Chef's Table (2015) s01e03 Episode Script
Francis Mallmann
I used to hitchhike back home from school.
This man who had a beautiful car would drive by, so I waited for him.
I would sit in the back.
I was eight.
And there was always a different lady by him.
One day after so much hitchhiking, you know, one of the girls said to me, "Come home for tea.
" And when I walked onto the deck, there was these two ladies taking sun naked.
And, you know, they said, "Oh! Here you are.
What would you like to drink?" You know, they didn't cover themselves or You know, they were French.
And all those things made me dream, you know, that there was a very free world somewhere.
So my big draw in life since very young was freedom.
The freedom of believing only in myself and not letting myself being, you know, sort of, led by anybody.
I wanted to be my own.
I wanted to do whatever I wanted.
A meal by Francis Mallmann, whether it's a special event that he does in the countryside or it's in one of his restaurants, starts with visual.
You enter it and you know you're in some place that's been orchestrated with a sensual eye.
You're set up with this beautiful, art-directed scene, and then, bam, really powerful, strong flavors.
He really has perfect pitch when it comes to taste, and ambience, and how people want to be made to feel.
He's extremely romantic.
He likes color, he likes lushness, he likes strong, sensual experiences.
Francis is quite different in that he's not defined by a restaurant.
He has a number of restaurants.
Every one of them is different.
Francis also does books.
He's done many of them over the course of 30 years and he's been on television all that time.
He's the biggest food star in the Latin world.
His shows are set wherever the will-o'- the-wisp takes him.
He really goes out into the wild, into the far-flung places to discover them and have his audience discover them with him.
To get to Francis' island in Patagonia, you drive 100 miles down a dirt road.
Then you get to the shore of this lake and the mountains that rise on the other side.
And those mountains go up, and if you would go down the opposite slope, you'd be in Chile.
So it's the very end of Argentina.
And you get in an Avon, an inflatable craft, and you go an hour across the lake.
And then you get to this little island in the middle of a lake.
There's no place more remote that I've ever been on Earth.
The feeling of Patagonia, I feel, is my deepest rooted feeling for home.
I arrived to Patagonia age seven, and I fell in love with it.
It's a land that you learn to love very slowly.
You start to understand its winds, the storms the solitude.
And once you understand how she is, you start to love her.
We lived in a faraway house in Patagonia with my brothers and my family.
And our house was ruled by fire.
The heating of the water and the heating system of the house was with fire and that's a bit what we have now here on this beautiful island.
It's going back to those times of childhood.
I'm a cook that uses cooking to send this message of a way of living.
I'm always cooking in remote places, in the wild with fires.
So my message is get out of your chair, of your sofa, of your office and go out.
Yes, right there and right there, and there.
When you cook with fires, when you build a fire, it's a bit like making love.
It could be huge, strong.
Or it could grow very slowly in ashes and little coals.
And that's the biggest beauty of fire.
It goes from zero to 10 in strength, and in between zero and 10, you have all these little peaks and different ways of cooking with it and it's very tender and very fragile.
Agustine, are you doing all right? Yes.
If anything happens, just drop that shit, let it all burn.
Don't worry.
Francis loves burned things.
Not carbonized, just burned, so it's just got this wonderful, what they call Maillard crust.
What would get you fired in another restaurant, will make Francis fall in love with your technique.
Whenever you grill or you cook something in a griddle, you have to be very respectful of that first contact.
If this is a steak for me and I look at it and I say, "Well, I'm gonna cook it for nine minutes.
" I'll put it there, leave it there for six minutes and then turn it for the last three, because what happens is that, when you put it in a surface which is hot, the first thing it does, it's gonna stick to it.
But slowly it will make this crusty layer and you will be able to move it without breaking it.
I don't believe in flip-and-flopping food.
You have to respect what you cook.
When we cook outside for big parties, I usually have a lot of staff.
I like to have a band of gypsy chefs.
We call it maestranza, which is a beautiful word in Spanish.
Maestranza means "the people who are around you helping.
" It's very romantic.
Over the years, you create a team that works with you, who know you very well and know what the dreams are.
We are a team that rolls constantly.
We are cooking here today, next week we'll being cooking in the street in New York.
There's an energy that rolls with us.
People from the outside get attracted to it.
I don't like taking chefs who have any experience.
We take young apprentices in all the restaurants who have never cooked anywhere and we teach them.
So out of 10, there is one who becomes a leader, the doer.
That's a spirit I like in my team.
I love the joy of working with all the team.
I need to be happy with them.
There has to be a festive feeling about the hard work we're doing.
One of the things I like the most, and I always tell Francis, it's the possibility to work in fresh air.
Because we work in fresh air, we have to work with the wind, we have to work with the rain, we have to work with the snow.
Francis has an energy to materialize a person with ideas that also accomplishes what he dreams.
It has shown me that practically nothing is impossible.
And that's why I would love to continue working with him.
We drank three of these bottles already.
"Have you wandered in the wilderness, have you galloped over the ranges, have you roamed the arid sun-lands through and through? Have you chummed up with the mesa? Do you know its moods and changes? Then listen to the Wild, it's calling you.
" I was born in Buenos Aires and we came to Patagonia because my father was offered a job in an atomic center.
He's a physicist.
That's where my childhood started, in Bariloche, in the middle of Patagonia.
I got hit by this wave of music when I was 13 and that changed my life.
One day, a family of Australian girls moved into the school.
The four of them put on a record of The Monkees, and they started dancing on top of a low table.
God, I never had seen that! I never heard that music.
That was the first time I felt in my blood, in my veins, in my soul what was happening in the world.
After that music hit me and that movement hit me, that was the only thing that interested me.
And I left school.
My dad didn't understand very much at all, really, the revolution that happened in the late '60s and '70s with young people.
He just didn't understand our long hairs, our flower shirts, our striped pink pants, our boots with heels.
He thought that this rock-and-roll thing was a disaster.
He couldn't cope with it.
But I was very stubborn about my freedom.
I was able to lie on my bed at night and dream about what I wanted.
I knew that I was myself and that I had to decide for myself.
There is a technique in the province of Córdoba in Argentina where you wrap a piece of meat in really cream mud and then you put it in a wood oven.
It's a very, very old technique of cooking.
Here, if you go all around the lake, you find this beautiful, beautiful clay.
I thought, "God, this clay must be very good to cook a fish in it.
" When the clay starts to get hot, really hot, the humidity of the fish will try to leave that space, but it can't because it's completely encased.
So what you get is a most beautiful steamed fish, and I like to cook it slightly raw so it's not overdone.
There's nothing more sad than an overcooked fish.
You can cook it longer and it will just completely detach.
But I think that the beauty is it's lukewarm and it's cooked but still attached to the bone because you feel all the quality of the fish when you eat it then.
When I started my first restaurant on my own, I was 19.
I was doing some recipes of Argentina.
And I had some books, you know, I had some very good books on cooking and I was always trying to learn and that Mostly that was what attracted me to France.
Everything I read was about France.
All the French recipes, the ingredients, and the tarragon, and the Madeira wine, things that were very difficult for me to find in Patagonia, but I started dreaming about them and I wanted to go and touch them, taste them and use them.
And I decide to go to France.
I thought that I would arrive in Paris and I would knock on the door, and somebody would say, "Yes, please come in.
We're gonna teach you how to cook.
" But I didn't achieve to work anywhere, you know, I couldn't.
I couldn't get work anywhere.
And then I decided to write a letter to all the three-star restaurants in France, which in that year it was There were 21 of them.
And incredibly enough all of them answered.
Maybe many of them said no, but many of them said yes.
And I started working in all these three-star restaurants.
Francis was very lucky in the way he was able to parlay that into working for some of the greatest three-star chefs.
Working in the great restaurants of France, the thing that Francis learned was technique.
Even though he uses these very primitive methods of cooking, the techniques are very much influenced by the great French restaurants of Europe.
It was a very passionate love affair with the culture of France and its food.
Sí.
Come here, Heloisa.
- Come, my love.
- Daddy? Vanina, with whom I have a daughter, we don't live together.
We spend about 10 days of the month together, which is very nice.
And we both love it.
We don't want to live together.
Love is one of the most difficult things in life.
Certainly the most beautiful one.
Don't let it go.
Again.
Now we drink a little bit.
No.
The smell delicious smell.
What does it smell like? Does it smell like ass? A loved ass? A healthy ass? - "It smells like ass, Dad.
" - Don't teach her that, I beg of you! Tchin! Again but with both It's difficult.
I think that living together it destroys passion.
And I hate all this thing of the faithfulness.
Part of us, we are animals in some sort of a way, and there's a beauty in that.
It's not that, you know, you have to be chasing girls all day round and that you're always looking to see what you find or It's not that.
It's just the freedom of loving, you know.
"I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again? I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would not bend to the shape of your body, perhaps.
" I don't know where I live.
For the last 30 years, I take an average of four or five planes a week.
So I'm sitting on a plane, I'm changing locations probably every two days.
It's just like a drug for me.
I need these constant changes of structures, of people, of ambiences, of languages.
They are very inspiring, they're very romantic.
They make me breathe.
They make me tremble.
They make me live.
Whoo! You like it? Let me put some on your finger, let's see your finger.
Eat it.
Food started out in my life as an image when I was eight and I was invited with my parents to have lunch in a little restaurant in Patagonia under a tree.
It was summertime, and everybody was dressed up.
There was flowers on the table.
So that day, I don't remember the food, really but the ambience of what was happening really touched me.
And I think I went into food by the theater of it.
The flowers, the tables, the music, the decor, the happiness.
Alex, do you want to look at this? - Yes, where? - On this couch.
Do you remember this? Of course I remember.
Come on, let's see it.
My dad lives life differently from a lot of people that I know.
We grew up doing campfires by the moonlight, he was playing the guitar to us and cooking at the same time and doing all sorts of different things that other kids didn't do.
He's taught us to live with with very much freedom.
And that's just amazing.
He's very free.
Princess! How does Luna sleep? Show me.
I don't want her to grow up.
And she turns in her sleep? Hello.
How are you? Alma, what are you drinking, white or red? Red? I seldom invite people to have lunch or dinner with me.
But they're really chosen because I can't spend time with people that I don't enjoy.
I can't do it anymore as theater.
I make choices, and that's a beautiful thing about growing up, learning to say no.
In a nice way, but you say no.
I have this friend of mine.
He was on the island, in fact, 30 years ago when we just started.
And we, you know, we parted.
We just went different ways in our lives.
Once he came back to me, he said, "Francis, you don't like me anymore.
" And I said, "No, it's not that I don't like you.
We've chosen different styles of life.
I still have these beautiful souvenirs of all the things we did together and how close we were and so on.
But the truth is, it's not that you bore me, but I don't enjoy talking to you anymore.
And I don't want to fight with you, but you know there's nothing in common between your life and mine nowadays.
" I would have never said that to him, but he asked me.
So what could I say? I said the truth.
But, you know, growing up has a bit to do with that, to be able to tell the truth, to show who you are even if it hurts.
With my team, I hand them a torch and I say to them "It's lit.
Keep it lit.
That's the only thing I want.
I won't be here every day to see if it's lit, but take care of it.
" Every person that works for you, you have to let it go in the best moment.
When he and you are at the happiest moment, when he and you think that you're doing your best, they have to go.
Because from there on, there is only one way, which is down.
And if that person stays, he says, you know, "God, this is a comfortable chair, I have a nice salary, good job," and from there he will get bored.
I think it's important that he goes on and somebody else will come up.
And that transfer of energy, of power, of work, makes a little difficult moment, but then it passes and new people grow up into it.
- Salud! - Salud! When he came back from France, Francis was making fancy French food for rich Argentines.
I was quite arrogant and I thought I was the best chef.
I was always with my huge white hat.
I would use caviar and salmon, and I was so serious.
Then one day, the restaurant was booked by the head of Cartier, the jewel company, a Frenchman.
The people sat, they dined, they laughed, they talked, they drank.
And I was walking around the tables after dinner in my whites with my hat.
With my hat.
And the head of Cartier got up and he came up to me and said, "I would like to have a word with you.
" So we went sort of on the side and he said, you know, "Mr.
Mallmann, this was a really horrible meal.
And I think you have to think what you're doing because it wasn't quite right.
And I want to say this in a nice way to you because I see a lot of effort in what you do, but this was not French food.
" I looked at him and I said, "Sir, thank you very much.
" But on my insides, I thought, "This guy's," you know, "He doesn't know what he's talking about.
He's not a chef.
He's French he does beautiful watches and jewels, but, you know, what does he know about cooking?" So I went home to sleep with that, and I never forgot it.
It was something heavy in me.
In time, I realized that he was right.
I wasn't doing the right thing.
I was just trying to copy exactly everything I had learned.
And I think that that happens in every craft in life.
You know, you're young, you have a master, you want to emulate him, do what he does.
But at some point in life you have to turn around and say, "I have to find my own way, my own language.
" In 1995, Francis received an invitation to cook for the International Academy of Gastronomy, which is the most prestigious gastronomical organization in the world.
So this was a really big deal.
I was 40.
I was going to be 40 when the president of the International Academy of Gastronomy in Europe says to me, "Would you like to come and cook for the Academy in Germany?" And they were giving this prize, Le Grand Prix de I'Art de la Cuisine.
All my teachers in France had won this prize, too.
So he says to me, "What would you like to cook?" And I say, "Well, I would like to make an homage, a tribute to the Andes.
" Potatoes are a symbol of the Andes.
It's one of the most beautiful things, food-wise, that South America gave to the world.
I decided to take potatoes from South America to Germany.
We find out it was impossible to take them.
So we decided to smuggle the potatoes.
We smuggled half a ton of potatoes in our bags into Germany.
We were taken to this castle.
It's 27 academists.
They know their food, they know their wine, they're quite grown-ups, all of them.
I didn't know them.
And there were many rules about this contest.
The maître d'hÃtel comes to see me and says, "Sir, would you like to come and choose silverware?" And I said, "No, no, no, I don't want any silverware or flowers.
I'm gonna put 300 kilos of dirty potatoes on the linen, in the middle of the table.
" So he says to me, "Ah, you can't do that here.
" I said, "Well, yes, I will.
And I'm not gonna wash them, they will have dirt as they came.
" The table looked beautiful.
Imagine, all these potatoes were red, violet, of all the colors.
And then we cooked 10 different dishes with potatoes.
Even the desserts had sweet potatoes.
And next morning, there was a meeting of all the academists, and after the meeting they came out and said, "You have chosen You have been chosen for this year prize of the Grand Prix.
" I had achieved the prize that all my teachers in France had achieved.
I matched them.
But, you know, big prizes in life, they make you happy and sad because they make you question yourself.
They thought that I was going to continue this path of excellence, more trimmed and manicured cooking as was happening then, and I didn't.
I just turned back on it and I went the other way.
I said, "That was it.
" I realized that I had to go back, kneel down, and pick up all those tools, memories and adventures and experiences from my childhood, and recreate my cooking life with all of that.
This is called curanto, which is a native name for cooking in a pit in southern Patagonia.
There are some traces of pits like this that anthropologists found that are 12,000 years old.
Instead of using cloth, they used a leaf which is the size of this pit, or bigger even.
It's like this, which is called nalka.
So they covered all the food with nalka, and then they would bury everything down and go on daily errands.
And there was not a trace of smoke or anything, so it was a hidden treasure of food.
Then they would come back at night to open it and have very hot, delicious food.
The taste you get from this pit in the vegetables is incredible because they are extremely moist and smoky.
I love cooking with pits like this.
So I came back to South America from Germany to open a restaurant.
Los Negros Los Negros was a tiny restaurant.
That's when I started doing fire.
That's where I constructed my first wood oven and I started playing with fire and iron and so on.
We had it for, like, I don't know, maybe 20 years the property, and the restaurant was open for, like, 15 years.
And I always thought I was gonna get married there.
It was a love affair with that tiny town, that when I arrived there, it had no road it had no water, no electricity.
And, you know, we started getting all these very glamorous people.
It lost a bit of its mystery.
What happens in my work is that Francis is still there working, his name is there, his team is there, but my soul is gone.
And I realized that slowly and then I looked back and I said, "God, I've left that place.
I better move on.
" So I closed down Los Negros and I just remained up there in the hills.
It was very, very sad.
I still think I didn't get over it yet, and I don't go anymore.
I can't even go to the town anymore.
I mean, I go, but it's, uh it's very hard for me.
Yes.
I can't keep a restaurant because my children are in love with it, or I can't keep this home, because I have to go on with my life.
I have to go on living and growing and doing what I have to do.
Which is not a very easy life to be adapted to as kids.
I'm a bit selfish because, you know, I think it takes a toll on them.
You know? Yeah.
My life has been a path at the edge of uncertainty.
Today, I think we educate kids to be settled in the comfortable chair.
You have your job, you have your little car, you have a place to sleep, and the dreams are dead.
You don't grow on a secure path.
All of us should conquer something in life and it needs a lot of work and it needs a lot of risk.
In order to grow and to improve, you have to be there a bit at the edge of uncertainty.
"There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us, and the Wild is calling, calling let us go.
"
This man who had a beautiful car would drive by, so I waited for him.
I would sit in the back.
I was eight.
And there was always a different lady by him.
One day after so much hitchhiking, you know, one of the girls said to me, "Come home for tea.
" And when I walked onto the deck, there was these two ladies taking sun naked.
And, you know, they said, "Oh! Here you are.
What would you like to drink?" You know, they didn't cover themselves or You know, they were French.
And all those things made me dream, you know, that there was a very free world somewhere.
So my big draw in life since very young was freedom.
The freedom of believing only in myself and not letting myself being, you know, sort of, led by anybody.
I wanted to be my own.
I wanted to do whatever I wanted.
A meal by Francis Mallmann, whether it's a special event that he does in the countryside or it's in one of his restaurants, starts with visual.
You enter it and you know you're in some place that's been orchestrated with a sensual eye.
You're set up with this beautiful, art-directed scene, and then, bam, really powerful, strong flavors.
He really has perfect pitch when it comes to taste, and ambience, and how people want to be made to feel.
He's extremely romantic.
He likes color, he likes lushness, he likes strong, sensual experiences.
Francis is quite different in that he's not defined by a restaurant.
He has a number of restaurants.
Every one of them is different.
Francis also does books.
He's done many of them over the course of 30 years and he's been on television all that time.
He's the biggest food star in the Latin world.
His shows are set wherever the will-o'- the-wisp takes him.
He really goes out into the wild, into the far-flung places to discover them and have his audience discover them with him.
To get to Francis' island in Patagonia, you drive 100 miles down a dirt road.
Then you get to the shore of this lake and the mountains that rise on the other side.
And those mountains go up, and if you would go down the opposite slope, you'd be in Chile.
So it's the very end of Argentina.
And you get in an Avon, an inflatable craft, and you go an hour across the lake.
And then you get to this little island in the middle of a lake.
There's no place more remote that I've ever been on Earth.
The feeling of Patagonia, I feel, is my deepest rooted feeling for home.
I arrived to Patagonia age seven, and I fell in love with it.
It's a land that you learn to love very slowly.
You start to understand its winds, the storms the solitude.
And once you understand how she is, you start to love her.
We lived in a faraway house in Patagonia with my brothers and my family.
And our house was ruled by fire.
The heating of the water and the heating system of the house was with fire and that's a bit what we have now here on this beautiful island.
It's going back to those times of childhood.
I'm a cook that uses cooking to send this message of a way of living.
I'm always cooking in remote places, in the wild with fires.
So my message is get out of your chair, of your sofa, of your office and go out.
Yes, right there and right there, and there.
When you cook with fires, when you build a fire, it's a bit like making love.
It could be huge, strong.
Or it could grow very slowly in ashes and little coals.
And that's the biggest beauty of fire.
It goes from zero to 10 in strength, and in between zero and 10, you have all these little peaks and different ways of cooking with it and it's very tender and very fragile.
Agustine, are you doing all right? Yes.
If anything happens, just drop that shit, let it all burn.
Don't worry.
Francis loves burned things.
Not carbonized, just burned, so it's just got this wonderful, what they call Maillard crust.
What would get you fired in another restaurant, will make Francis fall in love with your technique.
Whenever you grill or you cook something in a griddle, you have to be very respectful of that first contact.
If this is a steak for me and I look at it and I say, "Well, I'm gonna cook it for nine minutes.
" I'll put it there, leave it there for six minutes and then turn it for the last three, because what happens is that, when you put it in a surface which is hot, the first thing it does, it's gonna stick to it.
But slowly it will make this crusty layer and you will be able to move it without breaking it.
I don't believe in flip-and-flopping food.
You have to respect what you cook.
When we cook outside for big parties, I usually have a lot of staff.
I like to have a band of gypsy chefs.
We call it maestranza, which is a beautiful word in Spanish.
Maestranza means "the people who are around you helping.
" It's very romantic.
Over the years, you create a team that works with you, who know you very well and know what the dreams are.
We are a team that rolls constantly.
We are cooking here today, next week we'll being cooking in the street in New York.
There's an energy that rolls with us.
People from the outside get attracted to it.
I don't like taking chefs who have any experience.
We take young apprentices in all the restaurants who have never cooked anywhere and we teach them.
So out of 10, there is one who becomes a leader, the doer.
That's a spirit I like in my team.
I love the joy of working with all the team.
I need to be happy with them.
There has to be a festive feeling about the hard work we're doing.
One of the things I like the most, and I always tell Francis, it's the possibility to work in fresh air.
Because we work in fresh air, we have to work with the wind, we have to work with the rain, we have to work with the snow.
Francis has an energy to materialize a person with ideas that also accomplishes what he dreams.
It has shown me that practically nothing is impossible.
And that's why I would love to continue working with him.
We drank three of these bottles already.
"Have you wandered in the wilderness, have you galloped over the ranges, have you roamed the arid sun-lands through and through? Have you chummed up with the mesa? Do you know its moods and changes? Then listen to the Wild, it's calling you.
" I was born in Buenos Aires and we came to Patagonia because my father was offered a job in an atomic center.
He's a physicist.
That's where my childhood started, in Bariloche, in the middle of Patagonia.
I got hit by this wave of music when I was 13 and that changed my life.
One day, a family of Australian girls moved into the school.
The four of them put on a record of The Monkees, and they started dancing on top of a low table.
God, I never had seen that! I never heard that music.
That was the first time I felt in my blood, in my veins, in my soul what was happening in the world.
After that music hit me and that movement hit me, that was the only thing that interested me.
And I left school.
My dad didn't understand very much at all, really, the revolution that happened in the late '60s and '70s with young people.
He just didn't understand our long hairs, our flower shirts, our striped pink pants, our boots with heels.
He thought that this rock-and-roll thing was a disaster.
He couldn't cope with it.
But I was very stubborn about my freedom.
I was able to lie on my bed at night and dream about what I wanted.
I knew that I was myself and that I had to decide for myself.
There is a technique in the province of Córdoba in Argentina where you wrap a piece of meat in really cream mud and then you put it in a wood oven.
It's a very, very old technique of cooking.
Here, if you go all around the lake, you find this beautiful, beautiful clay.
I thought, "God, this clay must be very good to cook a fish in it.
" When the clay starts to get hot, really hot, the humidity of the fish will try to leave that space, but it can't because it's completely encased.
So what you get is a most beautiful steamed fish, and I like to cook it slightly raw so it's not overdone.
There's nothing more sad than an overcooked fish.
You can cook it longer and it will just completely detach.
But I think that the beauty is it's lukewarm and it's cooked but still attached to the bone because you feel all the quality of the fish when you eat it then.
When I started my first restaurant on my own, I was 19.
I was doing some recipes of Argentina.
And I had some books, you know, I had some very good books on cooking and I was always trying to learn and that Mostly that was what attracted me to France.
Everything I read was about France.
All the French recipes, the ingredients, and the tarragon, and the Madeira wine, things that were very difficult for me to find in Patagonia, but I started dreaming about them and I wanted to go and touch them, taste them and use them.
And I decide to go to France.
I thought that I would arrive in Paris and I would knock on the door, and somebody would say, "Yes, please come in.
We're gonna teach you how to cook.
" But I didn't achieve to work anywhere, you know, I couldn't.
I couldn't get work anywhere.
And then I decided to write a letter to all the three-star restaurants in France, which in that year it was There were 21 of them.
And incredibly enough all of them answered.
Maybe many of them said no, but many of them said yes.
And I started working in all these three-star restaurants.
Francis was very lucky in the way he was able to parlay that into working for some of the greatest three-star chefs.
Working in the great restaurants of France, the thing that Francis learned was technique.
Even though he uses these very primitive methods of cooking, the techniques are very much influenced by the great French restaurants of Europe.
It was a very passionate love affair with the culture of France and its food.
Sí.
Come here, Heloisa.
- Come, my love.
- Daddy? Vanina, with whom I have a daughter, we don't live together.
We spend about 10 days of the month together, which is very nice.
And we both love it.
We don't want to live together.
Love is one of the most difficult things in life.
Certainly the most beautiful one.
Don't let it go.
Again.
Now we drink a little bit.
No.
The smell delicious smell.
What does it smell like? Does it smell like ass? A loved ass? A healthy ass? - "It smells like ass, Dad.
" - Don't teach her that, I beg of you! Tchin! Again but with both It's difficult.
I think that living together it destroys passion.
And I hate all this thing of the faithfulness.
Part of us, we are animals in some sort of a way, and there's a beauty in that.
It's not that, you know, you have to be chasing girls all day round and that you're always looking to see what you find or It's not that.
It's just the freedom of loving, you know.
"I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make your dear voice come alive again? I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would not bend to the shape of your body, perhaps.
" I don't know where I live.
For the last 30 years, I take an average of four or five planes a week.
So I'm sitting on a plane, I'm changing locations probably every two days.
It's just like a drug for me.
I need these constant changes of structures, of people, of ambiences, of languages.
They are very inspiring, they're very romantic.
They make me breathe.
They make me tremble.
They make me live.
Whoo! You like it? Let me put some on your finger, let's see your finger.
Eat it.
Food started out in my life as an image when I was eight and I was invited with my parents to have lunch in a little restaurant in Patagonia under a tree.
It was summertime, and everybody was dressed up.
There was flowers on the table.
So that day, I don't remember the food, really but the ambience of what was happening really touched me.
And I think I went into food by the theater of it.
The flowers, the tables, the music, the decor, the happiness.
Alex, do you want to look at this? - Yes, where? - On this couch.
Do you remember this? Of course I remember.
Come on, let's see it.
My dad lives life differently from a lot of people that I know.
We grew up doing campfires by the moonlight, he was playing the guitar to us and cooking at the same time and doing all sorts of different things that other kids didn't do.
He's taught us to live with with very much freedom.
And that's just amazing.
He's very free.
Princess! How does Luna sleep? Show me.
I don't want her to grow up.
And she turns in her sleep? Hello.
How are you? Alma, what are you drinking, white or red? Red? I seldom invite people to have lunch or dinner with me.
But they're really chosen because I can't spend time with people that I don't enjoy.
I can't do it anymore as theater.
I make choices, and that's a beautiful thing about growing up, learning to say no.
In a nice way, but you say no.
I have this friend of mine.
He was on the island, in fact, 30 years ago when we just started.
And we, you know, we parted.
We just went different ways in our lives.
Once he came back to me, he said, "Francis, you don't like me anymore.
" And I said, "No, it's not that I don't like you.
We've chosen different styles of life.
I still have these beautiful souvenirs of all the things we did together and how close we were and so on.
But the truth is, it's not that you bore me, but I don't enjoy talking to you anymore.
And I don't want to fight with you, but you know there's nothing in common between your life and mine nowadays.
" I would have never said that to him, but he asked me.
So what could I say? I said the truth.
But, you know, growing up has a bit to do with that, to be able to tell the truth, to show who you are even if it hurts.
With my team, I hand them a torch and I say to them "It's lit.
Keep it lit.
That's the only thing I want.
I won't be here every day to see if it's lit, but take care of it.
" Every person that works for you, you have to let it go in the best moment.
When he and you are at the happiest moment, when he and you think that you're doing your best, they have to go.
Because from there on, there is only one way, which is down.
And if that person stays, he says, you know, "God, this is a comfortable chair, I have a nice salary, good job," and from there he will get bored.
I think it's important that he goes on and somebody else will come up.
And that transfer of energy, of power, of work, makes a little difficult moment, but then it passes and new people grow up into it.
- Salud! - Salud! When he came back from France, Francis was making fancy French food for rich Argentines.
I was quite arrogant and I thought I was the best chef.
I was always with my huge white hat.
I would use caviar and salmon, and I was so serious.
Then one day, the restaurant was booked by the head of Cartier, the jewel company, a Frenchman.
The people sat, they dined, they laughed, they talked, they drank.
And I was walking around the tables after dinner in my whites with my hat.
With my hat.
And the head of Cartier got up and he came up to me and said, "I would like to have a word with you.
" So we went sort of on the side and he said, you know, "Mr.
Mallmann, this was a really horrible meal.
And I think you have to think what you're doing because it wasn't quite right.
And I want to say this in a nice way to you because I see a lot of effort in what you do, but this was not French food.
" I looked at him and I said, "Sir, thank you very much.
" But on my insides, I thought, "This guy's," you know, "He doesn't know what he's talking about.
He's not a chef.
He's French he does beautiful watches and jewels, but, you know, what does he know about cooking?" So I went home to sleep with that, and I never forgot it.
It was something heavy in me.
In time, I realized that he was right.
I wasn't doing the right thing.
I was just trying to copy exactly everything I had learned.
And I think that that happens in every craft in life.
You know, you're young, you have a master, you want to emulate him, do what he does.
But at some point in life you have to turn around and say, "I have to find my own way, my own language.
" In 1995, Francis received an invitation to cook for the International Academy of Gastronomy, which is the most prestigious gastronomical organization in the world.
So this was a really big deal.
I was 40.
I was going to be 40 when the president of the International Academy of Gastronomy in Europe says to me, "Would you like to come and cook for the Academy in Germany?" And they were giving this prize, Le Grand Prix de I'Art de la Cuisine.
All my teachers in France had won this prize, too.
So he says to me, "What would you like to cook?" And I say, "Well, I would like to make an homage, a tribute to the Andes.
" Potatoes are a symbol of the Andes.
It's one of the most beautiful things, food-wise, that South America gave to the world.
I decided to take potatoes from South America to Germany.
We find out it was impossible to take them.
So we decided to smuggle the potatoes.
We smuggled half a ton of potatoes in our bags into Germany.
We were taken to this castle.
It's 27 academists.
They know their food, they know their wine, they're quite grown-ups, all of them.
I didn't know them.
And there were many rules about this contest.
The maître d'hÃtel comes to see me and says, "Sir, would you like to come and choose silverware?" And I said, "No, no, no, I don't want any silverware or flowers.
I'm gonna put 300 kilos of dirty potatoes on the linen, in the middle of the table.
" So he says to me, "Ah, you can't do that here.
" I said, "Well, yes, I will.
And I'm not gonna wash them, they will have dirt as they came.
" The table looked beautiful.
Imagine, all these potatoes were red, violet, of all the colors.
And then we cooked 10 different dishes with potatoes.
Even the desserts had sweet potatoes.
And next morning, there was a meeting of all the academists, and after the meeting they came out and said, "You have chosen You have been chosen for this year prize of the Grand Prix.
" I had achieved the prize that all my teachers in France had achieved.
I matched them.
But, you know, big prizes in life, they make you happy and sad because they make you question yourself.
They thought that I was going to continue this path of excellence, more trimmed and manicured cooking as was happening then, and I didn't.
I just turned back on it and I went the other way.
I said, "That was it.
" I realized that I had to go back, kneel down, and pick up all those tools, memories and adventures and experiences from my childhood, and recreate my cooking life with all of that.
This is called curanto, which is a native name for cooking in a pit in southern Patagonia.
There are some traces of pits like this that anthropologists found that are 12,000 years old.
Instead of using cloth, they used a leaf which is the size of this pit, or bigger even.
It's like this, which is called nalka.
So they covered all the food with nalka, and then they would bury everything down and go on daily errands.
And there was not a trace of smoke or anything, so it was a hidden treasure of food.
Then they would come back at night to open it and have very hot, delicious food.
The taste you get from this pit in the vegetables is incredible because they are extremely moist and smoky.
I love cooking with pits like this.
So I came back to South America from Germany to open a restaurant.
Los Negros Los Negros was a tiny restaurant.
That's when I started doing fire.
That's where I constructed my first wood oven and I started playing with fire and iron and so on.
We had it for, like, I don't know, maybe 20 years the property, and the restaurant was open for, like, 15 years.
And I always thought I was gonna get married there.
It was a love affair with that tiny town, that when I arrived there, it had no road it had no water, no electricity.
And, you know, we started getting all these very glamorous people.
It lost a bit of its mystery.
What happens in my work is that Francis is still there working, his name is there, his team is there, but my soul is gone.
And I realized that slowly and then I looked back and I said, "God, I've left that place.
I better move on.
" So I closed down Los Negros and I just remained up there in the hills.
It was very, very sad.
I still think I didn't get over it yet, and I don't go anymore.
I can't even go to the town anymore.
I mean, I go, but it's, uh it's very hard for me.
Yes.
I can't keep a restaurant because my children are in love with it, or I can't keep this home, because I have to go on with my life.
I have to go on living and growing and doing what I have to do.
Which is not a very easy life to be adapted to as kids.
I'm a bit selfish because, you know, I think it takes a toll on them.
You know? Yeah.
My life has been a path at the edge of uncertainty.
Today, I think we educate kids to be settled in the comfortable chair.
You have your job, you have your little car, you have a place to sleep, and the dreams are dead.
You don't grow on a secure path.
All of us should conquer something in life and it needs a lot of work and it needs a lot of risk.
In order to grow and to improve, you have to be there a bit at the edge of uncertainty.
"There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us, and the Wild is calling, calling let us go.
"