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PRESENTER: I wanted to welcome you all to another outstanding
Authors at Google Talk.
I can only do very little in terms of introduction here.
The true expert is fellow Googler Stephanie McClellan.
But she did give me a few pointers as we introduce our
latest speaker today.
Michael Romano is here speaking about his book, which
is called "The Family Table." It's a story of chef and staff
meals at the Union Square Cafe, which is where he is the
culinary director.
And this James Beard-winning, massively awesome restaurant,
massively awesome staff, really takes the concept of
enlightened hospitality to heart.
And so that's truly apparent in the staff meal, which is in
essence what you feed the folks that are
on staff for you.
Very similar to how we approach life at Google.
And so we will have some time for questions at the end.
And for now, please join me in welcoming Michael to Google.
Thank you very much.
MICHAEL ROMANO: Hi.
Thank you for coming.
Very excited to be here.
Great to see Stephanie up on the screen.
So I don't know, it's a little embarrassing, coming here to
talk to you about staff meal, because you have the most
amazing facility here.
I just got a tour.
I just had a wonderful lunch at Long Life, was it?
Long Life Cafe?
And I'm very jealous.
You have the most incredible food facility I've ever seen.
I was at the New York Google office, and that was pretty
spectacular.
But this is amazing.
Very excited about our new book.
This is my third cookbook.
The first two are "The Union Square Cafe Cookbook," and the
second one was called "Second Helpings from Union Square
Cafe." Kind of turned out to be a bad name, because people
thought it was a book about leftovers, but it's not.
And they've done very well.
But this one is very exciting.
I don't know if any of you are authors, or have written a
book or anything.
But you work very hard at it, sometimes for years.
And then it gets processed and put together and published.
And the moment when they put it in your hands is a really
amazing moment.
It's like welcoming a newborn into the world.
And it's just very exciting.
Because you never know.
You never know really what it's going to look like until
there it is, in your hand.
So the idea for this book, "Family Table," is that every
day in our restaurant, twice a day, the staff-- which is
always referred to as family, by the way.
The cooks don't say, I'm making staff meal.
They always say, who is making family today?
It's just a tradition in our business.
And every day, they sit down to a meal at lunch and dinner.
So we thought that in itself would be an interesting topic
for a book.
What is the food that is being prepared for these people?
And it's not the food that we are preparing for you, the
guests who come to our restaurants.
Quite different.
And then there was another thought that entered into
this, which really convinced us that we
should do this book.
And I say we-- this is my co-author, Karen Stabiner--
was all the stories about the folks who work in our
restaurant.
So we have over 2000 employees, which I know here
seems like nothing.
But for us it's pretty amazing.
And so all the people--
and some of them have been with us for over 20 years,
because our oldest restaurant, the Union Square Cafe, where I
started as executive chef.
Is going to be 28 years old this October.
So we have people who've been with us for
a really long time.
And what happens, of course, is they develop a kind of a
connection to the place that goes beyond if you're there
for a year or two.
They're connected to the history of the place.
They carry it around with them, and they teach this.
They are the keepers of the history and the everything
that goes into making our places.
And they teach this to the young people coming in, the
new people coming into our restaurants.
So we thought, well, that also would be an interesting topic
to put together in a book along with the recipes.
So that's essentially what we've done.
We've got great recipes, and we've got great stories about
the folks who populate our restaurants,
and make them alive.
They bring the spirit, the soul to the restaurants.
And without that, a restaurant is not really terribly
interesting.
It won't ever be great if it doesn't have that soul.
So what's interesting about the recipes, I think, is that
you have these cooks, right?
And has anyone here ever worked in a restaurant?
Ah, see that?
There's a few.
The cook will be assigned to do family.
And he or she will have certain parameters.
They'll be very pressed for time.
That's always a given.
Because they have their own work to do.
It's not like it's a dedicated cafeteria, where they're just
doing food for staff.
They have to do their other work as well.
So they'll have very limited time.
They'll have definite parameters as to what they're
going to use for the food.
We don't want to ever see truffles going out to the
dining room for the staff, and things like that.
So they have to make quick decisions, work quickly, and
come up with tasty food in a hurry.
And I find that has a tremendous synergy with
someone cooking at home for a family, because you probably
face the same kinds of constraints.
The parameters are about the same.
So we hope that that is going to be an enticement to folks
cooking at home.
Because they'll see recipes here that can be done pretty
quickly, they're very tasty, and not going to tax your
pocketbook too much.
But you're going to enjoyed them, and they're going to
broaden your repertoire of things that
you can cook at home.
The other thing is something that I hadn't really planned
on when we started the book.
Was the racial ethnicity across this
book is pretty amazing.
Because the cooks are cooking wherever they've come from--
they're Dominican, or Mexican, or Asian.
They bring this to the food that they know
and love to the table.
And so we have a great diversity in the book of
different recipes and different flavors, which I
think is really a lot of fun.
I'm also hoping something for this book.
This is a little deeper, a little bit
of a long term hope.
But I know that's out there, certainly in the television
world, there's a kind of a notion that persists, I guess
because it makes good television, that restaurants
are places where there's a lot of screaming going on, and
people are really getting emotionally
beat up and put down.
That kind of persists throughout our industry.
And I'm hoping that this book will just make a little dent
in that perception.
Because it shows how well people can be treated.
We don't do all that stuff, and I never
did that as a chef.
So I want people to see a different side of the
restaurant business.
People have asked me, why is staff meal, why is family
table so important?
And I tell them for two reasons.
One is physiological.
Meaning that you need to be nourished.
If you're working in a kitchen or dining room,
it's difficult work.
It's challenging work.
You're on your feet for a long hours.
And if you're in the dining room, you're facing guests,
and you always have to bring a level of hospitality, of
upbeat energy to it.
So if you're not fed, and you're thinking about how
hungry you are, and you're around all this food, and
you're serving this food, you're going to be distracted.
And you're going to be serving someone their chicken, and
you're going to be thinking, I wish I had a
piece of that chicken.
I want to take a little piece right off of that
plate and eat it.
And your mind is going to be not focused so much on what
you're supposed to be doing.
And at the most basic level, you need the energy to be able
to carry on and do the job.
So that's number one.
Number two is the psychological aspect to it,
which is cooking good food and serving good food--
and again, you folks know this very well here--
is a way of taking care of people.
And when you take care of people in that way, people
feel taken care of.
And they appreciate it, and they have a reciprocal kind of
experience, where they feel good about the place they're
working in.
And this is a great example of it.
So the folks in our restaurants, if they're well
taken care of that way, they're fed, and also they
feel, this place cares about me.
They care enough to serve food.
I know at one of our restaurants, Gramercy Tavern--
that was our second one to open, in 1994--
I'm always amazed at how carefully the food that goes
out for family is labeled with a lot of details about what's
in the food.
So that someone who doesn't want to eat pork, or doesn't
want to eat gluten, or things like that will
know ahead of time.
And believe me, that is not the norm in
the restaurant business.
Often in the restaurant business, it's if you get a
meal, it's like, here it is.
And if you don't like it, too bad, and you can just go out
and fend for yourself.
So I'm really happy and proud to see that
kind of thing go on.
And Gramercy was a big contributor in this book, and
they did it really, really joyfully and willingly, and
they were very proud of the book itself.
That was really a great aspect to it.
I noticed after the book came out, and I showed it around to
people who contributed the recipes, they were very proud
and they were just delighted.
And they couldn't wait to get a copy and take it home and
show their families that they were in this book.
And there's many pictures of the staff.
And they were proud that they had contributed to the book.
From my perspective--
I mentioned before that I have already done two cookbooks--
a big challenge of this book, which made it, in a way, the
most difficult work I've done, was that in my first two
books, the Union Square Cafe books, the recipes that you
find in there are my recipes that I mostly created myself
and was cooking at the restaurant.
So they were road-tested, so to speak.
They were broken in, we knew people liked them.
So really, the challenge for the book was just to get them
from restaurant quantities and restaurant technique to work
well for the home cook.
And that's not all that difficult.
So it was an exercise in transcribing these recipes for
the home cook.
This book, these are not my recipes.
These are the recipes that the cooks in our restaurants put
together every day for the family.
So the job became getting with them, trying not to upset
their routine and their schedule too much, but trying
to extract from them what it was they were making.
And believe me, they were not using recipes.
They were not putting a teaspoon of this,
and a cup of that.
They were just throwing stuff together, literally, and
coming up with some good-tasting food.
But, as we say, on the fly.
So Karen Stabiner, my co-author, did a lot of the
legwork of getting in there and trying to pull out from
the cooks what it is they were doing.
And believe me, they were sometimes wildly inaccurate.
A cook might say, yeah, I put about a cup of that in there.
And really it was a tablespoon.
So then, when I got the first draft raw recipe handed to me
and set about testing them in the kitchen, because we want
to make sure that they work, I was getting some wild results.
Oh, this is not going to work.
It just wasn't right.
And I knew what had been served was good.
So I had to bridge that gap between what had been served,
and what I saw on the page, and make them come together.
And sometimes I exercised a little bit of executive
privilege and tweaked it here and there, so that I knew that
this was going to be a good recipe.
Sometimes I thought, well, this needs a
little bit of this.
So I didn't hesitate to add it, because it's all in the
spirit of "The Family Table."
I'm proud of the recipes, and I think they came out well,
and I think you're going to enjoy them.
How many of you actually cook at home?
Oh, almost everybody.
That's great.
I got the right audience here, this is good.
So I'm going to tell you in a very un-objective, very
subjective way, my favorite recipe-- because I get asked
that a lot in the book-- is my mother's lasagna.
Now, you wonder why my mother's lasagna is in this
book, because it's not something we might serve to
the family in our restaurants.
There's a category of recipes in here that
came from the chefs.
Now, the chefs in restaurants don't cook family meal.
They're busy doing other things, and they assign it to
the cooks, the line cooks.
So we thought, well, we'd like to include them in there,
because they probably have some really great recipes.
So we asked the chefs to contribute recipes that they
might cook at home for their families, or had been cooked
for them when they were growing up by their family.
And that's how we got these group of recipes in here, and
that's how my mother's lasagna wound up in here.
Because that's, for me, the number
one memory of childhood.
It was always a very special time when she made it.
She didn't make it that often, because it's a
fair amount of work.
But when she did, my sister and I were always delighted,
and it was always so wonderful.
And so I had to go back and research, and
find how she did it.
What ingredients and what proportion she used.
My brother-in-law helped a lot, because he's a great
cook, and he used to watch my mother.
She's no longer alive.
But thank god, he noted down what she used to do.
So we pieced it together, and it came out really well.
And if you make it, I promise you're going to enjoy it.
And one of the things she did was to make--
her meatballs were really wonderful.
So she would make the meatballs, cook the meatballs
in the sauce, and then actually slice them and lay
them out, shingled, as the meat layer in the lasagna.
So instead of just having a sloppy joe kind of ground meat
in there, these were seasoned, held together, beautiful.
And they're very tender, you'll see if
you make the recipe.
They're intentionally very soft.
So that when you eat it in the lasagna, it's just this whole
sort of amalgam of--
and then the cheese layer is really wonderful, so it all
works together.
We had a book party for press in New York just before the
book came out, and that was one of the dishes I served.
And nobody wanted to leave until was all gone.
And I got a lot of great comments, which is very
gratifying.
And there's a number of other recipes that I really love.
There's one called Dominican Beef.
So-called because the fellow who makes it, Viktor, is from
the Dominican Republic.
And he started as a porter--
that is to say, would be receiving deliveries, and
keeping the basement in order.
And then he graduated to a prep cook.
And occasionally, he would make this wonderful beef stew,
essentially.
It was very simple.
It was a handful of ingredients.
But it's so delicious.
Some magic happens when he makes it.
And I would always look forward to the days
when he made that.
And now, the current chef at Union Square Cafe, Carmen
Quagliata, actually put the dish on the brunch menu.
So there's an example of a dish that did
make it to the guest.
And we're very proud of it.
And Viktor is just overjoyed with having his recipe not
only in the book, but on the menu as well.
And the photography is a fellow named Marcus Nilsson.
I think he's from Finland.
Very interesting guy.
Did some wonderful photography.
It's a little edgy.
A lot of them have black background.
And I love the way things came out.
Everything is very unstaged, in a way, especially the shots
of the people who made the food.
I hope that you can get a sense of the people's
personality through the profiles that are written in
the book, and then see through the food that they contributed
a little bit of that personality come through.
Because it's for me is really clear, because
I know these people.
It's a fun part of the book.
I have long, long memories of staff meals, family meals,
back to the '70s, when I was working in Europe, and France,
and Switzerland, where I first saw this institution of the
staff sitting down.
Although in France, and in Switzerland as well, we never
ate together with the dining room.
The kitchen ate separately from the dining room.
And that was something I wasn't too fond of.
And when I came to Union Square Cafe in 1988, I wanted
everybody to eat together.
And that's what we still do.
In the main dining room, everyone sits.
The cooks will will sit together with other cooks
because they want to talk about things, and the servers
will sit with themselves.
And in Union Square Cafe in particular, there are the
staff members--
that being the oldest of our restaurants--
who have been there for such a long time that they have their
seats, and that's where they sit for family meal.
And the new person is quickly informed, you don't sit there.
That's so-and-so's seat.
But in a very benign way.
It's just people get very comfortable.
Again, it feels like their home, because they're made to
feel so comfortable and taken care of.
Which is, again, clearly something that's going on here
in an amazing way.
You have so many things here that can help you get things
done that you need to get done.
I'm seeing laundry rooms, I'm seeing all kinds of--
it's astounding.
So you understand that concept very well, and taken it to a
much greater degree.
But our family table is our attempt at doing that.
I was talking to my partner, Danny Meyer, before leaving on
the book tour.
And he said, maybe there are always certain criteria.
And they kind of change, they're kind of topical.
Criteria by which people judge, or prejudge, a
restaurant from what they've heard about.
These days it would be, do they
practice sustainable cooking?
Is it organic cooking?
Is its farm-to-table?
Is it seasonal?
These kinds of parameters.
And he said, maybe just maybe people will start to think
about, hmm, I wonder how they treat their staff, in terms of
the staff meal?
Because by and large, people don't think about that when
they go to a restaurant.
What does the staff eat?
I don't know if it occurs to them that the
staff eats as well.
And that's part of a bigger picture, I think, of the
question of, how well is the staff treated?
Because I go back to the days in Europe, and I won't mention
names or places, but it was not always the rule.
We were treated kind of harshly.
It was not uncommon, in the kitchen for example,
certainly, to be screamed at, and to be even hit,
physically, or have things thrown at you and whatnot.
And the dining room also was kept on a very short
leash, so to speak.
And then you're expected to turn around and be genuinely
kind and hospitable to the guests, which I always find to
be a very difficult maneuver.
Because it seems to me--
and again, this is why it kind of bothers me to see this
prolonging of this idea of the chef as screamer, someone who
just wants to vent on the staff and belittle people.
Picture if you're in a restaurant, you're a guest in
a restaurant, and you are looking at the menu.
And you see something you like, but you don't
necessarily want it the way it's written on the menu.
I'd like this, the roast chicken, but could I get it
with the garnish that's with the steak here?
And so you're going to ask your server, right?
So imagine two scenarios.
If your server knows that when he or she goes back into the
kitchen and asks the chef, she's going to get her head
chopped off.
She's going to get screamed at and really get
hassled from the shelf.
How is she going to react to you, with your request?
Some part of her is going to cringe, and be saying, I wish
you hadn't asked me that.
But on the other hand, the other scenario.
If the chef is also genuinely hospitable and kind, and says,
sure, we'll make that work.
No problem.
She's going to have, or he's going to have, a much more
open spirit, and be much more accessible to you as the
guest, and give you better hospitality.
And one of the most wonderful things I've ever heard my
partner Danny say, Danny Meyers, describing the
difference between service and hospitality.
He says, service is a technique.
It's a one-way street.
It happens to you, as the guest.
How well your plate is presented, how well your plate
is cleared away, how well the wine is poured, have you got
the right cutlery.
That's the service.
Hospitality is a dialogue.
It has to happen between you and what you want and what you
need, and the server, who has to be listening so that he or
she understands what you as a guest need.
We have an idea how we're going to present
our product to you.
But you are going to have ways that you want to modify that.
Either subtle ways, or not-so-subtle ways.
And we have to be open to hearing that, and engaging
you, and finding a way to make that happen.
And then you're going to be happy.
You're going to be comfortable.
I think here, what I see around here, is a real
dialogue of what do you need, in terms of you being in this
workplace, to be productive, to be happy--
and therefore more productive?
And there's a lot of effort made to provide that for you.
So it's the same.
It's the same kind of hospitality that
we're talking about.
AUDIENCE: It's just an interesting idea to think of
all the chefs at some of these really amazing restaurants
just sitting around having dinner.
And I'd be terrified to cook for them all.
Is there a hands-off policy, you're not allowed to critique
family dinner?
MICHAEL ROMANO: No!
AUDIENCE: When they serve it, is it kind of like, all hands
on deck critiquing it?
I just would be terrified to serve.
You're talking about, they have a little bit of time,
they're not as experienced as the other chefs.
I would think that that would be kind of a terrifying
experience.
MICHAEL ROMANO: It could be for a new person, maybe.
But I think it's an opportunity for that person to
step up and show what they can do.
Because this is not something--
The chef has a menu.
And the cooks prepare the menu according to the chefs wishes
of how it should be done.
So there's not too much room for personal
interpretation there.
Sometimes you'll get in trouble if you do that.
But for cooking family meal, you do have room to interpret.
So it's a chance for you to speak.
If you're a timid person, then yeah, you might be a little
nervous about it.
As far as feedback, people will give feedback.
Hopefully in a kind way, and not a destructive way.
And it's not about, oh, I thought this needed a little
bit more salt, or you should've put
a little bit more--
No.
Basically, what I've seen over the years, is feedback when
people feel they're not getting enough of a certain
type of nourishment, or it's getting too monotonous, we're
having the same thing every day, or
there's not enough variety.
That's a big one.
That's really a big one.
If it's hot dogs and sauerkraut every day for a
week, you're going to have problems, and people are going
to speak up about it.
It's an opportunity for a cook to show that he or she is
genuinely interested and cares about cooking.
Because I have a great deal of concern and skepticism about a
cook who's saying to me, yeah, I love to cook, I want to
learn, I want to be great, and then makes a
miserable family meal.
Food is food.
If you're trying your best to do my menu and cook those
dishes, but when it comes to doing family you just put out
anything, that shows something about you.
It tells me something about you and your level of caring,
which is a big concern.
So it's a good way to assess.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, you see cooks
who really put their heart and soul into it, and they want
family to be great, and they love the positive feedback
that comes to them from the staff.
Like, great meal!
That was so good!
That kind of thing.
But thanks, that's a good question.
AUDIENCE: Thanks so much for coming.
MICHAEL ROMANO: Oh, my pleasure.
AUDIENCE: I've actually had the pleasure of going to a
number of your restaurants, which are great.
And I know that they all have very different personalities.
So I'm wondering a little bit about the difference in the
atmosphere and the setup of family meal between the
restaurants.
And then the second question is, I know your staff may move
between restaurants.
So as they move, have you seen favorite family meal dishes
move from restaurant to restaurant?
MICHAEL ROMANO: Yeah.
So the first question.
Definitely the way the meal is set up and the way it's
served, or the way people eat, is very much in line with the
feeling of the restaurant.
From very casual, like our barbecue restaurant, Blue
Smoke, to--
One of the restaurants that's included in the list, and
there are recipes from it, is 11 Madison Park, which
actually is no longer our restaurant.
The chef and GM, who are two incredibly talented guys,
decided they wanted to buy the restaurant from
us, and they did.
And so they're off on their own doing it.
But at the time that we started writing this book, it
was part of the family.
And that was a little bit more formal, and the
meal reflected that.
And both the food that was cooked in the way it was
presented, you could see the difference.
You could definitely see the difference.
And for me, it's fun because I can get to go to any of the
family meals that I want, and get that
feeling from each one.
Now for cooks--
yes, you're right.
Cooks do migrate, I like to call it, from one restaurant
to another.
If they happen to be the cook that gets on the line and
makes family, I'm sure they're going to bring stuff from one
to the other, although I don't have
concrete examples of that.
And they'll get to see what one family meal is like as
opposed to another.
There are differences, I have to say.
Stylistically, and also I keep coming back in my mind to
Gramercy Tavern, which seems, almost every day, to serve an
outstanding variety, and a tremendous amount of care goes
into the meal.
It's an interesting experience to visit a few of them and see
the differences.
And thank you all very much for your attention.