Chef's Table (2015) s04e04 Episode Script

When I was in Paris for pastry school, they were pretty clear this was a bad career choice.
They were like, "Just leave now.
Don't even finish.
Even as a hobby, probably not a good idea.
" I had the same experience in Spain.
And it was really hard.
I mean, the guy I worked with would say, "This is terrible, you're terrible.
" Like, everything was so bad.
Someone's screaming at you all day long, every hour, every minute, constantly, 18 hours a day.
In another language.
There's only so many times you can hear you're the worst and not at least have it in your mind that maybe everyone's right.
And that continued for years, so it wasn't, like, a fluke.
That theme would keep coming up.
Can I have some ice cream, please? Whiskey, let's go, right away.
Window.
- Will, what's that? - Uh, roasted watermelon.
- Oh! - Wow! The curse of the pastry chef is always having to follow someone else.
The concept of the dessert-only restaurant, that's a pastry chef's dream.
Dessert first.
You know, who wouldn't want to do that? Sauce, window.
Coconut, vinegar, and milk jam, please.
So, this guy arrives on the scene in New York.
Will Goldfarb, right? You hear he's making all these crazy desserts.
Something in a syringe based on the movie Trainspotting.
A dessert named after the Wu-Tang Clan.
It's like magic.
All of a sudden, dessert's the main event.
What Will did is bring in this new era of avant-gardism.
He proved that dessert could be fascinating and intellectual, and reference art and music and film.
Will elevated pastry to this greater cultural moment.
I mean, he was the first pastry chef to be profiled in The New Yorker.
Room 4 Dessert was interesting, was vital.
And it kinda felt for a while like you had to be there.
It was the Studio 54 of desserts.
And then, he's gone.
Where is Will Goldfarb? Can I have this? Two pieces.
How much? This one? Yes.
Yeah.
I love this.
Here, 5,000.
He speaks Indonesian! When I go back to New York, I feel people are really unhappy and disappointed with not doing things that they care about.
How much? - One thousand.
- One thousand? It's rarely possible in a high-paced, high-profile, high-pressure environment to reflect on what you're doing.
Bali has a great way of cutting through that bullshit.
You're very alive when you're here, and very engaged.
You're hot, sweaty.
You crash your bike.
Things are loud.
And it forces you to pay attention to what you're doing.
In New York, I was burned out and I was miserable.
I walked away from my house.
I walked away from my career.
I walked away from everything.
What Bali has given me for sure is the space and time to figure things out.
For a chef not to be able to get fresh fish would be considered ridiculous.
But for a pastry chef to get fresh chocolate would never even be a thing.
For pastry chefs, it's considered standard that you get what comes out of the box.
I think the best thing about Bali is that everything's fresh in a way that it really just isn't anywhere else.
Coffee, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon.
As a pastry chef, it's one of the most amazing places in the world.
To me, when people think about dessert, it's always chocolate.
Chocolate is the emblem of dessert.
Chocobubbles is a dessert, one of the first things I ever made.
It was just hot chocolate mousse.
Now, we have a good version of it with better ingredients.
Crushed cookies.
We do an emulsion of lime and honey and olive oil.
And then a hot chocolate mousse.
The beautiful thing here is that all these products are fresh.
The idea of making a warm chocolate mousse with chocolate out of a package, which was standard for me for almost 20 years, is now ridiculous.
If you don't want chocolate fresh for you, probably shouldn't be a pastry chef.
I grew up in Long Island.
It's about 30 minutes from New York.
We had the normal suburb life.
If you did well in high school, you could go to a good college.
And so, I worked a lot.
I studied a lot.
By the time I got to my senior year of college, I was pretty burned out.
I went to Paris to do pastry as an excuse to not start law school right away.
When I got there, I started working with Gérard Mulot.
He was the ultimate gentleman.
Not pretentious at all.
He worked every station in his own kitchen.
Took every phone call, put every box away.
Just did everything.
Mulot's food was really amazing.
It was very civilized.
It was very delicious.
The baguette was the best-tasting.
The croissants were perfect.
The vanilla ice cream was perfect.
Really proper pastry.
No bullshit.
I loved it.
At that point, pastry pretty much had its teeth in me.
It was a really good adventure.
It felt more like it was at the beginning than the end.
In 1998, El Bulli was the new best restaurant in the world.
It was the first year they'd gotten three stars.
It was just so obviously the next generation of cooking.
I knew I had to work there.
I faxed my CV to El Bulli.
Like, a handwritten CV.
And I was rejected.
I have no problem just asking until I get something.
I just assume eventually people will get tired of saying no.
I figured I could get a job by going.
So I went.
This time they were like, "Well, we're full.
" At the time, I was working in Florence for only housing and food.
And then one day immigration shows up, and I was immigrant labor.
So we hid in the office.
I'm literally under the desk, like very '60s private eye.
I was like, "Where am I gonna go now?" I was next to the phone, and I figured I should call the first choice, right? So I called El Bulli, and I think they thought I wanted to make a booking.
And it was like, "We can't take a booking.
We're closed for winter.
" I was like, "No, I wanna come.
I wanna work.
" And they were like, "Sure.
How long you wanna come for? The full year or the half?" I was like, "The full year is fine.
" And that was it.
It was, like, the most nonchalant, two-year wait for a under-the-table phone call, while hiding from the authorities, to get into the best restaurant in the world.
Getting that invitation made me feel I belonged at the big dance.
- I don't want you to fall.
- It's okay.
- There you go.
- I've had worse.
Not since yesterday.
There you go.
You can do this.
- Can I go here? - Yes.
- How many can I take? - Take a few.
- Here? - We need that.
- Yeah? - Bring mother's milk, yes.
Thank you.
- Enough? - Yes, wonderful.
Here.
There's about 5,000 years of oral and written history of the world's most advanced civilizations taking care of each other with food.
Ah, there, we got a whole bunch here.
All right.
So, this is lemongrass.
Beautiful.
If you're interested in food history, it's impossible to separate it from food as medicine.
Here in Bali, traditional remedies are very much still a way of life.
Let's make it sweet.
The most commonly known one would be jamu kunyit, or yellow jamu.
Thank you, dear.
To hundreds of millions of Indonesians, jamu is just a part of waking up.
I drink jamu in the morning when I have coconut water and coffee.
Making medicinal herbs a feature part of a dessert menu is certainly novel.
But it seemed like a really good fit.
- Cheers.
- Cheers.
When we did our last menu, we were trying to do essentially a tiramisu, but a vinegar base.
We'd use coffee grounds to make the tuiles, and we'd add our own vinegar from coconut water.
Little milk jam with palm sugar.
Stuff that grows around the restaurant.
But it was very boring.
So we had to reverse engineer the interesting part.
We thought if I drank jamu, coconut water, and coffee in the morning, the only thing that that dish didn't have was the jamu.
That must be the missing piece.
So we took jamu, tamarind, turmeric, honey, and lime and then brushed the plate with it.
You pick up a lot of nuances in the coffee and the vinegar from those accents.
It's the equivalent of focusing a camera.
When one thing brings the rest of the flavors into focus.
The chayote looks perfect.
Like, couldn't be better.
Flavor is excellent.
Did you crank up the oil from last time? Yes.
The ice cream is excellent, it's just unclear what it is.
It's not obviously sorghum to me.
So we have to figure out how to get more flavor in there, right? When I got to Spain, I was told I was gonna be working with Albert Adrià.
Albert was behind a lot of the amazing things that came out of El Bulli.
It was like he created a new genre.
Not just for pastry, but for restaurants.
The food was so obviously new and deep and thoughtful.
You knew you were somewhere special.
I remember walking down the street with Albert, looking at a cloud, being like, "I wanna make that cloud.
" And he did do that.
That's a very, very different way of looking at things.
Everything was new.
It's mesmerizing to be in a place like that.
When you work somewhere like that, you think you're special.
You're the center of the universe.
Your confidence is high.
After that, for me, the new minimum standard was to try to be the best in the world.
In the early 2000s, New York was pretty much still the '80s.
French food was still revered.
A great dessert was a soufflé.
Will comes back from working in the kitchen of El Bulli and wanted to bring in this new era of avant-gardism and say cooking can be about more than you think it can be.
When I got back to New York, I was coming from the best restaurant in the world.
Everyone wanted me to work for them.
I was a hot commodity.
I got a job with a chef named Paul Liebrandt, who was the bad boy of New York at the moment.
He had a place called Papillon.
I had a very clear agenda of what I wanted to do there.
Doing interactive stuff was considered, by me, to be the next frontier.
We had syringes, a lot of sensory deprivation.
Blindfolding, darkness.
I think we had some handcuffs in there.
And then the really edgy shit was, like, onion juice ice cubes.
Things that are just straight-up indisputably just not delicious.
It was about being provocative.
And we had a couple of busy nights, but just no one came.
It was an experimental catastrophe.
The owners were sure the direction wasn't the right way to go.
And then I got fired.
Will was doing the mad scientist version of desserts.
But what was popular was very upscale grandma food.
People in that era definitely weren't doing something unless it tasted good.
Meringue is the fundamental structural underpinning of pastry.
And it's only two things: egg white and sugar.
Everyone loves meringue.
It's awesome.
The problem is it's just sweet.
It's just not edible.
If you can imagine that, in a history of meringue-making, the idea of a less sweet meringue, it just didn't exist.
And that's a problem that I thought we were qualified to start thinking about.
When I first got to Bali, I was obsessed with this incredible natural product which is palm sugar.
It's a renewable source of sugar.
When you eat it, it has umami or savoriness that's more dominant to me than sweet.
So I had this idea of using palm sugar to make a "less sweet" meringue.
We spent about a year experimenting on this meringue.
And we did thousands of tests.
The final meringue is precise.
It's not sweet, it's delicious, it's stable.
It merits its place at the table.
The meringue is a classic piece of pastry.
It's always been made a certain way.
Will Goldfarb says, "I'm gonna change the ratios.
I'm gonna do it how it needs to be done here.
" It's a way of saying that the meringue doesn't belong to this French culinary tradition anymore.
It belongs to this new Indonesian pastry tradition.
I thought it was important to have at least one meringue that had some foundation in Bali.
So it's not named after me or the restaurant.
It's named after the place the sugar comes from.
Balinese Meringue.
In 2004, I was working at Cru, which was a really ambitious restaurant.
And I knew that I needed to play it safe.
I basically took all of that edgy shit out.
And then one day, I was sitting with Roy Welland, who was the owner.
He said, "Go for it.
Be yourself.
What's the worst that could happen?" I had this idea for a dish.
We called it "Day at the Beach.
" The general idea was that a dessert could transport you to a particular moment.
We use the saffron syrup.
The golden color kind of gives off the illusion of warmth.
The refreshing mist of the ocean became salt water in a spray.
And then there was the props and the beach towel.
We did a pastry cream soda with crispy ham.
A grapefruit gel with beer.
It had iconic imagery.
It's interactive.
It shows the technical advance, which was this idea of carbonating fat.
I was sure it would speak for itself.
The critical reaction was New York Post said hiring me was the worst decision in New York that year.
When you get reviews like that, you've got no credibility.
It doesn't just undercut your cooking, it undercuts everything you say you believe in.
I knew I was getting fired.
And I knew why I was getting fired.
Yeah, it was bad.
It was very hard to maintain any kind of confidence when everyone tells you always how terrible you are.
Hey, gorgeous.
She's so great.
By 2005, I was tired.
And it was really hard, being universally panned and repeatedly fired.
My wife was supporting us.
I was taking care of our daughter who was three months old.
And then there was an ad in Craigslist for a new dessert bar.
It's the movie moment, right? So I went to meet the guys.
And they gave me an amazing offer.
I was terrified about what would happen.
I was coming off a string of failures and departures and bad reviews.
I was toxic.
I thought there was no way it was gonna work.
So I turned it down.
My wife was like, "You're crazy.
You have to take the job.
" She was like, "It's a chance to have your own place.
That's what you want.
That's what you've been waiting for.
That's the only way you'll ever be able to do what you want.
" So I went for it, but I was terrified of the response.
Will opened Room 4 Dessert, a restaurant that didn't serve any food besides pastry.
People were going there like it was a meal.
They'd eat dinner at home and go to Room 4 Dessert and sit there and have a dessert tasting menu.
All of a sudden, dessert's the main attraction.
Opening a 20-seat dessert-tasting counter-restaurant in Lower Manhattan, that's a different sport.
You were in the kitchen with us.
There was no back of house.
I was doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets and cooking.
We were there busting our ass in front of you.
Cooking for 150 people.
You're watching us sweat.
This wasn't some abstract high-art thing.
This was a bunch of dudes in New York getting the food in front of you and really caring about your happiness.
We'd had an inkling that we'd be reviewed.
I just figured it would be awful.
When I saw the review, it took me by surprise.
I was crying.
A decent review? That's the first one I ever had.
I was totally in tears.
It was unbelievable.
And then, the New Yorker article came out, and that put us into the "You're not a restaurant, you're a cultural activity.
" And different people started coming.
And more of them.
A lot more.
All of a sudden, cars are picking me up to go places and I'm getting flown around the world.
I was on stage every night.
We expected to be in the paper every day.
We had a Pastry Art & Design top ten in America.
Got nominated for a James Beard award.
It felt like I was back with the big boys, but I wasn't an apprentice, I was on stage.
I mean, it was only 12 months before that I was unemployable.
It was intoxicating.
I became absorbed in my own importance.
Where's that bowl to cover my small batch? Two recipes, please.
Let's go.
Dying right now, on the fire, I've got nothing to cook.
The guys that I opened with and I had sort of gotten to the point where Neither one of us was handling the attention I was getting very well.
So they just decided to close the restaurant.
I found out and I was like I couldn't believe it.
It was a pretty massive blow to lose my place.
That was like being punched in the stomach.
I don't think I had any emotion left at that point.
I just went for shutdown.
I think that was easier.
Will was heartbroken.
For all the history of failures, there is a person in all of that who wants to be embraced by people who appreciate his talent.
It's a dream to open your own place in New York City, doing what you want to do by your own terms.
Making your own rules, forging a new path.
That comes to an end, it doesn't feel good.
My wife decided that it was time to get out of New York.
I was done.
Bali just seemed like Well, it's pretty severe as "exit stage left" goes.
By the time I got to Bali, I'd been pretty softened up with reality.
And I was like, "I'm here, but I haven't cooked for a while.
I'm sort of miserable.
The world is united against me.
" And I had much less money and ambition.
When I decided to get into the kitchen, no one there knew anything about me.
No one reads The New York Times in Seminyak.
Being somewhere new, where no one gives a shit what you're doing, is very humbling, and it forces you to reduce your self-centeredness, just deal with things the way they are.
Cooking outside of the confines of the competitive New York City dining world, that changes, I think, everything.
He started to relearn himself, concentrate on his life and his craft.
That got me out of the cycle of New York bullshit.
And that gave me the space and time to learn how to work with the ingredients that were here.
All the building blocks of delicious desserts are there.
Chocolate's there, nutmeg is there, coconut is there, palm sugar is there.
Getting it fresh in a way you can't get it anywhere else.
At that point, I felt like, for me and Room 4 Dessert, there was unfinished business.
I wanted to be at peace and do it right.
I was ready to try again.
We'd found this little place outside of Ubud with zero foot traffic.
We really poured our heart and soul into it.
When we opened, we had a ceremony to purify the place from the bad spirits.
It seemed like the beginning of a new adventure.
And it definitely felt like rising from the ashes.
I couldn't believe it.
At that point, I was like, "All right, let's cook.
" When somebody shows that they can be successful living what seems like a fantasy, people reevaluate what they want their reality to be.
"Oh, fuck.
Bali, I should do that.
What does this guy know that I don't? Can I start a restaurant in Bali? Can I escape? Can I go to paradise?" Will has been a provocateur, and as a chef you're constantly battling your own ego and your own insecurities.
But with a little bit of maturity, you can overcome those insecurities because you've transcended your own ego.
Moving to Bali was really a chance to restart and build from the ground up.
Now, I think it's much more charming to take care of actual people than to make something in an abstract vacuum for your own ego.
It's easy to lose sight of that when you're very self-centered.
There's a calm about Will now.
He knows who he is, what makes him happy.
Nothing's in a syringe anymore.
What he's doing now is much more serene, and it's because he is.
I'm just so happy now, and I think of it as lucky that I fucked it up then because otherwise I'd be struggling in New York instead of here.