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DAVID KINCH: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID KINCH: Thank you.
I'd be happy to answer any questions
I can about myself or, more excitingly, the book
or the restaurant or any of the projects
we're involved in, and especially about the book.
The book has done very well so far.
It's been released for about two weeks.
It's been a labor of love.
It's taken about 15 months of work.
It is a book that we did, actually,
much to the publisher's surprise,
we did on time and on budget, which
they tell me is quite rare in the publishing industry.
And even though it is a story of the restaurant,
people ask what the cookbook's about.
It's really not a cookbook, but a story of the restaurant.
We're about 12 years old now.
And I say it's a story of the restaurant
as told through narrative photographs and recipes.
And when we first decided to do the book, the first thing I did
is I went through the archives of all the dishes
that we had done for the past 11 years.
And there were a lot.
We kept everything in file.
And I was really excited.
I thought, we'll document the history
of the restaurant and our evolution to the restaurant.
And I found that looking through everything,
that I was not impressed with-- in fact, embarrassed
with a lot of the previous work that we had done.
And we had agreed to do photo shoots over a 15-month period
so we could capture all the seasonal nuances-- the seasons,
but also the seasonal nuances-- throughout the year
and be able to capture the full range of ingredients
that we work with at the restaurant.
And it ended up turning out that the dishes that we decided on
were all the current dishes that were on the menu,
during the 15 months that we shot,
to the point where when I look at the dishes
that we shot a year and a half ago,
I see a certain amount of datedness into it
and wondering why we were doing those in the first place.
So about 10% of the recipes are signature dishes.
There's recipes that have kind of come and gone.
There's certain dishes that we do
throughout the year in season that we really
like and the restaurant has become known for.
So those are represented in the book.
But even though it is a story of the history of the restaurant,
the actual recipes and photographs
represent the past 15 months in our evolution.
There is a reason for that, I think.
In thinking about why that happened,
there's a part of the book in which we
talk about cuisine being a dynamic.
Food being such an inherent part of our culture, whether we know
it or not-- there's the cliche of food, clothing, and shelter.
How we nourish ourselves, how we feed ourselves,
how we energize our bodies to do what we do
is such an ingrained part in the human psyche and our culture
that sometimes, we take it for granted.
And here in the United States-- I
consider myself an American cook, an American chef,
even though a lot of my training has been outside
in much more diverse and rich culinary cultures.
But it's very nascent.
It's very young here in the United States,
but we are growing, and we are maturing really, really fast.
Cuisine is a living, breathing endeavor
that is extremely dynamic.
It is constantly changing and moving forward.
And that's what happens with the food
that we do at the restaurant.
Say we're working with something like asparagus in springtime.
There might be dishes that we really like.
And then when it comes around to springtime again,
and great asparagus becomes available to us,
we have many options.
We can create the dishes that we did the year before or the year
before that or the year before that,
or we can create completely new dishes
based upon the cultural-- based upon the reference points
and the data points that we have gathered
throughout the year and the experiences that we learned.
Or we can take that exact dish, and we can build upon it.
So-called, we can improve it.
The point is, is that it's not static.
It is dynamic.
And I think any kind of endeavor,
especially with food, what I do for a living,
if we become static-- we don't evolve, we don't change,
we don't try to improve ourselves on a daily basis-- we
will wither and die, especially in such
an intensely competitive atmosphere as the restaurant
and hospitality industry in the Bay Area.
A great example of cooking, about dynamics
and static or passive, is, to use an example,
would be what is a static or passive dessert?
A slice of a tart, a fruit tart, could be considered passive
because you make the tart in the afternoon.
You make it the day before.
And then when it's ready to serve,
you cut a slice of the tart, and you put it on a plate,
and you serve it.
And it's great.
It's a wonderful dessert.
But it's also the same on Tuesday as it is Wednesday
as it is Wednesday at 4 o'clock in the afternoon
to the first piece you serve at 6:30
and to the piece you serve at 9:30 at night.
A dynamic dessert, a real fundamental example
would be a dessert that is finished with a scoop of ice
cream, because the ice cream is on the plate,
and then five minutes later, it's half melted,
and it has changed.
And it's completely evolved.
It's completely devolved.
That is a dynamic dessert.
That is a dish that you're trying
to create that is best to be enjoyed in the maximum flavor,
and its maximum effect on the client
is within a specific window.
And this requires a certain amount of labor and practice
and cooperation amongst different parts of the kitchen.
And that's one reason why dynamic desserts
are more expensive.
It's not necessarily because of ingredients or anything
like that.
But you're paying for the labor for it.
So that is a good example.
One last thing I want to mention before we can go to questions
is-- maturation of a chef, modernist cuisine,
the power of media in my industry.
It used to be when I started out as a young line cook,
nobody knew the name of the chef.
We were domestics.
We worked behind the scenes.
If anybody knew anybody's name in the restaurant business,
it was the owner of the restaurant or the maitre d'.
And it's changed dramatically over the years.
Over the past couple of decades, chefs have become famous.
They've become much more celebrity-conscious.
And I don't necessarily think that is a good thing.
It has lured people into the industry for the wrong reasons.
It used to be cooking was a craft.
It was a middle-class craft.
It would be almost like blacksmithing or learning
how to weave or working with tapestries, in which you learn
certain skills, minutiae, attention to detail,
and you did them over and over and over again until you could
just pick up an onion, and without thinking about it,
without looking at it, you'd peel it,
and you'd cut into quarter inch dice,
and your cutting board would be clean,
and you have a pile of waste, and you
have the pile of onions.
There was no thought process behind it.
You just did things.
And you spent years perfecting these rote, small minutiae,
details, and then you advanced up through a kitchen.
And it was a craft.
Were there artistic elements?
Yes, there was always artistic elements.
But there was never really artists.
Artists come along only once a generation.
Not everybody's an artist.
So it was always a craft with artistic sensibilities.
Nowadays, I think a lot of people
are attracted to the industry because they
feel that it's incredibly glamorous.
I can tell you, I'm 52 years old,
and I still work 'til 1:30 AM in the morning,
and there's nothing glamorous about that.
I work weekends.
I work nights.
I work holidays.
I work when you all have time to go out
and eat at nice restaurants.
That's what we do.
So the final maturation in a chef is not
when things are brand new and you see things
that you've never seen before, or you're bedazzled,
or the media tells you a dish or new restaurant is great.
The last thing that happens in a chef's development, when
they are mature, when they're confident
in their own abilities, when they're
confident in their style, is that they're
cooking the most simple food they've ever
cooked in their entire life because they
are confident in their technique,
in their perfection of their technique.
They're buying the best possible ingredients, which
they can buy because any chef worth their salt will tell you,
the single most important thing in cooking
is always buying the best possible quality product
that you can afford, which usually means catching things
at the peak of their season, because they're at their best
and at their cheapest, a win-win situation,
and then gently nudging them forward
to where they are showing at their very best.
Any flim-flammery, wizardry, gimmickry
that covers up the inherent beautiful qualities
that nature gives us is usually the last thing
jettisoned by an immature cook.
A lot of molecular gastronomy and gimmickry you will find
is mostly chefs who are trying to impress other chefs
and not necessarily offering the best possible experience
to you, the paying clients.
So that's really all I have to tell people at Google today.
I'd be happy to answer any questions that you
might have about the book or--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
DAVID KINCH: He's asking why I felt that now is the best time.
It wasn't completely my decision.
I had been wanting to write a cookbook for the longest time.
I had written several proposals over the years,
even with the same publisher who eventually accepted us.
And I was always rejected for whatever reasons.
And then the third time, it was accepted.
And in conversations with them, he
told me that, well, now the restaurant had a story to tell,
now that I had a story to tell.
And it was interesting because I really
fought to put the proposals together.
Everything was kind of forced.
And it was, you know, OK, I have a restaurant,
and people are starting to hear about the restaurant,
so my next step is to write a cookbook.
I have to do this.
And then I just kind of forgot about it.
And then when the final proposal was accepted,
it kind of happened really naturally
and really organically.
And a lot of the comments that we receive about the book
is that there is a naturalness to the book that's
reflective of the restaurant and what we do at the restaurant,
that it wasn't forced.
It wasn't like it was time to write a cookbook.
It was a cookbook that is naturally telling our story.
So I think it was more of a feeling,
just things fell into place.
I found the right photographer.
The writer who I really wanted to work with all of a sudden
became available and wanted to be involved in the project.
And of course, it was accepted by a publisher
whom I have great respect for.
Do I have a favorite season in mind?
If I had to pick one, it would probably
be right now, the fall, because we
have the best of-- the bounty of summertime,
but we're starting to move into a little bit-- we can start
cooking with red meats again.
Red wine comes into play, cooler nights, that sort of thing.
But the great thing about cooking
seasonally is you cook with all the bounty
of a particular season.
And right when you're getting really bored or tired of it,
you're moving out of it, and you're
moving to new and more exciting things.
And then for nine months, you don't have to worry about it.
And when things come around into the cycle, you're re-energized.
You're re-energized and think about things.
I like cooking all times of the year.
Believe it or not, my least favorite time is summertime.
Everything's so leafy and tomatoey.
It's frivolous, which is nice.
It's nice.
It's nice for three months.
But it's not my favorite.
Every year we do a tomato dinner,
where every course has tomatoes in it.
And actually, it's a celebration to celebrate the relationship
I have with Love Apple Farms, which is the farm that we work
with who supplies much of the produce
to the restaurant year round.
And she was originally a champion tomato grower.
I first originally bought tomatoes from her,
before we expanded the relationship.
And tomatoes are still a very big part of what she does
and how she does it.
So every year, we do it.
And we try to change the dishes up.
So it's getting harder and harder right now
to try and not repeat dishes.
We're trying to create our tomato desserts.
We're like on our 10th tomato dessert.
It's really hard at this point.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID KINCH: She's asking what dishes
I've seen evolve over the years and how
I've seen the involvement over the years, pretty much.
There's a dish that we do called Into the Vegetable Garden,
which is on the menu all the time.
It's on the menu all the time, and it's
the only dish that's on the menu all the time,
with the exact same wording all the time,
but the dish is different every day.
I know that sounds strange.
But what it is, the rule is that everything that
comes from Love Apple Farms on a daily basis,
there has to be an item of that on this plate.
And if it's not from Love Apple Farms,
it can't be on this plate.
It's a celebration of this relationship that we have.
One cynically could say it looks like a green salad.
But in the handful of bites, the four to five bites that
are on the plate, there's anywhere
from 45 to 60 ingredients on the plate every day.
And it's built up in the shape of a plant.
There's root vegetable purees on the bottom,
and there's a cooked set.
Then there's a raw set, a seed set, a flower set.
If you look at it from 10 feet away,
it looks like a green salad.
But each leaf is on there.
There's up to 30 leaves on it, and each one
is from a different plant or a different vegetable
or a different lettuce or herb.
So each mouthful is different.
And we get deliveries from the farm three times a week.
And we have two people who just work on this dish.
That's all they do.
For the 50 people we feed a night, everybody gets it,
and each one's built to order.
So they spend a lot of time cleaning and building
these little kits that come together.
But it never started out just like this.
It originally started out, we were
looking for a dish that represented
the relationship between the farm.
But when it started out, it was a lot smaller.
It was only about three acres.
The farm's now 22 acres.
When it started out, there was a limited amount of produce.
So we were kind of just doing vegetables.
They had a great patch of potatoes,
so it started out as a potato dish
with burrata cheese and vegetables from the farm.
And then we got rid of the burrata cheese
because we weren't producing it.
And then we weren't getting the potatoes year round.
So we were calling it-- it started out
potatoes and burrata with the vegetables from the garden.
And then it was just potatoes with vegetables
from the garden.
And finally, we just took this plunge
in which we went in and just called it
Into the Vegetable Garden.
And it became much more of a concept.
There's even an edible dirt on the plate we make,
which is made with dehydrated potatoes and parsnips
and almonds and roasted chicory root,
which makes it look like potting soil.
But it's very delicious potting soil,
and it's sprinkled around there to represent dirt.
AUDIENCE: Have a favorite dish?
DAVID KINCH: No, I don't have a favorite dish.
Do I have a favorite dish?
No, I don't.
I mean, I orchestrate everything.
I got a team of 14 people in the kitchen
for feeding 55 people a night.
They work very hard.
They work 12-hour days.
And I throw a lot of curveballs at them.
It's like, they'll come up to a dish.
They'll get into a routine.
And once we're into a routine, and everything is going really
well with the menu, that's usually
when I want to change things and try new ideas and things.
And we do only tasting menus.
We do a six-course menu and a 14-course menu.
So for me, it's not necessarily dishes, but it's the meal.
And we look at different points in the meal.
It's like you have chapters.
You have like an introduction of flavors, and things rise up.
The garden is kind of like the climax, the garden dish, which
is right smack in the middle.
And then there's a denouement.
We finish with a piece of red meat,
but it's not the biggest portion that you're going to get.
It's actually going to be the garden
dish in the middle of the meal.
So it kind of slowly descends.
And we then we have desserts.
And we kind of want to finish like a whisper,
or like really, really quiet at the end.
And we start with a dish and finish
with a dish that looks exactly alike,
but the flavors are completely different.
The first ones are savory, and the last ones are sweet.
You can see it in the book.
And it kind of denotes the full circle of the meal.
So I'm not looking at specific dishes,
but I'm looking at an arc of the meal
and how I can tweak the experience along that arc.
I think if you're doing a meal that
involves 10, 12, 14 courses, each dish
can't be really, really complicated
because then you can't process everything.
Everything needs to be simple because it all adds up.
And ultimately, if you're eating an appetizer, main course,
and a dessert at a restaurant, or you're
eating a 15-course tasting menu, one
is not bigger than the other.
I still think a meal should consist
of 25 small bites of food.
You can do it with three plates of food,
or you can do it with 15 plates of food.
What you're paying for or what you're looking for
is really a diversity or a variety of tastes and textures
and experiences.
A lot of people don't want that.
A lot of people want a plate of food.
They can have six or seven-- a dish evolves.
You have that first bite.
It's explosive, it's different.
And you enjoy it more, and you enjoy it more,
and things mix together, that sort of thing.
I understand that experience.
That's a great experience.
But then there's a tasting menu, where
you have two or three dishes.
Maybe there's a little bit of a palate
fatigue after the third bite.
But then you know what?
It's finished.
It's whisked away, and you have another small sample
that's probably a little bit different.
Hot dish following a cold dish, something crispy followed
by something soft, something vegetal
followed by something that has real oceanic or saline flavors.
That's kind of how we look at in the kitchen,
as opposed to individual dishes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID KINCH: He's asking how increased dietary restrictions
and/or aversions affect what we do at the restaurant
and how we deal with it.
Funny story, I was cooking in France at a restaurant.
A great friend of mine has a great restaurant in France.
I was cooking over there, and we were doing a special dinner,
and we were cooking.
And an order came back, and it had some dietary restrictions
on it.
And he turns around and says to his staff, four Americans
on table 22, because you'd be amazed
at how much of an American phenomenon this is.
America has more dietary restrictions and allergies
than any country on the planet.
Or at least they express them in a restaurant.
It is extraordinary.
I was saying at lunch today, 35% to 40% of my diners
every night make some sort of change in the menu
that we're preparing for them to suit their personal needs.
35% to 40%.
I would say that 80% of them are not allergies.
They are people who don't like red peppers,
or they don't want me to do mushrooms
for them, because they don't like mushrooms.
And that's fine.
We do what we can.
We don't say no to anybody.
We do everything within our power.
But my feeling is, is my restaurant,
at this point, my price point, in what
we do-- we've worked very, very hard to craft
a really great, sensual experience,
a hedonist experience.
We want you to come in for three hours,
turn off your cell phone, forget about your frantic lifestyle.
You have a chance to escape.
That's what you're paying for when you come to Manresa.
We hope you like the food, but the service, the ambiance,
everything we do is to make you forget everything and just
really enjoy yourself.
And we're an oasis.
We're an oasis in the middle of Silicon Valley,
and that's what you're paying for.
And I like to think that people come here,
and they kind of put themselves into our hands
and have them allow us to do everything possible
we can to crack that experience because that's what we do.
It's what we do for a living.
But sadly, that's not the case.
And I understand people who have severe nut allergies
or can't eat peanuts.
But I'll tell you, I have people who
come in and say they won't eat food that had a mother.
I have people who say they won't eat
food that has the color green in it.
And I'm serious.
They want to do tasting menus.
They want to.
And we have to create 15 to 18 different plates of food
on the fly.
We have to make it up at the beginning of the meal.
And we do our best, but we're not
giving them the best experience we can get.
The worst is the people who don't-- people call,
make a reservation.
We call to confirm.
We always ask, do you have any allergies?
Do you have any restrictions?
They're the ones who don't say anything and then come
in and say they're vegan.
Vegans with nut allergies, oh my god.
Oh my god.
Tasting menus, tasting menus.
And I'm not trying to denigrate.
I understand.
We're a business.
We want people to come in, and we want them to be happy.
But it doesn't allow us to craft the best experience we possibly
can.
Now another thing we were talking about at lunch today
is we're going to only one menu in January.
We're making a big step, and we're
going to offer only one experience.
We're going to offer the best menu
that we can put out every night.
But if someone wants three courses,
we're going to say fine.
We're not going to say no to anybody.
If someone wants seven courses, you know,
I've got to be out two hours.
I want to go to a show at the Mountain Winery--
I need to be out.
I just want to do five courses.
I got a guy who comes to my restaurant five times a month,
and he only does three courses.
And he buys a lot of wine.
I'm not going to all the sudden tell him,
you know what, you can't come to my restaurant
anymore because this-- we're going to say no to nobody.
That said, for us to craft the experience,
we have to know every single bit of information
about the customers that we do.
We feed 300 people a week.
We feed 300 people a week.
We feed 50 people a night.
We have the opportunity to know every single person who
comes into the restaurant.
You're not table 22.
You're not table 11.
You're not position two.
You are the so and so who's here,
and she likes to start with a Corpse Reviver Number 2.
He doesn't like mushrooms, and he always
buys red Burgundy, between $350 and $475 a bottle.
We have all that information.
We gather as much of that information as we can.
So when people call for reservations,
what we're going to do is we're going actually have, believe it
or not, a reservation concierge.
I have to hire someone full-time at the restaurant
to call people, and we're going to have
to get all their dietary restrictions five
days in advance.
We're going to have to do it.
And even though we're going to do only one menu,
we're going to have five menus a night.
We're actually going to go from two to five menus,
because we're going to have to create the menu that we think
offers the best Manresa experience.
We're going to have to do the gluten free.
We're going to have to do the vegetarian.
We're going to have to do the no shellfish.
We're going to have to do the no red meat, except for squab.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID KINCH: You know, it's-- and organize this.
And what we would like to do is know
what every table is going to eat.
Every single person is going to eat,
we want to know at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
There's no ticket going to come into the kitchen.
We have the ticket at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
And you know what, I think then we
will be able to offer a great experience.
Talking with other chefs who do this,
they say they got tired of it.
And it's not because they're tired of people dictating what
and how they want to eat, but they
got tired of the frustration, not
being able to offer their best experience to the customer.
So he says, I charge a lot of money,
and I've got to do this on the fly,
and I don't want to do this on the fly.
They're still paying the same money,
and I still want them to have a great experience.
I want them to come back.
But I can't do it when they just come in and tell me.
I need to know in advance.
So I think that's really the only thing we can do.
"Combat it" is the wrong word.
But it's pretty intense right now.
We have nights where 70% of the people change their menu.
Like last night.
Last night was like that.
All but four tables last night had dietary restrictions
that required menu changes.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID KINCH: OK.
That's an easy question.
There's absolutely none.
But there's a reason why.
Because our first restaurant was called
Sent Sovi, which was in Saratoga.
It's still there.
We had a restaurant called Sent Sovi,
and Manresa was a relocation of that restaurant.
And Sent Sovi, when it originally opened up,
was a Catalan style bistro.
And Sent Sovi was named after a cookbook.
It was called the Llibre de Sent Sovi.
And before the discovery of the New World,
it was the most influential cooking manual
in all of Europe.
It codified the most famous recipes in all of Europe.
They drew diagrams of all the fish
from the Mediterranean and North Atlantic that were known there
and wrote the flavor characteristics
and how to break them down.
It was this all-inclusive work.
And it was believed to have been written
by a bunch of Catalan cooks who cooked in the English royal
court.
And so we named the restaurant after this book.
And when we decided to move to Manresa--
and we slowly morphed away from this Catalan influence.
We became more and more enamored with the local ingredients
here in California.
And that's really where we started to do our focus on.
And when we decided to relocate, we
found the space that's now Manresa.
We called it Manresa as a working title.
Manresa is the name of the town next to Barcelona
in the Catalan country, the capital the Catalan country,
where the order of Jesuits or Junipero Serra was from,
who founded all the-- not Spanish missions,
but the Catalan missions along the coast of California,
named half the coast of California.
Junipero Serra, when everything was actually Catalan,
not Spanish.
So when it actually came time to name the restaurant,
we couldn't think of anything.
It was actually the hardest thing to do.
So we kept Manresa.
But the short answer is, it's a beach south of Santa Cruz,
really close to where we live.
You got the long and the short answer.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID KINCH: Yes, I mean I admire
all great ambitious chefs.
I learn-- right now, the most inspiring thing
is traveling and meeting like-minded chefs
and learning what they do and eating in their restaurants
and learning what their viewpoints are.
That's a really big part of what we do is sharing.
We started bringing in guest chefs
from all over the world at Manresa, back in 2007.
Some really great two and three-star Michelin chefs
from all over, from Denmark and France
and Spain have come over to cook.
And it's always been an exchange of ideas.
And the great thing is, is I get to go to their restaurant
and cook, too, because it's always an exchange.
So we like to do that a lot.
Most of my inspiration nowadays comes
from travel, reading and travel.
Actually, we have a really great-- May 17
and 18 of next year, we have this great [INAUDIBLE]
chef, a really young guy, just got his third Michelin star.
His name's [INAUDIBLE], and he cooks
in the middle of the Basque country.
He has a big garden.
His restaurant's surrounded by the garden.
He cooks completely from his garden.
And he's coming to cook with us May 17 and 18
of next year, which is going to be a really amazing event,
and he's cooking for two days.
So I'm pretty excited about it.
That's a great example of what you're talking about.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID KINCH: What do I do for the creative process?
Well, I have to be honest.
It's mostly ingredients.
We'll get one thing.
We'll have access to one thing that's
really special and really perfect.
It could be an eggplant.
It could be a piece of fish, could be a piece of meat.
It could be a piece of fruit from a great purveyor,
and we know we only have two or three weeks to work with it.
And what we do is we try and create everything
around the fundamental flavor and the characteristics
of that one, and everything else is kind of like a satellite
off that.
I talk a little bit about that in the book.
We try to have like three elements on a plate.
We have a main element and then a secondary element
that offers a certain sense of comfort or knowledge
to everyone.
It could be like meat and potatoes or tomato and basil,
something like that, something that there
is an obvious connection.
It doesn't have to be an obvious connection,
but it seems like an obvious connection.
And then the third element is usually
something jarring or contrasting.
It could be a temperature contrast.
When it comes down to having a finished dish,
and we're doing the editing process
before it goes on the menu, our process is not,
what else can we add to this to finish this plate?
It's, what can we take off?
You're stripping things of the plate
until it's still complete, but there's nothing else on there.
we try to leave things as bare and as simple as possible.
That's going back to the tasting menu format, too.
We don't want it to be 15 complicated dishes.
It needs to be 15 simple dishes.
Oh, how was your meal at Manresa?
It was great.
But what'd you eat?
I don't really remember, because it was just
this barrage of complicated dishes.
You want things to be simple and to stand out.
And the second question was cookbook about--
AUDIENCE: How do you hope users will
approach the cookbook [INAUDIBLE]?
DAVID KINCH: How do I hope people will use the cookbook?
A couple things about the cookbook, none of the recipes
are dumbed down.
Everything is exactly how we do it at the restaurant.
There are no shortcuts.
That said, there are tons of really simple recipes in there,
believe it or not.
Tons of simple recipes, and then recipes of more ambition.
And what I would hope people would do
is they try some of the simple recipes, or recipes they feel
is in their skill set or skill level.
And I think even the most basic cooks, there's several things.
And then if it works out, then you
work on to more ambitious recipes and try.
A lot of the more complicated recipes
are sometimes just a series of components.
Some of the more complicated desserts,
there might be a cookie and a cake
and a custard and an ice cream.
And you don't have to make the whole dessert.
The cookie, cake, the ice cream, they're
all standalone components that are
simple and easily approachable.
So you can break things down.
And the recipes are written that way.
But the other thing that is-- Ten Speed
was great in writing this cookbook,
in giving me almost everything I wanted.
The one thing I had a little bit of push
back on in the beginning, and it was really
the only thing I really insisted upon--
and the chefs in this room will know what I'm talking about--
is that we went to the metric system, and we went to weights.
I said, I'm not going to do imperial measurements,
and I'm not going to do volumes.
And they said, you have to because the American public is
really dumb, and they gotta cook like their grandmother.
They gotta have a cup of flour to bake a cake.
You measure things out in a cup of flour.
Well, you know what?
A cup of flour on a rainy day and a cup
of flour on a dry, hot day weigh completely different.
They weigh 10% in weight.
10% will screw up the recipe of baking.
But 450 grams of flour weighs 450 grams on a wet day,
on a cold day, on a dry day.
So weight, we weigh water in kitchens.
A liter of water weighs 1,000 grams.
It's easy.
It's really easy.
If you weighed-- the best chef, what
is the best kitchen tool in your kitchen?
What do you recommend is the one thing I can use?
A kitchen scale, a digital kitchen scale.
They cost $15.
You put it on.
You make a cake.
Instead of measuring volumes of flour and cracking eight eggs
and measuring out 8 and 1/2 ounces of sugar,
you put a bowl.
You hit the tare.
You put in your flour.
You hit the tare.
You put in the eggs.
You hit the tare.
You put in the flour.
Instead of getting four things dirty, you get one thing dirty.
It's faster.
It's cleaner.
It's more efficient.
It's more accurate.
It's a win-win-win-win situation.
It's so easy.
Metric system changes everything.
Weights change it.
Guys, am I right?
People say-- if you take one thing from the book.
Oh, you know, your book is so ambitious.
What is the one thing that we can take from it?
The one thing you can take from it is, is we
weigh ingredients in the professional kitchen.
You should weigh ingredients at home,
if you're going to follow recipes.
Weigh them.
And it's happening.
You're seeing more and more recipes.
Right now, you're seeing imperial measurements
with the metric weights behind it in parentheses.
In my book, it's metric and the weight
with the-- our compromise was the imperials
are in parentheses.
In 5, 10 years, you're going to see
nothing but metric and weight.
Get used to it.
It's so much easier.
You're going to be shocked at how easy it is.
Don't measure out a cup of flour anymore.
Weigh out 227 grams of flour.
Lots of reading.
Pre-internet, you know, you read a lot of books,
and you save your money.
And you travel, and you eat at restaurants.
Because nowadays, you want to go eat at a restaurant,
you can see a 20-course menu, 25 different 20-course menus
from a restaurant.
And believe it or not, I avoid that.
I avoid it because it's pollution.
You see so much images, so much food from so many--
it pollutes the ability to create your own style.
If I want to go eat at Noma in Copenhagen,
I'm not going to obsess about 15 bloggers
posting all 25 courses they had at the meal.
It's too jarring.
It muddles everything.
It's [INAUDIBLE].
The thing to do is to go to Noma and eat,
because a photo's not going to tell you anything.
A restaurant is not just about the food.
A great restaurant experience is about the entire experience.
It's the ambiance, the food, your mood when you go in,
who you're dining with, the weather.
And we only worry about the things
that we can control, which is food, service, ambiance.
Greeting-- you come into the restaurant,
we make eye contact, and we smile at you.
And it better be genuine because that's it.
Genuine smile.
No fake smiles.
No, you know what I'm talking about.
You know what I'm talking about .
Every person that comes into the restaurant, the service staff
makes eye-- you don't see that in a blog post.
You don't see that in a blog post.
Chefs who obsess, I can go into a restaurant,
and I can see a chef, and I know what cookbooks
are on the shelves, what internet sites they look at,
how old they are, where they work, whose chefs they admire.
That's what the internet has done.
Now I'm not saying that as a bad thing.
There's obviously very, very good things about it.
Research, learning about ingredients,
that sort of thing.
But this obsessive, real-time Instagramming
of food all the way through, in my mind, is [INAUDIBLE].
It causes blockage in my ability to create .
We try to make it as collaborative as possible.
We meet every quarter.
We try to work about three seasons ahead.
Right now, I'm going to be meeting her
for fall of next year, spring and summer for next year.
We make a pot of coffee, stretch out with seed catalogs,
and we talk about what we had last year at that time,
what worked, what didn't work, what we want more of,
what we want less of, new things we want to try,
things we don't want to grow anymore, and new varieties.
It's a clearly collaborative effort.
I think the big challenging thing at Love Apple--
and it took us the longest time to do--
was to cut some [INAUDIBLE] specifically
for the restaurant.
At the beginning, I don't know who gardens here, or zucchini.
You know, we had way too much zucchini.
You don't need much.
You don't need many plants.
And we had way too much salad greens,
but we had these big gaps in carrots, onions, and leeks.
We'd have it for three weeks, and then we
wouldn't have anything for six weeks.
But what we had done is fine tuned working together
on what the restaurant wants and what our needs are,
our basic needs are, and what we want to do to collaborate.
And we've drawn the correct amounts.
And now we grow the correct amount of sorrel.
Now we don't gap on carrots, that sort of thing.
And to me, that's really impressive,
what she has done at the farm to make that happen.
And that said, she always has a couple
of things growing on her on, for her own interests, that she
likes to present to me and, what do you think of this?
Well, that's great.
Let's work with it.
We also have a lot of seed exchange going
on with different people, Japan, France, Spain, Italy.
Exchange seeds.
Try new things, new product.
Because a lot of the complexity of our dishes
are heirloom varieties, really simple but carefully
grown and hopefully well cooked.
Thanks for coming.
[APPLAUSE]