Praveen Anand is chef at Dakshin, named by the Miele Guide as one of the top twenty restaurants in Asia. His embrace of traditional South Indian food is significant in a nation that has begun discarding some of its food customs in a headlong rush into modernity.

Vijaysree Venkatraman: Tell us about the idea behind Dakshin.

Praveen Anand: The word dakshin is Sanskrit for “south.” Our goal is to present authentic culinary creations from India’s four southern states: Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. The larger goal is to revive the disappearing culinary heritage of these regions.

VV: How did you get interested in food?

PA: My father worked with the Indian Railways and was constantly getting transferred, so I grew up in my grandparents’ home in Hyderabad. My grandfather was a policeman and a yoga expert, the author of books on this ancient practice. Thanks to him, I got into sports and physical activities. He also inculcated in me the habit of reading. K.M. Munshi’s seven-volume mythological series, Krishnavatara, on the life of Lord Krishna—that’s where I started.

My grandmother, who is ninety now, cooked for us all. I would accompany her to the market and carry all the heavy bags. I also tended our backyard vegetable garden. Because my uncles hadn’t married yet, there were no women in the family to help her in the kitchen. So I volunteered to be her assistant. She only gave me simple tasks like peeling garlic or shelling nuts. But being her helper meant I would get a little more than my share of the good food she made—that was my motivation, nothing nobler!

To me, she was like a magician—whatever she touched was perfect. Her cooking was in the traditional Andhra style: hot, with lots of red chilies. We had a separate pantry to store the dazzling variety of mango- and lime-based pickles she made. Food was vegetarian except on weekends, when we would gorge on chicken, mutton, or seafood. Her simple chutneys, dals and rasams, fish curry and mutton khorma—all were wonderful.

I became the family’s official taster. If I declared (even jokingly) that a dish was not up to the mark, no one would touch it. I wielded a lot of power!

VV: And you went to catering school as a young man?

PA: When it was time for college, I gained admission into two programs: aeronautical engineering and hotel management. There was no pressure on me to start earning but I wanted to be independent as soon as possible. Going to catering school meant I would be a professional in three years instead of five. So I came to the Institute of Hotel Management, Catering Technology and Applied Nutrition here in Chennai.

VV: When did you turn into an upholder of South Indian culinary traditions?

PA: In culinary school I specialized in Western cooking—I really did not see any value in anything Indian back then. But five years into my job as a chef, management floated the idea of Dakshin. My boss thought I would be a valuable addition to the team. I resisted the transfer as long as I could. My forte was continental food, not Indian!

After I reluctantly joined, focus groups began coming into the restaurant. One group would love what we offered; another would trash much the same meal. What does one make of such conflicting feedback? I remember one prominent visitor saying, “This is going to be such a glorious failure.” Somehow that remark spurred me on. It got me thinking and cleared my confusion.

At Dakshin we re-create authentic recipes. It dawned on me that we had to stick to traditions, analyze dishes, and present them well. For this we would have to study our local diners and the communities they belong to. Even subgroups within the strictly vegetarian Brahmin caste, the Iyers and Iyengars, have subtle differences in their cuisines. Their palates will tend to resist deviations from the script. So when considering dishes common to many—like the broths known as rasam—this would be an issue.

You would be astounded by the culinary diversity we have in this country. Spices are plentiful. The curry that is tweaked out of a given set of ingredients depends completely on a cook’s ingenuity. But each community specializes in specific combinations of masalas—spice blends—which they have perfected over centuries. We had to appreciate this fact and work hard to understand culinary traditions better. Doing so put me on a path of learning that will last a lifetime.

Praveen Anand in the garden of the Hotel Park Sheraton, Chennai. Photograph by Vijayan.P. © 2010

VV: What are some of the dishes always on the menu?

PA: Rice is the staple in almost all southern cuisines, so you will see plain and flavored rice of various kinds to eat with stews and curries. There is bisibela hulianna, a standalone rice and lentil dish cooked with spices. There is idiappam—steamed rice vermicelli; the lacy pancake known as appam; and crepe-like dosa made from fermented rice batter.

We use different types of aromatic spices, regional chilies, and black pepper. The masala-coated deep-fried small prawns, for instance, are red in color from the ground bedgi chili, which is mild in heat. People finish with bhagala bhath, rice mashed with yogurt. Fresh greens, tempered with black mustard and curry leaf, are always on the menu. Curry leaf is a vital ingredient in South Indian cooking.

VV: You have now become an anthropologist of sorts?

PA: Yes, you could say that. My first job was to get the restaurant off the ground, then I had to grow our repertoire of dishes. Initially, getting out into the field for research was difficult, so from the list of hotel trainees I would zero in on people from particular regions. Once I picked Muslims from Tamil Nadu and asked them about dishes unique to their community. They brought me tiffin carriers full of good stuff: rice dumplings with mutton, paya (goat’s trotters) soup. I invited their relatives, their aunts and grandmothers, to come give us a demonstration. Convincing women from conservative families to come to a five-star hotel was not easy, but some women accepted the invitation. They may have been intimidated by the presence of trained chefs like me, but they loved to teach youngsters. I learned to observe from a distance, to take myself out of the picture.

I also went to research libraries. I pored over the multi-volume Castes and Tribes of Southern India by Edgar Thurston, a British ethnographer from colonial times. I attended weddings and welcomed tip-offs about regional foods. I had some unusual sources: for instance, a cycling community. They would report back on unpretentious roadside eateries where food is still made the old-fashioned way on coal stoves or wood fires, with few ingredients. All this networking and reaching out helped me.

VV: Tell us more about Dakshin’s food festivals—foodies in the city mark them on their calendars, I am told.

PA: The idea behind the festivals is to showcase South Indian food, especially those cuisines with an interesting history. We host two different food festivals a year, each lasting ten days. We re-create lost traditions; we do not innovate. We also celebrate actual Indian festivals like Deepavali and Pongal, when we serve special feast-day thalis.

For the first food festival, Ummi Abdulla, the author of Malabar Muslim Cooking, walked us through her recipes. We presented “Moplah Magic”—the cuisine of Kerala Muslims who trace their ancestry to Arab traders. That was a simple cut-and-paste job. Later my quest for festival themes took me to a wedding in Chettinad, in Tamil Nadu, a region that is home to the NattuKottai Chettiars, an ancient mercantile community. Knowing my interest in local food and history, a friend introduced me to an old English-speaking widow who lived in a humble setting. She told me about the food in the region. As we spoke, she grew excited and pulled out a nearly foot-long key, saying, “Come, I will show you my house.”

I followed her through a dense growth of dry lantana bushes, wondering where on earth she was taking me. We emerged from the wilderness into an abandoned mansion. The hall had golden ceilings, Belgian glass chandeliers, and Spanish tiles. In the storeroom were old-style cooking vessels. You could cook for two thousand people and still have dishes left over, so many feasts were hosted there. Unable to maintain this palatial home, the widow had moved into the servant quarters; her only son had left for Malaysia years ago.

Her personal story reflects the history of this arid region. NattuKottai Chettiars had long traded with Southeast Asia and Ceylon, but in the nineteenth century many left to seek their fortunes in Burma, Singapore, and Malaysia. That explains the star anise and fennel seed in their food.

The richness of their cuisine was in evidence at the wedding the next day. There I met the caterer, America Natesan, who had done a stint as a cook in the U.S. He was a valuable resource behind our successful festival “Chettiar Kitchen: The Cuisine of the NattuKottai Chettiars.” And the widow’s son returned from Malaysia a few months after my visit, I am happy to tell you!

VV: Your recent festival was based on the forgotten recipes of Pondicherry (now Puducherry), a former French colony.

PA: I had always asked about local specialties there but never got any good leads. Then I visited on holiday. At a coffee shop I had a salad, langoustine curry, and a chicken dish—the owner just called it “Creole” food. I went straight to the local library to learn more, but my search was fruitless. Then someone brought me a tattered, out-of-print local cookbook. Glancing through it, I realized the ingredients were Indian. Not one was French, and yet the food tasted so distinctive. There was a seafood curry with fish and prawn—such mixing doesn’t normally happen in India. There was a prawn curry with ice apple, a small tropical fruit that absorbs spices beautifully. Baguettes, made with rice flour, were excellent for soaking up flavorful sauces. Coconut was used in a lot of the dishes—there was even a coconut-based substitute for mayonnaise.

I pursued this lead relentlessly. My guess is this was not everyday food: local cooks served it to their French masters or prepared it for a special guest, like a son-in-law. That made the food just right for our diners.

VV: You had a vegetarian festival based entirely on a nineteenth-century cookbook. How did that come about?

PA: In his column for The Hindu, Chennai city historian Mr. S. Muthiah mentioned that a reader had sent him a copy of Paka-Shastra, a 365-page cookbook published in Madras in January 1891—possibly the first modern Tamil cookbook. Women’s education was just then catching on, and one man, T.K. Ramachandra Rau, was concerned that daughters would no longer have sufficient culinary training to be good home cooks. So he set about documenting traditional recipes, including some desserts like gooseberry payasam and onion payasam that are unheard of today.

That foresighted man left behind such a resource! The book documents Brahmin cooking. What is striking is the simple, austere style of cooking—very few dishes have even onions and garlic. The recipes call for few spices, leaving the taste of the vegetable and of the few spices clearly discernible. This contrasts with the present-day practice of overwhelming a vegetable with many spices, which also tend to crowd each other out.

VV: Rumor has it that you are working to translate an even older cookbook written in Sanskrit.

PA: Yes, this is a book of recipes called the Paka-Darpanam. It also lays out the characteristics for a royal chef, good combinations of dishes for a balanced meal, and bad combinations that are to be avoided. It must be one of the oldest cookbooks in the world. Its anonymous author reminds me of the mythological Hindu king Nala, a connoisseur of good food who was also an excellent cook.

VV: What is the future of traditional cooking in India?

PA: It may die out with the grannies of today unless we professional chefs step in and document their culinary knowledge. Over the years I have learned so much from them, and there is much left to learn.

Youngsters are typically rebels—I was like that, too. Everything Western looked great to me when I was young. The French, they say, are enamored of anything that is French. In India, we don’t appreciate our heritage as we should—maybe because we are unaware of its richness and variety. It is my mission to share what I’ve learned over the years.

There has been a tremendous response to our food festivals. Everybody loves the food, but many are eager to learn even more. That fills me with hope. The highest appreciation is when some person says, “This is like the food my grandmother or aunt used to make in the village—I had almost forgotten this dish.” Such simple acknowledgment of my work fills me with joy.

Key West, Florida, has had a number of identities over the last two centuries. It has been a shipwreck-salvaging town, a cigar-manufacturing town, and a military town. Now it’s a tourist town, catering to visitors who pay top dollar for hotels, fishing charters, and meals, and to vacationers who pour off the cruise ships that dock nearly every day. Most of Key West’s restaurants are found along Duval Street, the main tourist drag. Twenty years ago, a restaurant called Ricky’s Blue Heaven opened several blocks from Duval, on Petronia Street in Bahama Village, the island’s historically black neighborhood. Serving mostly Caribbean dishes, Blue Heaven quickly received a rave review in the New York Times and has been unstintingly popular with tourists and locals ever since. More recently, other quality restaurants have opened nearby. Two years ago, Colombian Grace, the island’s first restaurant to feature food from Colombia, joined Blue Heaven on Petronia Street. The proprietor is Zulma Segura.

Nancy Klingener: How did you arrive in Key West?

Zulma Segura: My sister lived here, and she came to visit me in Bogot.. She said, why don’t you come? You’ll like it; it has bicycles; it’s small. She likes big cities, I like small places. Here in Key West, you can be anywhere in just five minutes. I love the size of the island. I love that it’s multicultural. You can meet people from everywhere. And there are bicycles, bicycles, bicycles! When I first arrived, I worked as a waitress at Blue Heaven. I had no experience. I didn’t speak English. But I worked there and I learned English. I saved pretty much everything I made.

NK: How did Colombian Grace come about?

ZS: It was a crazy decision, an impulse. After five years at Blue Heaven, I was like, oh my God, what am I doing now? I have a degree in marketing and public relations, but I didn’t want to go back to that field. At Blue Heaven I discovered I was good with people. I like taking care of customers and spending time with them. When you add food service, I just love the combination. But this restaurant is the hardest thing I have done in my whole life. When I decided to open the restaurant, my mom came here to train the cook. After the first year, the cook left, so I had to start cooking myself. The recipes are my mom’s and my grandma’s.

Zulma Segura at her family’s coffee plantation in Colombia. She selects the beans and roasts them to serve at her Key West restaurant, Colombian Grace. Courtesy of Zulma Segura

NK: So you had worked as a waitress but not as a chef?

ZS: I grew up with Colombian food, so I knew the flavors, even though I didn’t know how to cook. At first things didn’t taste right, so I was cooking with my mom on the phone. She’s like, what are you using? How are you doing it? I learned to cook over the phone. Even though I know how to cook now, it’s still hard. Every day something goes wrong with the refrigerator, with the plumbing, with the electric. It’s hard to get fresh vegetables, to find good-quality beef at not-outrageous prices. The hardest thing is getting people to try a restaurant with this name. When I first opened, nobody here had tried Colombian food. Even worse, Colombia has a stereotype in the States: drugs, cartels, guerillas. But there are a lot of great things about my country, like our food, our coffee, our bananas, our flowers. The Colombian people, too. That’s what I’m trying to share, so Americans can get another image of us. Our menu helps. Basically, the restaurant’s success comes down to the freshness of our food. We make everything to order. The hot chocolate is made with Colombian cocoa; the coffee is from my family’s plantation. Our juices are made with fresh fruits, and we make our own breads. We use a lot of local seafood. The restaurant’s décor—the molas, the flowers crafted of natural fibers and seeds and pine bark—is handmade by native Indians in Colombia.

NK: What is it like running a restaurant in a tourist town?

ZS: With customers in a big city you can build clientele. In Key West, there are new people every week. We depend on locals and hotels to recommend us—otherwise it’s really hard to reach new customers. That’s the biggest challenge. There are always new people looking for new things. I’m competing with Blue Heaven, with Santiago’s, with La Crêperie, restaurants that have been here for twenty years. Our location helps because we’re right next to them. But it’s hard to convince people that something from Colombia can be good. Sometimes I go to the corner to send people over to the restaurant, and they ask me what it’s called. When I say “Colombian Grace,” they say, “Oh, Colombian—no thanks.” If I’d chosen another name without the “Colombian,” the restaurant would probably attract more people.

NK: How did you come up with the name?

ZS: I wanted to share a Colombian experience—not just the food, but also the decorations, the hospitality. I thought about using the word grace as a charm. That’s why I called it Colombian Grace. Now people think Grace is my nickname. But the idea was to have a name that captured the beauty of the Colombian experience.

NK: How would you describe your menu?

ZS: Colombia has a lot of regions, and each region has a different cooking style. I’m from Bogot., so I serve city food. These are my mom’s recipes. A lot of people from other regions come here and they ask, where are the soups? Where are all the dishes like stews? My food is a little more gourmet than is typical. Colombians use a lot of garlic—we even make our rice with garlic. We use a lot of fresh herbs, scallions, tomatoes, and fresh peppers. One typical dish is called bandeja paisa. It a sampler of ten different foods—red beans, rice, skirt steak, chorizo, pork belly, green plantains, ripe sweet plantains, eggs, avocado, and a corncake. We make a great stew with fresh tomatoes, basil, calamari, and shrimp. All our breads are homemade. Our corncakes are made from white corn and water, our guava bread with yucca flour. We also serve cheese fingers. Our Colombian scrambled eggs have fresh roasted corn or scallions and tomatoes. They’re delicious! One thing we’re known for is our homemade sangria. We make it with pinot noir, passion fruit, peach, pineapple, lime, lemon, and mango. Every day we press fresh mango juice, pineapple juice, orange juice, and lulo, a tropical citrus fruit from Colombia. It’s really good. Our lemonade is also fresh squeezed. Our salad dressing has no oil, it’s just mango—Colombian mango—with a little hot sauce, honey, and white vinegar. We try to make flavorful, healthy food. It’s like going to grandma’s house. She makes everything right there. It takes a little longer than normal, but in the end it’s worth it.

NK: Key West is at the end of the road. There are no farmer’s markets or other reliable places for fresh produce. How do you handle that?

ZS: I go to the local natural-foods store and the grocery store every day to pick out the ingredients myself. We buy seafood locally, but our special potatoes, our chorizo, our empanadas are shipped from Colombia because they’re not available here, not even in Miami.

NK: I understand the coffee is from your family’s property in Colombia?

ZS: We have a coffee plantation an hour and a half from Bogot.. It’s been in my family for three generations. My aunts are taking care of it now. We do all the processing. We pick the beans, dry them, wash them, and roast them, and we offer this coffee here at the restaurant. Last year I closed the restaurant in August and reopened it in October so I could spend two months working on the plantation. I wanted to connect with the coffee that I serve here. I also wanted to bring back more tools, more pots, more cocoa. I want my restaurant to be authentic.

NK: Why did you choose this location and not something on Duval Street, which gets so much more foot traffic?

ZS: Blue Heaven and Santiago’s always have long lines of people waiting to get in. So I was thinking, all these people are looking for food, and there’s no way they can keep standing in line when Blue Heaven or Santiago’s tells them it’s a two-hour wait. I figured they’d go to the next closest place. Petronia Street is now the best food district in Key West. Duval might mean volume, but Petronia is quality. This neighborhood used to have a really bad reputation, like crack town. But now the police are around all the time. The neighbors help, too. There are cameras on every corner. I haven’t had any problems.

NK: Do you have any plans to change or expand in the future?

ZS: In the future I’d like to incorporate more dishes like soups. In Colombia we drink soup in hot weather. We sweat a lot, and we enjoy it. But here it’s really hard to serve soup in the heat. I’m working on getting a Colombian chef to help me in the kitchen. I’d love to do salsa night, to use the second floor for more private parties. Maybe I’ll have longer hours. Right now I’m open five nights for dinner and two days for breakfast. Probably with more help I can open up more. As for the food we serve, I’m happy with it, and my customers’ satisfaction makes everything worthwhile. That is the real motivation for me. It’s an honor to cook for other people. I take care of my customers as if they were in my home. They can have a Colombian experience without getting a passport!

Anne E. McBride: How would you describe the culture of Eleven Madison Park?

Daniel Humm: When we first started here [in 2006], Moira Hodgson at the New York Observer gave us three and a half stars out of four. At that time, that was way too good. But one of the last lines was, “I wish this place would have a little bit more Miles Davis.” We always want to learn from reviews and articles what we can do better, what we can improve. That line really resonated with us, and we started to research Miles Davis and try to figure out what Moira Hodgson meant by that. We learned how amazing Miles was, and his music, and we came up with a list of eleven words that were most often used to describe him and his style, such as “forward-moving,” “endless reinvention,” “collaborative.” Five years ago these eleven words became our guiding light, and the list has been hanging in our kitchen ever since. If you want to create something unique, I think it’s important that you take inspiration from something outside of your own world. Because otherwise, you’re just going to become like any other restaurant.

AEM: How do you define Eleven Madison Park’s point of view?

DH: I think one thing is important to us: We want to almost invite people to our home. And although the execution of every step needs to be intentional and perfect, we also want there to be a human quality to it, a really friendly quality, and a fun quality so that people have a good time and enjoy being here—both the employees and the guests. We’re really trying to blend coming home and going out. When you walk into this room, the high ceilings, the china we’re using, the silverware, the glassware: everything feels like “going out.” But the human interaction should feel like coming home. That’s why there’s always somebody at the door to open it for you. That’s why you’re not walking to a podium to get to your table. The cooks come to the table and explain the food. They might not be as perfect as a waiter is, but we believe that a cook has a certain passion because he created or prepared the food.

AEM: How important is a cook’s comfort with guests in terms of your hiring?

DH: It’s part of it. The dining room has to start in the kitchen. It’s good for the culture; the cooks also find out what it’s like to have a difficult table, and they know how to react in the kitchen. It’s really important to us not to have any separation between the cooks and the waitstaff. We used to call it the back of the house and the front of the house. We stopped doing that. It’s now the kitchen and the dining room. It’s these little things that culturally are really important, I think.

Daniel Humm in his kitchen. Photograph by Francesco Tonelli © 2010

AEM: What are you looking for in your employees?

DH: In our restaurant, people have to be passionate. That’s really the key ingredient for an employee. The rest, we can teach. Also they have to be good people, and not just because we tell them to be. If somebody walks on the street, drops a scarf on the ground and doesn’t see it, the person who is going to get it, pick it up, and give it back is the employee we want. Then we know they will pay that kind of attention here. If something is dirty, they clean it, and not because it’s their job.

AEM: Let’s talk about your food. How do you choose whether to use local ingredients or imported ones?

DH: We use an imported ingredient only if it’s something very special or something better than what we could get here. We constantly think about that. This year, for us, the focus is New York. We’ve been studying a lot of New York food history, dishes that were invented in the city. And we’re working on a second cookbook called I Love New York. We’re meeting lots of local people doing interesting things. For instance, we serve Cognac now, but we’re working on our own version of Applejack, which we want to serve in hand-blown bottles made by a glassblower in Brooklyn. Will [Guidara, the general manager] and I have formed a new restaurant group, called Made Nice. We’re working on a project in the NoMad Hotel, just four blocks away in a beautiful historic landmark building. The cooking will be just as involved as at Eleven Madison Park, but the plating will take fewer steps. We want to continue the same philosophy with seasonality, with New York farms, but the food will be healthy and light, with a lot of options.

AEM: Is your aesthetic, your way of approaching food, more American or European? How do you situate yourself?

DH: I don’t know if you can categorize it in those terms. I think my approach is more me than ever. When you start out as a chef, it’s hard, because you have to come up with new dishes every season. The cooks, the guests, everyone expects that. But suddenly the process became very natural, very organic. The team also learned how it works. Something they’ve seen somewhere else and want to make here is not going to feel right. Over the last two years we have really found where we want to be—who we are.

AEM: Did getting a four-star review from the New York Times in 2009 have anything to do with that?

DH: Getting four stars gives you confidence. That review came at a very crucial point for the restaurant. The economy had tanked. Eight months earlier we had been operating as a four-star restaurant, even though we didn’t have four stars, because that’s what it takes to get them. We were not full, and that was hard. For a while there, Will and Danny and I would look at each other and say, “This is not going to change soon. We have to change course.” Our food costs and labor costs were too high, and not enough money was coming in, but everyone believed in the restaurant. We kept pushing and pushing, and then [then–New York Times critic Frank] Bruni starting coming. He came five or six times. It was intense. In the end, yes, we got four stars. Since that day we’ve been fully booked.

AEM: You also went from one to three stars in the 2012 Michelin Guide New York City. Did you expect that?

DH: We were hoping that we would get a better rating, but going up by two stars was unexpected. We were really happy, of course. You can feel the excitement of the people coming in—it’s the place to be, even for people who already had reservations. Our team is really proud; everyone is standing up a little straighter, pushing a little harder. For me, as a European chef, three stars is everything. You work for it your whole life; it’s a dream.

AEM: You do a lot of sports—you even run marathons—and you’re always aiming for the next big thing. You’re quite competitive! Have you always been?

DH: Yes. As a teenager I was on the Swiss National Team for mountain biking. For a long time it looked like I would be a professional cyclist. When I was fifteen, everyone in my family would have said that’s what was going to happen. Then I started competing at the European level; I was always in the top ten but never in the top three. The guys who were beating me were on another level. I felt that I could never beat them, and to be number ten in the world in cycling is not very good. So I stopped cycling and started cooking.

AEM: Are there ways that you feel being Swiss influences you?

DH: I’m really happy that I grew up in Switzerland. Certain qualities that I learned growing up there make me unique here in the u.s., I think. But I love, love, love New York. I’m still Swiss, but I like to think of myself as international. In Switzerland, people are a little closed-minded, and I don’t really fit with that. It’s easy to make friends here; in Switzerland, everything is kind of complicated and everyone is very critical. I try to be critical within my own kitchen, but I don’t like to be critical of people or other restaurants, because everyone should be able to express themselves the way they want.

AEM: You changed the format of the menu in 2010. Can you describe what it looks like now?

DH: We have sixteen words on the menu, which represent sixteen dishes: four meats, four vegetables, four fish, and four desserts. Each word is the key ingredient, and the dish is based around that ingredient. We also ask our guests if there’s something they like, don’t like, or really like. We want it to be a dialogue. We want to get a little bit of feedback from our diners, and based on that, we create the menu.

AEM: Does this mean that, as a diner, I should have a pretty clear idea of what I want?

DH: Not necessarily. We started this menu because 80 percent of our guests ordered the tasting menu. So we were thinking about going to a tasting menu only. But then, at the last minute, we thought we could do something more creative. I remember going to France on food trips, where one night after the other you eat squab because the tasting menus in all these restaurants have squab. I don’t care what the squab is prepared with, but after three times, I just don’t want any more squab. So wouldn’t it be cool if I could just say I wanted beef! I don’t care what it comes with. That’s kind of the idea: that the guests can choose their favorite things and then be surprised.

AEM: How have your guests reacted to having all these options?

DH: Actually, people have fewer special requests than before. It’s pretty amazing. Most people say, “We’re totally in your hands.” When you go to a restaurant somewhere in France, you’re really excited. You book the table way ahead. You get into the car, you drive for three hours, you can’t wait, you’re open and ready, and all you’re thinking about is the experience. In New York, it’s very different. Sometimes people are in a meeting until seven o’clock. They’re fifteen minutes late for their reservation. They come here rushed, they sit down, and they’re still thinking about the meeting; it’s challenging. What the menu has done is make people engage. All of a sudden they have to think about food. For a lot of people, that moment makes the stress of the day disappear.

AEM: Did you ever imagine when you did your apprenticeship that you would be where you are now?

DH: No, never. When I started cooking, I was learning a craft. I never knew that being a chef could be what it is today. I started cooking because I really loved being in the kitchen. I loved the atmosphere, loved the ingredients and the fact that I could create something with them. In the beginning it was not even so much about creation. It was more about following and mastering a simple recipe. When you do the same recipe fifty times and it turns out differently based on very small details, that’s what really fascinated me about cooking.

AEM: What about now? What keeps you passionate?

DH: It’s the food and the people, the same things that got me into the business. I’m most comfortable in the kitchen because of the people and because of the food. I feel free, in a way.

AEM: Today, though, there are so many other elements to a chef’s career. Are you comfortable with media attention?

DH: In the beginning you say, “Oh, maybe I need to do more publicity. Maybe I need to do TV.” I’m so glad I never did. Reviews really are the best press for the business. Beyond that, I just try to be selective. In a way it’s nice when people get to know you a little bit, because it is about relationships. I try to go to the dining room a lot to talk to the guests, but I’m not going to meet every person. So if people can read about me and about our philosophy, then maybe that can enhance their experience.

AEM: Do you see yourself being a chef for another twenty, thirty years?

DH: Absolutely. I don’t know anything else. But my happiest moments are when I’m riding my mountain bike or when I’m running. You’re running through the woods and you’re dirty and you’re up on a mountain looking down and it’s beautiful and all you have is a water bottle—that is the best moment ever. I don’t really need much to be happy. I need a lot, but not material things. Family is very important. The people I work with are very important.

AEM: What you describe sounds like moments with no pressure. Does life as a chef ever get overwhelming?

DH: Yes—that’s why I need to find a balance. New York, in general, can be overwhelming. The traffic, the weather, the people, the this, the that. Sometimes I just want to scream!

AEM: You’re here six days a week. Do you need to be?

DH: I don’t need to be here—I want to be here. The restaurant can run without me. It has to, at this point. But I love being here. Work has never really felt like work to me. I do take time in the afternoon, if my wife comes in the city with our daughters, for example.

AEM: What makes Eleven Madison Park a success?

DH: The success of this restaurant is really a team sport—quite different from cycling. Will and I, we’ve been working together now for six years. John Ragan, our wine director, has also been with us for a long time, as have other key members. Will and I are very, very close, and I think the restaurant has been such a success because we have each other. He makes me better and I make him better. And that’s really awesome.

AEM: Last October Danny Meyer sold Eleven Madison Park to you and Will Guidara. How did that sale come to be?

DH: We had been discussing it for a long time, and we came to the conclusion that this would be the right thing, the best thing, for the restaurant. Danny is very close to us, like family, so in a way it’s like he’s given the restaurant to the next generation. Will and I always worked like owners but had a sort of insurance with Danny. If we had gone in a totally wrong direction, he would have pulled us back. But it was time to make the change. Danny trusted us, and that gave us confidence.

We’ve been here six years, which is a long time for New York. The restaurant is better than it has ever been; what we decided we wanted to do together, we did, and now we can begin to grow. I’m a little nervous, but very excited.

If you type the word slaughterhouse into a search engine, you get a scroll of Web sites exposing the evils of animal torture, authored mostly by animal rights and vegan apologists. The images of bucking cows and blood-stained pigs confirm your deepest fears about the steak you just ate. But you already knew that, didn’t you? How else did that tail-swishing cow turn into last night’s rib eye? It had to wind up at a slaughterhouse, a place so abhorrent that the word has become synonymous with torture. But you don’t hear “slaughterhouse” in the farmer’s vernacular. You hear euphemisms like “harvest my pigs” or “process my cows” instead. Stockyard signifies mega-processors like Swift or Smithfield. Small, independent processors are called abattoirs, which sounds so much more civil. Now, if you believe, as I do, that search engines reflect our social mores, it’s funny how easily you can find animal torture sites but not one link to an actual slaughterhouse. It’s as if they don’t exist. As if killing animals is so reprehensible, so misunderstood, it needs to remain invisible.

Chef Edward Lee slices a slow-roasted pork shoulder that has cooked sous vide for fourteen hours. Photograph by Dan Dry / Power Creative © 2011

As a chef, I wear many hats. Most recently, I’ve taken up slaughtering. Not the demonic, sacrificial kind, but the industrial, silent kind. There was a time when killing an animal was accompanied by a public ritual that demanded worship, respect, kinship, and dependency. The annual slaughter was worthy of bonfires, dances, incantations, and prayers. But today I’m just driving down to Boone’s Butcher Shop in Bardstown, Kentucky, to kill my pigs. I say “my” like I own them, but they belong to Jim, a kind, affable man with a dinner-table’s-worth of stories behind him and a rough divorce ahead. He raises Black Heritage pigs, a breed hard to find and harder to make money from, but they are his: stubborn pigs for a stubborn man. He drives a white pickup truck with a red trailer rigged to the back. Jim can be up to an hour late, depending on how long it takes to load the animals. Today he’s bringing twenty pigs, and the morning chill will have helped stir them a bit. It’s a two-hour drive from his farm in Rome, Indiana. I leave from Old Louisville and meet him in Bardstown. It’s a pretty drive flanked by uneven hills interrupted by evergreens and the Jim Beam distillery pumping steam into the sky. The road is lonely. The houses along the freeway are simple and sad. Every time I breathe, I fog up my windshield—it’s that cold.

I skirt Bardstown itself. Rituals of absolution have been tossed out by modern society. Keeping a slaughterhouse hidden on the outskirts of town is the best method for avoiding our guilt. An extreme example of this sleight of mind was the Japanese burakumin. During the Meiji period anyone working in the animal or human corpse industry, from butchers to leather workers, was classified as subhuman. These workers were not only segregated geographically, they were restricted from interacting with upper-caste citizens. An entire caste was relegated to the dirty work of keeping a society that wanted to eat meat guilt free. It’s hard not to see parallels in my own society as I coast to the bottom of the hill and enter the concrete building in a secluded cul-de-sac.

I can smell Jim’s pigs even before he arrives. They live on unique soil, more loam, more grass, and clover. They get to play around in mud, and it cakes onto their quill-like, porcine hairs. Their ears are so large they drape over their eyes so all you see are their quivering snouts. They smell like shit—a rich, fecund, herbaceous shit. Our order of business is to move the pigs from their trailer to the holding pens. I’m new at this and am slowing down the process. The guys around me are baffled, if not annoyed, that I’m here messing up their day. I’m thinking the same. Until today I’ve enjoyed the privilege of turning carcasses into pretty food. Until now, I’ve never killed a pig. Will doing so make me a better chef? Does a carpenter need to cut down trees? Probably not. But if killing is a ritual, it’s one that I need to experience. What I find is that it’s less a ritual than a process.

From the pens, we bring in the pigs, one at a time, to the kill floor. There they meet an electric rod that shoots 1.5 amps into their necks. It takes two to three minutes for the legs to stop kicking. Once dead, the pig is hoisted by its rear legs with a chain onto a conveyor, where its throat is slit and its blood drains out. The tricky part is making sure the animal is dead. If not, it endures the pain of the hoist and the bleed out. Most of the outrage in stockyards is due to this oversight, when animals, not properly killed, are pushed through the conveyor howling in pain and thrashing as they struggle hopelessly to survive.

And that’s what brings me to this kill floor. I need to see firsthand what happens to these animals, to determine if the Internet images are the exception or the rule. But, far from squealing bloody pigs, I find the process to be remarkably mundane. The animals are handled one at a time, and death, though never the same each time, has a disturbing predictability to it. The animals drop, shake, and sputter out in a routine that goes from briefly violent to calm. And yes, for a moment, I wonder if my own death will be as uneventful, but then I hear Donnie slam the scalder lid, shaking me awake. Donnie runs the kill room and has done so for the past ten years. He moves through each step of the process without saying much, but when he does, he is humorous in a way that is unexpected from the grim reaper of farm animals.

The pig’s carcass emerges from a four-minute, 150-degree scalding bath where rubber paddles have removed most of the hairs. The entrails are then removed and checked for parasites by a USDA inspector. The last remnants of hairs are burned off with a torch. Then it’s back onto the conveyor where the carcass is chain-sawed in half, washed, and sprayed with a lactic acid solution before being moved to a cooling room to hang overnight before butchering. This process takes less than fifteen minutes and is handled by a crew of three.

When the crew breaks for lunch, I duck out back to the holding pens for a cigarette. I quit smoking a long time ago. But out here in the December wind with the frozen earth beneath me, bits of pig flesh on my shirt, I want a smoke. The remaining pigs are huddled together, a soft medley of oinks in the air. They are used to humans and hardly pay me any attention. I’m sad for them, not because they are about to die, but because there is no ritual, no fanfare, no prayers or dances for them. Flesh from these pigs will wind up at the best restaurants in the region, brined, roasted, cured, and sliced with culinary charm. Their meat will be praised and photographed for magazines and books. But first, here they are, patiently waiting, quarantined and anonymous. How about I call you Mathilda and make a porchetta out of you? I feel stupid talking to a pig I am about to kill. Another farmer arrives and starts to back his trailer. Lunch is over.

We kill over thirty pigs in one day. By comparison, a company like Swift can do over a thousand pigs an hour. The difference between the two is like a small artisan cheese dairy and Kraft, except of course for the killing part. I sometimes feel discouraged by easy taglines like “Farm to Table, Field to Fork.” It’s a marketing tool—I get it. My farmers use these phrases to sell meat, and I’m sure I’m guilty of using them myself. But marketing overlooks a process between the farm and the table that deserves as much attention as the nurturing and the cooking. You can’t think precisely about a Farm-to-Table movement and not acknowledge the transport, welfare, killing, and packaging that all happen in or around the abattoir. It’s bewildering how much we concentrate on the life of the animal but think so little about its death. The Muslims and Jews historically have known this. Whether it is the dhabiha of Islam or the shechitah of Judaism, the ritual of killing the animal with a swift incision across the neck that both drains the blood and causes unconsciousness was a way to ensure that death was a carefully monitored process. And for all the talk about animal husbandry, the last fifteen minutes of the animal’s life will have a profound effect on the meat. A year of nurturing an animal can be entirely undone by an improper kill.

No one in recent history has had more of a say on how animals are killed than Temple Grandin. Resplendent in her cowboy shirts and lariats, Temple Grandin works tirelessly to convince the slaughterhouse industry that animal welfare is inseparable from meat quality, that humane transport and kills are profitable, that the only standard is a humane one. Animals, far from being just property, are sentient beings. It is her life’s work to eliminate the fear and panic from the process of dying, right up until that last moment when the animal’s life is separated from its body. She encourages cattle ranchers and abattoir owners to take videos of their operations and post them on YouTube. She wants the kind of transparency the industry has always tried to avoid. She is trying to shift perceptions. From shame to pride. From invisible to responsible.

The first few animals I killed were a shock to me; I felt a jolt and a cognitive disturbance. It’s not easy to watch anything die. Watching the blood disappear in the floor drains, I could feel the evaporation of life. The pace was fast but not so fast that I didn’t have time to notice how one pig had ears that were lopsided, how this one’s back fat was thicker, how that one’s tail was the longest I’d seen all day. It gave the pigs meaning. Facing a 250-pound carcass is different from receiving a case of cryovac pork loins. It’s hard not to ask yourself: if I only use pork chops, what happens to the rest of the animal? If pork belly is the bandwagon trend and that’s all we order, what does that do to the scale of pork economics? If I’m honoring the animal and the farmer, shouldn’t the entire pig be on my menu? What if, by reading my menu, you could assemble the whole animal from its parts?

I could serve two hundred meals a day, but I choose to serve forty. I could have a brigade cooking uniform steaks all night long, but I don’t. I employ three chefs who rotate positions and understand that every day is a new menu of distinct ingredients. Even so, our meat comes through the back door. Nowhere in the restaurant do we ask our guests to confront the killing that precedes their beautiful meal or to thank the animal that gave its life for human nourishment and enjoyment. Our eating pleasure is abstracted from the crucial step in the Farm-to-Table process.

I’ve been back to Boone’s, and to other abattoirs in the region, and when I occasionally tell people about these places, I get a range of reactions. Some curious, some disgusted. What’s a chef doing killing animals? Shouldn’t I be in the kitchen? I know I don’t belong there, in the kill room. But where do I belong? On a farm, picking berries? Behind an expo line shouting orders? In front of a camera, talking nonsense? They could not have realized it—either the workers at Boone’s or the pigs in the pen—but I never felt more at home than standing there with the smell of shit on my boots, cigarette and all.

Frances Baca: Can you tell us exactly what a taberna is and how it differs from other restaurants?

Tânia Martins: A taberna is a place where people play cards, talk about politics, and sing fado. It’s not a typical restaurant where you come in and someone is only serving food and wine. It has a different atmosphere. Everyone is talking and laughing; you can play chess; you can sit down at a table and talk to someone. It’s like a family restaurant.

FB: Susana, you’re the head chef, and Tânia, you’re the sommelier. Do your roles ever overlap?

Susana Felicidade: When I’m cooking, I talk with Tânia about the new things I’m creating, so she always participates in the process. We do the same with the wines.

TM: I don’t know anything about the kitchen. Susana, she’s the alchemist. She doesn’t measure anything. We call her the magician.

SF: Because if I measure, it will be not a mystery to me. I don’t want to control things. Sometimes people come to our restaurant and try the chocolate cake, and they say, “Oh, this is the most delicious chocolate cake!” And next time the chocolate cake will not taste the same. It never tastes the same.

FB: So tell me about yourselves. Where are you from and how did food influence you growing up?

SF: I’m from a place in Algarve called Praia da Arrifana. My grandmother had a taberna on the beach. Every summer I worked at the restaurant for twelve, fourteen hours a day. I loved it because I practiced French and English with the tourists who dined there. Later, I went to Lisbon to study law.

TM: She went through college cooking for everyone.

SF: I rented a house in Lisbon, and my friends always came to visit. They studied while I cooked. When I was thirty I went back to Algarve. My grandmother’s restaurant needed help, so I went there to cook. I stayed for four years, and Tânia joined me there during the final summer.

TM: I’m from Lisbon. I have a degree in publicity and marketing. I was the manager of twenty-three wine brands, but I got fed up with it, so I quit. Then a friend told me that Susana needed help in her restaurant. So I said okay, I’ll go and help organize her wine list. I never thought that it would grow into a partnership because it was only a summer job.

FB: The concept behind Taberna Ideal has been described as taking the best of a taberna—the informality, the familial atmosphere—and adapting it to more modern tastes. What inspired you to do this, and do you feel that the idea has been well received?

TM: We wanted a thoroughly Portuguese concept, but one step ahead. Without being afraid of saying “Yes, I’m Portuguese and I love it,” because the Portuguese like their stuff but are really afraid of saying it’s good. Sometimes people come to our restaurant and are very suspicious. They think, “These two girls think they’re so modern, but they are nothing special.” But then they eat the food and drink the wine, and you see in their faces that they actually believe it’s good after all.

FB: Would you say that regional identity is very influential in your menus? Do you cook a lot of food from Algarve or do you cook dishes from all over Portugal?

SF: My influences are mostly from the South—Algarve and Alentejo. In Arrifana we have the most wonderful sweet potatoes in the world. And we have such good fish and tomatoes. We have two mountains in Algarve, and there they eat a lot of pork, sausage, chicken, and lamb. In Aljezur we mix octopus with sweet potatoes. We also eat feijoada—bean stew—with sweet potatoes. And sometimes we add choco (cuttlefish) and buzios (periwinkles). So we mix things from the earth and things from the sea.

Tânia Martins (left) and Susana Felicidade. Photograph by David Clifford © 2011

FB: Beyond the Iberian peninsula Portuguese cuisine is not well known, and it’s often lumped together with Spanish cuisine. How would you differentiate Portuguese food from Spanish food?

SF: A big difference between us and Spain is that the Spanish have a lot of tapas, but they are not cooked. They prepare dinners with only simple products like ham, bread, and salad, and it’s a meal for them. The Portuguese never do this. We never have a dinner only with bread and ham or cheese. We cook every time. Of course, I’m talking about our grandmothers and mothers. But our food is more complex, I think.

TM: Actually, it’s simple but more robust, and it has a lot of ingredients.

SF: I like to call Portuguese food “Atlantic food.” It’s not Mediterranean, because we are turned more toward the Atlantic Ocean than the Mediterranean Sea. Our olive oil is stronger; our wines are stronger; our food has stronger flavors. I think that this is the complexity. We’ve had the influences of the Phoenicians and the Visigoths and the Arabs and Romans, and we’ve condensed them within our small country. And via the Atlantic we went to India and Africa and Brazil. We’ve preserved all of these influences. You know polenta? We make polenta but in many different ways. Sometimes we fry it like the Italians, but in the south of Portugal we make it with clams. And in the north we make it with pork and sausage and cod.

FB: So are there any dishes that you would consider quintessentially Portuguese?

SF: If I talk about Algarve, in my village, I think it is Caldeirada—octopus with tomato sauce and sweet potatoes. And then I can, of course, say bacalhau (salt cod), Cozido à Portuguesa (a mixed meat and vegetable stew), or Açorda (bread soup).

FB: Can you describe exactly how you transform traditional recipes to appeal to more modern diners?

SF: What I try to do with Portuguese food, because it’s so heavy sometimes, is to make it a bit lighter. Instead of using so much olive oil, I take some of the olive oil out of the recipe and instead I put in a lot of herbs. Instead of putting in so much salt or cooking things for a long time, I try not to overcook anything, otherwise it will lose flavor. Sometimes I introduce new flavors.

FB: Besides your second restaurant, Petiscaria Ideal, you’ve just opened a new restaurant, Pharmacia. Do you plan on opening any more?

TM: I don’t know. I think in Lisbon we are satisfied with what we have. But Taberna will never be reproduced …

SF: But with Petiscaria, we’ve started to think that maybe it’s possible to open one in another city, perhaps London. And with Petiscaria we are starting to change a little bit and be more open to trusting other people with our food. We have people working with us now who share our values and identify with us.

Once we had a young woman working with us. She had cooked in a fancy modern restaurant, but she didn’t grow up with a grandmother who cooked for her. So she knew all of the new culinary techniques, but the old cuisine she didn’t know. So she came to us to learn but complained that it was very difficult because I don’t use measurements. So she was watching me cook and kept asking, what did you put in there? And I said, I don’t know, just a little something [laughs]. You know, in that moment I’m talking with food—it’s a conversation. And so I just put in a little of this and a little of that, and she said, I know what you put in there—love. I don’t know exactly what it was, but it tastes so different from mine, it must be love.

People have asked me, what did you put in this? I say it’s easy, just garlic, olive oil, and things like that. But they say that theirs does not taste the same. And I ask, but do you talk to your food? Você fala com a sua comida? You have to talk to food, and you have to love food. You have to give love to the food. When I’m unhappy or have a bad day, I have to cheer myself up before I go into the kitchen.

FB: Do you think that comes out in your food?

SF and TM: Yes.

TM: Sometimes people come in and they are angry. And if they take the first bite feeling like this, the food won’t taste right.

SF: Yeah. When we worked at the restaurant on the beach, we had one of those experiences. I went outside so that I could see the people coming in, and I could see if they were sad or mad at each other. There was a couple, an old couple, and they were very formal and upscale …

TM: … and grumpy. They were very grumpy.

SF: I could tell that they hated the restaurant, so I wanted to make the best of the meal that they ordered. They chose rabbit. It was a very special recipe, and I made it more special for them. I added a few more herbs, and as I was cooking the rabbit I was saying, you will eat this and you will feel …

TM: … the love.

SF: … the love. I was making a joke and I said to myself that your better side will come out. I was thinking that, and as they ate I waited, and I went outside and they …

TM: … came outside and they were laughing! And I was like, what’s happening?

SF: Because they were …

TM: Like this (gestures holding hands).

SF: … and smiling.

FB: It was the love.

SF: [Laughs] Yes, and they called me over to thank me and say that the rabbit was marvelous. That’s happened a lot and it’s nice. It’s very nice. Also, when people have memories of their grandmothers and they say, “This reminds me of my grandmother—thank you, thank you for this.”

TM: That’s the best part.

SF: That’s the best, yes.

Janet Fletcher: Let’s start with your upbringing in Michigan.

Erik Cosselmon: I was born in Flint, and then we moved out to the country, to Grand Blanc, where I spent a large part of my childhood. We had a small farm. My father was a bit of a hippie, or wanted to be. We raised chickens, ducks, geese, and rabbits, and every year we had a big garden.

JF: What was food like at your family table?

EC: My mother had her schedule of what she cooked. It was all substantial, but nothing stands out. My father was more of a gourmet. He had cookbooks from all over the world, and he would invite people over for Chinese food or bouillabaisse. He taught me how to make omelets and how to use a knife. He used to make goose for Christmas, and one year he put the goose in the oven, went outside to work on his boat, and burned the kitchen down.

JF: Literally? Your mother must have been happy about that.

EC: It was completely destroyed. The whole house was full of smoke.

JF: Do you recall when you made the decision that cooking was what you wanted to do?

EC: I decided when I was nine or ten. When I finished high school, I moved to New York City and stayed with my uncle. I had gone through the restaurant listings in the back of Gourmet magazine and circled the ones I wanted to apply to. Each one sent me to another, until I ended up at Tavern on the Green, which wasn’t the best restaurant in New York, but it was something. The chef said, “Show up tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. and we’ll do a tryout.”

JF: Do you recall the tryout?

EC: Yeah. I’m all excited. I walk in. I’ve got my little chef’s knife. He gets me a cutting board and goes into the walk-in and comes out with this fifty-gallon trash can with a lid on it. He rolls it up to the counter, opens it, and it’s full of onions, big onions. He’s like, okay, dice these. I said, how many? He goes, all of them. That was my first job. I was there for two years.

JF: That was the heyday of Tavern on the Green. They must have done a huge volume.

EC: We would do three- to four thousand brunches on weekends, and upwards of four hundred and fifty just for pre-theater dinner. It was crazy.

JF: Well, the place is gone now so you can speak freely. What was it like back in that kitchen?

EC: It makes anything I do now look easy. We had one guy that just made butter curls and picked parsley all day.

The chef helped set up a three-month stage for me at La Bonne Auberge in Moustiers, France. The kitchen staff there was like a family. We would do lunch service, then prep for dinner, then take a break. When we came back to work, we all sat down in the staff room and had an early dinner. The waiters would smoke cigarettes and play cards and drink coffee, and we would clean mushrooms or whatever. Then we’d start dinner service. I miss that here in the States. It’s not such a team. We have to go, go, go.

JF: After France, you got a job at Le Bernardin. How did that experience affect you?

EC: It was just so simple, and it relied on the purest, freshest ingredients. If it wasn’t absolutely perfect, they wouldn’t even consider it. We would get scallops and shuck them and make a consommé with them. The chef would slice more scallops to order and put them in the bowl, and they would still be moving. Then he would pour the hot consommé over them, with butter and chives, and that was it. Doing as little as possible to the ingredients was important.

JF: What advice would you give to other young cooking school grads about how to structure those early years of a career?

EC: Don’t get too comfortable. Try on a lot of different cuisines. Work with a lot of chefs. If you work for somebody who really doesn’t care, you need to move on, because it’s all about the passion. If that’s not there, you’re not going to have a good experience.

Erik Cosselmon in the kitchen of Kokkari. Photograph by Sara Remington ©2010

JF: So then you moved to San Francisco. You worked at Rose Pistola, doing Ligurian food, then as the chef at Cetrella in Half Moon Bay. Now you’re the executive chef at Kokkari in San Francisco and its sister restaurant, Evvia, in Palo Alto. How do you describe Kokkari to people who have never been there before?

EC: My hope when I started was that the experience would remind guests of that time they were in Greece. It turns out that I remind Greeks of the food their grandmother made. Of course, mine is never as good, but Kokkari is a very Greek restaurant. Evvia is the same, just a little smaller.

It’s like a party here every night. People will make a reservation for five people, then show up with eight and keep adding. That’s the kind of atmosphere we want to encourage. It’s hard to run a restaurant that way, but that’s part of Greek hospitality. We’re welcoming people into our home, and if they want to bring friends, they bring friends, and you take care of them.

JF: So you took this job at a Greek restaurant. You’re not Greek. You hadn’t done any Greek cooking in your previous jobs. Did you have any confidence issues with that?

EC: There was a learning curve. My second year here, the managers took me to Greece for three weeks. It really changed what I was doing. It helped me understand the Greek ways as opposed to all my French technique, which was interfering. When a Greek cook cuts a potato, he cuts it into random shapes, not perfect shapes.

We had been doing whole lamb on the rotisserie, but after the trip, the preparation became more simple. Now we serve it the way you would get it in Greece: with potatoes cooked with lemon and garlic. We used to sauté our horta [cooked greens] in an Italian style with garlic and olive oil. But in Greece, the horta is boiled.

JF: It takes a certain confidence, wouldn’t you say, to cook so simply?

EC: Yeah. It’s the confidence that you have good ingredients. It took me four years to get good olives. Feta has been even tougher. I’ve only been able to get one feta that I like. There are a lot of good fetas in Greece, but they don’t ship them.

JF: I know that the partners behind Evvia and Kokkari wanted to steer clear of all the Greek restaurant stereotypes.

EC: Yeah, the iced fish display is forbidden here. And saganaki has been a struggle. At first, we didn’t serve saganaki at either restaurant. Saganaki is in every Greek taverna, and Kokkari is not a taverna. But with people asking for it night after night, we decided to do it, but we won’t flame it. They don’t flame it in Greece.

JF: How else have you addressed that difference between Greek custom and American taste?

EC: In Greece, very few dishes come dressed. But the Greeks know that the grilled fish needs olive oil and lemon, so they dress it at the table. Americans don’t know that, so we do it in the kitchen.

JF: What’s in your dressing?

EC: Lemon, olive oil, garlic, and oregano. Plus shallots, capers, fresh oregano, and parsley.

JF: So it’s a way of making sure that the diner gets this balanced collection of Greek flavors.

EC: Right. The same thing with the Greek salad. In Greece, a Greek salad comes out in a bowl. They put it in the middle of the table. All of the ingredients are layered, but there is no dressing. There’s olive oil and vinegar on the table, and you dress the salad however you want. We talked about doing that here. Do our customers know how it’s supposed to be, or do we want to show them? We opted to show them.

JF: So you have to engineer the experience a little bit for them. Can you talk about other challenges that you’ve faced in channeling that Greek spirit at Kokkari?

EC: Bones are an issue. Always. Everything we serve has a bone in it except for the meatballs. The fish, the lamb chops, the steak, the chicken . . . everything. Some people don’t want to see any bones, and we do our best to accommodate them.

JF: Kokkari is one of the few Bay Area restaurants that do rotisserie cooking. Your spit-roasted whole lamb is a huge draw. Why do you think more restaurants don’t install a rotisserie?

EC: Kokkari never used its rotisserie during the seven years before I started here. Everybody said it was just too hard. It’s not in the kitchen. It’s in the dining room fireplace. You have to put wood in it all day. You have to watch the lamb and baste it and make sure it’s ready in time. Plus, once you take the lamb off, it looks like you’re not cooking in the fireplace. But you have a whole lamb you need to sell. I wouldn’t be able to sell it if it weren’t for my regular guests or people who have heard that you have to have Kokkari’s rotisserie lamb.

JF: Kokkari is not the kind of restaurant that’s doing a new menu every day. I suspect that your guests like that consistency. They come to Kokkari for an experience that was as good as the one they had before. So I wonder how you keep yourself and your cooks motivated, since you’re doing the same thing every day.

EC: There’s the challenge of consistency, which is a big challenge with the number of covers that we do. Like you said, my job as chef is to make sure the lamb shank is as good as it was yesterday. And that’s part of what makes Kokkari so popular.

When cooks come here to look for work, I usually ask, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” It’s really simple food. It’s all about how fresh the fish is. Yet I still think it’s challenging. At how many places are you going to learn how to cook a whole lamb? Or to break down a two-hundred-pound pig and use the whole thing within the week?

JF: Let’s talk about your new cookbook, Kokkari: Contemporary Greek Flavors. You’re the rare chef who is willing to measure and weigh.

EC: I knew I would have to measure everything. I read cookbooks. But my favorite type is the one that just says, “Here are the ingredients, make what you want with it.” And there are not too many of those.

JF: Are there things that a recipe just can’t communicate?

EC: A lot of things. Like with the rotisserie, it’s hard to communicate how hot the fire should be. Hardwood chunks or briquettes? What’s the weather like? Is it windy or not? You can’t relay all that information in a cookbook. It would be boring for the casual reader.

I don’t cook at home a lot. But when I do, I find that everything comes out a little different than it does at the restaurant. The same dish made at home needs different pots and different timing.

JF: You also had the experience with this book of working with two accomplished home cooks, Angie Frangadakis and Judy Marcus, who are partners in the two restaurants with their husbands. What did you learn from them that you didn’t know about Greek foodways?

EC: It’s always fun to cook with somebody who is cooking dishes they learned from their grandmother. My technique is more refined, but I still learn from them. Angie’s avgolemono is a good example. The way she made it is not the way a trained chef would do it. She whipped everything up with a little hand mixer and then dumped it into the hot soup and swirled it and it was done. A chef would probably whip the whites separate from the yolks, temper the yolks, then bring everything together. But hers works and it’s delicious. She and Judy approach cooking like, this is how you make it. Don’t mess with it. And as a chef, I want to pick it apart.

JF: Are there cookbook authors or experts who have been your mentors in Greek food?

EC: I like Vefa [Alexiadou]. The recipes in her books are bare bones, but they work. And I like to watch [Elias] Mamalakis on YouTube. He’s kind of a food historian, and he does these short videos on Greek TV. It’s in Greek, but it’s cooking, so I understand. And if I have questions, I ask one of the Greeks at the restaurant. There’s Angie, Dimitri, Panos. When I ask Panos, he calls his mother, so we get it from the horse’s mouth.

JF: So there are plenty of Greeks looking over your shoulder.

EC: Yes. Which is good. It keeps me in line.

I remember being told as a child to “Keep your head up,” “Watch your step,” “Pay attention to the road,” “Don’t touch that,” and “Be careful.” Those admonitions came to an end when I started eating weeds. Now a simple walk to work, a hike in the woods, or even a stroll on the beach turns into a serious hunt for all things wild and edible. I can’t remember the last time I went on a walk or a hike and just admired the sky, the birds, or the way the leaves blow in the wind. I no longer see normal distractions like billboards, signs, cars, or people. I’m looking for oxalis, chickweed, wild carrot blossom, yarrow, and woodruff. I am constantly astonished at how a little walk through my neighborhood can become a botanical quest. Once your eyes have been opened to these amazing plants, it becomes difficult to focus on much else.

Matthew Lightner foraging. Photograph by Susan Seubert © 2010

Non-foodies may not understand when you excitedly present them with a handful of wild salmonberries or wood sorrel. “What do we do with those? Are they even edible? Are you out of your mind?” they may ask. But for me and my team at Castagna, we are simply partaking in the rich culture of the wild world, one that has largely been lost to modern generations. When I try to come up with new ideas and dishes, one of the first things I do is to research, especially Native American history: what the indigenous people ate; how they ate; how they utilized local ingredients; how they maintained a spiritual connection that stretched from the seeds, nuts, and fruits to the people who harvested them, and continued on to the animals that enjoyed these edible pleasures as well. To the Native Americans there was nothing other than local and sustainable. Foraging, harvesting, cooking, and eating, they took the Earth into themselves and created a bond with the soil and its riches.

These days there is a lot of talk about the importance of what is known in chef parlance as “product”—what it gives you, what you do with it. Product is treated in isolation from its environment. But at Castagna we see product as a cycle of abundance: when you eat it you become part of the cycle, and if it has been artfully prepared you can taste it, feel it, smell it, hear it, see it, and we hope understand it. For instance, at Castagna we serve salmon that have fed on beautiful shrimp, which give the fish its rich color and flavor. So we serve this salmon in a shrimp broth with freshly harvested seaweeds and wild herbs that grow on the banks of rivers. That is how we tap into this cycle of nature. With a little imagination, our diners can feel as if they are the fish feasting in waters on the shrimp, swimming among the abundant green plant life.

When a farmer comes to our back door with a product of lamb, pork, or beef, I not only order the meat but also ask what the animals eat. Then I will order, say, fifty pounds of lamb collar and five pounds of the grasses they fed off of. Then we investigate those grasses. High-protein grass, low-protein grass, clovers, wild chamomile, hay, dried berries, and ferns And there it is: a dish.

We are very blessed in the Pacific Northwest with our abundant culture of food. The other day one of my foragers brought in beautiful morels. I asked him for a sampling of what grew around them—I had to feel like I was there among the morels. The aromas of moss, the taste of miner’s lettuce, the wild violets, the enormous trees that tower over these tiny treasures. In a dish you become the forager. You pick, consume, and enjoy a sense of discovery.

When did all this begin? For me, it has been a long journey. I recall one of the first times I thought about these kinds of connections. It was on a simple fishing trip when I was twenty or twenty-one. Life had brought me back to Nebraska for a while, and my friends and I were fishing for croppy and catfish in a secluded spot. You had to be careful with casting because you could easily reach the other side of the pond. I remember cooking lamb sandwiches and steaming clams with beer as we patiently waited for the fish to bite. One friend mentioned that at this time of year you could fill fifty gallon bags with morels in an hour, right in the forest behind the pond. I was in disbelief. In Oregon, where I had been going to culinary school, chefs sought out Oregon morels, and Portland diners went into a frenzy when they became available. Growing up in the Midwest I never had eaten morels, but suddenly I remembered hearing about my grandfather collecting and frying some weird-looking mushrooms that no one could name. And at that moment something clicked.

The fish weren’t biting, so I went off to capture morels. That first hour was pretty boring. I didn’t see a sign of a single mushroom until suddenly there one was, hidden under a fallen leaf. I felt transported back to the days of the Gold Rush. I picked the morel, examined it, smelled it, cradled it. After that, it was as if I had on a special pair of 3-d glasses that magically showed me where each one was hidden. I could suddenly see! The harvest began. That was the first time I got my hands in the soil. My greater appreciation had begun.

But the most mind-blowing experience of foraging and of being one with the land happened during my time in Spain, where I worked at the restaurant Mugaritz. For the first few months I didn’t get it. I was just too … green or, for lack of a better term, too American. I would always say, “That’s cool, but why don’t you do this or that or add this in there?” I usually turned something simple and beautiful into a dish that was cluttered and contrived. But one day, as we were driving to the restaurant from my place in Astigarraga, I happened to feel especially tuned in with nature. I was admiring the landscape and thinking just how lucky I was to be in such a wonderland. As I gazed off into the distance, I suddenly saw the food at Mugaritz with absolute clarity. In these apple and chestnut groves lay the restaurant’s dish of an apple served with a crumble of chestnuts and herbs that represented the locale and the green grass nestling the fallen apples all around. On the other side of the grove rose a patch of ancient trees that had fallen and lain untouched for centuries. Here was an edible landscape, the restaurant’s fossilized salsify. Imagination released me into the midst of nature’s great cycle.

At Mugaritz we collected violets in early spring and made them into a dish that reflected the whole foraging experience. We served them as an ice cream with shaved chocolate and matcha tea, the chocolate standing in for the fallen bark of the trees that protect the wild violets, and the tea—the moss growing on the bark. It was a plate of food, but it was much, much more.

At Castagna, Tuesdays are our day of production and reflection, the beginning of the new week, a new menu, new ideas, and old ones. Our work begins with a discussion of openness, of mindfulness, which the entire staff takes part in, so that we can strive to make dishes as unique as each tree that stands outside our doors.

Yoshinori ishii is a prominent kaiseki chef. Kaiseki is a meal that epitomizes Japanese taste and aesthetics. It is never the same twice, changing with the seasons, the locality, and the chef’s creativity. Ishii has cooked at two fabulous Japanese restaurants: Kitcho, the ultimate kaiseki restaurant in Kyoto, Japan, and Iron Chef Morimoto’s Morimoto in New York City. He is now the chef at Umu in Mayfair, London.

Corky White: How did you get involved with food? Were you interested in it when you were a child?

Yoshinori Ishii: As a child I loved making things with my hands, and I loved fishing. When I caught a fish, I ate it. That was the first sashimi I made. I love to fish; the eating came second.

CW: You became a cook, though, not a professional fisherman. How did that happen?

YI: I went to high school in Saitama Prefecture [near Tokyo] and liked working in kitchens, so I entered Tsuji [Osaka Abeno Tsuji Cooking School] directly from high school, in 1989. Over a one-year course I learned kaiseki and Japanese cooking, Chinese, French, and Italian food. I learned how to use the finest ingredients and the techniques to bring out flavor. For example, if you make a French-style fond and use sake instead of wine and negi [Japanese scallion] instead of onions, you have the very best base for a sukiyaki. You can learn from all cuisines. I also worked at night in an ikesu kappo restaurant, a place where the customer chooses a fish from a tank or pond at the restaurant. I was chef for deep-fried dishes.

CW: You went on to cook at Kitcho in Kyoto. That is probably the Japanese restaurant best known outside of Japan, and probably one of the most expensive. It serves kaiseki food, which may be among the most demanding of cuisines.

YI: I continued to learn at Kitcho. It is a place where they pursue perfection — and I mean perfection. Let me tell you a story about Kitcho. They emphasize perfection in the service as well as in the food. The waitress pays attention to the customers so she can tell the kitchen when the next course should appear, never rushing the customer and always serving food at the perfect moment. One time a table of guests took their time before the rice course. They were talking and relaxing, so the waitress told the kitchen to stop making the rice. The cooks waited until the waitress signaled them to start a new batch, but she had to stop them again. This went on eleven times before the last batch was finally served, so important was it to deliver the perfect rice at the perfect time.

CW: Cooking at Kitcho with such an agenda must have been difficult. What was the trajectory of learning?

YI: My first year at Kitcho was spent learning to cut sashimi and to boil foods. I also learned about organic farming and local Kyoto vegetable varieties—like the round tama eggplant and the long, brightly colored carrots. Every morning I went to the fields to choose the vegetables for the day. My favorite jobs were arranging the display of scrolls, ceramics, and tea utensils for the restaurant’s rooms. I learned to love traditional ceramics, and I myself now make dishes and bowls. If I weren’t a cook I would be a potter.

The second year I was tsukemono (pickles) chef. I also helped prepare off-site dishes for ocha kaiseki (the tea ceremony meal) events, and I maintained the tea rooms at the restaurant. I loved cultivating the mountain land owned by Kitcho. It was a mix of activities.

In years three through five I was chef for main dishes. I also continued all the other activities, especially flower arrangement. During my last three years, I was kitchen manager and loved learning calligraphy to create the menus (I’m second danlevel) and other traditional arts. Through it all, I fished. When I am traveling, I am so fanatic about fishing that I pack my fishing rods in my bags before I pack my kitchen knives.

Grilled pigeon with Kobuyaki-Artichoke in “Bizen” pottery designed and crafted by Yoshinori Ishii. Photograph by Charmaine Grieger © 2010

CW: From Kitcho you were hired to cook in Switzerland. Did that present any particular challenges, making Japanese food in Europe?

YI: I was the Japanese Embassy chef in Geneva. The Japanese ambassador entertained dignitaries from many countries, so I was required to make different foods for them, not always Japanese foods. I loved visiting Spain, France, and other countries to eat their foods. I learned to create the savor of umami by using foods like balsamic vinegar, cheese, and tomatoes.

CW: Everyone talks about umami, but I am not sure everyone knows what it means. Can you describe it?

YI: Umami is salty but somehow wider, fuller, and richer. You can find it especially in kelp (konbu), but also in bonito, beef, and many other foods. It is a taste, or a sense, derived from protein in glutamic acid. Umami is very good for your health. But when you see commercial kombucha, like the bottled kombucha drinks in the U.S., most of them are just MSG.

CW: You cooked at Morimoto Restaurant in New York City for four years. What did you do there?

YI: I was the omakase chef at Morimoto. That means preparing the special dishes for guests who ask for the “chef’s choice” menu — the most demanding cooking that involves a creative use of ingredients.

CW: Spanish chef Ferran Adrià and others are known for so-called “molecular gastronomy.” Is that something you ever practice?

YI: Yes, in fact Japanese chefs often work through the technologies we now have to make things like soy foam for sashimi. I am currently working on a project to understand the science of grilling fish. It’s very complicated. I’ll let my wife, Yasuko [Kuroda], describe it.

Yasuko Kuroda: The method of grilling Yoshi uses is unique. It is a technique that combines two kinds of heat, one from infrared light and the other from regular heat. Both are generated from sumi, Japanese charcoal. When sumi is completely heated through and glowing, you use a fan to blow away the flame, which allows you to control the heat that cooks the surface of the fish. At the same time, the sumi is generating infrared heat that cooks the inside of the fish. If you don’t fan the flame away, charcoal cooks the fish only from outside to inside, and the outside will be burnt by the time the inside is done, and the fish will end up dry, with not enough moisture inside. This technique can also be used for meat and vegetables. It is not well understood, because we don’t yet have scientific evidence. Yoshi is hoping to establish this technique as a special Japanese grilling method, once we know the science of it.

YI: Yes, I spent a year just learning how to control the fanning.

CW: Such intense attention to your cooking is impressive! The word kodawari is often applied to people who do things thoroughly and with great care, sometimes obsessive care. Do you think this word applies to you?

YI: [Laughing] Well, I have a lot of kodawari myself, but I am very flexible. Most chefs who have kodawari are inflexible, and this is a bad thing—they might say, “I only use bluefin tuna.” But we know that bluefin tuna is scarce and expensive. This is bad kodawari.

I use my kodawari when fishing, too, but fishing is very relaxing for me. I am always studying different techniques for fishing, like changing the bait or the rod or the part of the river I am standing in.

In Switzerland I used to fish for perch. I would catch them and make escabeche—deep-fry them, then marinate them in a mixture of dashi, soy sauce, limejuice, and shallots. With rice, miso soup, and vegetables, it’s a meal. By the way, the fish for sashimi is much better if you don’t eat it right away. Layer the slices of fish with kelp and refrigerate. Day two is so much better than day one.

CW: What do you think makes a good restaurant?

YI: The people who work there. Everything they do makes the place work. Service above all must be good. We should make the customer feel relaxed and comfortable. The chef only takes care of the food; he must rely on others to make the meal good. American service can sometimes be good, if it’s just for me and close friends. But if there are important customers, then you need that Kitcho-style perfection.

CW: What are you doing before your next assignment?

YI: I’m going to Montana. I will fish.

Husband-and-wife team David and Karen Waltuck ran Chanterelle, one of New York City’s most influential restaurants, for thirty years, first in SoHo, then in Tribeca. At a time when all-male wait staffs and strict adherence to French renditions were ubiquitous, the Waltucks pioneered something else: a fine-dining restaurant where customers could feel comfortable and eat locally sourced food. In 2009, when the economy plummeted, Chanterelle’s investors decided to back out rather than proceed with a scheduled renovation. The Waltucks sold off all of Chanterelle’s inventory, from the famous oak wardrobe to the chandeliers and forks. Now David consults at Robert, the restaurant in the New Museum of Art and Design, while Karen ponders their next move.

Melissa Seley: What early influences helped shape Chanterelle?

David Waltuck: From a young age I was very interested in nouvelle cuisine. I’d read about it, thought about it, tried things. Gault and Millau, the early proponents of nouvelle cuisine, published a journal I liked, Gault et Millau, which listed the rules you had to follow. I also collected a fairly cheap series of cookbooks, very much thrown together and all in French, by Troisgrois, Chapel, Girard, Verger.

After Karen and I fell in love, we went to France and at least twice to Alain Chapel’s and Fernand Point’s restaurants. I’ve always had a romantic and romanticized idea about restaurants and cooking. Certainly about La Pyramide and the chefs who came out of there—Chapel, Bocuse, Girard, the Troisgros brothers. Essentially, you’d drive along this suburban, gritty Lyons road with lots of traffic. You’d come to a rather nondescript place and realize you had stepped into a beautiful garden. It’s cloistered, serene, and quiet.

Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9, 2005. Menu cover for Chanterelle, 2005.Production still © 2005 Matthew Barney. Photo: Chris Kinget. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

The appointments are well thought out, perfect. A number of things were happening in the food compositions, which were clearly arranged to make some point, but you couldn’t necessarily figure out what that was, so the food had an intellectual quality. It was particularly notable that the staff seemed formal, serious. At the same time there was an element of playfulness at Taillevent or Troisgros, where it was like, “We’re a great restaurant. You’re here. We’re going to take care of you. Relax. No problem.”

Karen Waltuck: There’s a story about chefs from the Point group sending a model to lunch at Chapel’s. She went to the bathroom, took off all her clothes, and sat at the table with nothing on. The waiters didn’t bat an eyelash. She finished the lunch nude. I thought, “That’s where it’s at. You don’t care what the person is dressed in or who has what.” What do I care if you want salt on the table? It’s your experience. Whatever it is, who cares?

We never said, “Oh, we’ll open a fancy schmancy restaurant.” It ended up that way because we loved the feeling of thoughtfulness. But we’re not like that. We’re Bronx kids.

MS: When you were first experimenting in restaurant kitchens, what kinds of things did you cook?

DW: I was cooking lunch at La Petite Ferme, so I was free in the evenings. Karen and I were living in this tiny Upper East Side apartment. Every few months we’d invite six people for a grand dinner. I’d make the food that ultimately became the food at Chanterelle—seafood sausage, crabs with sorrel, sweetbreads with orange. There weren’t many things I made at those dinners that I wouldn’t feel comfortable making now, in some version. Maybe I incorporate more Asian ingredients; otherwise I don’t think my style of cooking has changed much.

MS: How did your transition from cooking at home to cooking for others come about?

DW: I was at the Culinary Institute of America. A friend, Bill Katz, was doing sets and costumes for dance. In the summer of 1977 there was a benefit thrown by the Little Italy Restoration Association to raise money for the Louis Falco Dance Company and to landmark the police headquarters on Centre Street. Jacqueline Onassis was involved. Bill asked me, “Why don’t you make the food?” There were seven hundred guests. I didn’t have that kind of experience—I was twenty-one—but I gathered a bunch of my friends from school. It was fun. We used the kitchen at Lombardi’s on Spring Street and cooked all night. I boned out suckling pigs, made a forcemeat, stuffed the pigs, and roasted them. The meal was all over the place, Middle Eastern and French. After that, Bill encouraged Karen and me to open a restaurant. I’d only worked a few years in other people’s places, so it was ballsy in a way, but it didn’t feel like that at the time. It felt like, “Let’s just do it.”

MS: You started out with so little money. How did you do it?

DW: It didn’t feel fraught. We looked for a place in SoHo because it was inexpensive, still a fringe neighborhood. At first we found a large space on Grand Street in the middle of the block, up some stairs. We were moving in the direction of taking it when we had an epiphany, of self-doubt to some degree: it was like, “This is just too big.” Then we found the place on Grand and Green, a corner bodega. It was beautiful. It didn’t require much because it had a lot of character and details we just had to restore. The elaborate tin ceiling. The chandeliers we got on the Bowery. The curtains. The big windows. The columns. We signed the lease in May 1979 and opened November 14.

KW: The first Wednesday was a nightmare. Everyone was in the dining room—Gael Greene, Giorgio DeLuca, Joel Dean, Sonia Rykiel. David had one dishwasher, who was also his sous-chef, and whom he thought should only work during the day. So it was just David in the kitchen.

DW: We didn’t think we were going to be busy.

KW: The stove kept going out. He’d put a rack of lamb in—ten minutes later it was raw. I was doing the books, answering the phone. At some point someone said, “You know, dishwashers could help you vacuum too.” I was like, “Oh, right. That would be good.”

I felt strongly that if somebody called, you had to take them first, you couldn’t cater to celebs, which may or may not have been stupid on my part. Speaking of being stupid about business, I also felt you had to have one table open in the dining room awaiting someone.

MS: Where did you get that idea?

KW: I felt no one should wait. We wanted a ma-and-pa place. It was a type of business with a tradition, so it was very natural. I’m outgoing. David’s quiet. He hated coming out into the dining room. He doesn’t make small talk. He’s not arrogant. Sometimes stagiares would work in the kitchen for a while without realizing he was the chef.

MS: Were you conscious about reacting against the status quo?

KW: No. We loved our New York. We loved that downtown gave us the backdrop to do what we wanted. That’s what New York is, “Do whatever the hell you want. No one cares.” In the best sense.

The Four Seasons had one female server at the time. No one else had female waiters. But we loved New York’s diversity, so that’s how we hired. I never hired full-time. I felt you needed to be happy with what you were doing with your life; otherwise, you wouldn’t be happy at the restaurant. David always said, “The bitterness gets in the soup.” We didn’t have fancy uniforms, but the silver and china were fancy. The service was elegant, careful but not snobby.

We didn’t have a dress code, which everyone had back then. People had ties and coats in the closet you had to wear. We were like, “You must be joking. What, are you going to have your menu in French? Who the hell are we? People don’t speak French. Who cares if you want your meat incinerated? I don’t care. What do I have to prove?”

The person I’d say who is interested in the same style but who has codified it is Danny Meyer [of Union Square Hospitality Group]. A lot of things we did worked themselves into the mainstream. An integrated staff. Unpretention. Cheese! There were no cheese plates at that time in New York.

DW: You know, people make fun of nouvelle cuisine as excessive big plates, small food compositions and outlandish combinations. While there’s truth to that, in the hands of a master it’s amazing. Anybody less, it gets silly. I’m pretty damn sure Ferran Adrià came up through a system whereby he learned to cook in a classical way, then went off and did his experiments. If you don’t have that, I don’t see any grounding. It’s all gimmickry.

Our concept for Chanterelle was, “We’re here to make you happy.” Yes, this is the food we cook. This is the style of service. But within that world there’s an enormous amount of variability. So you might be here for a very grand dining experience, or you might be here to socialize with your guests and you don’t want to be interrupted with a lot of fuss. Or you might be here for a business meeting or a seduction dinner. Or you might be here for a lot of reasons other than the cuisine. Obviously, food is part of the experience, but it’s not necessarily the totality.

The bottom line is, nouvelle cuisine is the way everybody cooks now, whether they call it that or not: the whole idea of a chef developing his or her own style. Of seasonality. The concept of sourcing things from the best possible places. Of plated food that looks somewhat artistic. Intense, powerful, reduced sauces. Especially the idea of not reproducing classic dishes but coming up with your own version. There’s no such thing as classic cooking anymore. People describe certain restaurants as being classic, but in fact they’re idiosyncratic and personal.

MS: Speaking of idiosyncrasy, each of your menus was an original work of art. How did that come about?

KW: The idea was Bill Katz’s, and it was brilliant. When we opened, so many artists were living in the neighborhood near Chanterelle, and then different gallery owners became part of the restaurant. We looked at the walls and realized that if we put one painting up, everyone else would want theirs up, too, so we decided to have people contribute menu covers instead. Louise Nevelson lived down the block and she would come to eat. Philip Petit was a friend of mine. Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe would come with the dancers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. I used to sit for Maurice Grosser. When Bush was reelected it was our twenty-fifth anniversary, so Robert Rauschenberg made us a red, white, and blue fire hydrant, because that’s what dogs pee on. Bill Cosby walked in for dinner one night and asked if he could make something for us. The photographer John Dugdale was a waiter of ours. So it all happened very organically. I don’t think it was particularly conscious; it was just our lives. We changed the menus every week in the beginning, and then every four weeks for the entire life of the restaurant. The menus changed because life changes; the whole idea was very symbolic of who we are.

MS: In many ways Chanterelle was epitomized by that sense of curatorial elegance. How would you describe the restaurant’s aesthetic evolution?

KW: It just unfolded. I don’t think it had any particular path for itself. Time passes and it all just accumulates and grows richer. We were doing something we were passionate about. So were the artists who created the menus, as were the members of our staff. So there was a shared pleasure among us all about what makes life rich and enjoyable. It was this wonderful collaboration. If we decide to do something somewhere else, it will always be Chanterelle.

UH: The spirit at Noma—this very warm, welcoming, relaxed feeling the minute you step in—is that a Danish thing or something you have especially worked to create?

RR: In Denmark we’re not so formal, we don’t have an upper class, which is in some ways good. But in Denmark we tend to be withdrawn, so I’ve tried to create a more open atmosphere, to update our way of being.

UH: At Noma the chefs themselves come out and serve. That’s the first time anyone has really broken down the barrier between kitchen and dining room, them and us. Did you do that from the start?

RR: Yes, but not as intensely as we do it now. I’ve always felt it’s a matter of getting the job done. If the food is ready, don’t just stand there and shout for a waiter. Serve it yourself! Over the years of course I’ve tried to develop the kitchen and the concept, and to train the chefs to be better chefs. One way to do that is to make them serve. Also, the more famous you get, the more expectations people have, and the more nervous they become—dining at a place like this a big deal for them. So it’s also a way of showing that we’re on the guest’s side. When an awkward chef comes out…

UH: Oh, they are not awkward!

RR: They’re wonderful, but instead of having some kind of butler you have a person with rough hands and a little sauce on the apron coming out and saying “Welcome!” That is a very different approach from your usual waiter. The big thing with serving is psychology. It’s about confidence, and it’s about understanding people.

Quail eggs at Noma. Photograph by Andrea Thode/effilee.de © 2010

UH: Can you explain the idea behind Noma?

RR: It’s very banal really, but it took us a long time to come up with it. We want our guests to experience the sensation of time and place. So many times when you eat out you close your eyes and you could be anywhere in the world—Berlin, São Paulo, London. There is huge uniformity in the world of modern restaurants. Our job is to show people that we’re in the north of the world and the time of year that we’re in.

UH: The technical execution of each dish at Noma is impeccable, but what really got me was a certain lightness and sense of humor—your food made me smile the whole time, beginning with the slippery, bright orange fruit leather made from sea buckthorn and served on gray felt.

RR: That’s something I’ve been working on for the past seven years, to show where we are in everything we do. Felt is used a lot in our part of the world, so it’s natural for it to become the plate. Some people call the restaurant rustic. I don’t understand that, because everything here has been made by hand. There’s massive oak everywhere—so in fact when you think about it, it’s very luxurious. But it’s important to me that the restaurant should not be über-luxurious, with seven layers of the most expensive porcelain built up like a tower, and on top of that another porcelain dish with celery soup in it. Because then the link between the celery’s origin in the earth and the soup in the restaurant is completely broken.

UH: You worked with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli. Is your approach the next step beyond manipulating the material a lot? To be able to show the link to the earth?

RR: I’ve always been interested in this. Working at El Bulli pushed me farther in that direction, because I left with a great sense of freedom: good food didn’t necessarily have to be French oriented or involve foie gras and truffles from Périgord. It can be whatever you think.

UH: You restrict yourself to Nordic ingredients. That reminds me of a kind of experimental research laboratory: what happens if…

RR: We have discovered that by limiting ourselves, once you break through the initial difficulties, a whole new world opens up, and you start to see the possibilities instead of the restraints. That has been a big part of shaping our cuisine.

UH: How about lemon, or spices? How far does the experiment go?

RR: Well, of course we were Vikings. We can’t deny that we’re a country of sailors and traders and therefore have a culinary history that involves spices like cardamom. And of course we use chocolate for our petits fours, and we serve coffee… It’s important to mention that it wouldn’t make sense to use exclusively Nordic products forever. But as long as we’re still exploring our own natural environment—for instance, looking for our own oils to use, such as rapeseed—we will not put a drop of olive oil into our food.

UH: So what you mean is you first have to find your own identity…

RR: Yes, and then we can reach out and see what makes sense.

UH: You are making quite a lot of basic products yourself.

RR: We are growing our own grapes for white wine [on the island of Lilleø], we have beer, we have aquavit, we have liqueur and fruit vinegars. We pickle and dry a lot ourselves.

UH: Is this because you can’t find these things anywhere else or because you want to make them yourself?

RR: There is nobody else who does this, so we have to do it. The pickling, for instance, is important to get us through the winter. Wine we simply wanted to try, because people said it would be possible. And we try to find out how it works in the kitchen, which took a while to get used to, because we had been working with fruit-driven beers or light vinegars all the time. We also work with the actual grapes, and with grape juice. Unripe green grapes are incredible.

Chef Redzepi explains a dish. Photograph by Andrea Thode/effilee.de © 2010

UH: Who are your restaurant partners, and how involved are they?

RR: There are three of us. One is a designer whom I basically see only once every three months, at board meetings. Then there is Claus [Meyer], a famous entrepreneur in Denmark, a TV personality who is very good at developing quality projects in gastronomy. I only see him at board meetings, too. Of course, when we started I was a nobody, and Claus was super-famous in our part of the world, so very quickly the story revolved all around him. But the initial idea really was his. The three of us have a very good relationship. The other two completely trust the decisions we make here at Noma. Of course they make suggestions, but we run the restaurant the way we think we should. I definitely don’t want to be part of a corporate identity, because once you begin to enter this world or allow it to encroach, you’ll start making other products and compromises, and you won’t be able to keep things pure.

UH: But the temptation is strong, if you look at many of your colleagues…

RR: Of course it is, and the truth is that you simply don’t make money on restaurants like Noma. At one point it would be good, with all our hard work, to make some money. But I’m still trying to find a way where you don’t compromise, where you stay true to what you do.

UH: How about opening a second Noma?

RR: That’s always a big issue. But as long as I am here, it’s not going to happen. I have the opportunity to be part of something special, something I don’t think I am ever to see in my life again, so I am not going to ruin it just to make more money. Next time I’m involved in a restaurant, I won’t be a virgin anymore. Everything will be different. I won’t have the same pioneer spirit—or at least I really doubt I will. As long as I’m here I just want to focus 100 percent. To make sure that our cuisine is being developed at the highest gastronomic level and to inspire others within our region…

UH: Could you describe one of your favorite dishes?

RR: Oh, I love them all! Okay, let’s take the steak tartare. It was created five years ago, at the height of the high-tech era and that dish was like, well, let’s see what we can do without electricity. So it’s a dish where you use only your knife. You scrape and you pick; it’s simple. It’s not an assembly of textures created by machines; it’s an assembly of craftsmanship and products. To enhance that experience you should eat the meat with your fingers. Some people get provoked by eating with their fingers at a fine-dining restaurant, others love it. I think it’s wonderful because it breaks down the barriers. The same thing with the langoustine we serve on a big stone gathered from the beach, with an emulsion of fresh oysters and dulse for dipping. Those two dishes are quite important dishes for us in our repertoire.

UH: On the Noma Web site you talk about culinary legacy, but your own roots are not exclusively Danish.

RR: No, I am half Macedonian—my father is Macedonian and Albanian. I feel Danish, but it’s a good thing that I have not grown up the way most people in Denmark have. I think having a different background helped me to see some qualities that a 100 percent native Dane wouldn’t have. When we stayed four months in Macedonia every summer, there were eight of us in one room. We ate dinner, then took the table out and slept on the floor. You go places on horseback; there is no refrigerator.

UH: How about the food?

RR: Food was a hundred times better than what you ate here in the 1970s and ′80s, all that frozen food, microwaved food, fish sticks. There you slaughtered a chicken if you wanted a chicken. If you wanted milk, it was freshly milked. You ate much more simply, but the food was a lot fresher. I remember on Sundays having freshly laid eggs, cracked on bread and done in the pan. Or, in season, chestnuts roasted with cold milk for breakfast.

UH: Are you transferring any of these memories into the Nordic context?

RR: It isn’t intentional, but, obviously, that part of me is a part of this.

UH: Let’s talk about the New Nordic Food manifesto, which appeared quite soon after you opened Noma in 2004. It reminds me of the Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg and their Dogma 95 manifesto for a new film. They wanted to go back to their roots, rediscover a simpler way—do you feel a certain affinity to them?

RR: No. The Nordic manifesto was inspired by what the Basque did in the 1970s. The Dogma consisted of rules, whereas I never ask anyone in the kitchen to read the Nordic manifesto. It was an inspiration back then, when it first came out, but now I find it a little too political and too commercially exploited. Meeting Susanne, one of our farmers in Gotland, has been much more important for Noma. For a whole year she was our muse in the kitchen. She picks a lot of wild food, she has duck eggs, incredible berries, her son has a little farm where she produces fruit and vegetables, she has lamb that is out of this world… However, for the development of a regional Danish cuisine on a larger scale, the manifesto has been very important. For our restaurant it’s only been a small step on the way.

UH: Who are the people you work with in the kitchen, and how do you find them?

RR: They find us. We get around eight applications a day for the kitchen, seven days a week.

UH: So how do you choose?

RR: People come and try. We have to see them. They work at the restaurant for a week, and then they can also decide if it’s the right thing for them. It doesn’t matter if they have umpteen Michelin stars on their resumé. At the end of the day it’s about a certain kind of involvement and energy. With the right attitude and the will, the rest will follow. We have seventeen nationalities working together in the kitchen.

UH: You mentioned Ferran Adrià and El Bulli. Who are your heroes besides him?

RR: My biggest hero in the world is actually a French guy, which surprises a lot of people. Every time I feel I’m a little lazy, I think of him. Philippe Houdet is French, he lives in Denmark, he used to have a small, one-star restaurant, Pierre André. I did my apprenticeship there. He is the one who lit a fire in me.

UH: How did you initially get into cooking?

RR: Coincidence really. A friend started culinary school and I didn’t know what to do, so I joined him. I was fifteen. After going to school for six months you had to find an apprenticeship and stay there for three and a half years. I really learned a lot. Then I went to Jardin des Sens in France, in 1997. And then I read about El Bulli. I went there to eat and I thought—wow! Because everything that existed for me back then was French cuisine. El Bulli was a real eye-opener. Right after that meal I went up to Ferran and said, please, I want a job. The next season I worked there. During that time I met Grant Achatz, who now runs Alinea in Chicago. Back then he worked as sous chef with Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, and he told me a lot about him. I found it extremely interesting to hear about an American chef who worked some kind of Americanism into his food, instead of the French chefs in America you always read about. And so I went to the French Laundry for a stage after El Bulli. It was a brilliant time. Thomas Keller was a great inspiration.

UH: Nowadays, what do you do to re-energize?

RR: I spend time with my family. I have work and I have family and that’s it, really. I don’t do sports. I used to…the flip side of success is that the more success you have, the more work you’ll have. Maybe at some point I will reach a level where success will enable me to work how I want to.

UH: You opened in 2003, you got your first Michelin star in 2005, the second one in 2007. Does that define success for you?

RR: It’s part of it. I think every chef has the dream of making it to that level, right up to the third star. It’s not important enough for me that I would ever change anything, though. Perhaps one day they’ll think our food is good enough.

UH: Ferran Adrià has announced that he’ll close El Bulli at the end of 2011 for good. How long will Noma stay open?

RR: At one point you’ll just be empty, you’ll start repeating yourself, and then it’s time to leave. And my gut feeling is ten years. I can’t see myself here in twenty years. It’s very demanding in terms of energy. That’s another backside of success—you get a new level of attention focused on you and that makes you go forward even faster. So, ten years.

UH: And then what? Could you see yourself doing something along the lines of Noma but in a completely different place?

RR: Perhaps. I certainly couldn’t do a Nordic restaurant again. But taking the mindset to another place, why not. At thirty-two I am young, I have a young daughter, I don’t want her to grow up only in this country; I want her to be open to influences from around the world. For a long time in Denmark we have had great designers who make wonderful tables and chairs, beautiful linen, great porcelain, silverware, and glassware. But we have had nothing to put on them. This is slowly happening now—instead of only form we have some content. But let’s take it easy. Let’s see if we can develop this, if we can grow. This is just the beginning.