
It's not just about the dish.
It's about what the radish represents.
It has to add up to something larger than a plate of food.
Vegetables from the farm.
Thank you.
Single-udder butter comes from the milk of one single cow.
This is from three cows at Blue Hill Farm.
Invite you to taste each individual butter and see the differences you find.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you.
I've always been an admirer of Dan's philosophy.
Looking at it as more of a relationship with farmers, with agriculture, thinking of utilizing the whole farm, instead of, you know, just buying always the product that you want.
Getting creative with the product that not everybody wants.
organizes this.
This we're thinking about.
This we have to really think about, 'cause we got three cases.
This we gotta start thinking about.
This is for this week.
Next week, we have, um We have the dogfish.
We gotta figure that one out.
- I was thinking we could do the dogfish - Okay.
fried today in Adam's beer batter and then serve it with phytoplankton.
- Fish and chips? - That's good, actually.
We could slice it thin and almost do, like, the tacos but fried fish.
That and they can swipe it through the phytoplankton.
Whoa.
Like a Baja fish taco, like the fried fish taco.
- That's great.
Great.
- Okay.
It's so easy just to eat high on the hog.
I mean, the artistry in cooking comes not from taking a chop and throwing it on the fire, but from knowing how to make sausage, how to make head cheese.
That requires real knowledge, and one of the things that Dan is doing at Blue Hill is using everything.
- Pig face, rib and blood.
- Pig face, rib and blood with Crispino.
We need to redefine our definition of fine dining to help lead us in a redefinition of everyday eating.
That's gonna take some wit, you know, and creativity and some technique.
But that's the challenge and that's part of the craft of cooking, which is why I keep coming back to cooking.
I don't see how this movement continues its advance without real culinary application.
He has two different briefs right now, and one is, as a chef and restaurateur, to please his customers and make that a really wonderful experience for people.
- Hello, good evening! How are you? - Hi.
Good.
Welcome.
Nice to have you.
On the other hand, a responsibility to be an ever-curious and ever-vigilant voice for ethical, sustainable food.
We did something a little bit different this year.
I think that chefs play a really key role because we have this power now that we never had.
Not that long ago, chefs were in the dungeons of the kitchen and they were never heard from.
That's changed, for the good, whether you believe that chefs should have the celebrity status they have now or not but to use chefs as the canvas to broadcast these ideas is the right way to think about it.
This is a buttercup squash.
Great.
Super exciting.
It's bigger than Dan.
None of this works without the collaboration of a lot of people, and those people need to be like-minded in the sense that they're trying to change the status quo, and that's where he can be a really inspirational leader.
Very exciting experiment happening at Blue Hill Farm.
As you know, we The biggest challenge of working with Dan is we're always moving, pushing, looking for something new, looking for a new angle, looking for a way to rethink what we're doing.
I've never felt like we've arrived, and I don't think we ever will arrive.
There are times that can be very difficult and frustrating.
I'll be totally honest.
It can be quite frustrating, but it's also incredibly exciting to be a part of something like that.
We got our work cut out for us this fall to bring this message to the dining room and share the excitement.
Friend of mine said, "The world needs more zealots," referring to my brother.
It's true.
You need somebody who's gonna keep driving, devoting their life to their pursuit and Dan is about change.
Okay, guys, we gotta go to work.
Thank you.
- Thank you, Chef.
- Let's go do some good.
And the volume of that responsibility and the ripple effects are intoxicating.
Are you cool for this or you got it already? It's all yours.
I've never worked with a chef that is in the trenches with you.
From our menu meetings in the morning to running around all service long.
Yeah, let's do this together, no? He's in there, cooking with us every single day.
Now we wanna do toast, right? People who don't give up get other people's attention, and I think that determination with Dan runs through every vein.
I mean, he just does not quit ever.
We're plating four pig, right? Four pig, yes? Yes, Chef! - Behind that, eight duck.
- Yes! You know, it's inspiring, but it's also daunting to watch them throw their entire life behind the pursuit of being better, being more knowledgeable, being more thorough.
If it's not gonna be perfect, don't do it.
I think people really just think he sits and writes a lot and is a thinker, but he's truly a working chef this far into his career.
A lot of other chefs aren't doing that.
He's there all the time.
Too much for his own good, but that's just me.
That kind of drive or devotion to what you're doing is expensive.
What's the cost? He has a daughter.
He started a family.
He's got an 18-month old.
So I hope that that proves a joy and a reward for him.
You know, I hope that there's a balance.
- Tonight, we have beet salad with plums.
- Beets? Yum.
Thank you.
Want a little plum, baba? You want plum-a? You want me to have it? That's for Daniel? Okay, that seems fair.
As I reflect back on him as a kid, he was a relatively quiet kid.
You know, he wasn't bursting with talent.
My mother died when I was four.
She had cancer, so I ended up doing a lot of cooking for myself, and that's probably where this all started.
I think we were consciously and unconsciously quite protective of one another and making sure that things went as best as they could at the time.
He was always observant.
He was articulate but not outspoken, and he was a good learner.
He was a good studier.
It took a disproportionate amount of his time, and people would question, "Do you really wanna spend that kind of time reading? Do you really wanna spend that kind of time working on your writing?" Like, "What's your goal?" And I think along the way, he was deciding what he was gonna put his efforts to.
His first love in food that I was aware of was bread.
I came to visit him at college and he had, like, six bags of bread and he had me tasting all these different breads and wanting to know what I thought and why I thought this was different and what he liked about this or that, and I was like, "What's with the bread?" He's just like, "I don't know.
I think when I graduate, I wanna bake.
" I moved to LA to work with Nancy Silverton and La Brea Bakery which was, at the time, considered the best in America and one that was sort of redefining how we think about bread.
I figured, "If I'm gonna learn how to bake bread, I wanna go with the best.
" Drove down to LA and showed up at her door and just begged her for a job, and that's how I got in there.
But I was really not talented at all.
I was not a good baker, and there was a big account, and I mixed 1,300 pounds of rosemary dough.
But for this particular day, I forgot to add the salt in the recipe.
I just remember looking into the ovens and we saw this bread going up, and then just like as if the crescendo of a concert or whatever, they all fell flat like pizza and just in that one moment, I was like, "Jesus, man.
" Nancy was there, talking to her manager, and she was just like, "I can't let this kid ruin my business.
" It was my first time I ever got fired from a job, so I learned a lot through that.
When Nancy Silverton fired him, it became a challenge.
"Let me figure out how to make the best bread.
" This one is amazing.
So Smell that.
Fucking beautiful.
I mean, beautiful.
When we think of Western civilization, you start to realize it was built from wheat.
Grains represent 65% of our agriculture.
Vegetables and fruits are about 6%.
We eat more wheat than just about anything.
The problem is that we don't eat true, whole wheat.
We eat wheat that's dead and denuded.
So it'll last.
It's shelf stable.
Part of the reason that it has absolutely no flavor is because agri-business is looking for crops that can last a long time in travel or last a long time in your refrigerator.
They're not looking for flavor.
They're not looking for nutrition.
The real disaster is that in all of this, we lost the taste of wheat and we lost all the health benefits, and for something that we eat so much of, it's really a true disaster.
If we're gonna change the food system, we have to change how we grow and consume wheat.
I've never really met another chef like Dan.
He's just endlessly thoughtful.
Taking it back and back and back and back until he gets to the soil.
If you think of soil like a bank account, many of the crops that we love require a tremendous amount of soil fertility, which is to say they require a big withdrawal from the bank.
Every time we eat, we are withdrawing from a communal bank.
The question is, "How do you make a deposit into this bank account?" These two are rye.
This was triticale.
You need to return fertility back to the soil to get another crop.
So you can't count on the idea that soil will continue to give you a harvest, 'cause it won't, unless you're using chemicals like most conventional American agriculture.
One of the responsibilities of organic farming is to return fertility without using chemicals.
Actually, we just stepped over something here.
Red Dock.
Red Dock means that there is a shortage of soluble calcium in the surface.
Now, we don't have a lot of Red Dock, so I know this field has enough calcium.
One way to do it is to use rotation crops.
Plant actual crops that create a lively community of microorganisms in the soil that will ultimately translate into your tasting something more delicious than a plant grown in denuded soil in chemicals.
You're planting soy.
You're favoring doing it after rye? - Yes, based on what we're seeing.
- That's what you're seeing.
You cannot taste great flavor unless the soil's a fully active biological community, and the mechanics of that are difficult to explain.
I've spent a long time researching.
I've talked to a ton of people.
All we know for sure is that the more life there is in the soil, the more potential you have for the creation of flavor.
You have to stick to the rotation here because you have to have a crop following its most suitable predecessor.
Organic farmers have to do it.
They have to return that fertility back to the soil.
And what we've become accustomed to is that they're going to plant these crops at a loss and they'll make up the difference with a wheat crop or a crop that we covet.
What we ought to do is be encouraging them to grow these rotation crops not just to feed the soil, but also to feed us.
It seems like everywhere you turn, rye is such an important crop.
Yeah, that's right.
How much would it help you if people were eating more rye and creating more of a market for your rye? It would help a lot.
I'd like to give an economy to the farmer.
I'd like to give an incentive to the farmer to grow more rotation crops.
In front of you is a risotto of sorts, but instead of rice, - you have a variety of legumes and grains.
- Thank you.
And that's the challenge here.
How do we put the pieces together and celebrate the Hudson Valley in a way that supports good agriculture and good farming? So that's what we're after.
I wanna think about ways to upend people's expectations and there's a little bit of tension on the high wire act.
Gaga, where are my flowers? The chef I used to work for, David Bouley, always said, "If you're not about to maybe fall, then you're not really working, you're not really cooking, you're not really creating," and I believe in that.
Come on, we gotta move! I like the tension.
The tension is where I think you can really achieve some excitement.
That's it.
That'll cook while it's sitting in there, man.
That's like Come on, dude.
You don't have to Just That's enough.
It's cooked.
It's cooked.
When I was in my early 20s, I got an internship at a restaurant called Michel Rostang in Paris, and I ended up getting inculcated in this rigor and the history of French cooking and the tradition around food and the obsession with quality, and that's when the bug, I think, hit.
Ordering Farmer's Feasts for two.
Two tomatoes.
Two lobster.
Two duck.
Ending, two pig.
Yes! All French chefs of the old school had huge tempers.
I've adopted from those experiences, a temper that I'm just not proud of at all.
What is this? Just the one I made with chicken.
Well, forget it.
Throw it away, man.
Just forget it.
Throw the whole thing away.
You know, to shout at cooks mercilessly, it's not a good way to be successful.
I know that, but I do have a temper, and a really bad one and one that I regret.
It looks like, just It looks like shit.
Look at your fucking station.
It's easy for me to say, "Well, look at my history.
It's the language that I learnt.
" And to a certain extent, I believe that, but I really do have to think about this because I don't wanna be the kind of chef that intimidates and acts in a way that's, uh you know, that's just abhorrent.
That's all, it's just abhorrent.
So I'm working on it.
Don't bang the pots, okay? Yeah, okay.
Don't bang the fucking pots.
Where is he? Ordering VIP ticket.
Two tomato, two lobster, two goose, two carbonara, two lamb belly, and, ending, two pig tasting.
Yes! Last night, a chef came in.
We were quite busy and I hopped off the line to talk with him for a second.
He's like, "Wow, man.
You still cook?" The off-the-cuff response is, "Of course I'm cooking.
That's what chefs do.
" And the other thing is like, "He had a point to make.
Why haven't I set up two kitchens where they truly run on their own?" I mean, Michael here, along with Adam and the rest of the team, they're very good.
Extraordinarily talented and driven themselves.
So why is it that I haven't figured out a formula where I've extricated myself from the daily rigors of the restaurant? I think there's something there that's driving me.
It's not just because I wanna drive the team.
It also fulfills something in me that I need, apparently.
There's one way to look at my life as really exemplary in the sense that we have two restaurants that have been very successful, and then there's another way to look at it.
It's quite sad.
A lot of this work is the attempt to fill some kind of sadness or something that I didn't have in my life that I wish I had.
Filling a void.
I don't know that a mother dying when you're that age ends up ever getting filled.
Are we doing a lot of this because we had this void in our life we're trying to make up for? We build a restaurant.
There's always this unconscious thought of, like, "Who's gonna come into the restaurant?" So is building a restaurant a way to get our mother back to the table, so to speak, you know? That could be part of it yeah.
Isn't our life one attempt to fill a void after another? I don't know if I'm succeeding or not, but I'm trying hard.
Who knows where this stuff originates and where it ends and I don't know.
There's a lifetime to work out here.
Oy.
I started farming about 13 years ago.
I wanted to know more about food and where it comes from.
So I bought some meat chickens and it sort of grew from there.
The average age of the American farmer is in the 60s or something like that, which is a little bit ridiculous.
The toughest challenge is always gonna be how to do what feels right and what tastes good and isn't just about the bottom line.
We have this great milking operation going, and suddenly, we have males born on the farm.
They may go right past you.
Now, I knew what a veal calf is, but I never put together that if we have a dairy, we're gonna have to eventually deal with the males that are born.
They're not gonna be milked That's not your mom.
and either they're gonna become an asset to the farm or they're gonna become a liability, and from a dairy perspective, the last thing you want is a male sucking down your profits.
Yes, the veal business and the dairy business are Other than the fact that the veal calves come from a dairy, they're completely disconnected.
The reputation of veal is terrible.
It's of a tortured animal, and for good reason.
What most people do, 99%, is you take the calf off the mother and you feed it, you know, junk, and it gets very sick and you have to intervene with antibiotics.
Conventional veal's white.
It's blanch white because the calves are anemic.
I can't eat that kind of veal.
I mean, I just like Ugh.
So I started to realize, "Okay, I gotta get with this veal if I really wanna support the farm and the milk.
" And what Sean and I decided was to push this for the menu, to create a revenue stream for the farm and to humanely raise a truly delicious, extraordinary veal.
He's kept these calves on their mother throughout the course of the day and they have free-choice milk.
Conventional veal versus veal that's on pasture and on its mother it's a different product.
It's another world.
The highest order of humaneness produces the best flavor, and it pushes me and the chefs here to reinvent the menu constantly.
My hope is that people will start to recognize flavor and they're like, "Oh, my God, I didn't realize that food could taste this good," and they change the way they eat and it's a life-changing experience.
Pick up, two toasts! Yes! - Two marmalade on the fly, now! - Yes! - Forty-two.
- Forty-two.
- Exact, okay.
- Right.
Thirty-two.
Come on, come on, come on, come on! Pick up! We're headed to Mott Street.
I haven't been to this spot in yeah, 15 years.
I sort of stayed away because I think it brings back bad juju.
In 1997, when I ended up coming back from France, I had this catering company started.
I was doing an event every week.
I was desperately trying to make a go of it, of the catering.
I was preparing a wedding for 300 people.
I was in this ridiculously illegal kitchen in Chinatown, just below ground, had no ventilation for the stove.
Right down in here.
It's, like, the most illegal kitchen in the history of the world.
To ventilate, I kept the thing open.
This was a snail-cleaning operation.
So every time he washed out the snails, to clean the dirty water, it would just completely flood my kitchen.
It was so fucking crazy.
It was, like, 4:00 in the morning and I was just making the dessert soup, and I was like, "I'm gonna run out and just get a snack at the corner.
" I closed the door to my kitchen downstairs, I went up to the sidewalk and I realized that the door had locked behind me.
Then I started having, like, these visions of firefighters coming.
My whole mindset was that this was so illegal.
"I'd be in jail," that's what I kept thinking.
So I was just like, "Who the hell am I gonna call? Who am I gonna scream to because of the illegality of it?" I just I like I had, what I guess one would say I lost it.
I just, physically, I lost it and I got this itching attack.
It was just the weirdest physical manifestation of pain.
I was in this, like, crouched position, itching, itching, itching, itching.
Nothing could have been worse.
All of a sudden, this guy touched me and was like, "You okay, man?" Like, "What's going on?" I think I was crying.
I've not felt more depleted or low in a moment.
Every chef I know that's successful has had moments of just really intense failure.
Failure is very important.
It introduces you to an idea that you don't ever wanna return to.
Hang on a second.
No, no, no, no.
Real nice, man.
Real nice.
Okay.
Forty-three's first pick up.
Yes.
Yes.
Where did this start? What are you doing? What's going on? So, the two things we try to do are to either remove the heat completely or to be able to just set an upper threshold limit.
We need to look at modernity and science when it comes to flavor.
That is the future of really great cooking and really great farming.
And so, what we are working to do is take some of these paprika types and cross them with peppers that really excel here, - that ripen really early.
- Nice.
It might be hot.
Okay? Is it a hot one or a sweet one? My mouth is a three-alarm fire right now.
Okay.
Can you show us the red peppers you're developing for these special eggs, these red pepper eggs? We came up with the idea of pureeing peppers and feeding them to chickens.
Mike wanted to breed us a pepper at a concentrate.
The diet for the chicken would allow for the yolk to be truly a red egg yolk.
They'll have about 10 times the red pigment.
No shit.
No shit.
God, that's awesome.
The famous Michael Pollan expression is, "You are what you eat, but you are what you eat eats, too.
" We have the opportunity here to put that into action, to get people to think about not just what they're eating but what they're eating is eating.
Why would you waste a perfectly great pepper on a chicken instead of feeding it to people? Peppers evolved to be eaten by birds.
So all the really hot ones - They can't taste the capsaicin.
- Yeah, they can't taste it.
So it's actually It's the natural system of birds eating peppers.
- Whoa! - It's the natural system.
Which came first? I love that.
Mike came here for dinner.
I had a butternut squash.
I was like, "Mike, why don't you breed a squash that has a lot more flavor and shrink the thing and get the water out of it?" He looked at me and I'll never forget it.
He adjusted his glasses like this, he looked up to me and he said, "In all my years of breeding, no one has ever asked me to breed for flavor.
" It's something that really, as a breeder, you're really discouraged from working on.
Everything is supposed to fit this one uniform size, this conception of what the produce should be, and so this relationship, the beautiful thing is it's really set us free.
Yeah, he ran with it and then four years later, here we are with this new variety of squash.
It's just amazingly delicious.
The flavor's more concentrated.
It's sweeter.
It's more complex.
It's not just sweetness.
And it just blows away people in the dining room.
I look at my challenge as creating that cuisine around the things that I believe in.
I want the pieces to come together and I want more farms and more diversity.
I'd like to keep pushing.
How do we think about this 20 years down the road and how do you put this together in a way that speaks to a true Hudson Valley cuisine? That's where we're headed.
It's a lot of work.
A lot of work.
It takes a lot of time and a lot of devotion.
I was 43 when I had Edith, my daughter.
Anyone can have a family and raise children.
The question is You wanna do it in a way that, like people are reasonably happy.
Part of that requires time and investment in the same way that the kitchen does.
One more slide and then we gotta go.
Oop! Okay.
Ready? I was attracted to cooking 'cause it's so beautiful when you look at it from afar.
What I didn't understand when I was looking at the beauty is just how torturous it is, and and that's a lesson learned late.
It's still so difficult.
I still feel the sort of sadness.
I feel this extreme sadness when I'm not with her on a Sunday like yesterday.
I know that I'm not gonna get that time back.
It's prosaic to say that, but it's When you're actually living in it, it feels I feel a lot of pain.
Bye, Edith.
- Bye, Daddy.
- Bye.
First time she's putting words together, and starting to form a sentence, you're like, "Fuck, I missed that, dude!" Anyway I'm gonna spend some time with her tomorrow.
It's really the existence of being a chef.
You have this crazy life.
This is an absolutely crazy life, the hours, intensity, pressure, and the brink of failure that is just constant.
Being a leader, there's a high expectation and I think that became a calling that made it clear to him that the work he had in front of him was probably vastly different from what he might have imagined when he started cooking.
This breeding experiment is not about us just tasting something.
"Oh, I like that wheat," or, "Oh, I like that squash.
" I think the more productive use of our time is to go straight to the breeder and help them realize our goals.
That's the trick to all of this.
He has very knowingly taken on the responsibility of becoming the voice for the ethical restaurateur.
I'm here to introduce your next course.
Chefs play a huge role.
We have this power now that we never had.
We can introduce change for the good.
A breeder by the name of Steve Jones is breeding some of the best wheats of the future for flavor.
Which is why I'm so excited about wheat as one of the answers to looking at this holistically.
We need to breed the bran for flavor and for functionality.
That's where it's at.
They drunk off that.
This is new.
This is like This is the future.
Revolution.
I'd love people to leave here and think that they've connected with nature, and it sounds fucking weird when I say that, but I really mean it.
Well, it's 100% whole wheat.
This isn't, "Oh, whole wheat croissant, it's 10%.
" 100%.
And so here, we gotta pass this around.
Grab a bite of them.
The role of the menu is to put the pieces back together, and we can do that through what the land provides.
Right? It's good.
- Really.
- Wow! I'm blown away.
That's delicious.
It's not at all what I expected.
That's the gift of nature, really.
When you treat nature well, it gives you the gift of great food.
I am actually very hopeful about the sustainable food movement.
We now have a generation of young people who understand that eating is an ethical act in a way that no previous generation ever did.
So I feel like the challenge for this whole deal, for my lifetime really, is turning our expectation for dinner on its head.
How can I create a dish around veal or Mike Mazourek's squashes The future's gonna be great.
or Klaas' lowly grains and leguminous crops? There's likely to be a very impressive crop here.
How do you create dishes like Rotation Risotto that become important to someone to repeat? Well, that's it.
What if you had, like all cuisines, 200 of those kinds of dishes? And what if people started requesting them over and over again? Does it become a cuisine in my lifetime? I don't know, but as Wes Jackson likes to say, "If you're thinking about an idea that you can solve in your lifetime, you're thinking too small.
" That gives me great hope and also great energy because I don't know where else all of these ideas come together.
If you're a nutritionist, you're looking at this from a very myopic view.
It's an important one, but it's myopic.
If you're an agricultural economist, you have a different view of it.
If you're an ecologist, you're preserving the open space, you have another view of it.
Where is the connection? Plate of food.
And that's the power of the chef.