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Hors d'Oeuvre Five Great Places to Eat in Paris

Interview: Tataiana Levha

The Seeds of Change

EntrĂŠe Fantastic Mr. Fox

Main Profile in Obsession: Nick Leggin A Look into Kay and Rays Potato Chip Factory

The Lucky Peach Atlas

Five Great Places to Eat in Paris by Dorie Greenspan& Dave Chang

Happier reports from the City of Lights. First, Dorie Greenspan—author of some of the loveliest and best baking cookbooks of all time, spiritual medium of Pierre Hermé and Daniel Boulud, and part-time resident of Paris—took us for a stroll around town. Her wandering ways had her stopping in for tastes of charcuterie, oysters, and, of course, a few sweets. Then our own globetrotting Dave Chang locked in on two ways to eat up an entire Pasian afternoon. Option one: a perfect rotisserie chicken, cooked to order. Option two: one of Paris’s most well-lov aed modern bistros. Put yourself in the chef’s hands, strap in, and don’t miss the rice pudding.

Gilles Verot 3, rue Notre-Dame des Champs, Paris, France

Like any food-obsessed American in Paris, I’ll cross the city for anything delicious—and do. I’ll go to Du Pain et des Idées for a hunk of their pain des amis, a bread the size of my table, with a sturdy crust and a holey crumb that stretches like string cheese. I’ll climb the streets of Montmartre to shop at Gontran Cherrier’s for a loaf cake or a savory tart, the crust’s thinness rivaling that of a pizza from Roberta’s in Bushwick. And, of course, I’ll go anywhere for a good dinner, which is why my taxi bills are so high. (Thank goodness a steak frites at the Bistrot Paul Bert is only a bus ride away.) As a part-time Parisian, I do most of my shopping the way my neighbors do: on foot and in the ‘hood. That I live in an area that others travel to for food just makes it better. Every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday, I pull my cart to the open market on the Boulevard Raspail and bypass the vendors selling charcuterie because, no matter how good they are, they aren’t better than Gilles Verot, whose shop is just a couple blocks away. Verot became famous in the U.S. when Daniel Boulud put his pâtés on the menu at Bar Boulud. But the Parisians who wait patiently to be served don’t know about this and wouldn’t care if they did—they’re there for the head cheese, the classic Lyonnaise sausage (traditionally served warm with boiled potatoes), and the saucissons (to be nibbled with aperitifs). Two particular favorites of mine: his rabbit terrine with carrots and the tongue-and-pistachio terrine, a slab of which could pass as a medieval checkerboard. —Dorie Greenspan

Catogory: Pinnacles What to Eat: Things made of meat, particularly the rabbit-carrot and tongue-pistacho terrines.

The Lucky Peach Atlas

Pierre Herme 72, rue Bonaparte, Paris, France

Midway home from the market is Pierre Hermé’s pâtisserie. Of course I stop—I stop there almost every day, sometimes just to pick up my husband’s favorites, a mini kugelhopf or a kouign-amann. Kouignamann—the cult breakfast pastry sold at many shops but done well at very few—are thick knots of yeasted dough that get layered with sugar. It’s easy to caramelize the outside and make them look great, but it takes care and precision to bake the innards all the way through. I’ve known Pierre for ages, but still I marvel at his limitless creativity and his capacity for consistency—so appreciated when you’re a steady customer. His macarons are like no one else’s—because of their flavors, of course, but also because of the proportion of filling to shell. In a mac chez Hermé, the filling is the same thickness as the cookies, making the little pastries taller, heavier, and more fun to eat (the vanilla is a marvel, ditto the passion fruit-milk chocolate, the olive oil, and everything in his new Jardins collection). For years, Hermé’s best-known—and most widely imitated—creation was the Ispahan, based on a flavor trinity that he created: rose, raspberry, and lychee. Like the crowds that line up daily outside the shop, I’m an Ispahanite, but what I return for often is Pierre’s Plénitude, a cake that combines bitter chocolate and crackly salted caramel. —Dorie Greenspan

Catogory: Pinnacles What to Eat: Macarons, Kouign-amann, Plenitude.

Huitrerie Regis 3, rue Monfaucon, Paris, France

And then, just before I hit home, there’s the small, mightily white Huîtrerie Régis—part oyster restaurant, part oyster takeaway, and perhaps the most reliable place in Paris for oysters. Seating is so scarce in Régis’s place that I only ever go early or late. The bar is more for service than for slurping, so standing and having a few oysters and a glass of crisp white wine—which I rank as one of life’s great pleasures and luxuries, even if it’s not all that more expensive than having a café crème and a couple of macarons in a mediocre tea salon—is not always possible, but there are always oysters to take out. Gorgeous oysters. If you can’t get a seat and you don’t have a place to take your oysters to, think about walking a few steps to the Marché Saint-Germain and asking Georges at Bacchus et Ariane, the market’s wine shop, if you can buy a bottle of wine and slurp your oysters there. —Dorie Greenspan

Catogory: Simple Pleasures What to Eat: Oysters and White wine.

The Lucky Peach Atlas

Le Coque Rico 98 rue Lepic, Paris, France

Le Coq Rico is really a single-item restaurant. They serve other things, but you are here for the chicken. You sit down and ask for roast chicken, and only then do they put it on the rotisserie and cook it from scratch. It takes about an hour and ten minutes. You decide between french fries or macaroni au gratin. I get both. The french fries are fantastic; the macaroni is macaroni and cheese. While you wait for your bird to roast, you can explore the rest of the menu. There’s an awesome chicken sampler, which includes the gizzard and a fried chicken wing that’s been lollipopped. Their salad is perfectly vinegary, to cut through everything rich that’s ahead of you. Finally, they present the chicken, slice it, and you’re ready to go. A boat of chicken jus on the side. Some greens. The fries and macaroni. A perfect Parisian lunch. What a fucking awesome restaurant. No bullshit and a lot of love in every bird. —Dave Chang

Catogory: Specialists What to Eat: Chicken sampler, roast, french fries.

L ami Jean 27 rue Maler, Paris, France

L’Ami Jean is, like, the classic Paris bistro these days; it’s great, it’s fun, it’s very cute. It’s small, probably ten seats. I’ve known the chef, Stéphane Jégo, for some time now—we’ve cooked a dinner together— and I know he runs a super-intense kitchen. I recommend going for lunch on a day when you don’t want to eat dinner. The food’s really fucking heavy. It has a Montreal-type vibe, where you feel like you’re slowly turning into a sweetbread drenched in butter for the duration of the meal. It’s done in the right way—they’re not sloppy with all the meat and the fat, but they’re also not going easy on you. Leave yourself in their hands—order the carte blanche, their version of a tasting menu—and they’re going to stuff you. On my last visit, they started off so fucking strong: they just dropped a whole goddamn terrine of pâté on the table, with cornichons and mustard. And I’m thinking, This is how you do it. I didn’t need to eat anything else. I was like, If this is all you do, this is fucking sick. Gimme the bill, I’m good, I couldn’t be happier. Then the meal began in earnest. Probably the best thing I ate on my whole trip was a potato-cheese soup with croutons and a few lardons. Simple, classic, delicious. At this point, you’re fucking dead. And then they drop a strawberry milkshake on the table. They say, “You’re going to want this.” No, I’m not! I didn’t even want to taste it. But out of politeness, I did, and it was so light, so strawberry-y. It was the finest strawberry milkshake I’ve ever had in my life. I couldn’t believe I drank it. I couldn’t believe how good it was. —Dave Chang

Catogory: Simple Pleasures What to Eat: Pate, potato cheese soup, sweetbreeds, rice, pudding, strawberry milkshake.

Science Team 300

Illustrations Raymond Biesinger

The Seeds of Change by Chris Ying

For millennia, wheat has fed us. But industrially grown and processed wheat—stripped of its natural nutrition and flavor—is at the center of many issues in food policy and science today: obesity in the developed world, food security in the developing world, genetic modification, farm subsidies, the demise of local systems.

Science Team 300

If you talk to the chefs, bakers, doctors, writers, and activists thinking critically and creatively about wheat today — not the ones advocating the wholesome elimination of it from our diets — they’ll all point you in one direction: Dr. Stephen Jones and the Washington State University - Mount Vernon Bread Lab. The lab’s official purview is to develop strain of wheat that perform well in unexpected places, like Washington’s Skagit Valley. To do this, they have returned to time - honored methods: a man with a magnifying glass and tweezers doing the work of bees , cross - pollinating different strains, planting, and seeing what procedures well in the field. “That was our main goal: to reinvigorate and reestablish local grain economies. Then, five years ago, we grew some certifies organic bread wheat here, which everyone said you couldn’t do,” says Dr. Jones. “We grew that, we milled it right here, and then we sent it to George DePasquale at Essential Baking in Seattle. He baked with it and he said it was the best tasting bread that hes made in thirty - three years of commercial baking. And that just absolutely blew us away.” “For years the buyers always wanted whiter flour and they wanted us to have low - ash content, but that’s where all your minerals are— in the ash,” Jones says. Ash is found in the non-endosperm (aka not - white) parts of the wheat. “And so inadvertently, we were always selecting against all the nutrition. It sounds so simple, but when you’re so ingrained into that system, you’re just thinking low ash, low ash...” “Dr. Jones is a traditional, classic breeder by trade,” says JD McLelland, a filmmaker who is currently at work on a feature - length documentary called The Grain Divide, about the crisis of America’s centralized industrial grain system. “ The Bread Lab has a firm focus on regional grain systems — finding grain that work well in various regions — not trying to find one that works everywhere. But they also believe that you can achieve the yields needed to be profitable and still maintain that nutrition, flavor, and taste that had been lost several decades of breeding for convenience and yield. They’re still breeding for yield at any cost.” McLelland is a beiliever in the Bread Lab’s mission, and has become an active part of their work, connecting Jones and his staff with doctors, researchers, bakersm and chefs — Chris Bianco in Phoenix, Marc Vetri in Philadelphia, Chad Robertson in San Francisco — whom he’s been interviewing for the film. Over the last couple of years, a common vision has coalesced within the group, a hope that the country can return to baking and eating locally grown, freshly milled wheat. To you and to me, the idea of going to your local market for a bag of freshly milled flour might seem quaintly high-minded. But McLelland and other are quick to point

out that twenty years ago the idea of grinding your own coffee beans was similarly preposterous. It took the patient nagging of evangelists— growers roasters, baristas— to warm Americans up to the idea. McLelland emphasizes that the work being done at WSU will be critical to the movement.” It might be the biggest component to this whole thing,” he says , “because it all starts withe a seed. Going back and recreating the grains with the proper targets in mind—nothing is going to be as important.” The idea of the a Bread Lab is delightful to me. Of course, the people working here are serious, and the research they’re doing is important, but to the casual observer, it’s fun and all a little fantastical. In the main experimentation room, the walls are sprinkled with wheat centric humor ( a picture of a slice of white bread with a hole removed from the center reads A BAGEL WITHOUT MALT ); the shelves are lined with bread, pasta, and pizza, cookbooks. A long work counter separates the room into two sides. On one side, grad students run tests on equipment that looks better suited for a blood lab. Ont he other, a bearded baker folds loaves of wet dough, then slides them into a multi-deck oven. Both sides take a break for snack of still worm scones. Working in concert, the lab rats and the bakers help inform what happens in the fields outside. Strains of wheat that are found to be exceptionally tasty, nutritious, or high performing, can be bred for their best qualities. But what separetes the Bread Lab from commercial operations is the opposite workflow: performance in the field dictates the work in the lab. Thraditionally, commercial bread labs hunt for a very specific set of qualities; if given wheat doesn’t meet their needs, it’s tossed. “You take it to the quality lab and they run it through these machines and say, ‘ No, this is no good,’” explains grad student Colin Curwen- McAdams. “ Well, that’s not really true, right? It just doesn’t make a white sandwich loaf. It just doesnt make whatever they ran.”

Science Team 300

Alveograph The Bread Bubbler

urwen - McAdams describes the Lab’s cherry-red Alveograph as “the most charismatic of our machines.” It’s certaintly the most entertaining. The Alveograph has a small mixer, into which the tester dumps a set quantity of flour. The machine mixes the flour with water. In tiny staccato bursts, the machine extrudes smooth dough onto a small metal landing pad. The tester cuts the dough into squares with a putty knife, then, using a guide, rolls them to uniform thickness. He lubricates the dough squares with peanut oil and then trims them into discs using a ring mold. The discs go onto individual metal squares (also slicked with oil), and then geta quick rest to relax the dough. Finally, it’s into the bubbler. “It will change your life,” Jones jokes. “I just keep coming back, just for this bubble.” A dough disc is nestled atop the machine. The tester screws a thick metal lid over the dough, in a process that evokes the phrase “battering down the hatches.” A smaller, concentric lid is popped off, revealing that the dough patty has been squished thin, with the edges pinned down so that air can be blown into the dough. Here’s the big moment. With the push of a botton, the dough disc begins to inflate quickly and constantly, until it reaches a sphere three or four inches in diameter. It slows and lingers for a moment, then just as quickly as the bubble emerged, ir deflates and wrinkles into a sad sack. (One wishes there were the drama of a burst and splatter, but alas, it’s not in the cards.) The point of all this is to measure the extensibility (stretchiness) and elasticity (bounce-backiness) of the flour. “It measures the volume of air that puts in and the resistance to that flow and it’ll give us graph,” explains Curwen-McAdams. “Those numbers can be interpreted a lot of different ways. What we’re interested in is how things are different and how things change. We can see incredible differences between varieties and how those varieties change through the years.”

Falling Number Machine The Plunger

he falling number machine measures the enzymatic activity of the grain,” explains Curwen- McAdams. “So, whether or not it’s sprouts, the enzyme alpha-amylase is activated. Alpha-amylase cleaves complex starches in the grain into simple sugars “That’s important because usually as a baker or a malster, you’re trying to work with those properties of the grain,” says Curwen-McAdams. “ If the enzymes have already activated, they’ve already used up what you’re attempting to work with, and you can’t really create anything.” If the wheat has already sprouted, bread made with the resulting flour will be gummy and lack crumb structure. On the flip side, the simple sugars unlocked by alpha-amylase are crucial to fermentation. Too little enzyme activity and microorganisms responsible for fermenting and leavining bread will have nothing to feed on. The machine works thusly: A sample of grain is weighted out then milled into a powder. It’s mixed with a precise volume of water in a test tube. The tube is slotted into an opening at the top of a large canister that sits next to what looks like an accountant’s calculator. Sadly the machine is not designed with voyeuristic purposes in mind, so from here on out, we have to take the word of the scientists as to what’s happening inside. “It’s a hot water bath,” Curwen-McAdams assures me. “It basically mixes and cooks in there, and then we’ll try on drop a weight through.” The machine vibrates and hums, mixing and cooking the slurry for sixty seconds. When cooked, starches gelatinize forming the structures we recognize as bread or pasta. Simple sugars don’t. After sixty seconds, a plunger is allowed to fall through the tube, and the machine records the time it takes for the plunger to reach the bottom. This is the falling number, which is spit out on a roll of recipt paper from the calculator side of the machine. “So if there’s a lot of enzymatic activity, it’s converted the starches into sugars,” Curwen-McAdams explains, “and therefore they won’t gelatinize in the hot water bath and the weight will fall very quickly.”

Science Team 300

A grain with a low falling number (62 is the lowest) will come out of the machine looking thin and liquid-y, indicating that it has already sprouted in the field and a large portion of its starches have already been converted to sugar. A sample with a higher number emerges from the test tube thick and pasty, meaning low enzymatic activity. “For industrial processes, they want very specific numbers,” says Curwen-McAdams. “They want to be able to dump in a bag of flour, have it run.

Farinograph The mixer

he farinograph looks like a big ass laser printer, save for the metal box protruding form the front that houses a set of mixing blades, and a large, dark blue cylinder that holds water for dosing into the flour. The Farinograph measures the strength of wheat in dough form. The tester lifts the plexiglass lid off the front unit, and adds a measurement of flour. With the lid closed, the farinograph kicks into action, churning the flour with water. Results begin to show up immediatly onan adjacent computer monitor. A graph tracks the torque, or the resistance of the dough comes together and then it finally breaks apart,” explains Curwan-McAdams. Th farinograph runs flour samples through the same process, taking measurements the whole time to see how long it takes for the dough to firm up, then eventually break apart. The time it takes for the dough to reach its maximum resistance to mixing is the “development time” of the dough. The period of time the dough remains at this level before the gluten in the dough begins to break down is a measure fo the dough’s mixing stability.” Plant breeders can use this information to select greains of certain strength; millers use farinograph readings to blend flours to customer specifications; and bakers can adjust their processes to account for differences in dough stability.

Cooks and Chefs Corner

Tatiana Levha

30, Chef of Le Servan in Paris

The Surprising and affordable food at Tatiana Lehva’s restaurant, Le Servan, has Persian food nerds all atwittera. Non-Parisian food nerd Dave Chang ate there last year, and he hasn’t shut up about it since. He insists that Tatiana is the next big thing in cooking. She shies away from such suggestions. Levha was in Copenhegen to speak to Rene Redzepi’s MAD symposium this past summer, and she sat down with me, Redzepi, and my co-editor Mr. Chang for a chat. Lehva radiates talent, humility, and wisdom beyond her years, and conducts herself with archetypal French poise. — Chris Ying.

Cooks and Chefs Corner

Rene Redzepi

Has there ever been any point in your carrier where you thought, My goal in life is to get three Michelin stars, I’m going to kill everybody that’s in my way to obtain that, this is the ultimate dream for me?

Levha

I mean when I first started cooking, I think it’s something taht crossed my mind for a very brief time. But then I worked almost exclusively in three-Michellin-starred restaurants, and by the time I got into those kitchens, I already didn’t want Michellin stars. It was a way to learn things fast.

Ying

So does that mean you didn’t enjoy working in three-Michellinstarred restaurants?

Levha

No, I did, I did. But maybe I didn’t want to cook for the people who ate in places with three Michelin stars—or at least not only for those people. No, I did enjoy it a lot. But we just wanted to do something that everyone could afford, including our friends.

David Chang

Did you guys invest money? Raise money? Loans?

Levha

We invested a little bit of money. We have a business partner who invested money, and we borrowed money. But it’s a small, small budget thing.

Chang

I feel like I can taste that when I go to restaurants. I think what separates really good restaurants from restaurants that are forgettable is when the people cooking have a lot invested in it.

Levha

Change

Yeah , it’s a family thing also. So if things don’t work out, they also don’t work out for my sister, and that’s terrible.

Im sure Rene can attest to this too, but right now you’re in probably the worst and most powerful period, because you can do anything. Anything seems possible. That’s what I felt when I ate at your restaurant. Pascal [Barbot]’s never said very positive things about more than maybe one of two peope. Last year he said, “You better watch this restaurant. It’s going to be very, very popular.” He said, “ She’s one of the best cooks that’s ever walked into my kitchen.”

Levha

He’s been very nice. When I arrived at L’Astrance, I could not even cook meat—I was terrified. I’m a very terrified person.

Redzepi

Did you tell him you didn’t know how to cook meat?

Chang

Yeah of course! He said, “It’s fine, It’s fine, you’ll be okay, in two days you’ll be fine.”

Redzepi

In two days—ha!

Levha

Oui, two days, or course. And he doesn’t tell you anything. You just walk in and he’s like, Oh you’ll just feel it, you’ll just feel it. It will be okay. It will get to you.

Cooks and Chefs Corner

Ying

Was that true?

Levha

Yeah it was. And L’Arpege was like that also. You just kind of get thrown into it and have to survive. L’Arpege is even harder.

Ying

Do you run your kitchen similarly? Or do you find yourself consciously doing things differently?

Levha

I think yes, similarly. When you work in places like that, it’s hard to lower your standards for what you buy and the way you work things.

Redzepi

And technique.

Levha

Oui. But then it’s also different because we’re only four people and time goes really fast, so sometimes you have to do things you don’t really want to do. But you have to, because if not, they just won’t work. I think I’m really learning to be calmer than most of the people who run these kitchens are. Though a first I got really angry, which was very new for me. I never got angry before.

Redzepi

Did you shout?

Levha

Yeah, I shouted really loud.

Redzepi

What did you call people?

Levha

That’s very personal.

Redzepi

But isn’t it amazing the way that when you are sous chef, you think to yourself, Why is this guy angry? Why is he so stupid?

Chang

I’m never going to act like that.

Redzepi

Why does he do it like that? Can’t he see it does no good? Why does he do it? And then you get your own kitchen and suddenly you have this sensation that’s rumbling in your stomach and one day, poof! The lid is off.

Ying

How old were you when started cooking?

Lehva

Twenty. It’s late.

Redzepi

It’s normal today, I think.

Ying

What were you doing before you were twenty years old and decided to be a cook?

Levha

I was studying English lit. I was very—

Ying

It’s all right, I studied English lit, it’s cool. Look at what a great chef I am now!

Cooks and Chefs Corner

Levha

I got bored so I stopped. I started cooking because I loved eating. The only thing that I could think of over and over again was food, so I figured I might as well just cook it. I wanted to do something with my hands. I was bored; I couldn’t sit still.

Ying

I think there’s a large number of English lit people who decide they want to start cooking because they love eating, but a vast majority fail. Did you start cooking with the intention of opening a restaurant? That’s what your dream was, to be a chef or your own restaurant?

Levha

At first it was. And then I went through different phases. I thought maybe I was good sous chef and that maybe I should stay a sous chef. I had a period in my life where I thought that that was really my role. I thought I was a good support for a chef. It’s also a very important role and I thought I was fine. I was very scared of doing things that are so personal and I felt like I was putting myself out there and it was very scary. I couldn’t even tell Bertrand or anyone what I wanted to cook until the day we actually had a menu and opened the restaurant. I couldn’t say anything because I was shy.

Ying

How would you describe what you cook now?

Levha

It’s very simple food. The techniques are mostly French traditional, but it’s much more Asian influenced than I would have thought at first. And it’s getting more and more. Fusion food in France has a very bad reputation, so at first, when I thought of what I wanted to cook, there was no Asian influence at all. By the time we opened, everything had it.

Chang

Did you grow up eating a lot of Asian food?

Levha

Yeah, all the time. My mom’s from the Philippines and she raised us. We ate pork and rice all the time.

Chang

It was rare to see all the Asian influence at Le Servan, because most peopele in Paris don’t know how to use Asian ingredients.

Ying

I think you represent somethin special to Dave and Rene. They’re very doom and gloom about loss of the cook who puts time in at the best kitchens, then, only after doing due diligence at very difficult places, opens a restaurant. Do you feel like you’re an anomaly, that you’ve done something different from other cooks around you? Do you feel like you work harder?

Lehva

I feel that maybe young people are not willing to work as much anymore. Or maybe they never have been, but they did it anyway because they didn’t have any choice. I mean, I understand that people don’t want to do it. But it’s hard to learn any other way. For now i feel that if you want to learn basics, the only way is the hard way. It’s changing I guess. But yeah, I feel that young people, especially with this changing of the chef’s status and everything, arent willing to give as much of themselves when they’re very young.

Cooks and Chefs Corner

Levha

Well maybe the restaurants have to give more back for them to be more willing to commit. When I first started out, I was fifteen. If you didn’t follow along, you were fired. If you fell down and you didn’t get up, you were fired. If you fucked up in the middle of service and you cooked the squab or the foir gras too much, you could get a slap. The ethos has always been: if you can’t take it, just leave. There’s no helping hand, there’s no responsibility from the management side or the chef’s side. It was not expected to need to partake in that person’s upbringing in your kitchen. It might be a person that jsut needs three, four, five, six months of grooming and a little bit of extra care, and you have a chef that’s potentially much better than the guy that fits in and is just going to do the same chopping for the next ten years. What I’m talking about is just saying to your cooks: Let me teach you. Let me take care of you. You’re a part of us. You commit to us, we’re going to commit to you to make sure that you’re coming back. We want to pay you, have you work less; we want to try to also give you a life.

Chang

Do you feel that you have to change how you cook or how you teach cooking because of the work force now?

Levha

I know that for now, I ‘am a very bad teacher. I have a hard time explaining anything.

Redzepi

But nobody thought you how to be a teacher.

Levha

Mais oui. Nobody thought me how to be a teacher.

Chang

Managing people sucks. Why can’t you do it the way I do it?

Redzepi

Why aren’t you in my head you idiot?

Levha

Oui. Pascal Barbot is a good teacher. He says things over and over and over again. I think it’s a good way to teach. It’s sometimes annoying, but it’s a good way to teach. I have his voice in my head all the time, him and Alain Passard. I have their voices in my head all the time. They just say stay there! They haunt you your whole life.

Ying

Do you feel that you have to separate yourself from Pascal?

Levha

No, I don’t. He taught me everything. He’s the one who brought me to L’Arpege. He taught me everything. I don’t want to separate myself from him. And we do things that are so different. I mean, we opened as a bistro, we have a twenty-three-euro lunch menu. So there’s no mixing things up anyway.

Redzepi

How much does innovation matter to you?

Levha

Not much. There’s a difference between innovation and surprise. Innovation, as in finding something new to the world, is not something that’s important to me. Surprising people because that’s ehat they’re not used to eating is important. What really matters si for people to enjoy their food.

Cooks and Chefs Corner

Redzepi

Has anyone ever copied you?

Levha

No, but I wish they would! I would be flattered!

Ying

Oh man! She’s got a better attitude than you guys.

Redzepi

Do you sometimes zoom out and loot at your situation? Twenty-nine, you have a restaurant, you’re with your family, the boyfriend. Do you look at the whole situation and think it’s looking better than ever? Is it like, Wow, this is a positive environment, a positive situation that our trade is in?

Levha

It’s a rare thing to zoom out and think things like that. We’re very happy with everything that happened for the restaurant in the past year, but it’s still so fragile, so new. We’re closed for two weeks now, and I’m afraid that nobody’s going to come eat next week. I’m afraid that the restaurant is going to be empty, and everyone will have forgotten us.

Redzepi

That’s never going to stop— that feeling. No matter how big the success, no matter how many waiting lists you have. And you know what? To tell the truth, I honestly think that it can change, very fast.

Levha

Oui, I’m sure it can. But do you ever feel like your team is right, that you’re on top of things? Do you ever get that feeling and tell yourself, this is why things are working now?

Redzepi

I do actually, I do.

Levha

That’s good.

Chang

Anytime I say it’s gone. Instantaneously.

Redzepi

You know the zooming out and looking at your situation to think about things—I do that often. Most of the time I’m actually telling myself, You know what? This is a good moment.

Levha

Oui, oui.

Fantastic Mr. Fox by Rachel Khong

Jeremy Fox is not what I expect. Granted, this is more my fault than his. What I expect is based on hearsay: that Fox is brilliant, egomaniacal, difficult—that after he mysteriously left his post at Ubuntu, the lauded and influential Napa, California, restaurant where he was chef from 2007 to 2010, he couldn’t manage to hold a job, and burned every bridge that was lowered for him. Which is to say, I’m expecting a swaggering rock star who tells me to fuck off.

But Fox isn’t that. The first thing you notice is his eyes, doleful save for the occasional twinkle, and set into bags so defined he might have been born with them. His hand dwarfs mine when we greet each other; I picture him holding the sort of tiny sprout that might’ve grown in the Ubuntu garden, and the sprout just vanishing. He has the slight hunch that some tall people have—as though he’d like to close the distance between us. We’re in Santa Monica, California. It’s 2014—six years since Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times, declared Ubuntu the second-best restaurant outside of New York, and Food & Wine named Fox one of its Best New Chefs of 2008. We’re some distance removed from the Michelin star and all the accolades. And though what I’m curious about is that interim—those years during which much remains unaccounted for—I ask if we can start at the beginning. And so he does. My grandparents on my mother’s side had a pizza restaurant in Chattanooga when I was a kid—hardcore Jews who had an Italian restaurant in the Deep South. It seemed to always be in my blood. Ever since I was ten years old, I had an idea of the kind of restaurant I wanted. It always just seemed like that’s what I wanted to do. I associated restaurants with good times. Growing up, we didn’t have a lot of money. I lived with my single mother, and most of what I ate was fast food or frozen food. The times we did go out to a restaurant, it was such a treat. I wanted to recreate that for people.

When Fox was nineteen, he saw Big Night, the 1996 film starring Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci, and thought, That’s what I want. “I didn’t know if I wanted to be a chef or not, but that feeling, where people were so touched by what was going on and affected by it, it was like, Yeah.” He’d been studying English at Georgia State for about a year when he left to enroll at Johnson & Wales in Charleston. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he says, about the first cooking jobs he took while in school, including one at Anson Restaurant, where Mike Lata was chef. “I had been a cook at Chick-fil-A at the mall. I hadn’t actually cooked anything; I didn’t know anything about food. After I started, that’s

all I wanted to do.” But Fox never got his degree; he fell two courses shy of finishing. It was advanced baking and pastry. They were nine-day classes, and on the ninth day you had your project due and a practical exam. I always waited until the last minute; I was up late the night before doing my project, and I went to print it at about four in the morning and I ran out of ink, so I had to run out to the Kinko’s in North Charleston. I had a Jeep Wrangler with soft doors that didn’t have locks. All of a sudden, two guys jumped in, one in the front, one in the back, put a gun to me, made me drive to an ATM. I didn’t have any money, so they brought me back to my apartment. They were undoing TV and stereo equipment, and I noticed they weren’t really paying attention, so I was able to take off out the door, and they started chasing me through this swampy area.

He emerged in a neighborhood, “all cut up,” and started knocking on doors until somebody opened one and called the police. “They found the car a couple days later,” Fox says, “but I got dropped from the class.” Rather than pay to take the class over again, he decided to finish his education in the kitchen. He stayed a little longer at Anson, then moved to Atlanta, where he worked for two and a half years until, in 2001, he felt the call of the West. I’d kind of been obsessed with California ever since there was a Saveur issue that year on California. So that was my next obsession: California. I just up and left. I got to California two days before 9/11.

When he got to San Francisco, he took a job at Rubicon. He didn’t settle in immediately. I was always kind of nervous. I’m a very nervous person. People couldn’t necessarily tell, but I was always basically freaking out inside. I would show up four or five hours before I was able to clock in, because I would rather be able to not stress so much—be able to make sure I could do everything rather than having to rush. Which isn’t a good thing. It’s not healthy. I don’t want my cooks coming in so early.

David Kinch: “Specialists Innate talent, He’s one of those very rare people who knows how to make things taste good, regarless of what it is. People are born with that.”

“I washed

But that was just how it was. Everything changed when I staged at Manresa at the very beginning of 2002. I’d never seen food like that. I’d never seen people cook like that. I’d never seen a kitchen work that way. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t hectic, it wasn’t crazy. It was very controlled. You were able to focus. It was that job where it wasn’t about how much I could produce. It wasn’t about volume; it was about how well I could do this. And that was just everything for me. I didn’t have to rush. Luckily, after my stage, I showed up another day when another cook was a noshow, and that was his last chance. I helped out. It was a good thing I was there. David Kinch just gave me this look and a smile. I had actually made an impact. I ended up with a part-time job and eventually full time. I stayed there for almost five years. When I left I was chef de cuisine. David allowed me to learn. As long as I got all the other things I had to do done, I could order what I wanted. It would just make me work harder. I was able to learn through trial and error—sausages and pâtés and cured meats. Then the garden started with Cynthia [Sandberg] at Love Apple Farms, and the focus really changed, where we were getting this beautiful produce and things I’d never heard of—that none of us had ever heard of. The composition of the plates started changing. It was kind of our inside joke, like, we would set the plate before the meat went on and we would look at it and say, “Well, that’s a finished dish at L’Arpège.” It stopped being about the meat. Whenever vegetarians came in, we would do special dishes. I would do these vegetable dishes, and I started getting so much enjoyment out of that. I was able to just riff on what we had.

him grow in many aspects of his life and he is a major part of the success of the restaurant.”

Fox had been at Manresa for almost five years when Olivia Wu, a San Francisco Chronicle restaurant reviewer, visited. “She was doing a story on the garden and the symbiosis with the kitchen, and she was spending a few days in the kitchen observing, then going to the garden,” he says. “And she mentioned to me that another part of the story was going to be about this restaurant opening in Napa that had their own garden.” Wu connected Fox with the owner, Sandy Lawrence, who was planning to open a vegetarian restaurant and yoga studio and was looking for a chef.

Dawson, Ubuntu’s gardner. “ The garden site was a

I loved my job, but I felt like I was in a position where I could at least see what was going on—see if it was time to do something on my own. I didn’t feel like I had to rush into anything. I loved where I was. Unless something came along that I thought was just a home run, I was fine where I was. It wasn’t that kind of thing where I was itching to go.

semi-rugged hillside and the devel-

But having grown to love cooking with garden vegetables at Manresa, the idea of helming a vegetables-only restaurant appealed to him.

opment of the garden itself was really challenging.”

It obviously seemed really crazy as a concept, but I thought I could do something with it. I didn’t know how to cook vegetarian food,” he says. “I’ve never done that, it’s not what I do. But I thought because there was a garden and I met the gardener, Jeff Dawson—who is just a god—that it could be something really special if everybody just came together.

There’s a consensus among those who ate at Ubuntu while Jeremy Fox was cooking: there was nothing quite like it, in Napa or anywhere else. It was the scariest thing in my life up to that point: I’m opening up a vegetarian restaurant in Napa with a yoga studio. Am I going to embarrass David Kinch? Is he going to disown me, is everyone going to laugh at me? All the things running through my head. I wanted to make David Kinch proud, and I wanted to represent him well. I didn’t want to just regurgitate his ideas out of respect for him.

The name Ubuntu, Dawson tells me, comes from an ancient word and philosophy that means, “I am what I am because of who we all are.” It’s an apt way to describe any restaurant, but especially this one. I had an amazing, amazing team. A lot of people who had worked with me before at Manresa, probably half my team. The garden was the heart of the restaurant; we couldn’t have done what we did without it. The food we did there couldn’t have happened without Jeff’s produce,” he says.{5} It had to be picked that morning and on the plate that day.

Handled in small volume and picked early in the morning before the sun came out, so it didn’t wilt. Kept super crisp and pristine. It made us work really hard. Rose [Robertson] did the day-to-day; we knew there was someone up at five or six in the morning picking our stuff and making sure it was beautiful. We weren’t going to disrespect her and the work she was doing. It was such amazing produce I was getting. And it was just kind of tunnel vision, where meat and fish weren’t an option, and my entire brain was just constantly, constantly aflutter with vegetable ideas. I would later find out that the entire time was a manic episode—which had to end at some point, and it did. But it was probably the most focused I’ve ever been in my life.

That intensity and focus yielded dishes that were singular, and still reverberate in the food community, among both diners and chefs.{6} There was the cauliflower prepared three ways—raw, roasted, and puréed—spiced with vadouvan and served in a tiny cast-iron pot. The spring peas with white chocolate{7} remains memorable to others.{8} The desserts were part and parcel of the restaurant’s success, garden-driven and balanced. They were made by Jeremy’s wife, Deanie Hickox, who’d worked at Rubicon and Manresa with him. In the beginning it was very simple. My vision for the restaurant, from the beginning, was a vegetarian A16 [chef Nate Appleman’s celebrated San Francisco restaurant]. I didn’t want it to be precious; I didn’t want it to be froufrou. I wanted to be just like this kind of fun, loud, bustling kind of place. I didn’t want it necessarily to scream that it was vegetarian. My wife at the time was the pastry chef. Our bases were covered. We opened strong.

Not long after the opening, Michael Bauer reviewed the restaurant in the San Francisco Chronicle, declaring, “Everything Fox produces has perfect pitch. What Fox is creating at Ubuntu is truly extraordinary. He’s taking vegetable-based cuisine to a new level.” When I first read the review from Michael Bauer I thought, Seriously? I didn’t think the food was as good as he said it was. I’m always very self-deprecating. I

think it was a great story. Something people could latch onto. It wasn’t like anything that happened before. It was the right place at the right time.

“It was this moment in time where all these different factors came together and created this brilliant flash,” says Jeff Dawson. “Unfortunately, it didn’t last, but for that period of time it was something really incredible, and really unique, and really special.”

****** Frank Bruni: “I think some chefs get very ambitious, and they’re looking out across the globe, and they’re looking out across the country, and they forget to take utterly full advantage of where they are. ”

t was never very busy, especially in the beginning. We got reviewed by the Chronicle pretty quickly—we got an amazing review. We got a great San Francisco Magazine review, and we got these little pops, but it was Napa, it was the winter, locals wanted fried chicken and rib-sticking things, not what we were doing, so we were dead. We were dead. It didn’t look good. Then all of a sudden, after lunch service one day, my manager brought over a little note that said FRANK BRUNI and a phone number. I was like, “Frank Bruni called, and you didn’t tell me?” He said, “You don’t like to be bothered during service!” “Frank Bruni! You can bother me anytime.” He had written this five-week series on the top ten restaurants outside of New York, and we were number two. All of a sudden, overnight, boom, we were too busy, we were busier than we could handle. It blindsided us.{9} We had major growing pains. The kitchen wasn’t designed for what we were doing, especially the volume. There was very little refrigeration. We were getting killed by the health department. After less than a year of being open, we had to close down for a little while, and we spent $150,000 on a new kitchen to handle it. But two weeks later, I was a Chronicle Rising Star Chef, and then a week later, Food & Wine Best New Chef, then boom boom boom, things just changed, super quickly, way too fast. I didn’t know what was going on—things were pulling me out of the kitchen, doing events. It seemed like there were photo shoots every day, always having to supply recipes. I didn’t really work with recipes, so

when I had to do one—it seemed like such a simple task, give a recipe to the PR company—it was like pulling teeth. Things got really, really convoluted.

You can still see the results of the photo on the internet, you can still see the results of the photo shoots he’s talking about: a picture of him holding a bunch of carrots, another of him in the garden looking stern with a bunch of radishes. He looks tired. I was very proud of what we were doing. I basically derived all my self-worth from what was going on there. Our cauliflower dish in a cast-iron pot, different preparations—people loved that. It’s just a simple, humble vegetable. I was definitely proud of simple dishes. Eventually I had flowers all over everything and shaved vegetables and everything looked like it was alive and growing and it did nothing for the flavor. But I was proud of the simple flavor combinations. I think eventually it moved away from that. It kind of got away from me a little bit. It did become very precious. I didn’t know whose expectations I should be serving: whether it was the gourmands and the people who were flying in from all over the world. I didn’t know who my audience was. It definitely wasn’t the locals. I think things got a little mashed up. I lost sight of who I was cooking for, what I was doing it for, and we kept pushing, pushing, pushing, trying to push the boundaries. And eventually, yeah, it just kind of collapsed a little bit. We opened in August. I had maybe one or two days off the first eight months, working fifteen-, twenty-hour days. I spent many nights sleeping on table twenty, in the booth, catching a couple hours. There was a lot of that; not a lot of free time. But it wasn’t because anybody was telling me that I needed to work—to me there wasn’t even a question: that’s just what I did. I woke up, I went to work, maybe I would sleep a couple hours, and I would do it again. There was nothing else. The pressure was all from me. It felt great that people were taking such notice—everybody wants to be recognized for what they do. But that pressure did me in. I was trying to please. I don’t know who I was trying to please. I had to work harder, I had to be more creative. In my mind, that’s what everybody else was thinking and needed from me. But I don’t think that that was the case.

Frank Bruni: “I was struck by how fully Jeremy utilizes the fact that he’s in California and has access to really superior products, you know, especially when it comes to greens and vegetables, and that sort

Dawson: “I’d come in and he’d

There’s a pause, and Fox exhales. It’s nearing dinner time, and the staff of his restaurant, Rustic Canyon, are gathering for family meal a few tables away. “I’ll just put it all on the table,” he concedes, lowering his voice a little. “The pressure was a lot for me.”

have big bags under his eyes. ‘Dude, when was the last time you slept?’ And he’d go, ‘Oh, it’s been a couple days.’ And it was just because he was driven by what was going on around him. “

I ended up going to a psychiatrist. I had never had any sort of therapy, but I ended up on a really weird combination of medications, and really didn’t understand what they were doing to me. It was like an Elvis cocktail—it was really, really, really bad. I definitely changed; I didn’t even really know what I was doing or what was going on. Things were going south everywhere. The restaurant never made money; it was constantly losing money. My wife and I split up. It was a perfect storm of everything. Every magazine thing and photo got the frame treatment; the owner of the restaurant lined the whole hallway with them. I hated looking at them. I was so bitter. I thought, if I got Food & Wine Best New Chef, and I got a James Beard nomination, Michelin stars, life would be great. And it was quite the opposite. I just saw all these things on the wall, and I’m still running a slow restaurant, and my life is falling apart. And I just hated it. I hated being there. I just let things move so far negative. The morale of the place, my relationship with people. I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating. I had lost about forty pounds, literally going days without sleeping, and working on a cookbook that never happened. I probably would have died if I had kept going much longer. Drugs were never a thing for me, but all of a sudden I was like, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know: what happened, what happened, what happened? How did it get so bad? I did other projects after that that fell apart really quickly, I burned a lot of bridges, I was just screwing up left and right.

“I don’t really talk this much,” Fox says. “This is a story I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for a long time—people are very curious as to why I left Ubuntu, what the story was. I was never ready to talk about it.” In the absence of an explanation, people speculated. Eater SF ran the press release (“Ubuntu restaurant owner Sandy Lawrence and chef/partner Jeremy Fox announce amicable separation; Aaron London assumes position of chef de cuisine”),

and the comments that ensued range from skeptical (“Yeah, me and my ex-boyfriend separated amicably as well, and I got the knife marks in my kitchen wall to prove it.”) to spiteful (“Yeh, I wonder if Jeremy will be able to get away with working out of whites and in a fedora at his next gig. Man, what a rockstar!”). The online hating continued as online hating does, until the bullies moved on to other targets, or forgot what the point was in the first place. I didn’t want sympathy. And I didn’t want to use the fact that I was messed up on medication to be an excuse to be given a second shot. I would rather talk about it after I had worked through it all. I wanted to earn people’s respect again. Be a good role model. Things can get really bad, but you gotta push through and look at yourself, and be okay swallowing your pride and saying, Yeah, I screwed up. Maybe it’s not everybody else. Maybe it is me.

After Fox left Ubuntu—his marriage officially over, too—there were a series of failed projects. First at Daniel Patterson’s Plum, where he was supposed to be chef; then with the Tyler Florence group, where he was hired as creative director and left after just four months. Things had hit rock bottom, and he knew he couldn’t continue working in the Bay Area. He moved to LA and started a few other projects that went nowhere. But he started seeing a doctor that specialized in medication adjustment, and began the long process of weaning himself off the drugs he’d been taking. In December 2013, Fox heard that the restaurateurs Josh Loeb and Zoe Nathan were looking for a chef for their restaurant Rustic Canyon in Santa Monica, and approached them about the job. This was, in his mind, his last shot. We talked for a while. I told them everything I’m telling you. I came clean on everything. In my mind, this was my last chance. If I screwed this up, I would not be cooking ever again. I was scared shitless. I didn’t want to screw it up. They were just very cool, and they weren’t pushing me to do press. They let everyone know I was here and what I was doing. I’m just thankful they gave me the chance. It’s all I know how to do. I think that’s what I loved about cooking: I didn’t have to think about anything else.

I started here almost two years ago, kept my head down, worked harder than I’ve worked in my life. The expectation, people I work with, people I work for—it just feels safe. It feels like this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. It’s not about Michelin stars and getting attention. Everyone wants to be recognized for their hard work, but it’s not what I’m after.

He is, essentially, trying to be okay. I take pretty much most fault in all the breakdowns at Ubuntu and with Daniel Patterson and Tyler Florence—these things where I flamed out really quick. I take the blame for those things. I was afraid. When the pressure hit and when it was down and I was in it, is that where I would go again? Back to how I was? I was afraid that I would self-destruct; I was afraid that I would be my own demise. But I have such a better support system now. I’m getting married in November to an amazing woman. I’d gotten all these things out of my system. I was ready to focus and get back to work.

Fox’s priorities and perspective have changed since leaving the Bay Area. Being chef of Rustic Canyon has been an exercise in finding balance. It’s hard training people and managing people and not necessarily wanting to push them the way I was pushed, with intimidation and violence. I also don’t want to be too soft and not push enough. I don’t want to be too light on people. I want them to have an experience where they have to reach inside and push through. I’m always trying to be a better person, a better chef. The cooking, at this point, is not my priority. Not having balance and killing myself for work is not something I’m able to do anymore. I want to go home and be with my wife and have time to enjoy life. I don’t want my cooks to be miserable. If it means that the food has to be a little less complicated to do that, then I’m totally cool with that. It’s food. When it comes down to it, I just want people to come here and eat the food and enjoy it. I’m not trying to change their lives. I don’t expect that somebody’s going to come eat my food now and necessarily be moved the way they were at Ubuntu.

I ask if he feels like he’s holding back—if he’s less ambitious with his menu at Rustic Canyon. Sometimes, sometimes. But I’m holding back less than I was a year and a half ago, less than a year ago, less than six months ago, less than three months ago. I think the food is constantly getting stronger. Also my team is constantly getting stronger. I can’t do it all myself. I came into this job with the long game in mind. I wasn’t looking to catch lightning in a bottle. I was looking long-term at how I can make my life better, and that’s what this has been for me.

“I mean, at the end of the day, really, we get one crack at this, and then we’re all going to die,” says Ari Taymor, the twenty-nine-year-old chef of Alma in Los Angeles, who staged for Fox at Ubuntu. His respect for Fox is obvious. “If you’re killing it but you’re miserable, it’s nothing. It’s meaningless. What I’m seeing from Jeremy now is that he’s been able to compartmentalize the pressure and the expectations on him, use them in a positive manner, but also focus on all the other parts of his life that influence what’s going on. And so his food is really delicious. It might not be, you know, the Michelin-starred style of food that he was putting out before, but that doesn’t mean anything. He’s making people happy. He’s training a great staff and he’s living a life. His food, as it’s continued to progress, it’s getting more intricate, more creative, more layered, and his confidence in what he’s doing is really pretty inspiring to see.”

****** hefs have always had to deal with plenty of bullshit that comes with working in the hospitality industry—running a kitchen, sourcing ingredients, interpersonal relationships in the kitchen and dining room, difficult customers. But I can’t help but wonder if—with the Internet, Yelp, food blogs, the vast array of venues in which smack-talking can and does occur—there’s more bullshit to contend with than there’s ever been before. “Ubuntu or Meadowood, being in Napa, out of the city, we have to invariably rely a little more on the media,” says chef Christopher Kostow, who remembers eating

David Chang: “ I want people to know that Jeremy Fox was one of the great chefs America’s ever produced,” Chang told me. “That’s what I want people to know. His contributions to the culinary canon are really priceless.”him. “

lunch at Ubuntu when he was first applying for his job at the Restaurant at Meadowood. “We have to. We’re not in huge populations. People need to be drawn here. We’re blessed—speaking of Meadowood—we’ve done really hard work to spread the message and do it in an authentic way, and now we’re an incredibly busy restaurant, and everything’s great. But it took years and years and years here. And I know what that’s like. And then you have to be careful what you wish for, because all of a sudden you’re doing a million interviews and everyone wants to talk to you and everyone thinks they know you, and all that sort of stuff. You just wonder where the sweet spot is. I don’t really know.” “Without the press we received, we would’ve closed,” Taymor adds. Bon Appétit named Alma the Best New Restaurant in America in 2013. “If we weren’t number one on that Bon Appétit list—not two through ten, but if we weren’t number one—I don’t think we would have made it. It’s what we need to do because of the nature of where food is in LA and what the dining public wants. We need to constantly have that level of media attention just to stay relevant, and just to stay in the conversation at all times.” “I’m almost schizophrenic about the whole thing,” Kostow says, “because sometimes I’m like, Wow, we need more attention! And then I’ll be like, I don’t want to talk to media for the rest of my life.” Kostow and Fox knew each other in the South Bay, when Fox was chef de cuisine at Manresa and Kostow was chef of Chez TJ. And though Kostow was in Napa at the same time as Ubuntu, and witnessed a lot of what went down, he hesitates to speculate too much. “As chefs, we have to find this balance between putting pressure on ourselves to keep ourselves sharp, and putting pressure on ourselves in a way that doesn’t service us, it doesn’t service the food, it doesn’t help at all,” he says. “I think that there are times we swing to varying degrees in both directions. At that time, the pressure Jeremy was putting on himself and the pressure that was being exerted upon him in his personal life was such that it wasn’t helping him and it wasn’t helping his food and it certainly wasn’t helping the culture and the place. It wasn’t a huge departure from what all of us deal with. It was just—it was a lot. It was a lot at one time, I guess. “There’s more of a spotlight,” he adds, about the modern restaurant landscape. “If anything, the rise of all this content has actually lowered the bar a lot. You can be not

that good and have your name in the paper. There’s so much content being created. We always want to celebrate who’s new. The media’s job is often to present things that haven’t been presented before. It’s not about what’s good. It’s about what’s clever, what’s ironic, what’s hip. No one celebrates the guy who kicks ass every day and strives for perfection. That’s not interesting. “I want the people who are really working hard and doing good food to be the people who are celebrated,” he says. “Jeremy Fox is a great chef, period. Irrespective of any personal challenges or whatever, he is as good as they get. I still think Jeremy’s as good of a chef in this generation as there is.”

****** fter Fox and I finish talking, I stick around for dinner. I order the lavender-sugared marcona almonds—the same almonds that Frank Bruni ate at Ubuntu—I wonder what it would have been like to eat them in Napa in 2008, instead of in Santa Monica in 2014, and I wonder if they would have tasted different, or more perfect somehow. And it occurs to me that maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe food is supposed to disappear, and a meal shouldn’t be around forever—shouldn’t live on in thousands of Yelp reviews and eGullet and Eater posts and photographs—analyzed and praised and hyped ad infinitum. Maybe a night should be allowed to be over, and a meal should be allowed to end. It’s generally unhealthy for people engaged in creative endeavors—whether musicians or painters or writers—to think that they’re founts of genius. But it strikes me as especially harmful for chefs to think this way. Because no matter your talent, it’s not just about you—it’s about ubuntu: I am what I am, because of who we all are. Success, as a restaurant, hinges on innumerable factors: it’s about the moods of the staff and of diners. It depends on the weather. It’s about flashes of insight as much as it is about consistency and hard work, day in and day out. Chefs can’t rightly claim or receive all the credit, and neither should they take all the blame. In his review of Ubuntu, Bruni called Fox’s egg and brioche “out of this world.” However apt that may have been, that’s the sort of unwittingly harmful terminology that gets used when discussing food—especially on the Internet. It puts unrealistic

Frank Bruni: “ The nuts set the tone for the rest of the meal, establishing Ubuntu’s talent for presenting the familiar, be it almonds or avocado, in a form more rarefied, and with seasonings more nuanced, than you expect. less. “

pressure on chefs to make something otherworldly when, at best, perfection happens as a result of hard work and pure luck. That kind of perfection is possible, if rare—when everything is working together flawlessly, the second before it all turns to shit. Big Night ends, actually, the morning after the eponymous big night. Everyone looks a little worse for wear—some irrevocable shit has gone down, the brothers have fist-fought on the beach, and Louis Prima never does show up. The restaurant is doomed. In silence, Stanley Tucci makes an omelet for Tony Shalhoub: only eggs and olive oil and some salt and pepper—nothing brilliant, just sustenance—and when Shalhoub eats it, without saying anything, it’s like an accepted apology. Because that’s the thing with restaurants: you come together, and if you’re lucky, something magical happens. The food is good—even perfect, let’s say—and you’re “close to God,” as Tony Shalhoub puts it. But afterward, when you’re mortal again, with your hangover and a sink full of dirty dishes, you eat the omelet. It’s food, and it’s how you stay alive.

English Peas in a Consomme of the Shells Makes 6 servings

1 Shuck peas and reserve shells. 2 Wrap shells, mint stems, garlic, and shallot in cheesecloth. 3 Add above to a pot of water, about 1 quart. Cover and steep on low heat. (Do not even let it think of bubbling or I’m coming after you personally.)

4 After 2 hours, remove the cheesecloth and cool the pea-shell consommé.

Season to taste with the champagne vinegar, then salt, strain, and reserve. This will taste similar to pickle juice, and that’s okay.

Blanch peas in salted boiling water for about 2 minutes, until they’re tender but not too soft.

Ingredients 2 lbs English peas (weighed out of the pod)

7 Shock in ice water and allow to dry on a towel.

12 spearmint leaves, stems reserved

1 clove garlic, smashed 1 shallot, sliced

Squeeze each pea gently to remove the two halves inside each husk. (You can dehydrate and grind the husks for a biodynamic preparation if you’d like.)

1 T champagne vinegar + salt to taste

To serve, season peas with the olive oil, lemon, and salt.

2 T olive oil 2 t lemon juice

10 Arrange peas at bottom of individual bowls.

2 T chopped white chocolate 2 T chopped, toasted maca-

Evenly top with the chocolate, macadamias, and pea shoots.

damia nuts 36 pea shoots

12 Garnish with the mint leaves and small pansies.

24 chocolate mint leaves, for garnish, stems reserved 24 small pansies, for garnish

13 Tableside: add about 1 fluid ounce of pea shell consommé to just cover the peas.

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Location: Lancaster, PA

Mark Ibold

So what kind of job do you have? Where do you work?

Nick Leggin

I do IT consulting—I work for a pharma company on the north side of Chicago. I have been doing some variation of that for the past eight or nine years.

Mark

But you are also a potato chip enthusiast.

Nick

I am!

Mark

One thing I like about your site is that you don’t turn your nose up at large brands. I mean, you give them as much coverage as you would a small regional brand.

Nick

When I set up the site last year, I wanted it to be something for myself and anybody else who likes chips—a rabbit hole to go down and see the different logos and the different names and the cities, to see what’s available, because I really struggled to find that online. You have Wikipedia, then there’s another site called Taquitos.net that reviews different snack foods. But for something as big as potato chips, there seemed to be very little to no centralized data, or even a list of all the different brands and flavors. So I wanted to build the data set for my enjoyment and see what existed out there. I certainly didn’t take this on as a profession—more of a hobby.

Mark

Maybe I’ll ask you some questions about your potato chip eating. When you buy potato chips, do you gravitate toward a flavored chip? What excites you? Do you like plain chips, or does it depend on the brand?

Nick

I tend to go plain. I guess you almost have different levels of chip eating. There’s the day-to-day consumption, and that calls for plain— the worker bee of potato chips. But then you have the exploratory side—there’s this brand called Route 11 in Virginia, which is pretty good. Tyrrells, which is this British brand, has some other flavors that you might buy on a lark—Worcestershire Sauce & Sundried Tomato, Mature Cheddar & Chives, and Sweet Chili & Red Pepper, to name a few. Whenever I see something that’s really off-the-wall—and I’m not saying it’s always weird flavors, but different brands—I’ll go for those. A lot of the time I’ll have my wife try one, and I’d say seven out of ten times her reaction will not be positive.

Mark

What about volume—do you eat a lot of chips in one sitting, as I sometimes do? I tend to binge. I don’t know how many times I’ve been at someone’s house when they said, “Oh, we have some potato chips over there,” and I look over at my girlfriend and she kind of rolls her eyes, because they’re going to disappear because of me, and no one else will really end up having any.

Nick

It depends. I would usually eat a third of a bag of normal chips—the ten- or twelve-ounce size. I think it’s comfortably more than whatever the serving suggestion is, but I don’t think I could eat a whole bag of chips in one sitting without feeling some ill effect. I have a lot of food allergies, so potato chips were always something that I could eat without worrying about how I would feel or react. Chips are a known commodity.

Mark

Immediately after opening the bag, do you put them into a bowl or something?

Nick

My wife tends to either put them on a paper towel or a plate or a bowl, and when I was a kid, that’s how I consumed them. But at some point I saw my Dad eating out of the bag and in the back of my mind, I was like, Well, this seems like a much more straightforward means of consuming chips. One exception: we have a pet bird that chirps at different points in the night based on noises in the house, and one of the things that I’ve come to learn is that he does react to the noise of a potato chip bag. So late at night I’ll find myself sneaking into our laundry room, carefully opening a bag of chips, then carefully dumping them out onto a plate so that I can eat them without fear of repercussions for waking up the bird.

Mark

Are there choices of dark or light potato chips where you live?

Nick

Cape Cod used to have a Robust Russets flavor that was a staple of my father’s, and those were fantastic. There really aren’t a lot of dark chips here. There are some out East that are great. I think it has to do with the sugar content a lot of times. If there’s a different style of potato that has more sugar, it will caramelize, which makes the chips darker. I like the dark ones. I think that some people also get excited about fold-over chips—always a special treat. And you don’t see those a lot in the Lay’s or the plain ones. But when you can find something that’s almost a little nugget that’s, like, folded over three or four times, it’s like you’ve found this prize. There are even some companies where that’s their goal—to have as many fold-overs as possible. Cape Cod is really good at that.

Mark

Do you have a particular favorite at the moment? I know when people ask me what my favorite book or movie or record is, I can never answer the question, but sometimes I have an of-the-moment favorite.

Nick

The Bar-B-Q Waffle chips from Martin’s, in Thomasville, Pennsylvania, are outstanding. I wouldn’t say that they’re my absolute favorite, but it’s a hard question. I have this list, like, “These are my top tier,” but there’s not a favorite, because a lot of times it might just be finding whatever is a comfortable, plain chip that’s good. Like Lay’s plain is a tasty chip, and I buy it frequently. I guess if you went by how frequently you bought something and used that as your favorite, Lay’s would fall toward the top. But I wouldn’t say that if I were on a desert island that that’s what I would take with me. The Cape Cod plains are really good. Deep River makes some good ones. Their Sweet Maui Onion ones are really good. The Martin’s ones—I was floored. Like, these are some of the best chips I’ve ever had.

Mark

Would you call them kettle style?

Nick

These were not kettle style. These were more continuous-fried—it was a ridged chip, but they were really big ridges. The barbecue seasoning on it was really good. There’s a brand in Chicago called Vitner’s, which used to be a lot more prevalent but is now hard to find. I guess if I had to pick one brand for the rest of my life, I would pick the Vitner’s chips, because they’re not a kettle chip, they’re a continuous chip. Their barbecue is really tasty; the plain is always good.

Mark

Were Vitner’s what you ate when you were growing up?

Nick

We were a Jays household, or a Barrel O’ Fun or a Lay’s house, from what I can recall. Jays is a Chicago brand. There’s a brand called Krunchers! as well. When I was growing up, we always had those around. But we didn’t have Vitner’s too much. De-lish-us was another one.

Mark

I’ve always liked the images on the regional potato chip bags, because they don’t always seem like they’re super designed. Whenever I’m traveling, I like to check out the different bag designs. Do you have a favorite look for a bag?

Nick

I think Middleswarth’s is my favorite design.

Mark

Does that one have sort of a seventies vibe to it?

Nick

NL: Very much so. It seems like a lot of the brands came up with their designs about forty or fifty years ago and said, “Yep, that’s it.” Have not evolved at all whatsoever. I like packaging and design, and it’s always deflating when they take a really cool old design and put a bunch of gradients on it.

Mark

Oh right, didn’t you have something on the site about how the Pringles logo has changed?

Nick

Yeah, it’s so disappointing because you go back thirty years and the Pringles logo was a very flat, 2-D design—the Pringles logo was in the bow tie and it looked great. Now they have just bastardized it.

Mark

I’m pretty sure it must have an effect on the way I actually enjoy the product, you know? I feel like these companies are researching that stuff, trying to tweak things in a way that makes the modern football-watching guy want to buy Pringles. It has the opposite effect on me, I guess.

Nick

Exactly! I’ll shoot myself for using this word, but the older designs seem “authentic,” like this person is more focused on making the chip than figuring out how to sell it.At some point we will lose these older brands—due to the economics or the business model. There are a lot of difficult practicalities to be overcome when considering potato chips. Potatoes are heavy and then you lose all that water volume when you cook them. You gotta store them, make sure they don’t spoil, fry them right, and bag them carefully. And you gotta then distribute those. I think that it’s really hard to build some sort of national brand because there are just so many factors working against you—just the sheer volume of product and the manufacturing and distribution. That’s probably why there are so many regional brands and so few national brands. The barriers to entry are so high to be able to do something on that scale.

Mark

You seem to be in tune with the business of potato chips. Is there a reason for that?

Nick

The business side is interesting. I guess when you look at just one food or facet of food, it really frees you up to be able to research other things that connect to it tangentially. I’ve always had an interest in design and how businesses operate. Potato chips have been the means by which I’ve learned about so many of these other things. When you have an interest in something, it spurs you to start learning more and learning more and peeling back the onion. The constraint is always that I’ve got a full-time job, I’ve got two kids, and this is something I try to wedge in that hour of time when the kids are asleep and the wife may be asleep, too. I’ve got years of work ahead of me. And that’s the pleasure of it—and the challenge.