Chef's Table (2015) s03e03 Episode Script

I think you have to be obsessed with bread to be a baker.
You're always looking at all of the nuances that make your perfect loaf.
When you're depending upon something that's alive it can't be completely controlled.
Baking a loaf of bread is not making a chocolate chip cookie.
Having the patience is very trying.
When I would bake, I would look at the crumb.
I would look at the fermentation bubbles.
I would look at the oven spring.
I would always find some fault.
My shaping wasn't quite perfect.
My cuts weren't great.
I didn't get as much of an open structure to the loaf that I wanted.
You dissect every single aspect of the bread.
I tried mixing at 30 degree water and 45 degree water and 80 degree water and 90 degree water.
And then I'd think, "You know, I think I'm gonna put four tablespoons.
" And, "I don't really like it, so I'll go back to three.
" "Well, let me try two and a half.
" Continually tweaking.
And that's obsession.
People make jokes about LA's relationship to food.
Sprout jokes and the Woody Allen line, where he's sitting in a restaurant and says, "I'll have a plate of mashed yeast.
" In the late '70s, early '80s, there was less coming out of Los Angeles, as opposed to New York or Paris.
But Nancy brought the mojo back.
Hello, Lynn.
Hey, how are you? Come into the restaurant, I'm gonna show you my favorite salad that I'm doing right now.
All right, then I can copy it.
- Yeah, and then you can copy it.
- Or attempt to.
Thanks.
Nancy is one of the people who discovered California cuisine.
She takes Italian dishes and she adds her aesthetic.
Her food is directly connected to the land.
The way that it expresses the great agricultural region of Southern California, at the same time referencing Italy, is brilliant.
Nancy has a pitch-perfect palate.
She can remember the way something tasted in July of 2006.
And she can tell you what was wrong with it and what was right with it.
Add a little more mustard.
- More mustard? - Yeah.
- This is more, like, flaky.
- Flaky.
Rather than you want a little, teeny bit of sponginess in there.
Like, there's a bread in Umbria, called torta al testo Her mastery of bread was what really brought her to the forefront of our culture.
And now she has three amazing restaurants.
On Melrose and Highland, the Pizzeria Osteria Mozza.
And then you have Chi Spacca.
Unlike a lot of people in her position, she still likes to get her hands dirty.
She still likes to work with the food.
When Nancy grabs ahold of a problem, she does not let it go until it's solved.
Sometimes that means tasting every cheese in Italy.
Sometimes that means spending an entire year thinking about grilled cheese sandwiches.
I suppose if it were under different circumstances, you'd call it OCD.
Her obsession is her mantra.
But she works so much on something.
By repetition, a thousand and a thousand and a thousand and a thousand times over again.
That level is is very craftsmanship, not necessarily artistic.
And that distinguishes her from a lot of the fancy Michelin star kind of chefs.
Nancy does not need frippery.
She does not need tricks.
She does not even really use garnish per se.
She just uses all of the food itself in its own expressive way.
All of the fancy chefs, from Grant to Massimo, if you ask them where they really wanna eat Sunday dinner they wanna eat at Nancy Silverton's house.
Because it's that food that is the most nourishing, not only to your palette but to your soul.
It comes down to simple and exquisite.
You know, towers of foie gras and eel and elder flower blossoms are not what she does.
What does she do? Pizza, pasta and salad.
Behind you.
- How's business tonight? - It's good.
- Is it good? - Yes.
Are we selling any stromboli? - Yep.
Just sold one.
- Oh, great! Loving it.
I create my dishes based on flavors that I crave.
'Cause I love to get up in the middle of the night and say, "Wow, I have to have that again!" I had been in Rome on the Campo de' Fiori, where they were making pizza.
I was so taken by the flavor, the texture everything about that crust.
Very open, very light but crisp.
I had never tasted anything like it.
How could something kind of like street food be so delicious? I wanted to figure out for myself how to make the pizza crust that was mine.
My mom worked on that dough for, you know, as long as it can take you to get a master's degree.
Day after day after day.
There were certain things she wanted to achieve with that dough.
And she became obsessed with it, as she does.
Why would anybody spend this much time making something like this, when all they do in Italy is put salt, yeast and water with some olive oil in the flour and just mix it all up? Her pizza dough is almost anti-Italian.
If they knew she was making it like this, they would ban her.
She developed this recipe, within a half of a quarter of a gram of brown sugar and the right kind of yeast and, obviously, some malt or some rye flour.
Her recipe is incomprehensibly long.
It's inefficiently long.
It's ineffectively long.
- There you go.
- Thank you.
It's not obsession.
It's sickness.
It's a twisted, inside-her-mind, Los-Angeleno-crazy-person thing.
But the result is perfect.
Ketchup.
We're gonna have iceberg, uh, leaves? Yeah.
Iceberg leaves.
- We have a lot to do.
- I know.
Everyone's coming at 4:45.
So And I'm gonna have Michael light the fire.
- Okay.
- Okay, I need to cook bacon.
Liz, are you listening? Avocado, bacon Avocado, bacon, onions.
Two different kinds.
Uh, tomatoes Oh, we have to cut tomatoes for, um - For the salad.
Yeah.
- the salad.
- We need to cut - We're done with the burgers.
We have to cut sweet 100s.
Liz's famous, uh, secret sauce.
- It's not famous.
- Okay.
Well, it will be when the book comes out.
Liz's uh, secret sauce.
I didn't grow up wanting to be a chef.
I wasn't obsessed with food.
It was never a profession that I even considered.
I grew up in the '50s in Sherman Oaks, so a suburb of Los Angeles.
It was a time where families didn't eat out the way that they do now.
Going to a restaurant was more a special occasion.
I can still hear my dad saying, "You know, we're gonna celebrate tonight.
" So we would come over the hill, and it was a big build-up.
But at that time, there were no celebrity chefs.
Being a restaurant owner or a chef had no cachet.
I entered college in 1974, at Sonoma State.
I thought that I would maybe be a lawyer as my father was.
Shortly after arriving I was eating at the college dormitory and I was very attracted by a handsome man.
He ran the vegetarian program at the dormitory kitchen and I thought, "Ha-ha, I gotta meet this guy.
" And so I went up to him, and I told him I was a vegetarian.
I told him I love to cook and I would really love to cook in the kitchen.
I was not a vegetarian, and I didn't know how to cook.
But he hired me.
Within the first month, I realized that I loved working with my hands and putting together dishes and mixing salads and placing things on the plate.
I remember thinking "I know what I wanna do when I grow up.
I wanna be a cook.
" It really just felt right.
Hey, you guys meatballs! - You need more sauce in here.
- I'll fix it.
Okay? Thanks.
Who are you working with back here tonight? I just had to yell at them for their meatball sauce.
You know, that is my biggest pet peeve.
- Broken, or - No, no, no.
Either they let it reduce too much or it gets so thick it turns into meat sauce.
- It's too thick, is it? Okay.
- Yeah, okay.
Right? Behind you.
- Thanks.
- Mmm-hmm.
After cooking school in Europe, I came back to Los Angeles.
So good, Dahlia! And my parents took me to Michael's restaurant in Santa Monica.
- Okay, boss, how's everything tonight? - Great.
It was the restaurant in Los Angeles, at that moment, that was getting all the attention.
Jonathan Waxman was the chef.
And I loved the food there.
So I knew I wanted to be there.
Is she new? I went into the kitchen.
I asked for the chef.
Hi, we haven't met yet.
Nancy.
And I told him I would be honored to work in his kitchen.
He let me know that he needed someone to be in the pastry department.
I did not want to be in the pastry department, but I saw this as an opportunity, and I thought it was probably just a matter of time before I would be at the stoves.
Coming through, Jacopo.
Coming through.
So I took the job.
When I was learning pastries in cooking school, they taught me that there was no flexibility and pastry making was so exact.
But at Michael's, I realized that there are certain basic principles, but within those parameters there's so much room for creativity.
It was completely liberating.
After that, I couldn't think about anything other than making pastries.
And I think that's when I really first recognized that feeling of being obsessed.
Hey, guys.
Hey, is that the culatello? - Yeah.
- Oh, wow.
Let me try it.
- So it's how old? - Seventeen months.
Seventeen? Gettin' old.
Excellent.
Really good.
Oh, so good.
There's a little funk on there, which I like, but this is also really delicious.
The last one we had was 20 months, and that had way more funk on it.
You can taste the Lambrusco.
It comes through.
I like this one a lot better than the last one.
This one's more balanced.
When we were in Antica Corte Pallavicina and Zibello, those were up to 36 months and 27 months.
- Yeah.
- This one's only 17.
Well, I think it's a perfect age.
- Okay, I'll see you later.
- Okay.
See you.
In 1982, Wolfgang Puck was preparing to open Spago.
My boyfriend at the time was Mark Peel.
He had worked previously with Wolfgang, and Wolfgang had approached him to be the chef.
But when Wolfgang contacted me and said, "Will you be the pastry chef at Spago?" I was very, very reluctant.
I wasn't sure I was ready to run the pastry department.
But Mark convinced me that I should take this job.
So we left Michael's restaurant to open up Spago with Wolfgang.
That step was a game changer.
A few months after we opened, Spago was the most popular restaurant in Los Angeles.
We were doing 300 dinners a night.
And lots of people are writing about it.
They write about Wolfgang as the chef, and they write about me as the pastry chef.
I was becoming confident in my dessert making.
It was more difficult for Mark because he was in Wolfgang's shadow, and so, was getting no attention.
One of my jobs at Spago was to help Wolfgang make bread.
At that time everybody was using a packaged mix.
All you had to do was add water and bake it.
People loved it, but there was just something about that process.
It wasn't me.
These are from today.
We gotta take a look at 'em and see what you like.
- Okay, wait, look at - What do you wanna start with? So there's maple with ginger and no ginger.
- So let's start there.
- Okay, let's try those.
Yeah, that's ugh! I don't like it.
It's so soggy.
- All right.
Moving on.
- Okay.
- How's that? - Yeah, it's That This one's much better without the ginger.
Plus, the color That makes me think maple, and this doesn't.
- Well No.
- Really? What? - Does it taste like molasses? - With the brown sugar.
- Yeah, molasses.
- But not a lot.
Yeah.
I understand that, but this isn't the answer.
- You don't like this? - No, neither.
- I mean, it's better than this.
- Yeah.
For sure.
No, but they're not They're not ready at all.
- All right.
- Now this is the spicy candy walnuts.
- It's spicy.
Is it good with the spice? - It's really good.
- Okay, this is it.
- Yeah, this is it.
Okay, well, we got one good one down.
- Okay.
- There we are, one.
After a few years at Spago, Mark and I decided to get married and start a family.
But there was no honeymoon period.
We kept completely different hours.
He worked at night.
I worked mainly in the day.
So we weren't together that often.
My daughter was born on a Thursday, my day off.
And I was back at work on Tuesday.
It was very, very difficult.
We wanted to get away.
There was something that was pulling me to Italy.
So we decided to rent a house for a month.
That summer, it really was relaxing and joyful.
There was just something about the vibe there that I loved.
It really just felt like home.
We were eating at little bakeries.
And buying produce at local markets.
We were cooking very simply, but we were cooking very fresh.
And we realized that the kind of food that we both liked to cook relies very heavily on fresh ingredients.
And so, we decided that we needed to open our own restaurant.
Being able to coax a flavor out of an ingredient without hiding it, is something that was really defined on that trip for me.
In 1987-'88 Mark and I started looking for a location for a future restaurant.
And realizing that it would be a great addition if I could find a space that was large enough to have a bakery also.
We found a location that we both really liked.
It was this great, crazy building with a metal tower and a big star on top.
And then we actually moved in upstairs from the restaurant.
We wanted to give it an Italian name.
Campanile has two meanings.
It means "bell tower," but it's also "the meeting place.
" So you would say, "I'll meet you at the campanile.
" So it felt like the right name.
And we started collaborating on the menu.
When Campanile opened, it was almost a shock through the food system of LA.
They had great Italian dishes that nobody had really ever seen before.
We lived above my parents' restaurant in this very small apartment.
And my dad, you know, was behind the grill every single night.
My mom was, you know, running pastry.
My brother and I would Rollerblade inside the apartment and get in a lot of trouble, 'cause you could hear it downstairs in the dining room.
It felt like Campanile was our house.
There was a period where I would eat at the counter at Campanile three times a week.
There would always be desserts.
She used herbs to make the flavors, especially with things like chocolate and, uh, fruit tarts, just soar.
Besides running that fantastic dessert program, Nancy came up with the Grilled Cheese Night and people would show up on Thursday nights.
She would be behind the bar making sandwiches, and everybody would be around her.
That put her in kind of a cult status.
Like, people are, "Have you been to the Grilled Cheese Night on Thursdays?" And they're like, "What? How do you get in?" "You gotta kinda know Nancy," 'cause they were turning people away at this bar.
I mean, it was just, like, a bar attached to the place.
Her husband was the best grill chef in California.
But her aesthetic was always very important to the restaurant.
And I think that she was probably the more ambitious of the two.
Dragan! We've been waiting for you.
Why is it so stuffed today? - I got a lot of stuff! See? - Wow! - We have some cranberries.
- What do you have now? - What else? - Yeah, just cranberry today.
- Still cranberry? - Yeah.
When are flageolet? - We have some dry flageolet.
- No, fresh.
- No, I know.
- What about our Jimmy Nardello? - I'd say for probably another month.
- Another month? What about baby chicories? Just still - We have - Wait, just radicchio, or some - Yeah, just baby radicchio.
- No castelfranco? No.
Do you have better ones that you're hiding for Bestia? - Here.
- Is that, uh Oh, I love Persian mulberries.
Hey, did you by any chance get wiser on the small cantaloupe? This is a different variety.
This is called rocky sweet.
Okay.
- It's good.
- Good.
Mmm, delicious.
- Isn't that the one that I - It's delicious! Here are some really nice squash blossoms.
Oh, great.
Spinach for Estidio, okay? - You have baby kale? - Yeah.
And what about Pinkerton? Do you have any Pinkerton? We do I only have surprise avocado today.
Can I taste the Sungold? I mean, no What? Let me see more than three leaves.
- What about haricot vert? - We have some haricot vert.
- How much are they a pound? - They are five a pound.
Four a pound.
You were late today.
When Nancy Silverton first started thinking about bread, American bread was pre-sliced in a plastic bag, and had a two-week shelf life.
But traveling in Europe and understanding the fantastic bread, Nancy started to get the idea of making this happen.
For years, people had been saying we can't make the European-style bread in America, because we don't have the flour, we don't have the water.
But I had been to a little bakery called Acme in Berkeley, and having that bread, I knew that it could be done.
So I set out to make my first loaf, which was going to be a baguette.
The first step was to grow my own starter.
The starter allows the bread to rise and ferment.
I had half a dozen five-gallon plastic buckets going.
Then I started testing my bread recipes.
With a little bit of this, and a little bit of that.
My first loaves of bread were all so heavy, and so dense, and the color was so off.
It was exciting and it was deflating.
I didn't know where to go.
You know, it's like, "Okay, well, should I add less water, more starter, hold back on the salt?" My kids lived upstairs from the restaurant, and so I could run downstairs, stick a load of bread in the oven, run upstairs, finish the story.
It allowed me the time I needed to work.
I used to get up at midnight, bake all night come back home at 8:00.
It wasn't easy.
There were some rough hours in there.
But finally, I realized that it's not something that you can control, but you can kind of guide it in the direction that you want.
And I didn't stop until I got a baguette that I said "I like this baguette.
" And La Brea Bakery was born! Hello, I'm Julia Child.
Welcome to my house.
What fun we're gonna have! Julia Child, to me, was one of the most important figures in American cooking.
Right here, in my own kitchen.
Nancy Silverton, owner of La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles, bakes a crème fraîche brioche tart with fresh fruit.
They called me, and they asked me to come into Julia's kitchen and bake with her.
The only difficulty was that the counter was so much higher because of her height.
So we're gonna transfer our brioche to a nice, clean, lightly oiled bowl.
Anyway, I'm making a brioche tart.
Everything is going well.
And the tart is gonna be finished with this sautéed stone fruit that was in a very, very hot wine syrup.
So I quickly spoon on some zabaione.
I cut a piece, and I give it to her, and I look at her.
And she looks at me, and I can see these tears streaming down her eyes.
And I thought, "I just burned Julia Child.
" It's a dessert to cry over! Literally! You are just so good! - Thank you! - You're welcome! - That's a triumph.
- Thank you.
To have Julia Child say, "This is a delicious dessert," I was just That's probably the most flattering thing someone's ever said to me.
And I'll never forget that moment for the rest of my life.
- But you get a really distinct rye.
- Yeah.
I still have It's unfortunate we still have to remind people that, uh, this is what rye bread's like.
- Right, yeah.
- Not the caraway version.
But you know what? But I think that, you know I remember the the earlier comments when, um, I first opened La Brea Bakery.
I remember one saying, you know.
Some old lady coming in and saying, "You know, your bread is dirty.
" Looking at, like, you know, the flour pattern that's left from the, uh, rising, uh the proofing baskets.
But then the other complaint I got was, "Your bread is too holey.
" Now, of course, that's what I really wanted.
And all the peanut butter, you know, falls through.
Remember? Within that first year of being open, La Brea Bakery was just exploding.
It was such a huge success that people would line up for hours to buy the bread.
It was perceived as, like, a Tiffany Box, bringing it to someone's house.
It was, "Wow, you got Nancy Silverton's loaves.
" This is before allocation was, like, a hip thing in the food business.
It was just, you couldn't get it.
You remember the haunting flavor of Nancy's toasted bread for a lifetime.
It's a loaf of integrity.
Just astonishingly good.
You cut into it and the strands of gluten are just gorgeous.
It's almost like you're going into some, like, you know, ice cave or something.
Right away, we started selling out of bread very early in the day.
By 1:00 in the afternoon, our open sign was turned to closed.
Just a very exciting time.
I mixed, I shaped, and I baked every single loaf of bread.
But I didn't have a lot of room to do it.
We had to expand.
So we moved to a larger facility in Van Nuys.
The batches of bread were much larger.
I couldn't mix all those batches of dough by myself.
I certainly couldn't bake it all.
I had to give up a lot of control over the baking process.
But that was difficult for me.
Going from these small buckets of starter to seeing these machines take over It's overwhelming.
I slowly realized that all the joy and the satisfaction I got was not counting the money at the end of the day.
It was me mixing, shaping, and baking every loaf.
And once it was no longer gonna be me it may as well be somebody else's.
So we decided to sell it.
Excuse me, I'm Nancy.
- Hi, Nancy! - Hi! It's so delicious.
- Oh, thank you.
- Everything was great.
Everything was excellent.
Thanks for having us.
Not too spicy? No, I don't think so at all.
- Great.
- Yeah.
So how's your liver? Did you try some? Customers come to me at the restaurant, and they say, "That pasta dish was so good.
" And I'll say, "Liz did such a great job on it.
" And they don't wanna hear it.
People think that everything that's done in the kitchen is done by myself.
But it's not.
I feel like I'm living a lie.
My comfort zone is touching food and being able to put it together, and then offer it.
If I'm not making something myself then I feel really embarrassed accepting the compliments.
And so, I don't feel comfortable being put on on a pedestal.
Behind.
- Now, that's a great one.
- Thank you.
Let's see Wow, look at that.
Beautiful.
Hmm, do you need a plate? Yeah, I have to let it cool off a little.
Oh, yeah, look at it.
It looks great.
- Tell Nemo good job! - I'll tell him.
- Good? - Perfect.
It got the thumbs up.
Really good.
Great.
- That's pretty awesome.
- Wow! It's an Italian quesadilla.
By 2004-2005, my marriage was falling apart.
Being a parent is hard enough, and being a partner in a business is also very hard.
There was a lot of tension, and it wasn't good for the people around us.
I used to say, you know, "This is pretty great that here's someone that is confident enough that sees me getting all this attention, but it doesn't bother him.
" But I'm not sure how accurate that was.
I think that there was resentment from the beginning.
We made the choice to get divorced.
I wasn't ready to leave Campanile emotionally.
I mean, I had put so much into it.
But I was not the executive chef there, Mark was.
And one of us had to go.
So I left the restaurant.
I had no idea what to do.
So I went back to Italy.
It was not a loss of my relationship that was difficult for me.
It was the loss of Campanile.
It was the first time since I was 21 years old that I had not worked consistently.
I was alone.
I took a step back from cooking.
I just thought, "How am I going to rebuild what I lost?" That summer, I'd spent time traveling and eating in the countryside.
One day, I ran into a friend of mine, Jeremiah Tower.
I said, "Why don't you come over for lunch?" I wanted to make something that was simple enough that I wasn't chained to the kitchen.
And I had bought a few varieties of fresh mozzarella.
And I spent a few hours coming up with all sorts of little condiments that would complement the cheese.
As we were visiting, he said, "You know, there's a place in Rome I just went to.
You gotta check it out! It's called Obica.
I think you'd like it.
" So I went to see Obica.
When I walked in and sat down at the counter, someone behind that was doing all sorts of different things with different types of mozzarella.
It was like the experience of making sushi, but using cheese as the canvas.
I immediately knew that this was what I wanted to do.
I wanted that little counter that I would work behind, and that everything that I was doing was something that I made myself just like when I started La Brea Bakery.
But this time, my obsession became cheese.
And when I came back to Los Angeles, we opened Osteria Mozza which turned into three different restaurants, each one a showcase of a little bit of Nancy.
But my space is the mozzarella bar.
I get the best of both worlds.
I get to socialize, but I also get to create.
There's something great about the mozzarella bar and her place in it.
I don't think Nancy is ever happier than when she's surrounded by a dozen of her friends and food that she's made is on the table and everybody's drinking red wine.
Have you had the chopped salad before? Nancy has become the goddess of the delicious.
She probably doesn't think of herself in the pantheon of great chefs.
I don't think she sees it as a competition anyway.
Like, she doesn't really care.
She's not here to win.
She's here to express her inner being.
Several years ago, I was nominated for a James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef.
I went to the ceremony, and it's announced that I won.
And walking up and seeing Jonathan Waxman my mentor, in the audience, made me feel very, very uncomfortable.
What I really wanted to say is, "Why am I here, and not Jonathan?" I'm not one of those kinds of chefs.
I am not imaginative I'm not technical, and I'm not doing anything new.
I take dishes that have already been done and I personalize them.
I'm on the schedule, just like everybody else.
And I show up and I do my job.
When people come in at night and they see me, they say, "I can't believe you're still working.
You're 62.
When is this gonna stop?" And, uh, that would be never.