conversations with the world’s top culinary artists
salty raw. unfiltered. candid.
Dominique crenn: it took thirty years to get here peter gilmore: The dish before the story Pierre herme: Sugar as spice
vol. 2
salty 10 Humanity and the Planet by Dominique Crenn 12 Peter Gilmore: The Dish Before the Story 32 Self Portraits by Quique Dacosta 42 Dominique Crenn: It Took Thirty Years to Get Here 58 Finding Our Dialogue by Dave Beran 68 PierrĂŠ Herme: Sugar as Spice 82 A Future Based on Traditions at Neolokal by Maksut Askar 96 Albert Adria & Blaine Wetzel: A Thousand Truths in the Kitchen 112 Rebirth of Dutch Culinary Culture by Joris Bijdendijk 122 Happenings
Peter gilmore The last time I visited, you mentioned your interest in unusual flavors and flavor combinations. I remember a congee dish with sea urchin on the menu, and you were also using salted and fermented egg yolk? Yes, absolutely I remember that dish. I used the congee and the fish maw that we made to resemble super crispy like pork cracklings. There was a sea urchin in that dish as well. That is definitely the sort of thing that I create, and I think that those are kind of the textures and flavors that are ever evolving and coming in and out of the menu at different times. What is the most unusual flavor or texture combination on your menu now? I have got a sea urchin dish on at the moment. It is made with sort of a rice, and I actually turn the sea urchin into a butter and then I fold that through the rice and it is served on top of some little tiny poached sweet prawns and then over the top of the whole dish is fish maw. The maw is the swim bladder of the fish that regulates its ups and downs and that maw gets cooked for 12 hours, steamed,
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and then dehydrated. Then you fry a little piece and it puffs up, so it becomes like fish crackling, and that’s over the top of the rice with a little bit of beautiful fermented egg yolk, salted egg yolk, and then we pour over what I call an umami broth, which has about 12 different ingredients, and it is texturally really beautiful. How important presentation?
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That can be a double-edged sword too, though it does help in the food. You have to fight twice as hard for the food to standout. When you get the food right, the atmosphere right, and the service right, and if you can maintain those levels of quality and just try and innovate what you do, I think then that is the key to longevity. Do you think that chefs have a comfort zone, and is it safer to operate within it? I think at the top level you cannot just rely on your comfort zone. According to me, you’ve got to challenge yourself to be more inventive but within reason, and while staying within a philosophy or style
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“You cannot rest on your laurels and have to be inventive at this level of cooking.�
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Peter gilmore
“When you get the food right, the atmosphere right, and the service right, and if you can maintain those levels of quality and just try and innovate what you do, I think then that is the key to longevity.�
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Quique Dacosta
“You must know yourself, have a concept of yourself, understand and accept yourself, and even imagine how others view you.�
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dominique crenn know if maybe tomorrow it won’t be busy, and then we still have that money to pay, and you know, it’s not easy with taxes and labor and everything. This is why so many restaurants are closing because you can’t charge $500 a person for people to come to your restaurant. I mean you need to pay your rent, but food needs to be affordable also. Of course, to make the kind of cuisine you do requires a lot of expense. Does food need to be more approachable for the average diner? Yes exactly, that’s why with Bar Crenn you can come and have a glass of wine and sit at the bar, and it’s the same with Petit Crenn. Now we’re going to be opening Boutique Crenn, and for me it is all about being able to create these types of places that will be more affordable for others. We have a farm also; it’s all a work in progress, but I got to tell you it’s not an easy business, and we are not making money. In your opinion, do women help other women like you say to achieve their dreams? Does that happen in the culinary industry? You know I’m going to be very honest with you; not all women do that. I know some women chefs, I’m not going to say who they are, but I know that when they come to the top, they just want the limelight and they don’t really care about those around them. It is interesting that while I was being interviewed by the BBC, one of the journalists, a woman, said that she was also responsible for not putting women on top. She said, “Even though I have been a journalist all my life, I didn’t believe in a woman being a chef, so I just followed the men in the industry because of the way society functions.” So I personally think that there are some that do, and some that don’t, but at the end of the day, we all need to help each other. As a woman, I am hoping I can help the others, but I think as a society whether you are a man or woman, we need to help each other, just to be able to grow. We are all family, whether they are wives, or mothers who have children, or are someone’s daughters.
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Salty Magazine Let us not look at gender as something that is scary. Let’s look at gender as something we all need to embrace. It’s amazing to have all this diversity in our world. Coming to that question of gender balance, are we going from one extreme to another? Earlier no one spoke or wrote about it and now that’s all the media focuses on. Is there need for a place in the middle? I mean you know as much as I know, it’s not just about our industry, it’s everywhere. Women have not been treated equal for a long time. We see so many sectors in the society in this country where women do not rise. What happened is that the media wanted to emphasize this problem in our industry. Now I think the important thing is to come back to the middle and really understand exactly how to evolve and how to change things. For the most part, the conversation at forums and panels on this subject is about people sharing their unfortunate experiences instead of focusing on finding solutions or strategies. Is it time we mentor other women to help them get out of this or to fight back? I actually agree with you. Now it’s time to get together and have a different conversation. We need to find a solution. you know, I read stuff about complaining, but now we need to move forward and be the change that we want to be, and that’s important, in this I am in agreement with you. What is your take on women-only forums and events? There is one thing that I like about such forums like Parabere which was created to empower women in our industry, that at least they are starting somewhere. They are also including men, so I think there is a balance of speakers which is great. What you have to realize is that yes, we start with women. Women have to come together, and yes, women have to work with men, because otherwise we are going to create a place where we limit ourselves again, and we don’t want that.
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dominique crenn what you need to remember, that you have done something you believed was right for you, and that’s very powerful. Do you feel that we need mentorship in this industry? Does it exist, and is there a need for it?
to find love with a new family when I was abandoned and grab that love and that joy of life. Maybe that is where it comes from. Choosing to live life on your own terms is not always easy because of family or societal pressures. Can we change the perception of others? What we need to understand nowadays is that you can’t tell people to choose. You have to listen to them and embrace who they are. You might not agree with what they want to do, but at least embrace their ideas. It’s funny, I was talking about education yesterday and about school, and I think I said that in the school system and even at home we need to change the way that we talk to our children. We are the main figures and they look up to us, but we have to be able to listen, especially listen to children because they have a voice too and they are trying to say something. They have things that they want to say and that they want to tell us, and we have to be able to listen, and I think if we do that, a lot of families will not be breaking up that way. We all have stories in our lives and a reason for what we do, why we do, why we are the people we are. I have made some difficult choices and borne the consequences. You should be proud of who you are because you are a creative woman, and you are very strong and you’ve done a lot of amazing things, and I think that’s
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Yes, it’s something that is important. In my experience, when you are young and you are looking at the world, you want to look up to someone or a few people who can mentor you. Whether from close or from far away, and you can be inspired. I think in our world, a lot of youngsters, especially a lot of young women, are looking for that. They want to have a connection with someone that they can recognize and relate to their experiences in this world. With the news that keeps coming out in this industry, as we talked about before, it’s important for them to have someone strong and resilient to look up to and give them hope. I mean, I can’t tell you how many emails I get from people who are not yet in this industry, young women and young men also, who have, through listening to me or reading about me, found a strength that they did not know they had before, and that for me is very powerful. If you can do that, make that little change, and ask people to believe in themselves, then I think that is beautiful. We are all here for a purpose, we are here to help others. We are here to make this world a better world. We are here to make this humanity a beautiful humanity, so how do you do that? One word at a time. One dish at a time. One song at a time. One paragraph at a time. Maybe. Little things matter, and I think what a lot of chefs are doing, and actors, and politicians, they’re out there and want to mentor others, it’s very important. It’s very powerful. I often say that every night we dream a new dream. Do you feel now that all your dreams have been realized? Oh no, there are so many dreams yet to come. You are right, every night you do dream a new dream. The journey is endless. Completely endless. That’s the beauty of the world. I think what is also beautiful is that you surround yourself with people and you allow them to dream too. It’s amazing.
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“At the end of the day, the 15 minutes of fame are not going to last. What’s going to last is the way that we handle ourselves and the way we work, and I think 10 years from now there won’t be any more lists.”
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Dave Beran meaning behind the dishes. I looked back to the meals and courses that had the most impact on me. All of those courses were personal, courses that had as much importance in the backstory as they did in the value of the items on the plate. These were courses that had a real sense of place, courses that answered the question “why.” Typically, when a chef is a part of creating a restaurant’s cuisine, their style becomes tied to it. As they depart, their food becomes more of a continuation of where they came from. New chefs with new restaurants often create spinoffs of the food they had been making previously. I didn’t want to be a continuation of the restaurants that I had worked at for the previous 10 years. I wanted to understand my voice and what my food was. Dialogue was an opportunity to define an identity and philosophy separate from where I came from, where I would be able to have a voice and a direct conversation with the diner in a very small and intimate space. “Finding the Single Note” Simplicity became the focal point of our food. The challenge to simplicity in food is that it can easily be copied. Simple food can often lack depth and identity. For a long time, the way to show you were good was to outdo someone—outmuscling other restaurants by showing just how much more you could do. Twenty-five components to a dish meant it was better than seventeen components and was much more difficult to copy. This type of food can be very difficult to relate to. I wanted to go the opposite direction with Dialogue. As a chef, I felt that my identity was hidden somewhere in all of the food I had been producing, and the only way to find it was to strip away
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all of the noise. Find the single note. Over the year and a half prior to opening, we put forth a tremendous amount of effort in creating a pantry that was specific to us. I wanted to create simple food, food that showed our voice, food that was complex but with identity. We felt that the best way to make simple, unique food was to create food with things that no one else had. We created things like two-year barrel-aged burnt onion syrup, 30 different aged vinegars, flower syrups (lilac, rose, and begonia being favorites), sambals, seasoning salts, and pretty much anything else we could think of—with no dishes in mind. We simply wanted a creative jumping-off point for our food, all made from things that we had seen while locally foraging and in the farmers markets. Everything was intended to represent an aspect of us discovering Southern California. Everything was going to be a building
Salty Magazine block in the identity of our cuisine. “Forward Progress” California produce is tricky. In February you can purchase arugula flowers, Winter squash, and blueberries at the market— all of which show well. Coming from the Midwest, this was a challenge. I have always seen and defined seasons in menus by the available produce—peaches and tomatoes mean Summer, chestnuts mean Fall… What was I supposed to do with a delicious December tomato? In 2012, we did an Autumn kaiseki menu at Next. I fell in love. Kaiseki had an ongoing storyline. For Autumn you began by looking backward to Summer and ultimately ended by
looking forward to Winter. Three seasons were embraced in a menu format that allowed for forward progress. Kaiseki offered a way for us to embrace the whole market by compartmentalizing seasons in a single menu and giving us a way to present them in a logical order. Kaiseki gave Dialogue structure. The premise and underlying storyline of Dialogue was forward progress. Dialogue was a restaurant that allowed me to find my voice as a chef, define our philosophy as a company, and paved a way for us to engage with Los Angeles. We wanted to respect where we were coming from while always moving forward. Kaiseki was our first breakthrough. Our menu structure became seasonally focused, always
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Dave Beran
“At Dialogue the entire premise is forward progress. The restaurant, as it exists, was created to allow us to grow and see what we will become.“
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Salty Magazine constant change. Every menu was its own thing. I fell in love with that. It forced change, prevented complacency, and allowed the diners to fall in love with the experience rather than a particular course. It gave the restaurant freedom. It was the biggest thing away with me: constantly
embracing three seasons, first by looking backward, then by looking forward. “Continued Storyline” My business partner once asked me why we only used an ingredient once in a menu. He asked, “What if you had something that made the courses relate?” I gave him a handful of reasons why that was simplistic. In most tasting menus, you work off a metaphorical checklist. If basil is in one dish, it’s not used again—why? It prevents the menu from being repetitive.
I took change.
I wanted Dialogue to be a restaurant that was constantly growing and constantly in pursuit of what was to come. When Mike, my business partner and longtime friend, suggested that the dishes relate, he unintentionally defined the next layer of the Dialogue menu: the carryover ingredient. Just as the menu was to look forward and backward with the seasons, the dishes were to do the same. Every course was to have something from the previous course and something looking forward to the next. “The Lost Art of a Great Album”
However, something in his question resonated. Why aren’t the dishes connected? The simple answer is that most tasting menus are a collection of short stories. Each dish has its own identity, and the structure of the menu is built around putting those in a meaningful order. With most tasting menus, you often find a restaurant’s “signature” or “famous” dish; you find something new and seasonal, perhaps the last dish of spring and the first dish of summer. As a whole, a typical restaurant’s menu is always in flux and always built around a progression that relates to either flavor profiles, weight of the food, or the wine.
In the midst of discussing menu structure, I was also becoming more and more immersed in understanding overall storylines. Music became an incredible influence on the notion of crafting a menu. In a conversation with Questlove, DJ and drummer for the band The Roots, I asked him how he is able to write a five-hour DJ set. He responded simply with, “Can you tell a story in a tasting menu in an hour?” He was right.
How can a restaurant progress when they have dishes that can never change?
Ferran Adrià discussed something similar about the elBulli menus. He would interject courses which were intended to regain the diners’ attention: courses such as the “Espuma de humo” (1997) or the
Though I didn’t understand it at the time, the brilliance of Next was the
In a DJ set, you need to work with the crowd. You need songs you can dance to, songs that allow for rest, songs that build energy, and songs that are surprising. Everything revolves around engagement.
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pierre Her,mé something he will be remembered for, but I like the way he takes something from a culture and puts his own twist on it. He did the same in London, and he did the same in Tokyo. I spoke with Francois Perret about this, because for me it’s a good example of creativity. So how does one remain interested in creating something new and novel all the time? Do you get tired of always being on the search? I’m not sure that I’m the guy who searches, I’m a guy who finds because it’s more interesting to find me a call, and we spoke for a while. He is doing a very interesting experiment for Netflix to discover the culinary heritage of United States while filming for ‘The Chef in a Truck’. He is taking a food truck all over California; first he discovers a product, and after that he picks some traditional American recipe, and then he reinterprets it with the product he finds in California. It’s interesting because it’s very different from what he’s doing, as the pastry chef at the Ritz in Paris every day. I told him that I also admire what Dominique Ansel is doing with American tradition, or even English tradition, as when he opened in London. What he is doing is special because he has this ability to take something classic from the culture, as he did with the cronut, and then he made it over into something different. It’s always something clever, good, and smart. I also tried the one where he took something the Americans like to put in the fire? Marshmallow? Yes, and then he did an ice cream, surrounded by marshmallow, and it’s interesting. I don’t know if it will be
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Salty Magazine than to be in search of something. Th e people want something different, but the subject is always the taste and the pleasure that you give to the clients or customer. Do you have to change certain specifications in different regions and climates depending on how sugar reacts in certain places, with the temperature or the humidity? Yes, it’s a subject I work on, but I always look at it as an opportunity to make something different, to find another way to work. I don’t say it’s easy, I just say it’s interesting as is being able to exchange ideas with other pastry chefs about this subject. This year as a judge at a pastry competition, there was a L’Astrance pastry chef who said his dessert was without flour or sugar, so the judges asked how he did that as they were curious to know something new. There were some very interesting and good products we sampled. Without flour and without sugar, so were they using fruit paste? With fruit, with no sugar but instead using honey, so it was very different... it’s interesting, because it opens new things, new ways. We made some, one day, as a test with a company from Orleans. We found some ingredient that is not sugar, but has a sweet taste, and is made from starch, actually modified starch. We did a lot of tests with it and while it was not really perfect, but it was a start. We have to improve it, and work a little bit more on this subject. Recently I spoke with a friend who said “I understand you have worked with this company, and I’m interested too.” I said, “Okay, we can try to speak with them together.” It’s always better when we collaborate.
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pierre Her,mé
“I’m not sure that I’m the guy who searches, I’m a guy who finds because it’s more interesting to find than to be in search of something.“ What do you envision in your future? More expansion?
Macau somehow reminds me of Las Vegas, because now it’s over the top.
Doing better.
It’s full of full-time video, like Las Vegas.
You’re doing great!
Have you ever considered taking your brand to Las Vegas?
Doing even better, different, more change, and opening in new places. We have 96 locations right now, but we are doing something very different like going from a pastry shop selling macaron and all the pastries, to a cafe, salon de tea, a restaurant, a corner in a department store like Saks in NYC. Also taking care of all the pastry of a hotel as we are doing now at Le Morpheus in Macau and La Mamounia in Morocco.
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We had a contact in the past, I think it was 18 years ago, when we tried to get a place, but it eventually went to Francois Poillet. Is there something people don’t ask you yet which you want to talk about? I don’t wait until the people ask me the question for responding. For example,
Salty Magazine my next appointment is at the Gare de Lyon, because we opened a corner (Café) with coffee, macaron, and croissants. I have to go there because we have put a coffee machine there, and though we buy the same coffee as in our other places, I feel the coffee there can improved. So I am going there to meet with the person who makes the coffee, and with the team because I have to understand how to make it even better. We are roasting a variety of coffees because it is a subject that interests me, and I work on the recipes for making great coffee. For us, it’s really a new craft, and it is worth noting that the barista works just like the pastry chef, because they scale everything, everything is precise, everything is a recipe, and so the product is very important. We have to check if the weight of the coffee is correct, not for every cup of coffee, but for every 10 or 15 coffees, or if the ground coffee is the right proportion and then calibrate the machine. We pay attention to the machine, because during the day, depending the humidity, the air pressure, you have to readjust. We use both a manual machine and automatic machines and we are gaining expertise in them. Are most of your pastries sold in places where instead of a coffee culture there is a tea culture? Actually, Japan has a very strong coffee culture. There is a marked java culture, and this coffee culture is not coming from Europe, but it’s coming mostly from Australia and New Zealand. Our two chief baristas are French, but have trained in Australia and New Zealand. Incidentally in New York, Starbucks has opened a Starbucks reserve with high grade coffee, and they have one in Kyoto and one in Tokyo at Ginza Six. We had one in Paris also, but I don’t know why they closed it.
have good coffee, most of the time we roast the coffee on-site, and use around eight or nine processes to make coffee. There is cold coffee, filter coffee with the AeroPress, and so many different coffee experiences. Now that we have a restaurant, we need to have expertise in coffee just as we have in pastry. We work with Hippolyte Courty of L’arbe à Café, and the name of the brand is Lapa Coffee. I have worked closely with them and (laughing) maybe am becoming somewhat of an expert. Have you visited Tim Wendelboe in Oslo? Nathan Myhrvold said it’s a must-visit for a coffee lover. I have not been to that one, but I did go to the Café Collective in Copenhagen. I visited Nathan Myhrvold and the Modernist kitchen two years ago. He is a brilliant man and published the most interesting book on savory foods. A few years ago, he was planning to do one on pastry and was going to hire a pastry chef, and then I didn’t hear more about it. Since your world of pastry collides with coffee, is it going to collide with tea as well? Yes, we work on tea also, but for me, it’s all part of our work, because when you eat dessert, you don’t drink wine, at least I don’t drink wine with mine.
At our location in Gare de Lyon in Hall 2, we
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maksut askar
“I was an Anatolian. Who was I to cook some other cuisine when I did not really know about my own? “
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maksut askar classics were the thing back then, what most of the locals craved when they dined out. I was determined to do the best versions of those classics and work with the best recipes. I slowly started to be recognized as a great bistro chef when I started to cook casual food with a fine twist. I thought, though I cannot cook French or Italian in the same way a French or Italian person can, I can at least make the best copies of their food. But still, they were only copies. Every three months, I decreased the amount of world classics and increased the number of local classics. Within a year, I ended up with switching everything on the menu into local classics, throwing away all the foreign ingredients. Oh, it was radical. We called our menu concept, “Neo Lokal Kitchen.” We faced some resistance at the beginning, but within a year we had already gained the trust of the locals, so it was easier for them to accept these radical changes on the menu. I was an Anatolian. Who was I to cook some other cuisine when I did not really know about my own? Anatolian cuisine was a vast ocean that gave us a great chance to dive into this never-ending learning process. I knew that I was creating borders for my cooking, but there was a lot to learn within my own culinary heritage. Thinking back, Anatolia has been the cradle to many civilizations with its great history of food and cooking habits. This gave me the courage to focus more on my own heritage. In March of 2014, I was invited to take over the restaurant at the Salt Galata museum. I was so excited with the space and felt I would be very lucky if I took over. I told them that I would sleep on it, write down my dreams, and see if it fit their dreams. And they did. They loved the idea of
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opening a restaurant named Neolokal that would chase the traditions and twist them into today’s understanding. It was a great commitment and a lot of hard work. I visualized it as a restaurant that, unlike the majority of other restaurants, would evolve every day. After six months of the preparation process, Neolokal was born on the 1st of November, 2014. This preparation process was a brainstorming period for how to create an identity that would understand, reapply, and represent a vast cultural heritage. Within these six months, we came up with the following philosophy: We believe that those who do not take care and preserve their traditions cannot have a future. To guarantee our future, our traditions have to be adjusted to today’s circumstances and become sustainable. The correct way for us to do this is to express our respect for the earth at every opportunity and to share this deep respect we feel for our guests. This is what we are doing in a very humble manner. We learned the taste from our traditions, and through our traditions we learned to recognize taste. If our traditions are disappearing one by one due to today’s conditions, we believe our future will also disappear if we do not
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do anything. Within this frame, we have to define our traditions to suit today’s conditions and convey them to the future generations in the correct language. Your taste perception defines your borders. You cannot go any further. Even if you go further, the things that you create become something totally different. It is not your tradition. As a restaurant we consider ourselves timeless. Being timeless gives us the opportunity to constantly renew ourselves as we continue on our path and learn from our past. This past includes our traditions and lost cultures. We feel it is our duty to preserve it for the future and for the future generations. Thus, we feel like we are a bridge between the past and the future, presenting dishes from the past in a modern way that will be accepted in the future.
We believe that the way to be a bridge is by giving the true value to the mother earth, our past, and traditions, rather than just acting like it for the sake of it. A bridge has its footholds on the earth. In the same manner, we can only be a bridge if we touch the earth. We, as a team, are just learning that. A casual menu concept would not fit in the space we were offered; therefore, we felt like we had to refine our cuisine. But I didn’t like the term fine dining, so I decided to call it refined dining. We wanted people to feel relaxed in a bit more casual atmosphere but also experience the colorful world of Anatolian cuisine. Though we intended the restaurant to be there for a long time, we never intended to promote it neither locally nor globally. But somehow, some international journalists recognized us
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willows inn I thought about food. Just before that I worked mostly in classic restaurants like Italian and French restaurants. At the time Scandinavian cuisine especially was really new and different and a lot of the products there are very similar to here, similar geographically, weather-wise, etc. So to see some of the products I grew up with that were cooked and seasoned and flavored differently was really nice; realizing that the same products could be used so much differently based on their traditions. A: Do you have only two seasons in the year, cold and hot? Or Spring, Fall... B: Here? Here we have our rotating seasons. It’s very rainy so it’s more wet and dry seasons. It’s very cold, like this is the coldest it’ll get all year. Almost never snows. Almost never freezes. Two or three years we haven’t frozen at all, this is like the first frost in awhile. But it is a strong Spring and Summer because we’re very far north so it’s very long days. A: Mushrooms for example, do you have all year? B: Well no, only Fall. G: So you also have your own gardens, and you’re growing a lot of produce. Is it almost all of a certain product or is it just some of it that you grow here? B: We grow everything. G: So you are totally self-sustained? In everything? B: Yes, everything. It’s been eight years with the farm and every year it’s improving. We now have a staff of five fulltime growers. G: Are you able to supply all your meats here?
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Salty Magazine B: Oh more than enough. G: So what do you do with the excess when you have it? B: We try to use it. Actually we try to use everything that we grow. That’s the idea, to grow everything that we need. That seems like what you would want with a restaurant with a farm. Grow what you need for the restaurant and use what you grow but it turns out that it’s really challenging and it took like five years to even get to that point where were using everything and growing everything. Only in the last 3 years has it been a much deeper work of really exploring varietals in a different way, exploring different techniques and really syncing the two, the garden in the restaurant, but it remains a challenge. G: You have never done that Albert, right? You’ve never grown anything in terms of having gardens? A: Not personally no. Only specific products we have other people grow for us. For example for the Mexican restaurant we have people grow very specific things. We work directly with the farmers and we are very lucky in Spain with the weather and the soil and the pH and the quality of all products from the legumes to the fruits and we do a really really seasonal kitchen. We have a calendar with the seasons of the produce, like in this moment we have peas, artichokes, foie gras, duck, truffles. And when we change the menus, we change the menus for all the restaurants at the same time. And we are very democratic with the products that we use in different ways at each restaurant. At Bodega we use sea urchin in its natural state, and at the Mexican it is with aguachile. When using sea urchin at Hoja Santa, Tickets, and Enigma we work to create simultaneously different concepts for all of them for that one product.
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B: This is the next step, like I think it’s complicated working with a garden and working with a restaurant and a tasting menu but I can only imagine having that just be one part and having different restaurant concepts to fit it in. It’s just such a high level of work.
A: You make beer? B: We didn’t make it here. We made it at a brewery. Everyone: Cheers! A: It’s a great color, it’s very rich.
G: The beauty is that even if you eat in one restaurant after another all in one week you will never feel that there is anything similar or anything that carries over. They are all entirely separate experiences. Because I’ve done that and you absolutely cannot say, “Oh this is kind of like what I had last night.” Then beer, Albert’s favorite beverage which he likens to water, appeared at the table. A: Oh we have beer! G: Blaine you make beer here?
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B: Last year we made a beer that was very smokey and but this year I wanted a beer that you could have all day. A: This is something we are always talking about. People mistake artisan with quality and sometimes it is not like this. People make wine for 2,000 years and if you make a drink to substitute for wine, it is not possible. It will not take over as the new protagonist. People today drink kombucha, and sometimes I drink kombucha and it is very very strong and I cannot combine it with a dish.
Salty Magazine G: Do you do any fermentation here? B: Yeah we do some. We make miso or lots of times there’s extra product in the garden and we ferment it. So whether it’s like pickles or pickling items or lactofermentation or whatever it is because the farm has an excess and it’s a good way to process those things. It is also flavorful and nice, but it’s not a focus of the kitchen. The kitchen first and foremost works in the season. A: There is a very natural process in your work. A lot of technique to use. Using your knife is a technique, using knife as a technique, so using fermentation is a technique. And some cooks now only do it because it is the fashion. G: Albert, do you like juice or fermented drink pairings?
all things you are preparing but my stomach, your stomach, his stomach is different and there is a limit. Some dishes you have a red wine, is one option. Some dish you have a white wine, is one option. Some dishes you have Champagne, is another option. Some dishes you have with beer. Like this beer, I’m sure it’s perfect for your dinner here. Others times it’s only red wine or there is only white wine. Now you have complex beers, sake, tequila, mezcal, pisco. Respect to all drinks but I don’t believe that when you eat 7 dishes you need a drink for each dish. For example if you have foie gras with a sauternes, when you eat a half kilo of foie gras and drink sauternes, you eat and you are finished. G: So Blaine, when you have colleagues and peers come visit, how does it feel? With some legendary people, do you feel a little pressure?
A: I love pairing with everything. I respect
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joris Bijdendijk I want to show the world that the agriculture and gastronomy of Netherlands are ready to take their place among the great food cultures of the world. So I called two of my longtime collaborators, Samuel Levie and Joris Lohman, and we went to work and the Low Food Symposium was born. On January 13, we kicked off the First
developments. We invite speakers to talk about the food culture and agriculture. Levie, Lohman, and I may be the Low Food founders, but let me be clear: we are not the only ones. Our farmers, producers, chefs, policy makers and journalists are all Low Food founders. We all have an important role to play. Without the help and hard work of the many chefs around the country, farmers, and producers, there
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Edition of Low Food Symposium at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This will be an annual event where we bring together Dutch food pioneers, so they can be inspired by innovators in other parts of the world. This is a place where we celebrate all the wonderful and successful initiatives that have sprung up in recent years. The Low Food Symposium is where we are offering a platform for new and promising
wouldn’t be anything to talk about. Low Food is a stage on which we can show the world what is cooking in our kitchens. Low Food was put together in a very short space of time. Everyone told me to wait and take our time—to make a plan first. But I believed I had to start and try. I took the plunge without knowing what on earth it takes to build a symposium.
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I have to say, it was mission impossible. But I have been so lucky that so many people have put a lot of effort into getting the first Low Food Symposium off the ground. I could send messages 24 hours a day (and I’m telling you, I did) even at 3 o’clock in the morning. For instance, I remember I was buying groceries with my kids and in the middle of it calling Levie to ask if his mother could check the English version of the Symposium program book. “Yes, of course, for when?” He said. “Uhm, now Samuel, it needs to go to the printer in 5 minutes!” I said. It was like that over and over again. Everyone was working in their spare time, but with great positivity. Two months ago, we had no idea what to expect. And look how far we have come. I am thrilled we have welcomed a room of participants from more than ten different countries and I am proud that we have presented our program, including Claus Meyer (the Nordic Cuisine and restaurant
Noma), Kamilla Seidler (Chef, activist & Latin America’s Best Female Chef 2016), Martin Scholten (Director Animal Sciences Group, Wageningen UR), Iris Bouwers (Young farmer & Vice President of CEJA (European Young Farmers Association)), Luc Hoornaert (Head of Inspections at Gault & Millau the Netherlands), Onno Kleyn (Culinary author & food historian) and Jonnie Boer (three Michelin star Chef and entrepreneur). To me, Low Food is the beginning of a dream come true. We know very well that we stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us. I truly believe and hope that this community will grow in the coming years. This generation should pave the way for the next generation—our children, our future chefs. We must focus on doing justice to producers and to nature. We must preserve out culinary heritage and develop new heritage. We need to simulate sustainable food systems and the right choices with an eye for the future.
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