Chef's Table (2015) s03e02 Episode Script

Ask any Russian, "Do you like dressed herring?" and they will say, "Yes! Yes! I love dressed herring so much!" Even I am under the spell of that crap.
When I see dressed herring, I understand that it is, God damn it, a complete piece of shit.
But I take it and eat it.
That taste it's in our heads.
Russians suffered 75 years, two and a half generations of Soviet time, when people were fooled into eating this gray urban grub.
And our mentality has remained the same ever since.
I really hate that period because it destroyed all Russian cuisine.
And I will do whatever it takes to bring the genuine Russian taste back to the people.
Move it to my side.
Most people abroad think Russia is some kind of completely wild kingdom somewhere in the woods where you can see bears walking down the streets.
Even the most educated restaurant critics ask me some really bizarre questions.
"Do you all really drink vodka there year round, Andrey?" It's pretty bizarre.
The idea of Russian cuisine is almost the same.
The majority of foreigners see Russian cuisine as very simple and almost crass.
But it's not only about vodka and the snacks that go with it as people may think.
There's an interesting cuisine.
The White Rabbit is nothing at all like what you would expect from a tasting menu restaurant.
It's full-on Alice in Wonderland when you walk into this restaurant.
Vladimir, he takes the theme as far as it can go.
There's giant cartoonish images all over the place.
It's this onslaught of stimuli.
It's a lot to take in.
But, if you think about it, he's leading diners down the rabbit hole, into a new sort of Russian cuisine.
Russians are often offended that, abroad, we are associated with the words "pies," "pancakes," "caviar," "borscht.
" Vladimir does a very important thing.
He rediscovers the old cuisine, the old recipes but he filters them in his personal style to such an extent that it becomes interesting for the contemporary public.
He shows that there is diversity to our cuisine.
Anyone who wants to talk about what's going on in Russia has to talk about Vladimir Mukhin.
He comes from five generations of great Russian cooks.
That's what makes him uniquely qualified to move Russian cuisine in a new direction.
He's been preparing for this his whole life.
I have known Vladimir for a long time.
He is always in the pursuit of something more.
And he doesn't really hide his ambitions to become the best chef in the world.
He was the first one who broke into the international arena and showed everyone what Russians are capable of.
There's more than ballet and rockets.
There's the new Russian cuisine.
Let's cook Maundy Thursday's salt, okay? Okay, we mix salt with rye flour.
Venya, do you know about this? You don't? Do you know what Maundy Thursday is? Maundy Thursday is a day when people are washing and cleaning everything, man.
This is Maundy Thursday.
It occurs during Lent, right before Easter.
This is a unique history.
Especially for this day, people made this salt.
And this salt was used to salt the Easter eggs.
Got it? In our country, people say we do not have Russian cuisine.
What is Russian cuisine? It's nothing.
They say this.
And they are cooks! These are my colleagues who are doing this.
And I want to destroy them for this.
Russian chefs, we started to copy cuisines from all over the world.
I really don't understand how we got to this point.
How could you be so spineless, trying to fit in with the rest? I want to do things differently, to tear this all to pieces.
Maybe another flour? - White? - Maybe.
I think maybe we should smoke it.
In our country, we should be proud of what we had.
My task is to prove to those people that live in our country that Russian cuisine existed, exists and will exist.
Still young, they've just begun.
Yes, they have only just started gathering.
To understand what honey means to Russian people, one needs to go far back in time.
Basically, everyone used to harvest honey, because there was no sugar at all.
Everything was honey-based.
The aroma is unreal; the smell is totally crazy.
Sugar came to Russia sometime in the early 16th century.
Honey slowly got replaced by sugar.
But it's not right.
Because honey embodies the true Russian taste and tradition.
When I talk about dishes that define the Russian taste, I mean honey cake.
When I was little, my grandmother baked huge honey cakes.
She would leave layers of the cake on the stairs to cool down.
Naturally, I was impatient.
I would walk to where the cream was cooling down and eat it with my finger.
I loved that cream a lot.
I still remember the flavor.
The perfect combination of sweet and sour fried honey and sour cream.
The real Russian taste.
Now, I bake honey cake at my restaurant.
But I make it more modern.
Because many people don't understand what honey cake is.
They taste it, and they'll realize it's delicious but they won't understand what it's linked to.
That's why I give my modernized version next to my grandma's recipe.
I slowly teach them to feel the moment of evolution.
My cake can't hold a candle to hers, damn it.
The end of the 19th century was the peak of the Russian culinary cuisine.
It was wonderful.
It was diverse.
Everything changed after the revolution.
In the past, the country was governed by the rich and by the capitalists.
But now, for the first time, the country is being governed by the masses.
Revolution, famine, civil war We went through a period of total shortages.
A terrible shortcoming of the period was the isolation of our cuisine from the global cuisine.
We were stewing in our own juice, while the entire culinary world was developing, evolving and moving forward.
During the Soviet Union, cooks were very constrained.
Everyone was supposed to do the same thing to make it easier to run the country.
And everyone cooked from one book of recipes called On Tasty and Healthy Food.
They were trying to paint everyone with the same brush.
There was no creativity at all.
Shall I not salt it at all? Well, you should add salt and pepper between the layers.
Yes, just like that.
The peasant style.
I'll take some parsley now.
Remember you told me that in America there is a stem of parsley? Yes.
Do you know that I'm using it? That I make a dessert of it? Of course.
I am your dad, after all.
When I was young, my dad was one of the most famous chefs in our town.
He was always busy at work in the kitchen.
Three eggplants.
- There won't be enough room.
- It will press down.
- Okay.
- It will press down.
I was always fighting for a possibility to spend time with him.
And when I finally saw what my dad was doing in the kitchen I knew what I would do with my life.
I remember Vladimir saying, "I want to be a cook.
I want to be a chef.
I want to be like you.
I want to be better than you.
" He was 12 at that time.
So he found himself in my kitchen.
I am a very demanding person.
So it was going to be difficult for him.
Cover it with the lid.
And put it on the fire.
Dad gave me the worst jobs right away.
So I was washing dishes for a while.
While my friends were still asleep, I went to work.
They used to bring us three to four cows at a time.
About 1,300 Ibs each.
You have to pull a knife along each rib.
It's very hard work.
I remember I almost stabbed myself in the stomach.
We need lower fire.
- Shall we pour some water? - Of course.
Dad set a really high bar.
Every mistake was regarded as a catastrophe, an explosion.
It was very difficult.
Look, so tender.
You can sit on it, and it will spring right back.
This is a traditional pryanik.
It's a traditional Danilov recipe, restored.
- There is filling in there.
- Mmm.
Let's taste it.
- Delicious? - Unreal! In Russia, we had some pretty interesting culinary traditions.
Unfortunately, we have lost them all.
This is really a classic one, a monastery dessert.
And now, Vladimir is trying to revive old-school Russian cuisine.
Vladimir and his team have spent months in the libraries, discovering old recipes.
And they've discovered some really interesting things.
There is an old Russian recipe that I found in an old book.
Moose lips shchi.
When I read about the moose lips in the book I started to fantasize, to visualize them.
Oh, moose lips.
I imagined them, how I'd cook them.
But when they actually brought the moose head I looked into its eyes and I was shocked.
This part of the lips is what is edible.
Here, where it is hanging.
I started by cooking in the same style our ancestors had cooked them.
I was restoring the old recipe and restoring the old flavor.
I liked the combination, the texture, the intense flavor.
So I gathered all that and tried to make it my way.
My task is to preserve the exact taste from the past, but visually, on the plate, make it modern.
So I took the taste of moose lips shchi and packed it into dumplings.
Remember the story about the ugly duckling? Transformation.
That became a trend.
Moose lips are cooked at many restaurants in Russia now.
It's important for me to use as many old authentic recipes as possible, to transform them and turn them into a fashionable dish that one day will be cooked all over the world.
The red flag came down over the Kremlin tonight, as President Gorbachev resigned and brought to an end seven decades of communist rule in the Soviet Union.
The daring 1990s.
That's when everything started changing.
There was an explosion, a breakthrough, and everything that was outside and forbidden to us before immediately became available.
The globalization touched our whole nation.
I was young, and I am immediately surrounded by Snickers, Mars, Twix.
I don't know what M&M's.
All this came to my life.
It was so unique and so forbidden.
Suddenly new restaurants emerged out of nowhere, new products.
It was definitely something new for a Soviet cook.
Russian gastronomical culture made a gigantic step forward, like a rocket took off in Russia.
Choosing a fish, first of all, you should pay attention to its gills.
Its gills should always be good-looking and eyes should not be cloudy.
It should always smell like the sea.
Smells like fish, right? When I was 18 years old, I was appointed chef in my dad's restaurant.
Mmm.
I was the youngest cook in the whole area, if not in the whole country.
I had everything to create the cozy life of a family man.
I had a house and a car.
I had a girlfriend whom I was dating but I wanted to prove that I was capable of more.
My father was doing classic Russian dishes.
That is, it was genuine; his dishes were filled with Russian taste.
However, I liked what the Europeans were doing.
Vladimir began to change traditional dishes, sides and sauces into something different.
He eventually shifted towards modern cuisine.
I disagreed with it for a long time.
To the extent that the menu got split in two.
Customers knew the Soviet classics were from Mukhin Senior and the modernized dishes were from Mukhin Junior.
Eventually our small town became too cramped for the both of us.
He started visiting Moscow trying to settle there.
Dad and I had a very serious talk.
Dad said, "Here, you've got everything and there, you will have nothing.
You'll have to start over.
Go back to the very beginning.
" I was thinking a lot after this conversation.
It was always important for me to do something outside of Dad's control.
So I decided to go to Moscow.
Guys, attention! There are plenty of orders ahead.
We haven't seen anything yet.
Speed up! Back home in Essentuki, I was the goddamn king of the castle.
I came here, and they send me to the sink.
Runners! I was washing dishes, peeling potatoes, peeling veggies, cleaning mussels.
I started from the bottom.
It was hard for me, but it was my life.
What I learned from the cooks and the chefs was insanely interesting for me.
They introduced me to many European technologies and ways to cook.
Father was very upset.
He didn't talk to me for a long time, because he didn't understand my decision.
He tried to get me to come home several times.
He was sending food cooked by his own hands.
I was eating his food and thinking of home.
He was showing me that I was still under his control.
When we stopped communicating, for me it was a tragedy.
But I loved cheating on the Russian cuisine.
I had always been under his eye and, here, I broke free from that life.
I felt what freedom was like.
Guys, do you know what trutovik is? Right now, trutovik is a trend all over Russia.
Okay, let's cook the mushrooms.
When I became a sous-chef, I spent some time in Avignon, France.
I was working at Restaurant Christian Etienne.
And one day, Christian was cooking Russian cuisine.
When I looked at it, I said, "Christian with all my respect, you are a kickass chef, but what you are cooking is not Russian cuisine.
It's a pathetic excuse for it.
Do you want me to give you the real Russian taste?" He said, "Go ahead!" And I cooked real Russian dishes.
I clearly remember, he loved the borscht.
I even have photos of him tasting and saying, "Oh!" After that, I wrote a menu.
He made a few revisions, made some things lighter changed some sauce and so on.
His French clients who ate it were amazed.
They loved his Russian cooking.
Voilà.
This is, uh, scallops from, uh, Kamchatka.
Every time in Russia, we, uh The many taste combinations my dad taught me they really do work.
It's, uh, typical Russian, as we bake it.
Then I realized that Russian cuisine can have its own place in the modern world.
We do have the potential.
Some people think that it is impossible to make wine out of honey.
They should drink this.
Mmm, terrific.
I was extremely amazed by that trip to France.
And after that, I could not stop.
I had my family knowledge, but I wanted to complement it with knowledge from all over Russia.
This Dousheparka honey ale is only made in Yaroslavskaya region.
The idea was to build my knowledge brick by brick.
So I started traveling a lot and talking to people.
Do you use any spice, laurel? Laurel at all times.
Sugar? Absolutely no sugar! That is not for shchi.
These people opened new doors for me and I actually started to recover all these old recipes.
Russian cuisine was revealing its face.
Do they eat something particular that makes their milk so special? Noxious plants are part of their diet.
Are you serious? They eat noxious plants? Yes.
It's like a delicacy for them.
In three years, this little fish will give caviar.
Three years? Cool.
While traveling, I discovered new products, interesting new produce.
People did everything differently.
Kvasura, Kvasura, bless our mead.
And if the goat drinks it up, then it will be good.
Everything was new for me.
For me, it was quite a breakthrough.
Then I happened to meet my partner, Boris, the owner of White Rabbit.
Da! At that moment, I had this nuclear suitcase, as they say in Russia.
I went up to the 16th floor, and I decided to detonate it here.
Mmm.
Let's go.
So this one is ryazhenka.
And on the top, I put pastila.
Pastila is just a, uh, apple and honey.
Mixed.
It's like marshmallow, you know.
And this one is, uh, liver of a swan.
When I opened White Rabbit, at that time, we had a boom of Italian restaurants.
After that, a boom of Japanese sushi restaurants rolled across the country.
Our Russian restaurant culture was centered on the phenomenon of globalization.
So when we started sharing Russian food with our customers, there was a lot of skepticism.
In the beginning, people didn't understand.
I almost had fights with the guests.
We were buying oysters from the Black Sea, and we were cooking those in an unique way.
They would eat them and say, "I've been to France.
I was eating oysters there, and they had a different taste.
I want oysters like that.
" I would say, "But these are our Russian ingredients.
We should be proud of what we have.
" It was a very critical period for me, and I was desperate.
I wanted to show the Russian guests exactly what their cuisine is like and to show them that Russia is also a developed country like the others.
But the Russians couldn't understand.
Utter carnage everywhere you look.
In the midst of all this destruction soldiers awaited orders.
Amongst them, plenty of Russians.
This is a counter-revolution, and it's gaining ground.
I just spoke with Chancellor Merkel of Germany.
We agree that Russia is responsible for the violence in Eastern Ukraine.
As a result, the United States is imposing new sanctions in key sectors of the Russian economy.
About these sanctions.
These are not just a nervous reaction of the US or its allies to our position on the events in Ukraine.
If none of this had happened, they would have come up with another excuse to restrain the growing powers of Russia.
But we did not let them.
When the Russian government started the conflict in the Ukraine, there were Western sanctions against Russia.
And Putin's response was to say, "We don't need you," and, "Screw you," and, "We're closing our borders to your food products.
" The officials from Russia's agricultural watchdog performed a check aimed at finding banned Western food.
The Putin regime sent out enforcement brigades, who burned stacks of German cheese.
They seized frozen geese from overseas and ran over them with bulldozers.
It was way over-the-top.
There was a half-year period of food shortages.
Prices skyrocketed.
Our society on the whole was frazzled and confused by the situation.
As a result of the actions Russia has taken, Russia is more isolated than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
How does it affect the society to have this embargo? They created new food industries and farms and cheese makers.
Putin wanted local goods to surpass Western goods, but he wasn't thinking that this locavore movement would emerge.
I'm sure that wasn't Putin's goal in imposing this embargo.
The farmer's markets in Moscow are starting to look like the farmer's markets in Brooklyn.
There's the little food stalls, the small artisanal farmer, the little cheese shop.
So out of something terrible, something good, potentially, has emerged.
When they sealed the borders, we were, so to say, on the crest of the wave because we started working with the Russian ingredients a long time ago.
We already had many farmers who were growing produce for us.
So we were making a living by it, working with it.
And all of a sudden, the embargo helped us and pushed us further up.
We were ready.
Suddenly, everything he's been talking about is tied into the politics of the day, which makes what he's talking about what everybody else is talking about.
Give out the veal! Fish soup, hurry.
And he's the only chef on the world stage talking about these things.
Vladimir was suddenly everywhere.
The main question was this: "So who works with Russian produce?" "Vladimir Mukhin.
Let's check him out.
What is he up to? If he can make it work, then it does work.
" All the cooks started using only Russian ingredients.
We started having different guests at White Rabbit.
They really came here with a purpose to come and eat Russian cuisine.
Wow, awesome.
We have such a cool soup.
Eventually, Father took my side.
Now, he closely follows my achievements and what I am doing, always.
What we have now is very cool.
I have a father as a friend.
To our success! When I watch Vladimir, I remember my own childhood and youth.
My father used to drive me hard.
I didn't know why he did it.
Now, I know it was so I could find a place in life.
I wanted the same for Vladimir.
White Rabbit is his greatest achievement.
That wasn't me.
I never gave this to him, I never ate this, I never tasted it or cooked it, but it is still Russian! And Vladimir discovered it.
I am so proud of him.
Vladimir now represents the breakthrough of Russian cuisine in the international arena.
I'm personally very happy with the fact that people abroad can look at Russia from a different angle and see us not as the enemy or a great superpower with nuclear weapons.
There's an entirely different side of Russia.
You know what came to my mind yesterday? What if we put kvass wort in there? It'll be cool.
- Let's do it with kvass wort, okay? - I'll bring it.
The chefs in our country, they are different now.
They started cooking new and different Russian cuisine.
This movement is way stronger than just a culinary movement.
It's a very cool movement that is making progress.
It can change, and it is changing, the whole system.
Only when we change ourselves, the society will change, too.
We have one path.
And there's light at the end of the tunnel.
The light of the Russian cuisine.