MAD & The Lake Radio are delighted to announce the latest in our MAD Monday series of talks, which will take place Monday March 30th at Jazzhouse, in Copenhagen. The evening's program will feature a series of talks by speakers of different disciplines on the role of waste in the food world. The goal for this evening is to inspire creative solutions that can be applied in both the restaurant trade and our everyday lives. The questions we pose this evening will be: ”How can we understand waste? And how should we move forward, if we want a beautiful, sustainable future?” After the talks have concluded, the band Frk. Jacobsen will play a set and guests will have the opportunity to purchase specially crafted drinks made from fermented "waste."
Ticketing
Seating is limited, so those wishing to attend should secure their places in advance: http://www.billetlugen.dk/en/event/mad-monday-frk-jacobsen
All talks will be recorded and made available online on the MADFeed.
Tickets: 85DKK
Doors: 18:00
First talk: 19:00
Speakers:
Ida Auken
Ida is MP for the Danish party Radikale Venstre and the former Minister of the Enviroment. Ida has written extensively about sustainability, climate changes and circular economy in The Guardian.
Arielle Johnson
Arielle is the Head of Research for MAD, and holds a PhD from UC Davis in California. Her research focuses on flavour chemistry and cuisine, and collaborating with chefs and other food authorities around the world.
Christian Coff
Christian is the Research Manager at the Center for Ethics and Rights, and in addition to holding a PhD in Philosophy, is a former farmer. Throughout his career he has written several books on food production systems and food ethics.
Matt Orlando
Matt is the head chef and owner of restaurant Amass in Copenhagen. The restaurant has gained international recognition for its unique way of letting the season determine what is one the plate, and has its own compost systems and a 500 m2 garden.
Søren Kjærgaard
Søren is a jazz pianist and composer with collaborations ranging from the legendary Torben Ulrich to the band Ikscheltashej. In recent years he has been exploring different approaches to music and sound, converging elements of improvisation, composition, and performance into one field of play.
Victor Wågman & Samuel Nutter
Victor and Samuel are the head chefs and owners of Restaurant Bror in Copenhagen. The restaurant has gained national recognition for its use of produce that is often wasted - be it sheep brains or bull testicles.
Over the next few months, we'll be sharing stories from MAD's travels in Japan—pieces about everything from the characters we meet along the way to the chefs and techniques that capture our imagination. Our research ambitions are an important aspect of this adventure, too, and the first MAD team member to land in Japan was Arielle Johnson, our Head of Research. She has been traveling all over the country over the past few weeks. Here, she explains why, and what you can expect from her in the coming weeks:
Japan obviously has a complex food culture, extremely rich in history. One aspect we're particularly excited about is fermentation. Techniques originating in East Asia have of late become the subject of fascination for western cooks, many of whom are using them for in-house production. A big part of the appeal is that the resulting products – miso, shoyu, koji, vinegars, meat and fish sauces – are delicious, rich in umami, bright acidity, and a whole range of other flavors. But equally important to the adventurous cook is the incredible versatility of fermentation processes. For almost any ingredient conceivable, there are fermentation processes that can be used to transform it—from the grasshopper garum invented by Lars Williams of noma to the (in)famous Mountain Dew vinegar chef Sean Brock produces in Charleston, South Carolina at Husk, these techniques are applicable to virtually any food culture. Bringing together microbes and local ingredients extends the expression of terroir, creating new-but-native flavors that could be hard to find without importing products from elsewhere (like citrus in Scandinavia).
Grasshopper Garum from Rene Redzepi Noma on Vimeo.
Having worked on fermentation with noma and in Copenhagen for years, much of our knowledge has been second hand; extensive reading (and a lot of YouTube videos) have provided a lot of information about creating new and delicious ingredients using koji-making and other techniques, but we haven't had the chance to gain knowledge in-person from experts working in these traditions.
Last week we made miso with the grandmothers of Niseko, Hokkaido
That's why, while René and the rest of the Noma test kitchen, back of house, and front of house teams are putting what they've learned about Japanese ingredients to use at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, I'm working my way around the country, meeting with producers and enthusiasts of koji, miso, shoyu, vinegar, sake, ishiri (fish sauce), tsukemono (vegetable pickles), and the year-plus-aged rice-and-fish ancestors of modern sushi to learn at the source. I'll be making miso on the snow-covered northern island of Hokkaido with a group of grandmothers using techniques they learned from their grandmothers, and spending time in Kyoto, the old imperial capital, where vegetable pickling is used to highlight and express the changes in the seasons.
Stay tuned for research, photos, techniques, stories, and some useful science.
Choi and Patterson Announce Crowdfunding Project for Loco'lMAD
Chefs Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi have announced a crowdfunding project for their new fast food venture loco'l. Announced at MAD last summer, loco'l is a for-profit business that aims to compete with behemoths like McDonald's, by providing real food to people in underserved communities (like the food deserts Choi spoke about at MAD3). That's why Patterson promises that this won't be boutique or Fast Food Plus. He and Choi will work to come up with a menu where you can actually have a 99-cent burger, with bread designed by Tartine's Chad Robertson.
Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson Announce loco'l from madfeed.co on Vimeo.
"How can we find the price point, but challenge the status quo?," they ask in the pitch to potential contributors. "The burger—cutting it with grains and the tofu—is finding a way because we don't have the power to get our meat at the same prices that these chains do yet."
The crowd-funding page also includes new information about an advisory board:
- Chad Robertson, Founder and owner of Tartine Bakery, Bar Tartine
- Rene Redzepi, Chef and Co-owner of NOMA, Founder of MAD
- Scott Kester, Founder and owner of Scott Kester Design
- David Irvin, Principal and Creative Director at Folklor
- Mark Stech-Novak, Founder and owner of Mark Stech-Novak Restaurant Consultations and Design
If you're interested in donating, there's a range of perks, from getting to try the first loco'l burger ($25) to a street food tour of Los Angeles from Choi ($5,000).
The IndieGoGo campaign was launched just before the weekend has a funding goal of $150,000. As of this writing, it has raised $8,500. Check it out here.
The first location of loco'l will open this spring in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.
Checking in on Soba Master and MAD4 Speaker Tatsuru RaiMAD
Soba Master Tatsuru Rai Demonstrates His Craft at MAD Symposium from madfeed.co on Vimeo.
At the age of 19, Tatsuru-san traveled—walked, actually—all the way from Tokyo to Hokkaido and built the structure for the restaurant by himself, with his own bare hands. Here are some pictures from Arielle's visit. We were touched to see mementos from their visit to Copenhagen up on the wall.
For more on Tatsuru-san's methods, and what it took to stage his MAD demonstration (which entailed a meticulous recreation of his set-up in Hokkaido), visit this earlier post.
Creating the Food Systems of Tomorrow: a Guide for CooksThomas Harttung
Thomas Harttung, the man Time magazine calls a hero of the environment, presents a few ideas for how cooks can help improve our food systems:
For me, as a farmer and food activist, cooking is the creative process that connects the work of the farmer/gardener/herdsman/fisherman/hunter/forager with the work in all kitchens: transforming the bounties of the land and sea into feasts of honest, nutritious, seasonal, inspired food. This has been the mantra of my work for the last 20 years.
In many ways, the picture resembles the branded global restaurant and hospitality trade. Food is being grown, processed, and delivered to the food industry and the supermarkets of the world in an increasingly industrialized model.
Invariably, we hear that there is simply no other way to feed and clothe ten billion people on planet Earth. If you are not an agricultural expert, or a trained environmental economist, you will quickly find yourself in unknown territory, with people throwing facts and figures and thick reports at you. The system that exists has an aura of inevitability. Those who challenge the orthodoxy are deemed naïve, at best—or else reckless, or even dangerous and subversive.
We challengers need ammunition: cookbooks of facts and arguments to commandeer in discussions about the future of food. Here’s an attempt at one:
The global menu of today:
- The world today has enough food for all, and we can increase the amount of available food without further compromising the planet. It is a question of what we grow and how we grow it.
- Currently, we only turn two percent of the available energy from sunlight into food we can eat.
- The world’s marine ecosystems are severely threatened. They can rebound if the right policy decisions are taken, but the present system of fishing rights only reflects short-term commercial interests.
- In the southern hemisphere, the main limiting factors are uncertain land rights and access to local food for the underprivileged.
- In the northern hemisphere, the main limiting factors are urban sprawl and an increasing focus on feed for industrial animals rather than food for people.
- Food waste is a massive problem, especially in our part of the world. Somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of all food grown is never put to its intended use: a resource tragedy, and a threat to our survival.
- The global trade agreements in existence today tend to worsen these problems rather than alleviate them.
The unhealthy ingredients:
- These imbalances exist primarily because our dominant economic system operates through a crops and global markets paradigm.
- We continue to base the global food system on fewer and fewer monocultural crops (sugar cane, corn, soy, rice, wheat, palm oil, potatoes).
- This is an extremely risky strategy from a sourcing perspective, a disease perspective, a monopoly perspective.
- One of the key technical ingredients of the present system, Glyphosate (also known as RoundUp, the “harmless” pesticide), is coming under increased scrutiny, following indications that it causes endocrine disruption even in minute concentrations. Without RoundUp as a remedy, the industrialized food system would more or less break down.
- Four global companies—ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus (or the ABCD)—control more than 75% of world trade in cereals and soy. This increases risk even further.
- Overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. More than 80 percent of the antibiotics used globally are given to farm animals, mainly because their living conditions make them ill. This is a tragic testimony to the way we treat our domestic animals; moreover, it engenders antibiotic resistance, a huge threat to us all.
- Excessive water use. Today’s monocultures are deeply dependent on irrigation. In fact 75 % of the world’s water use goes to irrigation. And we are exhausting the reservoirs of freshwater (lakes, rivers and below ground aquifers) at an alarming rate. Furthermore, the overuse of water in dry regions creates salty soils that loose their fertility (salination).
- On top of that, financialization of food has taken place, enabling massive speculation in food “futures”. Originally intended as a straightforward futures market for farmers and processors, this has grown increasingly volatile and contributed to sudden spikes and dips in food prices.
- The American author and food activist Eric Schlosser once remarked that the present food system looks more like a losing or lost strategy for the former Soviet Union than a winning one for the Free World.
The promising ingredients:
- Politicians around the world are increasingly aware of the negative role of the industrialized food system.
- The fact that the present system produces obesity, respiratory, and cardiovascular diseases at an alarming rate compromises the argument that we should rely on technology to feed the world.
- When exposed to the methods of modern agriculture, especially in its treatment of animals, most people react with deep disgust and anger.
- The rediscovery of wild plants and insects as a food resource. Chefs have been the torchbearers of this revolution, which has the potential to push on and on. Foraging puts a value on wilderness, but we urgently need a way to ensure that wild ecosystems are not over-exploited, as has been the case too many times in history.
Thomas Harttung: "Urban Food Systems" from madfeed.co on Vimeo.
The radical ingredients:
- Urban (and peri-urban) agriculture has the potential to change the way we perceive food. Though generally seen as a mere fad in the North, it is a key ingredient in tropical and subtropical food systems. More than 800 million people in the South make their living from urban agriculture.
- An 80/20 diet, wherein plants comprise 80 percent of the average daily human energy intake and animals, just 20 percent. Widespread adoption of this diet would transform the way the planet is managed, allowing a far more harmonious use and recycling of resources. Just imagine if we created a network of “80/20 farms”, where the output obeyed the 80/20 principle.
- Integrated land use strategies, where landscapes become truly multifunctional, and where synergies among diverse functions (food, fiber, biodiversity, energy, recreation, fellowship, carbon sequestration, clean water) are promoted.
- Nose-to-tail and root-to-flower Gastronomy. This approach to cooking should extend to post-meal interactions between plants, microorganisms, and domestic animals, i.e. composting, fermentation, and feeding scraps to non-ruminant animals (pigs and chickens). Such procedures could go a long way towards minimizing food waste in the future.
- True Cost Accounting. A boring name for a crucial ingredient. Most of the negative environmental, human health, and biodiversity costs of our present food system are borne not by the polluter, but by society as a whole. If all these negative outcomes were factored into the economy, a very different food system would emerge.
- Global Land Reform. In contrast to today, when much farmland is owned and managed purely for financial reasons, land reform would see landowners become fully accountable for the ecosystem functions of the landscapes in which their properties sit. Innovative solutions to future land ownership and multifunctional land use would be encouraged.
- Regional Food Sovereignty. The UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, and G7/G20 all base their strategies and recommendations on a continuation of our present globalized, commoditized food system. Yet the prioritization of the commercial interests of global trade is undercutting the innate right of nations and societies to provide for their inhabitants without outside interference. Upholding this right, promoting regional food sovereignty, should become a new global developmental goal.
Some thoughts on the way forward:
While there are hundreds of examples of individual farms that successfully practice sustainable methods, they are also a very diverse crowd. Most of them have had to survive in a very contrarian environment and consequently have tended towards niche specialization, i.e. in vegetables, or cheese, or bread, or wine.
There aren’t many examples of farms, whether in urban or rural settings, that embrace all that a farm can be. Not in the northern hemisphere, at least. But there are grounds for hope that this will change in the near future. A number of promising initiatives are underway.
The organic movement has been very successful at establishing a standard for farm sustainability that has become a globally recognized seal of quality. The global retail value of organic food, one might be surprised to learn, is now estimated at more than 63.8 billion US dollars.
The main challenge facing the organic movement is that much of this growth has come from entering into the retail mainstream. This alliance, inevitable as it seems, is also a clear threat to organic principles. So as to retain the trust of an ever-growing constituency, the organic movement needs constantly to reinvent itself at the cutting edge of sustainable food production. This becomes more difficult when “organic” production devolves into generating “me too versions” of otherwise conventionally branded products, like Heinz Ketchup.
As chefs and food activists, you are already forcing the organic movement to “re-radicalize” itself.
There's no better example than ants
It is estimated that the combined body weight of all the ants on the planet is the same as that of human beings. There are clearly more of them than of us—about 500 billion, at last count—and they are amazingly good at looking after themselves.
The ant lifestyle is surprisingly like ours. Ants live in large cities. They farm crops. They get into fights with their neighbors over resources, even to the point of systematic warfare.
Do you catch my drift? The collective intelligence of ants is about the same as ours. Yet we hardly ever see them! They don’t seem to have any pollution problems or obesity pandemics. They have found extremely elegant solutions to the work of being-in-the-world.
What is their secret? It’s a bit like in a kitchen: practice, practice, practice, and some strict discipline. And they have been at it for 50 million years.
I would say that it’s all about social skills. The ants are not alone in this: they belong to a group of insects commonly called eusocial insects: insects that live in large, well-organized groups (bees and termites are further examples). This group consists of only two percent of the known insect species, but more than 50 percent of the total body weight of the world’s insects.
We urgently need to learn more about how ants and creatures like them go about leaving such a small footprint on the planet.
Beacon Farms
The world critically needs sound examples of sustainable practices. A number of initiatives are underway, and an obvious role for MAD would be to profile such good examples around the world.
Some beacon farms should be left exactly as they are, serving as pure inspiration. Others should invite scientists and other experts inside and allow the work to be quantified and hopefully, replicated, so that we can move from the anecdotal to the verifiable.
Public awareness
Vast sums of money are being spent nowadays to convey messages about food choices in the industrialized world. Even in the southern hemisphere, the level of advertising aimed at increasing consumption of highly processed, generally unhealthy food products is shocking to behold. Such advertising also tends to saturate the available space, crowding more healthful messages out.
The global food industry is very keen to “let the market forces decide” people’s food choices and is very critical of any kind of political interference. Therefore, social media and word-of-mouth emerge as the most promising avenues for promoting alternative messages. Chefs and food activists have an important role to play in that field. Play that role.
Or maybe create new platforms of awareness. One thought: when people go out to eat, they anticipate reading the menu and making some choices. Once they have read through the options and ordered, they wait for their food to arrive at the table. Who can come up with a way—playful, unobtrusive, yet powerful and reproducible— to make customers more aware of the significance of their food choices while they are waiting for their food?
Catalytic philanthropy
An interesting development at present is that charitable foundations, private individuals, and forward-looking private companies are becoming involved in this work. Over the years, a huge amount of funding has been given to medical and biological research; and while these programs have dramatically boosted both the human survival rate and the level of food production, there is increasing awareness that the system is fundamentally flawed.
A number of charitable foundations around the world are making bold decisions to support initiatives in the area of sustainable food production—initiatives that would have been unthinkable just five years ago. These institutions know that they cannot change the world themselves. But by enabling radical ideas about the future of food to be realized in practice, and to prove their validity, they can help to catalyze that change.
Clarity of message
As always, we need to find compelling ways of articulating what a more promising future could look like.
Here’s a shot at it:
Call me mad, but there is something special that comes from aspiring to be truly human and intensely alive and open to the world. A shared meal is a microcosm of the potential of human civilization. Such a shared meal is simultaneously Meaningful, Artisanal, and Delicious. Together we can create a vibrant and equitable global food community that lives by these rules.
And that is what’s cooking at the back end.
Further reading:
Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat by Philip Lymbery and Isabel Oakeshott
The Third Plate by Dan Barber
In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Slow Money by Woody Tasch
Organizations and publications to look into:
Sustainable Food Trust
Modern Farmer
International Center for Research in Organic Food Systems
Choi and Patterson Announce First Location of loco'lGabe Ulla
Chefs Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi have announced the first location of their fast food concept loco'l: it'll be at 57 Taylor Street, in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, one of the most dangerous areas of the city. They promise a late spring/early summer opening date.
Here is the official announcement:
In January we talked on the phone and decided to open a new kind of fast food chain. We barely knew each other.
In February we got together, ate hot pot, and talked about how we could change the world. We had an idea for a restaurant. We had no name, no concept, no menu.
In August we showed up at MAD with a name, a logo, a prototype of a burger, and lots of big ideas. We still had no space, no business plan, no money.
Now we have a business partner and a little money. And we have our first space. It’s 57 Taylor Street at Turk in San Francisco.
We’ve gotten so many questions in the last few months, but we still don’t have a lot of details to share, because we’re making this up as we go. We can tell you one thing, though: We’ll be open by late spring/early summer. You can come by then and all your questions will be answered.
Promise.
Peace,
Roy & Daniel
Choi and Patterson announced the project at MAD over the summer. In a statement published on this site in August, Patterson explained, "I needed to start a business that could grow quickly and supplant the fast-food chains and convenience stores that separate our youth from the taste of real food. I envisioned a new kind of fast-food restaurant that served real food in a nice environment, and which could contribute to the neighborhood around it in myriad ways. My answer lay to the south, in Los Angeles, where Roy Choi was bringing people together from all over the city around Kogi—food trucks that served tasty, hard-to-categorize food." You can read Patterson's complete thoughts on the genesis of loco'l here.
Choi was a crucial inspiration for the project: at MAD3, he spoke of hunger, food deserts, and the need for high-end chefs to reach people that don't get to try their restaurants. It is one of the most popular talks in the history of MAD.
Inside Scoop SF has some additional details on the space and neighborhod, including how the restaurant's commissary will double as a cooking school:
"It will host classes from the Cooking Project, the non-profit organization founded by Patterson and Sasha Bernstein that is dedicated to teaching fundamental cooking skills. Here, the Cooking Project will be extended from youths to older residents as well. The address is also a few blocks away from the new location of Larkin Street Youth Services, the neighborhood organization with which Patterson has worked extensively and will continue to.f MAD.
Choi and Patterson have high ambitions for loco'l. They plan to open another location in Los Angeles in the coming year, and then really expand the operation. Stay tuned for more.
Today we feature an essay from Michael Twitty, the historian who spoke about culinary injustice at MAD3, on what happens when lay cooks from different parts of the world meet:
The dialogues about food that take place when people of different backgrounds meet, unscripted and off-camera, are a vital resource. Do we ever stop to think about the remarkable narratives we have lost, the stories behind the great techniques and flavors that have come down to us? In preserving memories of these encounters, carrying these narratives forward, what’s at stake is not merely the genesis of our favorite culinary expressions or trivial knowledge surrounding their birth, but a new ability to use food to foment change, based on mutual understanding and a deeper awareness of human interconnectedness.
It’s easy to grow up as I did, totally unaware of the multiple collisions that brought food to the table. We plant flags in our food early, insisting that we make them the best, and that nobody else can make them as we do. My elder cousin’s delicious “nut roll”, for instance, was neither African nor American, but somehow it became African American in her hands. In fact, it was an Austro-Hungarian cake, likely with many Eastern European and Middle Eastern influences, that in the hands of the daughter of Southern migrants living in Pittsburgh lost its walnuts in favor of pecans, and was sweetened not with honey but with rich touches of cane and sorghum syrup. Blacks from the South and European immigrants shared coal mines and steel mills, and when someone was born, married or buried, cakes and plates of food accompanied notes and went through screen doors. All of us are contributors and partakers in moments long forgotten.
I came to western North Carolina to bring the diners back to the beginnings of barbecue. I came to show and demonstrate an old tradition: meat slowly roasted over an open hardwood fire, heavily spiced. In a place with only the mildest sense of diversity, I didn’t expect to meet someone from a part of the world that seemed more antipode than analogy. I came to teach, but with a song on the wind, I was about to be taught.
"Burek, burek, o usta murat!" sung in Albanian with a Kosovar accent came down the verdant NoCarolina hills, flying and falling through the hickories, oaks and pines like a playful cardinal. The only word I recognized was burek(a)\borek(a), and I wasn't even sure the person singing was speaking of the same thing. The lilting little tune kept coming towards me until it terminated in a "Hayloww!" from a head-scarfed woman wearing tiny pearl earrings, in a dusty dark blouse and grey skirt. She looked happy but worn, simultaneously ancient and brand-new; and her expression, like her accent, was caught between Balkan and Appalachian.
Michael Twitty: "Southern Discomfort — Confronting Culinary Injustice" from madfeed.co on Vimeo.
"How are you doing? Can you understand myyy English?" she said.
"Yes, Ma'am, I'm doing all right. Just making a barbecue pit today!"
"Yays Ma'am!" She clapped her hands. "Barbaycue? When it is special, we roast the lamb on the spit in Kosovo, you use these sticks and a hole?"
"Why yes, this is the old fashioned way, going back to the way Black slaves did it before the Civil War.” I go on to tell her that I am a culinary historian focused on the lives and foods of America’s slaves; a preserver of memories through food; a reenactor of the edible past. I almost felt proud to tell her this. Then I studied her spinach hands, as richly lined as driftwood, and they reminded me of my Grandmother’s hands; humility and reverence pulsed in me.
“What was the song you were singing? Was it about burekas?"
More smiles in attack formation: "What do you call them? Burekas! Ha! How do you know burek?" I had unlocked a part of her that seemed lonely here in the South; she looked as though she had already given up explaining herself here. I told her how I learned to love burekas from the Sephardic Jewish community to which I belonged. Then I asked her to sing the song back to me and explain its meaning.
She spoke of warm burek filled with local cheese, ground lamb, onions, or leafy greens, sold from a basket on a bike. She spoke of war and conflict, death and remorse; of missing relatives, burying children, and over a million people displaced. She spoke of the dozens of Kosovar tribes, and of fierce independence. She was not just a cook; she was a refugee, and her song, like her cooking, had taken refuge with her here in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina. I asked about the making of phyllo dough, which to me is as difficult as difficult gets. "Come back, and I will teach you!” she said. “It is the simplest thing ever!"
She was as curious about my barbecue as I was about her burek. My mind immediately went to chopping hickory- and oak-smoked meat and hiding it in a bed of phyllo dough. We spoke of cornmeal gruel and grits, of leafy greens cooked in springtime, of deep frying and okra, fresh tomatoes in a stew and hot peppers drying in the sun. The intestines of lamb met chitlins (the Southern name for the small intestine of a hog). As we talked, memories and recipes merged, taking on a fresh survival as they morphed and became Albanian-African-American-Southern.
As she talked, I was surprised at how everything in her life referenced the foods of her heritage and her youth. She moved up and down the rows of her steep, neatly planted hillside garden, discussing the plans for each fruit, leaf, root, and stem. The war and the violence she witnessed had not dampened her recipes: these were, in fact, the only part of her mental luggage seemingly untouched, still beautiful and sweet. In her I was learning as much about my own ancestors’ story as I was about her life. There were the secrets of cuisines in diaspora: the seeds must come; the traumas of life are not more important than the celebrations; even in exile, one must follow the exacting instructions and preserve the stories around the food. All this keeps the motherland alive.
When it comes to the past, we have but little record of moments like these, when two or more cultures meet in the form of lay cooks. Even rarer are the moments when these meetings produce an unrestrained dialogue about cooking, identity, and all the rest: journeys, travails, pain, pleasure, and memory. We know these moments happen time and time again, but no one talks about them. Even as we record the birth of the great dishes we deem indigenous, our cultural memory fails us.
Yes, we have international events like Cook It Raw, where these collisions and collaborations are encouraged and celebrated. But what a drop in the bucket these are, compared to the long human history of moments in which the conquered and their conquerors meld their food cultures with each other. The true story of our most beloved global dishes lies in these moments, these exchanges, when the participants are not chefs and food journalists, but slaves, serfs, and overlords. Many of these events—when what’s cooking is the ferment between the minds of traditional cooks, brought together through trade and war, enslavement and oppression, exile and migration, and multicultural communal contact—are concealed in us as inconsequential exchanges. But they are the heart of cooking in a globalized food scene, and they must be recorded and rescued.
It is in these moments that we recognize what we have in common and what separates our worldviews. We need not fear exposing our national food characters to each other, for the ideas we share with each other constitute a boundless frontier. The dialogue of gastronomic interplay should be something we devote significant time to exploring, recording, and passing on. In my own work, dialogue focused on food has led to reconciliation and healing of past hurts and deep cultural divides. This dialogue is not a feel-good exercise; it is an assault on selective memory, amnesia, and any attempt to divorce food from its less pleasant contacts. Just as death happens, so does struggle and suffering: and these have been, for better or for worse, the prime movers of foods around the planet. Let us confront, let us collaborate, and let us cook.
More than ever, we are a global village: ideas, recipes, foods are unbound by space, and even by time. Even as we keep our unique selves and dishes, we are all winners in the story of food when our edible genealogies intertwine. It is not enough to have the final product; we need to mine the narratives that got us there. We are not too late: as we carry on cooking, there are more songs to capture, more details to remember, more recipes for burek stuffed with barbecue and beyond.
How Myrtle Allen Started a Culinary Movement in IrelandBen Mervis
Now 90 years-old, the massively influential Irish chef and author Myrtle Allen was unable to join her family at MAD4 this year (you can view video of their presentation here). Now, a closer look at just how Myrtle changed the way Ireland looks at food:
"In restaurant terms in Ireland, [Myrtle Allen's Yeats Room] was the big bang. It is the moment that everything else began." - Food writer John McKenna
“We had discussed how badly a restaurant was needed here in East Cork but did nothing about it while the children were at home but I remember sitting down in front of the fire one day thinking, ‘What are we going to do with this big house?’ I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life cleaning… So I revived the idea of a restaurant.”
The idea wasn’t new to Myrtle, as she had always collected and read cooking books and her husband, Ivan Allen, a vegetable farmer, encouraged her to make use of his farm’s produce when feeding the family. She started to take cookery classes at the College of Commerce and became a cookery correspondent at the Irish Farmers Journalfrom 1962.
“I read a lot and always had a lot of cookery books. I studied cooking, always wanting to know how one would produce a potato in a certain way. My parents liked good food, too. They cared a lot and had their own garden. They were also very interested in nutrition. People don’t think about food and nutrition anymore. My mother hadn’t been strong for most of her life, so she was anxious that we had good food so we would remain healthy.”
Together, Myrtle and Ivan converted the family’s dining room into a restaurant and renamed the space The Yeats Room. They derived the name from the paintings of Irish artist Jack B. Yeats, whose work Myrtle hung in the room. She supposed that they might make up for the food if it was poor.
But the backup plan wouldn’t be necessary—with no more than a simple text advert in the newspaper, diners began to make the pilgrimage to the rural manor house. The Allens built their reputation on a simple philosophy: a menu full of fresh delicious, local food that changed daily. The restaurant earned a Michelin star in 1975 and held it for five years.
The grounds of Ballymaloe
Speaking to the Montreal Gazette, Myrtle explained the philosophy behind the restaurant, and how it influenced the local community, even in its early days:
“We always had food of the area. It’s a cliché, but that’s the way it has been. We would go to friends for dinner. They weren’t startling cooks, but it was just a good meal. Nothing was outstanding, it was just well-cooked and much appreciated. I remember when I was about 10 years old; I went on holidays out in the country. There were farmers there and I used to go in and have a meal with them. You knew exactly what you were going to get, lovely fresh vegetables from the garden, and potatoes, of course. But you didn’t see that kind of food in a café or restaurant or even other people’s houses for that matter. I particularly remember the farmers, who would always have the local food. Opening up the restaurant started people in the locality thinking about what they had. People used to come to the door with, say, a bucket of blackberries and we would say yes, please, and buy them. We created a bit of a demand around here, which was nice.”
Myrtle’s devotion to local produce was a culinary philosophy far ahead of its time, especially in that region. In the 1970s, she actively discussed the concept of terroir, which had been applied almost exclusively to wine production. She discussed this in the introduction to her 1977 classic, The Ballymaloe Cookbook, writing:
“The butter your sister is sending us is very good,’ I said to my neighbour one day. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that field always made good butter.’ That is long ago and the fragrance is almost forgotten.”
Myrtle would later turn the house’s unused rooms into guest rooms, and transform Ballymaloe House into a hotel. In 1983, Myrtle’s daughter-in-law Darina, a sous-chef at the restaurant, would also start giving cooking courses at the hotel. The Ballymaloe Cookery School was born. Darina has led the school since ’83, also becoming actively involved in the international Slow Food Movement.
Perhaps the brilliance behind Myrtle’s legacy is that today we take her advances for granted. It has gone from minority opinion to accepted culinary ‘fact’. A piece by Joe McNamee in The Irish Examiner addresses the matter:
“Her culinary philosophy, based on using the best of local, seasonal, Irish produce, grown and harvested in a sustainable way, is now so accepted by the mainstream, that it’s difficult to convey the revolutionary impact of her approach when she first opened a restaurant at Ballymaloe.“
The late Irish chef Gerry Galvin built on this by underlining how foreign it was to stress local produce:
“Myrtle served home cooking in a refined environment, using whatever fresh, local foods were available. This is commonplace now, but it was fairly revolutionary then. At the time, anything really good was expected to have been imported. We were still suffering from the notion that anything that was our own was inferior.”
The Ballymaloe Festival consists mostly of intimate events, like this reading with chef and cookbook author David Tanis
Myrtle’s work remains influential. In 2013, she and her family inaugurated a festival, called the Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine. It is the first ever literary festival in Ireland dedicated to food and wine, and it attracts over 8,000 people to the grounds of Ballymaloe house for a weekend of talks from national and international culinary figures.
And here is an extended documentary on Allen's life and legacy:
Myrtle Allen: "A Life In Food" from Ballymaloe House on Vimeo.
It is difficult to overstate the impact the Allen family has had on the way Ireland cooks. Myrtle, the matriarch, sparked a movement in 1964 when she founded a restaurant in County Cork that broke away from French tradition and celebrated the work of local farmers. Her efforts have resulted in a cookery school, a beloved annual literary festival, and a family of acolytes that promotes good eating throughout the country.
View the excerpt above to see why on the first day of each semester, the first thing all new students at Ballymaloe do is plant a seed.
More recent posts from MAD:
- Albert Adrìa's Remarkable Rise to the Top
- Jeremiah Tower's "Benchmarks, Not the BMW"
- Yale Professor Paul Freedman on the history of the celebrity chef
- Celebrating 20 years of St. John
- On All the Ways to Write a Recipe
- Thomas Keller answer "What is Cooking?"
- How restaurants can fight climate change
- Jay Rayner: "Being a chef doesn't make you an agent of change"
- Eric Schlosser: "Chefs should get political"
- Chris Cosentino on the perils of food television
- Rising star Tatiana Levha on the pain of opening a restaurant
- Fulvio Pierangelini's talk, "Fulvio in Exile"
- Famed maître d' Silvano Giraldin on the art of the table
- Wylie Dufresne on how you should act in a kitchen
- Soba Master Tatsuru Rai opening MAD4
- Legendary French chef Olivier Roellinger on the duties of chefs
Noma's run at the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo at the beginning of 2015 is completely sold out, with one exception: the 28 January fundraising dinner in support of MAD. Tickets are available now via an online auction: http://ibidmobile.net/madjapan/auction/
On The Chef Who Transformed Norway's Food SceneBen Mervis
Take a closer look at the career of Eyvind Hellstrøm (we released his MAD video yesterday). He's the chef who helped transform Norway's dismal restaurant community into what it is today.
In 1970 a pair of roadtripping twenty-somethings arrived to dine at the classic three-star restaurant Auberge de l’Ill, in Illhausern, France. The young men were Eyvind Hellstrøm and his friend Asbjørn, two apprentice chefs at the Grand Hotel, Oslo. They were ready to experience one of the finest meals in the world. Until Eyvind realized he’d forgotten to make a reservation.
The staff at Auberge de l’Ill did initially reject Eyvind, but the young Norwegian told the owners their story and plans, and they finally relented and found space for the pair to eat. For Eyvind, this was a decisive moment, as he credits this meal with sparking his career. As he puts it, “It was the beginning of the adventure. This was my educational journal.”
Another important meal for Eyvind was his first trip to Les Frères Troisgros in Roanne. He was particularly inspired by the way in which Jean Troisgros seemed to embody hospitality, style, and generosity, later saying at MAD in 2014 that, “You need great cooking, but you need great attitude and great style. I think it’s all about getting people to return to the place.“ The initial trip became the first in an annual series of pilgrimages to the restaurant. To Eyvind, it is still the greatest restaurant in the world.
Back in Paris, Eyvind spent five years as a ‘chef bohème’ working for cheap, and traveling to and from Norway to earn money. When he left Paris, he moved back to Norway to study at culinary school in Stavanger. In the 1960s and 70sm the state of Oslo’s restaurant scene was dismal. Its local resources were massively overlooked in favor of canned goods and frozen foods.
For Eyvind, one of the most important steps was to learn French: “Learning French is the smartest thing I’ve ever done—it’s the culinary world’s language. There’s always at least one Frenchman in a kitchen, and the French school of cooking is fundamental for everything else. France is the most important culinary super power. Everything starts with the French kitchen.”
But cooking French food was difficult to do without fresh produce, and the key to his success would be the implementation and fusion of French cuisine with Norway’s unique resources. This philosophy was the backbone to Bagatelle’s success, and crucial in helping it become Scandinavia’s first two-Michelin-starred restaurant.
According to Eyvind, “The most important thing for me is not the dish but the ingredients, which must be of the best quality and as fresh as possible. Wild salmon or Norwegian scallops, for example, don’t need anything more than a little salt and pepper!”
Norway’s local produce offered a wide array of incredible ingredients, and Eyvind was keen to uncover their potential at the restaurant: “When I started Bagatelle in 1982, Norwegians had no idea they possessed the world’s best salmon! They were unaware that the whole world was ready to import their coquilles Saint-Jacques, their halibut, fresh cod, king crab, turbot, langoustines, and muscles, not to mention the game, reindeer, venison and snow partridge.”
In his time at Bagatelle some of Eyvind’s most famous dishes included “scallop carpaccio served with sea urchins or with yuzu fruit, lobster with an orange dill sauce, King crab salad, and wild pigeon with trompettes de la mort mushrooms.” From “la poularde de Bresse aux fromages au lait Cru, to foie gras, truffles, and Grand Bordeaux wines,” Eyvind’s kitchen brought French food to Oslo, and to the whole of Norway.
The chef has refuted claims that he is a stern and sometimes excessively intense perfectionist in the kitchen: “That perception has been created by the media. I’m actually a kind and good guy”. “I had to be unambiguous and expect high discipline from [my] chefs.”
Eyvind has cultivated a high level of praise from his colleagues. Esben Holmboe Bang, head chef of Oslo’s Michelin starred Maaemo, speaks of Eyvind’s legacy in superlatives: "Eyvind Hellstrøm is the single most influential person in gastronomy in Norway. Not only has he mentored and nested a generation of chefs, he has single-handedly changed the way the Norwegian public thinks about and approaches food.”
Eyvind has also been praised by his friend and “spiritual father” Paul Bocuse. In 2007, Bocuse selected him for the French Legion of Honor, saying that “This is a recognition of the work done over the last 40 years from Hellstrøm to develop vocational studies for cookery in Norway, lifting Norwegian chefs up to the highest international level, and making Norwegian cuisine and ingredients known internationally. Rarely has a person done so much for a country’s fare as Eyvind Hellstrøm, and the Norwegian people can be proud and thankful for what he has done so that Norwegian chefs and ingredients now find themselves in the world’s elite.”
The chef left Bagatelle in 2009 to pursue a life in food television, but he insists that his interest and outlook on eating culture remain the same: “My food philosophy has been to cultivate individual ingredients. Now I’m doing the same really, just in a different way. I convey good food and the importance of good ingredients.” Since 2013, he has been a judge on Norway’s MasterChef, as well as the host his own food show. He is proud to be an influence on changing food culture in Norway: “Most of my fans are aged between 10 and 12. They see me on TV, and instruct their parents. In light of this, I feel my work is very important.”
Eyvind Hellstrøm: "Changing the Way People Eat"MAD
You could argue that Eyvind Hellstrøm is the Paul Bocuse of Scandinavia. From 1982 to 2009, the Norwegian chef ran the two-star Bagatelle, in Oslo, paving the way for the contemporary restaurants of region.
In the clip, Hellstrom explains how he took a Nutella addict—a man who would eat that and nothing else—and made him see the light.
More recent posts from MAD:
- Albert Adrìa's Remarkable Rise to the Top
- Jeremiah Tower's "Benchmarks, Not the BMW"
- Yale Professor Paul Freedman on the history of the celebrity chef
- Celebrating 20 years of St. John
- On All the Ways to Write a Recipe
- Thomas Keller answer "What is Cooking?"
- How restaurants can fight climate change
- Jay Rayner: "Being a chef doesn't make you an agent of change"
- Eric Schlosser: "Chefs should get political"
- Chris Cosentino on the perils of food television
- Rising star Tatiana Levha on the pain of opening a restaurant
- Fulvio Pierangelini's talk, "Fulvio in Exile"
- Famed maître d' Silvano Giraldin on the art of the table
- Wylie Dufresne on how you should act in a kitchen
- Soba Master Tatsuru Rai opening MAD4
- Legendary French chef Olivier Roellinger on the duties of chefs
Despite what it may seem, there is still a strong mutual distrust between scientists and chefs, and the two sides haven't fully realized their potential for collaboration. In this dispatch, MAD head of research Arielle Johnson argues that it's time chefs and scientists develop a new wave of cooking and science investigation.
Now more than ever, knowledge is being recognized as an essential component of creativity and craft in the professional kitchen. New York restaurant Blue Hill has a maxim: “Know Thy Farmer.” Or, put less pithily, that chefs have a lot to gain by working collaboratively with the folks who know the most about produce—those growing it. The logic being that working with those who provide their raw materials provides chefs with better crops as well as new knowledge that can inform their cooking. Relying on the farmer’s expertise as a guide towards new and potentially interesting products, like aged carrots or long-lost heirloom grains, enhances creative and aesthetic freedom in the kitchen.
This all stands to reason and farmers have taken on an increasingly essential place in the professional kitchen, but this isn't the only expansion of a chef's circle of advisors that will improve food both inside and outside the restaurant. The same type of renewed, recast relationship between chefs and scientists will be essential for continuing to advance the craft of cooking though knowledge, and improving the place of food in the world.
Appreciation for the role of science in the cooking process is not new, as evidenced perhaps most clearly by the enduring popularity of Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, a fixture in restaurant kitchens around the world since its initial publication in 1984. Likewise, some boundary-pushing chefs have consulted directly with scientists as part of their culinary R&D. Dufresne, Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adrià, Dan Barber and others have taken their technical questions to the scientific community, leading to novel dishes and innovations like hybrid wheat bred specifically for flavor. But perhaps the most publicly visible aspect of this growing food-science relationship (though it hasn’t done much to affect research on food) is the increasing popularity of using food as a medium for science outreach. In recent years, UCLA, Harvard, NYU, and other academic institutions have partnered with chefs of note to teach chemistry and physics, applying key scientific concepts to culinary systems. As a result, food science literacy has never been higher, with even casual diners knowing that the Maillard reaction is what makes the sear on a steak taste so good, or that an egg cooked at precisely 63 degrees for an hour will yield a creamy, set yolk every time.
Historically, while scientists have been studying aspects of food and nutrition for generations, it wasn’t until the 1960s that physicist Nicholas Kurti and his book But the Crackling is Superb popularized the idea of applying the hard sciences to cooking. (Kurti famously bemoaned, “I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés.”) This mode of investigation, while still popular in some circles, nevertheless revolves around the scientist alone; the goal is not obtaining more delicious food, but formalizing, cataloging, and theorizing about technical aspects of how food works. These early developments were followed by a generation of chefs enthusiastically appropriating data, techniques, and technologies from laboratories and industry, and putting them to work for the fine-dining kitchen. This was the age of immersion circulators, hydrocolloids, and other new techniques for manipulating texture, as well as Herculean efforts (such as On Food and Cooking) to mine the existing scientific literature and academic establishment for useful culinary information.
An unfortunate limitation on this second movement is that chefs aren’t currently involved in the production of the research that they use. Although they can easily come to scientists with specific questions, there seems to be an unspoken, though seemingly universally accepted idea that while scientists may dispense knowledge when needed, cooks have no place in the workings or thinking of the laboratory. Chefs ask sensory scientists about taste perception, and mold scientists about mold, but only on very rare occasions do their questions shape the research. At present, therefore, consultation is a one-way street: a chef goes to a scientist with a question—“will this fermentation kill me?”—the scientist looks up a paper or maybe runs an assay and gives a yes or no answer, and that’s the end of the conversation. The chef goes back to the kitchen and the scientist goes back to his or her work, of value to only a minuscule number of academics or industry folks.
My interest in this situation is not entirely impartial: I am a scientist who works with cuisine, and did a significant portion of my thesis work at the Nordic Food Lab here in Copenhagen. So on one level, I’m naturally thrilled about the growing numbers of chefs (and diners) taking an interest in what science has to say about cuisine.
But at the same time, I am increasingly frustrated by the current limitations on how scientific research is integrated with culinary development and knowledge. On a personal level, while I feel extremely privileged to have been able to work with a lot of brilliant cooks for my dissertation research, intense pressure on the academic side for a certain kind of technical precision and adherence to form had the direct effect of making my work less applicable and less useful to those in the kitchen. Even when I was researching the same topics as my chef-collaborators, the constraints of keeping my professors relatively placated meant that we were essentially working not together, but in parallel. While a rigorously designed sensory descriptive analysis of novel vinegars, for example, helped earn me a PhD, I am dubious that it will help anyone produce a better dish, or if the kind of work that would help is even possible within the confines of the academic establishment.
To date, in-depth food research has been limited to exploring questions academia and the commercial food industry deem important. The result is that most of what we know about how food works is confined to a very narrow set of issues, much of it hidden away in cryptically-written journal articles that most non-academics can neither access nor understand, and very little designed with any sort of practical application in mind.
What we, chefs and scientists together, must develop is a third wave of cooking and science investigation based upon truly collaborative relationships with each other. This means a reciprocal exchange of knowledge: the knowledge and perception of the chef informing the experimental work of the scientist. There is a universe of scientific information about food waiting to be discovered, questions that chefs and scientists alike haven’t even considered yet. That’s because the kind of on-a-level, chef-scientist conversations that could identify the questions we need to be asking to produce new, useful knowledge haven’t really begun to take place. Until these conversations become commonplace, the science of cooking will remain largely unexplored, undiscovered.
The future of this investigation is not about a scientist telling a chef what to do, but about building a hybrid discipline where both are on equal footing, borrowing aspects of the lab and the kitchen, where both parties’ knowledge informs the research agenda. Here, a scientist’s knowledge perhaps inspires a cook to try a technique or ingredient or to ask a question they had not previously thought of, and the cook’s experience informs experimentation that the scientist designs specifically because of its utility for craft and creativity in the restaurant kitchen. New knowledge is produced, and the cycle repeats, resulting in new data, knowledge, food, and changes in technique that would never have happened without a close-knit experimental and knowledge-sharing relationship.
The pantry at elBulli's workshop in Barcelona, where scientists would often visit.
Any half-decent chef clearly does not require scientific knowledge to identify deliciousness. Science has no business defining quality or making aesthetic judgments; scientists are not cooking experts. But we are researchers and empiricists. What we can bring to the table is an understanding of how, on a molecular level, flavor is composed: the biological, chemical, and perceptual processes that give rise to what’s happening inside ovens, vegetables, and fermentation rooms and what compositional changes will occur according to specific time, heat, microbial, pH, salinity, and ecological constraints. We know where and how to look for information; how to interpret it exhaustively; and most vitally, how to generate and utilize new knowledge in a methodical and reproducible way. Science is a tool and a process we can wield with proficiency. Yet in deciding what direction to point the scientific apparatus, and what research is worth investigating, scientists would do well to seek guidance from the outside world.
There is an inherent distrust between chefs and scientists. Both (rightly) believe themselves to be keepers of wisdom, and there can be more than enough ego on both sides to make communication difficult (I speak from experience in saying that the restaurant kitchen is not always the most immediately welcoming place for an academic; and I know the converse is equally true). It’s time to put those egos aside. Science is not a way to force order on creativity, no matter what some chefs may fear. The question is not whether an immersion circulator can heat a steak to a core temperature of 57 degrees celsius more consistently than a line cook (it can); the question is what that cook can do with this knowledge and technology, and how what they do might add interest and substance to a second, third, or five-hundredth round of questioning and empirical investigation about temperature control, texture, and flavor, one that goes well beyond “what happens when we cook meat in a water bath?”
A common complaint about academic scientific research is that it is too reductive: that scientists must break down a system into its component parts in order to study them, and therefore can’t come up with practical information or solutions for complex systems, like food. While this is often true of science in practice, it’s a function of how scientific research is undertaken—the culture and customs of the sciences—rather than an inherent limitation of the scientific method. In fields as diverse as flavor, soil science, and ant sociobiology (and I would venture most fields), synergies and complex interactions among parts are keys to true understanding. I mention all of this to point out that science can look at difficult, previously unexamined complexities, if we force it to do so. Some have argued that developments in cuisine over the last decade—especially foraging, adopting traditional and ancient processes in the kitchen, and a renewed focus on locally typical ingredients—point towards a turning away from science and the “science-based cooking” that typified modernist cuisine. I would argue that, on the contrary, this just reflects an expansion of the kinds of science from which cuisine draws inspiration and information, from physics and physical chemistry to microbiology, ecology, botany, psychology, flavor chemistry, anthropology, and others. The most important thing for a scientist to bring to the table in this paradigm is not so much the skill-set or specific knowledge particular to any one field of study, but an ability to flexibly apply the scientific method—empiricism and critical thinking in particular—to a wide variety of questions.
When I formulate the encouragement (with borrowed phrasing) to “Know Thy Scientist”, it comes with a complementary imperative to the broader science community: if you as scientists care about cooking, or the future of food at all, you have to start changing the way you think about and weigh knowledge and open up your research agenda to input from chefs. What is cooking? Like science, cooking is and has always been a constantly evolving, collaborative effort, from learning to bake with your grandmother to talking with your farmer about what’s in season. Creating a real conversation between scientists and chefs is simply the logical next step, and an essential one for the future of food.
Last night was the final service at wd~50, the trailblazing restaurant on New York's Lower East Side from chef Wylie Dufresne.
I think it's because New Yorkers are used to getting exactly what they want, and I don't think you always get exactly what you want here. There's flexibility and there's give, but like I said, you can't come here and say, "I want a salad, some steamed veggies, and I've got to be out of here in 45 minutes." I'm getting better at finding that middle ground, though, like I described.
However, I will say that when I started this restaurant, I thought New York was going to say that, "We as a city not only need one restaurant like this, but many." There are tiny cities in other countries that have a half dozen restaurants in a similar style. Not similar food exactly, but similar aspirations and inspirations. I thought New York would say, "We're a world class food city, so we have to have that, too."
In June of this year, after the announcement of the closure, journalist Alan Sytsma offered another explanation for the phenomenon:
The problem is that, unlike a progressive movie or album, forward-looking food is literally perishable, and dishes that might feel ahead of their time don't really live on for people to rediscover once they've caught up. So however much chefs and food nerds have heaped praise on Dufresne, it's not so surprising that many members of the public never really warmed up to wd~50. And in a strange way, that's what makes the restaurant even more impressive: Dufresne never backed down. If business wavered, he didn't add a burger or, ahem, a salad to the menu. Even when he started serving fried chicken, it was cold and garnished with both hot sauce and caviar. And it became iconic.
The list of historic dishes and innovations from wd~50 is practically endless. (Have a look at all the courses from a marathon meal at the restaurant in 2010 here) Momofuku chef David Chang, who credits Dufresne as one of the most important influences on his growing empire of restaurants, bemoaned the shuttering by saying that for years, “[Wylie] was doing stuff that no one else was doing. He was so ahead of the curve that people took it for granted.” On the day the closure was announced, New York Times critic Pete Wells referenced the East Village's fecund punk and new wave scene of the 70s and 80s, tweeting simply that "in the future, we are going to realize that wd-50 was the CBGB of this era, with way nicer bathrooms."
But beyond the dishes, the stylistic choices, and the relentlessly bold spirit of the restaurant, perhaps the most important aspect of wd~50 was the kitchen environment. Alex Stupak, the noted modernist pastry chef who worked at wd-50 for several years and now runs the Empellon restaurants has said that “At WD-50, it’s not an option to give your opinion. You’re required to give your opinion. Creativity there—it’s a requirement. Every single day.”
It's something that's nicely encapsulated in a story Dufresne offered this year for MAD, in which he describes how Sam Henderson, with absolutely no culinary training, rose up the ranks at the restaurant to become its current chef de cuisine. In that piece, Henderson said that after taking a break from Dufresne's kitchen, "I came back because very few places give their cooks as much opportunity to learn and work on and contribute to the menu as wd~50. That’s something that will be important here, and to me, until we close our doors. I think it’s just important to stay curious because, I mean, what’s the point? I don’t want to sound hokey, but I think a life without imagination and learning makes your world very small and sad. And those things are very important here."
Here's to Dufresne, his team, and whatever they come up with next.
Albert Adrià's Remarkable Rise to the TopBen Mervis
As a way to give additional context to the recently released video of Albert Adrià at this year's MAD, here's an exploration of the chef's career, from the early days at elBulli to the empire of daring restaurants he's been building in Barcelona over the past five years:
In 1984 Gines Adrià, frustrated by his young son’s apathy in school, gave to him an ultimatum: “Albert, if you don’t study, work.” Albert, aged 15, took the latter option and joined his older brother Ferran in the kitchen of elBulli, on Spain’s Costa Brava. Albert arrived at the restaurant without any formal training. Over the next two decades, would go from performing the most menial tasks to establishing himself as the greatest pastry chef in the world.
Albert gives Anthony Bourdain a tour of elBulli's workshop
While his brother Ferran was always the public face of elBulli, Albert won himself considerable praise during his time at the restaurant and developed a cultish group of admirers within the restaurant industry. His desserts were crucial in maintaining the restaurant’s reputation as one of the most forward-thinking places to eat in the world. His brother Ferran has hailed him as “without a doubt the most complete cook working in the world today.”
Albert’s love for dessert seems to derive from the expansive, unrestricted nature of the work: “With pastries I can create whatever I want—it’s an open book. There’s something very technical about it. If I mess up, it can be tasted.” He found much of his inspiration from brief moments spent in nature; one of his most famous desserts came from a mid-winter experience, when he noticed how the leaves had changed color, simultaneously changing the color of the ground. He transformed this moment into a cherry sorbet with salted honey yogurt, frozen chocolate powder, and spice bread. Among his other creations was an eggplant sorbet confit with yogurt and balsamic caramel, and cake made with bacon, pine nuts and Pedro Ximénez croquant.
Albert Adrià: "Be Afraid" from madfeed.co on Vimeo.
In 1997, Albert moved out of elBulli’s kitchen and into its research lab, the taller, where the main members of the kitchen team would spend half of each year working to develop an entirely new menu for the restaurant. Albert was the head of innovation.
Noted pastry chef Alex Stupak (who now owns the Empellon restaurants in New York) credits Albert with inspiring his career: “His book Los Postres de elBulli changed my life,” says Stupak. “Discovering flavors and combining them is important, but his work added another axis of thought for me—it was about physical manipulation of the ingredients. Chefs have an arsenal of classic techniques that they learn from. Albert added to the body of this knowledge in a permanent way.”
Albert’s other publication, Natura, is a revolutionary cookbook in which all the desserts resemble landscapes. A sample pastry resembling a tree in roots features almond streusel, albarizas almonds and yogurt, coconut sorbet, ice cream coconut powder, salted honey yogurt, and lemon custard.
Since leaving elBulli in 2008, Albert has become one of the world’s most successful chef/auteur/entrepreneurs, developing new concepts and interpreting different cuisines—all within Barcelona’s theater district. His first Barcelona restaurant was a very well received though short-lived tapas bar called Inopia. In January 2011, he opened 41 Degrees, a cocktail bar with a sleek, jet-black interior that featured elBulli style snacks, including frozen sliced Parmesan, and mango slices with Tagetes flowers. 41 Degrees evolved and became a 16-seat space where diners enjoyed a 45-course feast. That space is now closed, and Albert will turn it into a new venture called Enigma.
Albert’s third and perhaps most famous restaurant, the large, playful, and bustling tapas bar Tickets, was inspired by his desire to find a balance between tradition and innovation: “I was sick of the eternal discussion between tradition and modernity. I began to ask myself if it were possible to find a model in which the two could co-exist.” With a circus-inspired interior, Tickets offers dishes like “oyster with a pearl” (the pearl is made of a seaweed and lemon juice) and "air baguettes" made from crunchy, puffy pizza dough that’s filled with Manchego foam.
The Tickets manchego bites
Albert’s efforts to improve the neighborhood through food have been successful and swift. According to the noted Spanish chef Juan Mari Arzak, “If anyone can transform an entire neighborhood into a gigantic restaurant, it is Albert Adrià…He’s always been a lively, quick-witted and extremely inventive individual. There aren’t many chefs that can match his creativity.”
Albert is constantly working on new projects: in 2013, he opened a Peruvian-Japanese restaurant called Pakta, and since then, he has opened the classic vermouth bar Bodega 1900 and the Mexican restaurants Hoja Santa and Niño Viejo. It’s almost impossible to keep up with his growing stable of restaurants.
Wrap filled with pork crackling, leek, and chipotle ash at Hoja Santa
When asked about how he maintains his creative spirit, Albert has said, “It’s not the same as making a book, where you finish the book, you’re happy, and you’re done. No.” He uses his fear of failure to motivate himself: “When you overcome your fear and transform it into a creative element, you get your dreams."
How Mushroom Farming is Transforming Communities in ZimbabweChido Govera
A change of pace today as Chido Govera, the remarkable activist who spoke at MAD2, offers an update on the initiatives she has been developing in and around Zimbabwe. Over the last two years, Govera has worked to grow The Future of Hope, an organization that helps improve the lives of women and orphans through sustainable mushroom farming. Here is her story:
It has been only two years since I was at the MAD Symposium in Denmark sharing my story and a bit about my work and future plans. In an effort to stop my tears when I took the stage, I remember saying, “I hate people who cry.” Yet there is actually nothing wrong with crying. I don’t necessarily hate people who cry as such, but I have no respect for people who just cry and don’t do anything to change the situation they are crying about. My appetite comes from the same place where my tears come from: my life experiences. When I cry, it’s a song of gratitude.
Chido Goverra: "What Gives Me the Appetite to Be the Person that I Am" from madfeed.co on Vimeo.
The Future of Hope recognizes the importance of women’s participation in food production. There is no doubt that women are the future of agriculture and that food production can help transform the plight of women and girls. Through our network, we are improving accessibility and promoting special initiatives that offer people possibilities and give them a sense of hope they never thought they could have. Violence against women and other forms of abuse are directly linked to poverty, and food security is a great way to combat these problems.
Our initiative uses mushroom cultivation as a starting point. Mushroom production uses organic waste as a resource and requires very little space. The returns are quick. We have simplified the art of farming mushrooms into a low cost and adaptive process that provides multiple benefits. Following the production of mushrooms, we have an opportunity to use the organic waste as a fertilizer that can help us produce more food: vegetables, crops, and more. It ends up creating an integrating farming system in a small space, and requires a minimal investment. This kind of solution is key to sustainability and conservation of the environment.
The Future of Hope believes in building healthy communities where children, and all forms of life, for that matter, can thrive in peace, freedom, and happiness. Between December 2013 and November 2014, we have set up projects in 13 communities around Zimbabwe focused on food production. Through our community projects, which are built upon the framework of our successful mushroom farming techniques, orphans and women are responsibly engaging in the development of the community and pioneering the implementation of new initiatives.
My hope is that our work with these women will enable them to become innovators in the fields of agriculture, revolutionizing food production in their communities while ensuring that the residents have a safe place in which to flourish.
When I look at the amount of mushrooms that the 13 communities have produced and realize that there will be 20 more communities by next year, I can’t help but wish that you all will come visit and cook with us. We are currently finalizing the purchase of a space where we will build a training center. Our target date for the opening is August 2015.
We need all the support we can get, so please do reach out if you’d like to volunteer or contribute in any capacity. In the meantime, hope you like the pictures.
Albert Adrià, perhaps the most influential pastry chef of all time and unquestionably one of the most talented chef-restaurateurs working today, appeared on the second day of MAD to tell young cooks that they should be very afraid.
There will be more about Albert on this site this week, but first, take a look at his presentation. Then, maybe check out Juan Mari Arzak's advice for young chefs to be restless, as well as rising star Tatiana Levha describing just how scary it can be to open your first restaurant.
More recent posts from MAD:
- Jeremiah Tower's "Benchmarks, Not the BMW"
- Yale Professor Paul Freedman on the history of the celebrity chef
- Celebrating 20 years of St. John
- On All the Ways to Write a Recipe
- Thomas Keller answer "What is Cooking?"
- How restaurants can fight climate change
- Jay Rayner: "Being a chef doesn't make you an agent of change"
- Eric Schlosser: "Chefs should get political"
- Chris Cosentino on the perils of food television
- Rising star Tatiana Levha on the pain of opening a restaurant
- Fulvio Pierangelini's talk, "Fulvio in Exile"
- Famed maître d' Silvano Giraldin on the art of the table
- Wylie Dufresne on how you should act in a kitchen
- Soba Master Tatsuru Rai opening MAD4
- Legendary French chef Olivier Roellinger on the duties of chefs
