The Mind of a Chef (2012) s04e06 Episode Script
Hustle
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Looking good.
Can you put more butter on that, please? Yes.
Surviving the restaurant game for 15 years in New York City takes some major hustle.
I'm really going to deliver right now.
From lying about her age to get her first dishwasher gig, to getting busted and charged with grand larceny, hustling ended up being the easy part of running a restaurant for Gabrielle Hamilton.
Step aside.
That is perfect.
It was competitive and surviving, I need to be the best thing in this room.
Solo huevos.
Yes, huevos.
Are you ready, because I have it.
I can take it.
Enter the Mind of a Chef.
It's so good to be classic and not trendy.
Oh man, we are making some food here now.
I was definitely ready to come here.
This was the big city for us from where I grew up, even though we were closer to Philly.
My dad worked here, so it was a familiar city.
I'd been coming here a lot.
There's that palpable energy that is only here.
The intensity of how many people are living here on top of each other.
Ten minutes outside of this town and everything is ten minutes less uptight and lesser quality, also.
That uptightness and that quality go hand in hand.
If you happen to be bent that way, this is the place to come.
You got to be good here.
It's a little overwhelming, but you want to get in that game.
It's this big Double Dutch jump rope and you're like, "Yeah, let me in, let me in.
" What was I thinking to open this restaurant in New York City? Honestly, I didn't know.
I was not in the restaurant world and I wasn't paying attention.
I was completely naive.
I didn't have any understanding that there was a big, competitive world.
I was not reading the restaurant reviews in the New York Times.
I didn't know about it.
To be in the East Village, which in 1999 was still very edgy, gritty, empty, graffitied, methadone clinic part of town.
And I somehow thought no one would notice.
Yeah, just open up that Olympic swimming pool and jump right in.
Did I work the first brunch? Do you think that's right? It seems right.
I worked a lot of brunch.
I know because you were freelancing and you didn't quite know where you wanted to land.
Yeah, well, I had a lot of jobs.
Right.
When we cooked the bacon beforehand, I would get there before anybody else got there.
Oh, we made you do the bacon? But you were a busser, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I was a busser.
Oh, that's nice.
And we put trays in the oven and I would pull them out and they would just be molten, scar-making hot fat bubbling, waiting to kill you.
Yeah.
Yup.
Christmas soup is the soup that's just every vegetable left in the kitchen, essentially.
It's the antidote to the artery-clogging, colon-blocking grilled cheese.
So it's great, it's perfect.
Yeah, I've recreated Christmas Eve for you.
Fa la la la la I just thought it made sense that we would have our traditional meal.
Also because we've had some routines, like Sunday breakfast, occasionally, but like things have changed.
So what do we really rely on now? Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve.
The meal that we definitely see each other.
Cheers.
So this is usually the part that I say, "Can I do anything to help you?" And you say, "No," because I'm not allowed to do anything.
Let's do it the same way.
Okay, but is there a task of which my skill set would be appropriate for help? Okay, take the spine off of those? Exactly.
Okay.
You know I'm good at repetitive tasks.
It's so funny because you are the prune.
First of all you were an investor in the very beginning.
You gave me $5,000 when I needed to raise, what, $50,000? And look where we are now.
It's given us jobs, more steady income.
How did I get $5,000? What did I do to did I just work? When I got to New York, I picked up the Village Voice every morning and pored over all of the ads.
You just take whatever you could possibly get.
You have to figure out how to make money if you're going to survive.
Stand on corners handing out flyers.
You were catering.
We were catering.
- Yeah, right.
Sold FrozFruit in a cart in Central Park.
Ushered in theaters.
Was a secretary at Judson Church.
Yeah.
Geisha work.
Where you just go and sit in the Japanese sake bar, and you're a white girl in a dress.
You just have to sit there and have a drink.
I was a consultant for the Ford Foundation.
Oh my god, scalp tickets.
Eventually, what I got was a waiter job.
That was the one that I'd probably wanted right way because I knew it would be the most money.
To me, hustle is how am I going to be true, how am I going to keep my integrity and keep my demons at bay about how am I going to take care of myself and my loved ones? I'm on the grind all the time.
I didn't know it was going to hit.
I really, really didn't know.
It has become this thing.
People stand in line for hours and hours and hours for eggs and Bloody Marys.
I really love this meal.
It's my favorite shift and it's so fun to kill it.
Bene cheese scramble, followed by Tabasco, turner on the side with two bene.
It would just be so nice to have that hung over, I'm in a rock band, I'm going to smoke my Camel-less filters and have a really good Bloody Mary and some eggs that are made in a pan and cracked to order.
Welcome to brunch.
All right, so I'm taking carbo, followed by Tabasco bene sausage.
Whoo, by noon I'm good.
I really have it down by then.
If you are behind on your prep, you are tanked.
You will never get back in.
There's no, "I'm going to run down for 20 minutes and finish the job," that's not happening.
You're standing tall when the doors are open, and if you can't get out from behind It's going to be a bad day for everyone.
New ticket, order fire a solo scrambled egg.
Scrambled.
This is my favorite station of all time.
Order fire Tabasco, with side sausage and bene.
Tabasco bene, bene for two.
I'm going to make a totally classical Hollandaise first.
Melt the butter.
The thing I want to put in are the yolks.
Squirt some lemon juice into here.
That is a beauty.
The only key to success is to make sure there's enough acid to receive all that fat.
The butter is now bubbling away, melting.
Thickening up, you can see it's gotten emulsified.
I prefer to make the sauce highly seasoned, bright with lemon, warm from the cayenne, perfectly salty.
I started brunch, frankly, to make some money.
Any time you have the space not generating dollars, especially in a place like this, we have the engine of a 65-seat restaurant with only 30 seats.
So brunch became a pretty obvious way to offset being in the hole all the time.
It's classic eggs Benedict, but to bring all of that hacker line cook, greasy spoon, speed and energy to a good pan, and a good egg and a real Hollandaise.
To make the roast individually and to cook everything à la minute.
The white is going to come up around.
Perfecto.
Okay, there's my perfectly toasted English muffin.
Butter wall to wall, as we like to say.
All righty, Canadian bacon.
You want cooked white and soft, runny yolk.
And now we're going to drench.
The Hollandaise sauce, it's pretty light, it's feathery.
Brunch is in fact the hardest shift.
No other service here is that fast with such delicate product.
The fragile egg.
Fast and finesse.
That's my gig, I'm here for you.
There were some scary, scary breath-sucking times where you're like, "Mm am I going to make it here?" I think I even loved it in the moment.
I'm going to make some grilled cheese.
What's my cheese? Cheddar.
Good, okay, fine, acceptable.
Sharp cheddar, it's one of my favorites.
What is happening with your work? You know, going back to our earlier conversation, I am not a person who believes that I don't know what's going to happen.
Okay, well I'll give you $5,000 if you ever need it.
Now we can go in the reverse.
I paid you back, right? Yeah, you paid me back.
I paid everybody back.
You were always, and still are, like so afraid of old age, and retirement and not having And poverty.
Right.
Not being able to make ends meet, and yet I know that I want to do something different with my life.
Even if it's a little different.
Huh.
Whatever you're going to do, I have the $5,000 to give you now.
Okay.
From the person who essentially lives in an apartment with her two children.
We have a corner for you here.
We can put there's a nest of rags and newspapers under the sink that you can curl in at night.
Oh, whoops.
I'm going to give you the burnt one.
Special for you, little lady.
That carbon is fiber.
Maybe we can get some of that part where it oozes out onto the griddle and makes a little cheddar potato chip.
Mm that is the best.
Oh! What burnt one? All right, I'm going to finish this soup up now.
Fa la la la la André Soltner is kind of the epitome of the working chef who was the face of his restaurant when there was no Facebook.
No television, no remuneration or glory.
He enjoyed the work.
You have a little bit of German in your French accent.
When I speak French I have a German accent.
And when you speak German you have a French accent? Yeah, well, I come from Alsace, you know.
So we are bilingual.
Yes.
So when did you come to New York? Andre Surmain, he dreamed to open a French restaurant, Lutèce.
I became chef of Lutèce.
It's famously known that you worked there for 40 years, is that correct? And you missed a remarkable few days of work in your whole lifetime.
When Lutèce was open, I missed four days.
Wow.
Lutèce, what does it mean? I'm happy to tell you, Lutèce is the first name of Paris.
It was called Lutetia.
I'm happy to tell you.
Nobody knows in France, yes.
I didn't know.
Ãle-de, the city where Notre Dame is, it's a small island, and that was Lutetia.
Incroyable! Incroyable, yeah.
So we start here.
We have to do a panade first.
It's whole milk? Whole milk, yeah.
Bring the milk to a boil.
Cook the flour.
Like a pâte à choux until it becomes white here.
It becomes very smooth.
And you're not worried about how hot it is in there? No.
Okay.
Mix that now.
Now it's cooked.
We just put it on the side.
In the meantime we do our quenelle.
So it's a freshwater fish, pike.
Yeah.
Right now the lakes are frozen, and yesterday they said to me, "No pike.
" You can use any white fish.
So you have halibut.
I have halibut, yeah.
Quenelle of pike is really a specialty of Lyon.
Love it.
Now panade has to be cold, it doesn't have to be cold, cold, cold.
Okay, so butter in.
Put the eggs.
Oh, and added white? White and we are ready to put the cream in only now.
If too early it separates.
Wow, thin.
See how smooth it is? I do.
Okay, we go to do the sauce now.
Oh, look at this puppy.
They have no blood so it's okay.
They don't feel nothing.
That's what they told me.
I'm not sure it's true, but that's what they Let's go with it.
Okay.
Now we need some butter.
I'm very interested in how a person sells their restaurant.
We had Lutèce already 34 years.
It's a long time.
Restaurant in New York, you know as well as I do, you know, it's tough.
And my wife worked with me.
We started to be a little bit burnt out, you know.
After 34 years, a little? Yeah.
We had a great time our whole life, and when we stopped, we stopped, finished.
You knew when the party was over.
We knew when the party was over.
And everybody said, "André, you're going to miss it, "you're going to miss it.
It's terrible.
Your whole life will change.
" And you know what, Gabrielle? I didn't miss it one day.
I didn't miss it.
Put a little saffron.
If you have a restaurant and work your whole life you should be a little comfortable, too.
Okay.
You've come to be the dean at a school.
Are you 80 70? I am 63.
Uh-huh.
No, no, I will be 83 in November.
Right.
But you know here at the school I'm not working.
You're lending what you know.
To tell you the truth, I really am not here for a salary, you know.
I'm here for pleasure.
Right.
With the young people here to teach them a little bit, for me it's great, you know.
Okay.
Let that cook a little bit.
I put the cream in and then cook that now for an hour and a half, at least, you know, then strain it.
And will you quenelle with your hands? With one spoon is enough.
With one spoon, okay.
Now you have to poach it very easy.
Not boiling, boiling.
And there's no vinegar, nothing in the water? Salt.
You can do bouillon if really you want to go out of your way.
Right, so you heat the spoon every time, and it releases it because the spoon is hot.
Yeah.
They start to float, and then we turn them a little bit, we shake it a little bit.
Cook it for 15 minutes.
They have to be very fluffy.
The best is pike, it's really holds the best.
Butter the plate a little bit.
You see the sauce, Gabrielle? I do.
It's beautiful.
You see, they start to swim now.
Oh, they are light as clouds.
Wow.
Okay, they are ready.
Now we put the sauce on, put it in the oven, and then it blows.
You mean inflate or Yeah, you will see.
When you cook, you cook for other people, you know.
With pleasure.
If you don't like the people, you cannot cook good.
But that's interesting.
It's not just the act of cooking.
No, you want to give pleasure to others, no? Yeah, you have to enjoy the work.
They have taken in some of the sauce.
Yeah.
Mm Mm! It is a good dish, you know.
It's a good dish.
And it's easy to do.
That was beautiful, thank you.
We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas Mm perfect food.
I would love to taste my Christmas soup.
And it is now ready.
I love this soup and it is the perfect antidote to grilled cheese.
It's very hot, so blow on it.
Okay.
Mm awesome.
It is pretty.
Well, it's drab, but I still think it's appealing.
Simple tastes.
I have a lot of fondness for things that are not ostensibly good looking.
I can extrapolate for many years on that, but I'm going to let that one go.
She's plain, but good-hearted.
I love her.
Mm Yeah, it's good, right? Yeah.
I do feel my general state of anxiety about being homeless, or not having enough money or failing, is somewhat lessened by the fact that I do know that you would always feed me.
You can always count on me.
I can always count on you for a burnt grilled cheese.
I'm much better at the restaurant.
If you've made it this far, right? If you've had the 15 gazillion jobs, if you're doing the thing that you want to be doing that brings you happiness, that is an outlet for your self-expression, and then you get to do this other stuff with some integrity.
Yeah, everything's a-okay.
Yeah, then it's all gravy.
I just need to make some more money.
I'm going to hustle.
I'm going to take on another job.
Yeah, I have a feeling.
So what are you going to do to make the money? I don't know, I got to figure it out.
What's the can I write very good books? I don't know the answer to that.
But you need to ask your colleagues in publishing.
Right.
Stuff happened, you do one thing, you open a restaurant that people loved.
Then you wrote a book that was completely awesome.
So beautiful.
Then people start offering you things.
That's right.
And opportunities start occurring.
The same thing happened with me in the sense, except I didn't open a restaurant that was awesome.
This has happened to all of us to one extent or another.
I just want to know.
I want to capital "K" know everything that there is.
You know, you had to take your apron off at some point and make the transition from Line cook.
To entrepreneur.
Right.
We all make a lot of plans about starting.
Imagine your first restaurant, and you plan it out and not a lot of us start to think about getting the hell out.
Is it even possible to jump into anything anymore at my age? I'm that stupid that I think, "Yeah, sure, I'll give it a try.
" I'll go talk to a group of people, or I'll do an event at a grocery store or I'll open something that may seem slightly incongruous.
And then I find out, well, does that really make me happy? Does this work for me? And then you weed out the stuff and you augment the ones that you like.
Is there a riskier, stupider thing than opening a restaurant? So you already did that, so doing risky, stupid things, taking that leap Taking that jump.
Taking that leap of faith, jumping into the void, doing something that all of received wisdom tells you is probably really a bad idea, you already did that.
You know, Prune restaurant is the tap and faucet to everything good that has ever come from me.
I must tithe to it, and polish it and be loyal.
You can't go too far away.
I'm going to keep going.
I'm going to try some things that I've never done before, and I'm going to let myself get hurt.
I'm going to die trying.
You paid your dues.
You know what, there's nothing noble about dying on the line.
I agree.
About standing there behind the line at 45 years old.
And anybody who says that you're not keeping it real definitely never worked in a kitchen before.
On the line.
Anybody who worked the line, and I'm sure you've heard this, "Good for you, you got out.
" Yeah, it's a hustle, right? The funny thing, though, is that it works out.
You just have to hang in.
You have to hang in long enough, and be scrappy enough and resourceful enough and it starts to yield.
And then you're addicted.
Support your PBS station.
Looking good.
Can you put more butter on that, please? Yes.
Surviving the restaurant game for 15 years in New York City takes some major hustle.
I'm really going to deliver right now.
From lying about her age to get her first dishwasher gig, to getting busted and charged with grand larceny, hustling ended up being the easy part of running a restaurant for Gabrielle Hamilton.
Step aside.
That is perfect.
It was competitive and surviving, I need to be the best thing in this room.
Solo huevos.
Yes, huevos.
Are you ready, because I have it.
I can take it.
Enter the Mind of a Chef.
It's so good to be classic and not trendy.
Oh man, we are making some food here now.
I was definitely ready to come here.
This was the big city for us from where I grew up, even though we were closer to Philly.
My dad worked here, so it was a familiar city.
I'd been coming here a lot.
There's that palpable energy that is only here.
The intensity of how many people are living here on top of each other.
Ten minutes outside of this town and everything is ten minutes less uptight and lesser quality, also.
That uptightness and that quality go hand in hand.
If you happen to be bent that way, this is the place to come.
You got to be good here.
It's a little overwhelming, but you want to get in that game.
It's this big Double Dutch jump rope and you're like, "Yeah, let me in, let me in.
" What was I thinking to open this restaurant in New York City? Honestly, I didn't know.
I was not in the restaurant world and I wasn't paying attention.
I was completely naive.
I didn't have any understanding that there was a big, competitive world.
I was not reading the restaurant reviews in the New York Times.
I didn't know about it.
To be in the East Village, which in 1999 was still very edgy, gritty, empty, graffitied, methadone clinic part of town.
And I somehow thought no one would notice.
Yeah, just open up that Olympic swimming pool and jump right in.
Did I work the first brunch? Do you think that's right? It seems right.
I worked a lot of brunch.
I know because you were freelancing and you didn't quite know where you wanted to land.
Yeah, well, I had a lot of jobs.
Right.
When we cooked the bacon beforehand, I would get there before anybody else got there.
Oh, we made you do the bacon? But you were a busser, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I was a busser.
Oh, that's nice.
And we put trays in the oven and I would pull them out and they would just be molten, scar-making hot fat bubbling, waiting to kill you.
Yeah.
Yup.
Christmas soup is the soup that's just every vegetable left in the kitchen, essentially.
It's the antidote to the artery-clogging, colon-blocking grilled cheese.
So it's great, it's perfect.
Yeah, I've recreated Christmas Eve for you.
Fa la la la la I just thought it made sense that we would have our traditional meal.
Also because we've had some routines, like Sunday breakfast, occasionally, but like things have changed.
So what do we really rely on now? Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve.
The meal that we definitely see each other.
Cheers.
So this is usually the part that I say, "Can I do anything to help you?" And you say, "No," because I'm not allowed to do anything.
Let's do it the same way.
Okay, but is there a task of which my skill set would be appropriate for help? Okay, take the spine off of those? Exactly.
Okay.
You know I'm good at repetitive tasks.
It's so funny because you are the prune.
First of all you were an investor in the very beginning.
You gave me $5,000 when I needed to raise, what, $50,000? And look where we are now.
It's given us jobs, more steady income.
How did I get $5,000? What did I do to did I just work? When I got to New York, I picked up the Village Voice every morning and pored over all of the ads.
You just take whatever you could possibly get.
You have to figure out how to make money if you're going to survive.
Stand on corners handing out flyers.
You were catering.
We were catering.
- Yeah, right.
Sold FrozFruit in a cart in Central Park.
Ushered in theaters.
Was a secretary at Judson Church.
Yeah.
Geisha work.
Where you just go and sit in the Japanese sake bar, and you're a white girl in a dress.
You just have to sit there and have a drink.
I was a consultant for the Ford Foundation.
Oh my god, scalp tickets.
Eventually, what I got was a waiter job.
That was the one that I'd probably wanted right way because I knew it would be the most money.
To me, hustle is how am I going to be true, how am I going to keep my integrity and keep my demons at bay about how am I going to take care of myself and my loved ones? I'm on the grind all the time.
I didn't know it was going to hit.
I really, really didn't know.
It has become this thing.
People stand in line for hours and hours and hours for eggs and Bloody Marys.
I really love this meal.
It's my favorite shift and it's so fun to kill it.
Bene cheese scramble, followed by Tabasco, turner on the side with two bene.
It would just be so nice to have that hung over, I'm in a rock band, I'm going to smoke my Camel-less filters and have a really good Bloody Mary and some eggs that are made in a pan and cracked to order.
Welcome to brunch.
All right, so I'm taking carbo, followed by Tabasco bene sausage.
Whoo, by noon I'm good.
I really have it down by then.
If you are behind on your prep, you are tanked.
You will never get back in.
There's no, "I'm going to run down for 20 minutes and finish the job," that's not happening.
You're standing tall when the doors are open, and if you can't get out from behind It's going to be a bad day for everyone.
New ticket, order fire a solo scrambled egg.
Scrambled.
This is my favorite station of all time.
Order fire Tabasco, with side sausage and bene.
Tabasco bene, bene for two.
I'm going to make a totally classical Hollandaise first.
Melt the butter.
The thing I want to put in are the yolks.
Squirt some lemon juice into here.
That is a beauty.
The only key to success is to make sure there's enough acid to receive all that fat.
The butter is now bubbling away, melting.
Thickening up, you can see it's gotten emulsified.
I prefer to make the sauce highly seasoned, bright with lemon, warm from the cayenne, perfectly salty.
I started brunch, frankly, to make some money.
Any time you have the space not generating dollars, especially in a place like this, we have the engine of a 65-seat restaurant with only 30 seats.
So brunch became a pretty obvious way to offset being in the hole all the time.
It's classic eggs Benedict, but to bring all of that hacker line cook, greasy spoon, speed and energy to a good pan, and a good egg and a real Hollandaise.
To make the roast individually and to cook everything à la minute.
The white is going to come up around.
Perfecto.
Okay, there's my perfectly toasted English muffin.
Butter wall to wall, as we like to say.
All righty, Canadian bacon.
You want cooked white and soft, runny yolk.
And now we're going to drench.
The Hollandaise sauce, it's pretty light, it's feathery.
Brunch is in fact the hardest shift.
No other service here is that fast with such delicate product.
The fragile egg.
Fast and finesse.
That's my gig, I'm here for you.
There were some scary, scary breath-sucking times where you're like, "Mm am I going to make it here?" I think I even loved it in the moment.
I'm going to make some grilled cheese.
What's my cheese? Cheddar.
Good, okay, fine, acceptable.
Sharp cheddar, it's one of my favorites.
What is happening with your work? You know, going back to our earlier conversation, I am not a person who believes that I don't know what's going to happen.
Okay, well I'll give you $5,000 if you ever need it.
Now we can go in the reverse.
I paid you back, right? Yeah, you paid me back.
I paid everybody back.
You were always, and still are, like so afraid of old age, and retirement and not having And poverty.
Right.
Not being able to make ends meet, and yet I know that I want to do something different with my life.
Even if it's a little different.
Huh.
Whatever you're going to do, I have the $5,000 to give you now.
Okay.
From the person who essentially lives in an apartment with her two children.
We have a corner for you here.
We can put there's a nest of rags and newspapers under the sink that you can curl in at night.
Oh, whoops.
I'm going to give you the burnt one.
Special for you, little lady.
That carbon is fiber.
Maybe we can get some of that part where it oozes out onto the griddle and makes a little cheddar potato chip.
Mm that is the best.
Oh! What burnt one? All right, I'm going to finish this soup up now.
Fa la la la la André Soltner is kind of the epitome of the working chef who was the face of his restaurant when there was no Facebook.
No television, no remuneration or glory.
He enjoyed the work.
You have a little bit of German in your French accent.
When I speak French I have a German accent.
And when you speak German you have a French accent? Yeah, well, I come from Alsace, you know.
So we are bilingual.
Yes.
So when did you come to New York? Andre Surmain, he dreamed to open a French restaurant, Lutèce.
I became chef of Lutèce.
It's famously known that you worked there for 40 years, is that correct? And you missed a remarkable few days of work in your whole lifetime.
When Lutèce was open, I missed four days.
Wow.
Lutèce, what does it mean? I'm happy to tell you, Lutèce is the first name of Paris.
It was called Lutetia.
I'm happy to tell you.
Nobody knows in France, yes.
I didn't know.
Ãle-de, the city where Notre Dame is, it's a small island, and that was Lutetia.
Incroyable! Incroyable, yeah.
So we start here.
We have to do a panade first.
It's whole milk? Whole milk, yeah.
Bring the milk to a boil.
Cook the flour.
Like a pâte à choux until it becomes white here.
It becomes very smooth.
And you're not worried about how hot it is in there? No.
Okay.
Mix that now.
Now it's cooked.
We just put it on the side.
In the meantime we do our quenelle.
So it's a freshwater fish, pike.
Yeah.
Right now the lakes are frozen, and yesterday they said to me, "No pike.
" You can use any white fish.
So you have halibut.
I have halibut, yeah.
Quenelle of pike is really a specialty of Lyon.
Love it.
Now panade has to be cold, it doesn't have to be cold, cold, cold.
Okay, so butter in.
Put the eggs.
Oh, and added white? White and we are ready to put the cream in only now.
If too early it separates.
Wow, thin.
See how smooth it is? I do.
Okay, we go to do the sauce now.
Oh, look at this puppy.
They have no blood so it's okay.
They don't feel nothing.
That's what they told me.
I'm not sure it's true, but that's what they Let's go with it.
Okay.
Now we need some butter.
I'm very interested in how a person sells their restaurant.
We had Lutèce already 34 years.
It's a long time.
Restaurant in New York, you know as well as I do, you know, it's tough.
And my wife worked with me.
We started to be a little bit burnt out, you know.
After 34 years, a little? Yeah.
We had a great time our whole life, and when we stopped, we stopped, finished.
You knew when the party was over.
We knew when the party was over.
And everybody said, "André, you're going to miss it, "you're going to miss it.
It's terrible.
Your whole life will change.
" And you know what, Gabrielle? I didn't miss it one day.
I didn't miss it.
Put a little saffron.
If you have a restaurant and work your whole life you should be a little comfortable, too.
Okay.
You've come to be the dean at a school.
Are you 80 70? I am 63.
Uh-huh.
No, no, I will be 83 in November.
Right.
But you know here at the school I'm not working.
You're lending what you know.
To tell you the truth, I really am not here for a salary, you know.
I'm here for pleasure.
Right.
With the young people here to teach them a little bit, for me it's great, you know.
Okay.
Let that cook a little bit.
I put the cream in and then cook that now for an hour and a half, at least, you know, then strain it.
And will you quenelle with your hands? With one spoon is enough.
With one spoon, okay.
Now you have to poach it very easy.
Not boiling, boiling.
And there's no vinegar, nothing in the water? Salt.
You can do bouillon if really you want to go out of your way.
Right, so you heat the spoon every time, and it releases it because the spoon is hot.
Yeah.
They start to float, and then we turn them a little bit, we shake it a little bit.
Cook it for 15 minutes.
They have to be very fluffy.
The best is pike, it's really holds the best.
Butter the plate a little bit.
You see the sauce, Gabrielle? I do.
It's beautiful.
You see, they start to swim now.
Oh, they are light as clouds.
Wow.
Okay, they are ready.
Now we put the sauce on, put it in the oven, and then it blows.
You mean inflate or Yeah, you will see.
When you cook, you cook for other people, you know.
With pleasure.
If you don't like the people, you cannot cook good.
But that's interesting.
It's not just the act of cooking.
No, you want to give pleasure to others, no? Yeah, you have to enjoy the work.
They have taken in some of the sauce.
Yeah.
Mm Mm! It is a good dish, you know.
It's a good dish.
And it's easy to do.
That was beautiful, thank you.
We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas Mm perfect food.
I would love to taste my Christmas soup.
And it is now ready.
I love this soup and it is the perfect antidote to grilled cheese.
It's very hot, so blow on it.
Okay.
Mm awesome.
It is pretty.
Well, it's drab, but I still think it's appealing.
Simple tastes.
I have a lot of fondness for things that are not ostensibly good looking.
I can extrapolate for many years on that, but I'm going to let that one go.
She's plain, but good-hearted.
I love her.
Mm Yeah, it's good, right? Yeah.
I do feel my general state of anxiety about being homeless, or not having enough money or failing, is somewhat lessened by the fact that I do know that you would always feed me.
You can always count on me.
I can always count on you for a burnt grilled cheese.
I'm much better at the restaurant.
If you've made it this far, right? If you've had the 15 gazillion jobs, if you're doing the thing that you want to be doing that brings you happiness, that is an outlet for your self-expression, and then you get to do this other stuff with some integrity.
Yeah, everything's a-okay.
Yeah, then it's all gravy.
I just need to make some more money.
I'm going to hustle.
I'm going to take on another job.
Yeah, I have a feeling.
So what are you going to do to make the money? I don't know, I got to figure it out.
What's the can I write very good books? I don't know the answer to that.
But you need to ask your colleagues in publishing.
Right.
Stuff happened, you do one thing, you open a restaurant that people loved.
Then you wrote a book that was completely awesome.
So beautiful.
Then people start offering you things.
That's right.
And opportunities start occurring.
The same thing happened with me in the sense, except I didn't open a restaurant that was awesome.
This has happened to all of us to one extent or another.
I just want to know.
I want to capital "K" know everything that there is.
You know, you had to take your apron off at some point and make the transition from Line cook.
To entrepreneur.
Right.
We all make a lot of plans about starting.
Imagine your first restaurant, and you plan it out and not a lot of us start to think about getting the hell out.
Is it even possible to jump into anything anymore at my age? I'm that stupid that I think, "Yeah, sure, I'll give it a try.
" I'll go talk to a group of people, or I'll do an event at a grocery store or I'll open something that may seem slightly incongruous.
And then I find out, well, does that really make me happy? Does this work for me? And then you weed out the stuff and you augment the ones that you like.
Is there a riskier, stupider thing than opening a restaurant? So you already did that, so doing risky, stupid things, taking that leap Taking that jump.
Taking that leap of faith, jumping into the void, doing something that all of received wisdom tells you is probably really a bad idea, you already did that.
You know, Prune restaurant is the tap and faucet to everything good that has ever come from me.
I must tithe to it, and polish it and be loyal.
You can't go too far away.
I'm going to keep going.
I'm going to try some things that I've never done before, and I'm going to let myself get hurt.
I'm going to die trying.
You paid your dues.
You know what, there's nothing noble about dying on the line.
I agree.
About standing there behind the line at 45 years old.
And anybody who says that you're not keeping it real definitely never worked in a kitchen before.
On the line.
Anybody who worked the line, and I'm sure you've heard this, "Good for you, you got out.
" Yeah, it's a hustle, right? The funny thing, though, is that it works out.
You just have to hang in.
You have to hang in long enough, and be scrappy enough and resourceful enough and it starts to yield.
And then you're addicted.