What's Next?

Hey All! I swear I'm going to start writing again- but this is just a little update to say I'll be moving some of this blog over to the newer, although more limited access site Personal Forking. If you are looking for the last post about working in Chicago, it can be found there- but you'll need to be signed up for Personal Fork to get access. Email me to be added to the list. Otherwise- stay tuned. Here's a much more brief version of Chicago, originally posted a few months ago, soon be followed by the (almost!!) past year spent in SF.

Here I am, nearly 8 months deep into west coast living, and I've just now found time to write about the amazing experiences that brought me to this point. We can thank this found addition of a Saturday off work to a small battle between me, a rondeau, and the floor resulting in 7 stitches on my face- but a moment to sit down and write was long overdue.  Since leaving New York, I've staged in 7 kitchens in 3 states, worked in Chicago, and have been at Flour and Water in San Francisco for the entirety of my time in California…it's about time for a recap.

In the summer, I'd taken a job at probably the most talked about restaurant in the country- excited, scared shitless, and ready to work harder than anyone else. I found out very quickly what I was willing to endure in order to learn, and what I wasn't; what pleases me about cooking, and what really turns me off. Working in a restaurant is hard- no matter which one you choose to devote yourself to- Michelin starred or not, it’s a grind that is incomparable to any other line of work, but each individual has to find their balance, and then draw a line.
There are some incredible minds at work in those kitchens, and I had the honor of working by their side for a short period of time and soaked up priceless knowledge- but that's not the life for me.

A few weeks into life at X, my Dad came into town for dinner where I spent the entirety of the meal gulping down tears while he curiously poked around at my new job.  I didn't want to spill out all of the tears that welled up every night onto our table- I've always been a hard worker…If I can do anything- it's outwork the next guy.  I couldn't possibly admit to not being able to get through something.  But Dads are…Dads.  They know.  All he had to say was, "You're happiness is the absolute most important thing to me, the prestigious kitchen you're in, is not.  And you should put your happiness first, too."  And like that, everything was clear again.

Endure for a purpose. Endure because you love it.  Endure because once the daily grind is over, while you’re taking off your apron and throwing it into the laundry at the end of the night, you better be smiling.

I only spent two more weeks there after that dinner but I appreciate every second in that kitchen.  I learned what I value in myself, cooks, and kitchens, and what shakes my values just a little too hard.  I learned what I'm made of there, and what I'm not.  I saw qualities I admire so much that I'll never step foot in the kitchen without thinking of them first, and qualities I'd never let within a mile of my own.

Since leaving that restaurant, I had low hopes that was I was looking for existed- a place where intuition is listed on the job requirements.  I know that the place I left is a finely tuned cash-machine well oiled to replicate it’s system across the country for the most efficient restaurants the world has ever seen…So if I knew that was right…could there be another way?  If there wasn’t- you’d find me outside of the kitchen forever, but I was determined to at least look.

I searched the fields of Blackberry Farm again, finding lots of old friends cooking great food…I headed to California where I was exposed to ingredients I’d never seen before and spent long days picking chervil and cutting carrots in other peoples kitchen's with all different ideals until one hit home.

At first, his philosophy sounds pretty common sense.  A chef’s job also emcompasses keeping the employees happy as well.  While your cooks will almost always put up what you’ve asked them to- they will also put up a perfect dish every time when they’ve had a part in creating it.  Chef said-

“I could say,  Hey, this is the new pork and egg dish.  It’s cooked like this, seasoned like that, plate it like this and put in the window.  And they will make it look and taste pretty much like that every time.  Or I could say to a cook- hey, how would you add an egg component to that dish?  Think about it, then let’s talk about your ideas then we can try it out.  Every single time the cook makes, and plates that dish- he has a personal role in it, a piece of him goes up with every plate.  Every plate will be perfect that way too.”

Instead of fighting the creativity that harangues the cook to do things a little differently than the person before them, he harnesses that, embracing the small loss in perfection that you have to throw to chance and human error, and allow the cook to revel in the glorious craft we chose. Over and over again. I've been at Flour and Water since that conversation and can't wait to write about everything I've learned here and since I'm sitting out of work one more day- I might just get that done.

My hat tips to all those in kitchens of X's caliber, I will absolutely be in the dining room again, just not the kitchen. And whatever quality you have that allows you to endure- bless you.

And a little view from the travels that bought me, and kept me, in San Francisco...

I call it a....                                                       Stage Montage.

Blackberry Farm

I can't describe how amazing it is to harvest your own prep.  It was so nice to be back on the farm- brought back so many good memories!

Creative way to carry herbs- pluck out a big cabbage leaf!

 Lardo and grissini

 Getting ready to be smoked!

 I'd never seen gnocci made this way... but...

 Man that piping bag was smart...

 It worked!

 Ohhh Cheffy...Loved cooking with Chef Joseph again!

 The farm, just as beautiful as ever.

A warm welcome : ) tasting of Ports

 Old pals!

New ducks!

 Heirloom beans that John collects through the years...

 My favorite farmer!!!

Livin the Dream : )

Being back at the farm was like arriving at home.  They were always warm there, but even warmer this time around.  The familiar faces nearly convinced me to live out in Walland, TN again...but I was still yearning for a little city.  

Some of my earliest kitchen memories come from there- I still have every single prep list I ever wrote during my stay.  Anytime I ever smell thyme being cooked, I'm immediately brought back to a very vivid memory of my first time cooking lobsters in the back room... I will always have a place in my heart for Blackberry.

The farm has never been prettier, the food never as beautiful, and the people never as loving.  If I ever get the urge to slow down and hang out in the fields snipping greens for dinner, you know where to find me.

Flour and Water

I thought those notes were so damn cool! Now it's kinda an everyday thing...I'm pretty lucky.

Standard. We take all of the face away from the bone, cure it for a few days, sous vide it for 48 hours, then slice it super thin for a pretty bad ass Coppa dish.

I was so smitten with the handmade pastas...These are the Brigante.

Saison

Probably the most impressed I've ever been in a kitchen. And the most excited.  My notes aren't even legible as I tried to scribble in all the new things I was seeing and ingredients being used. Amazing, beautiful, deeeeliscious, brilliant, creative stuff goin on in there. Almost everything touched that fire...bones for stocks, desserts, me. Such a cool place.

Saison's other fire...in Golden Gate Park. If I recall correctly...we were grilling Spam.

Quince

 Trio of Pastas.  I didn't grab a lot of pictures at Quince.  It reminded me strangely of Marea.  It felt kind of like a parallel world.

And what really sold me on San Francisco...this.

Bangkok or Bust

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been in Thailand.  And as I’m writing this- I’m thinking about how many additional weeks it’ll be from the time I start writing this to when I actually post this. The day after I landed from Thailand, I started a new job in Chicago that demands more of my time, energy, and concentration than any job most people have ever fathomed.  I literally think of ways to put one foot in front of the other that will be more efficient than the last step I took just to shave a few seconds off the time it takes to blow through my hefty prep list.  Besides laying down for the 5 hours of sleep I’ve been getting, I haven’t actually stood still since landing from Bangkok- until now.  It’ll take me awhile to write about everything- at the same time I’m trying to document the amazing time I’m having at my challenging new outpost.  Wish me luck and happy reads.

I ate at Benu on the layover through San Francisco and if I hadn’t eaten in Thailand right after, I would have said it was the best meal I’ve had in years.  But after devouring the expanse of food I discovered in Thailand, I can’t claim that statement anymore.  I'd put the duck laab I had down some alley in Bangkok up against any single dish on the planet. At Benu, it’s not that it was the absolute tastiest food I’ve ever had it was meticulously prepared, and everything was cooked perfectly too- but it was eating something different.  In both places I was coming across uncommon flavors- and over the past few years of being immersed in the food world, even the oddest offals have become all too familiar.  But at Benu, and then Thailand, all I ate was the unfamiliar.  This way, even if it wasn’t the best, it was the only.  In my tear through the fine dining scene in New York- nothing quite stirred the desire to cook like eating the flesh of young coconut just pulled down from the tree. Now I know it’s not just great food that excites me- it’s the unknown.

My first taste of Bangkok was a Leo.

I landed at midnight and after being the air for somewhere around 24 hours, I had no idea if it was morning night, if it was time to drink beer, or drink coffee- but Emma met me at the gate with some strange Thailand brew, so beer was the chosen elixer for my first 8 hours in Thailand.

Armed with only a few phrases she thought useful for survivial such as- “Chicken,” “Go Faster,” and “Handsome,” we sped into the city.

As it turns out, I rarely resorted to Emma’s survival phrases. I made it through the entire trip to Thailand by pointing at food and just three phrases: Hello, Thank you, and Very Delicious. I never found the need for other words.

Once we got into Abac, the area of the city Emma lived in, I pit stopped us into the first noodle stand with steam rising form it.  I watched him dunk a basket of noodles into a cauldron of unidentifiable boiling liquid…and went to sit down.

I was immediately struck by how little I could understand about what was going on in front of me. I’ve always thought of food and cooking as math: a common language spoken everywhere in the world. No matter what kitchen I’ve landed myself in; Italy, Greece, or a new kitchen in the states- however unfamiliar I was with my surroundings- I still knew how to do the math of food.  At least we still had that language in common. And while I didn’t speak a lick of Thai, I thought I could stay afloat with that commonality- but quickly I realized our math was different.

I didn’t really understand the adding and subtracting I was watching in front of me. I didn’t understand the tools I was looking at, the cooking processes, and I definitely did not understand what I was smelling.  As for the tastes…I couldn’t even begin to comprehend them. The next 10 days were spent trying to wade my way through the new galaxy of food I entered.

We were sitting on picnic tables outside of a 7-11.  Not to eat there, but because in Bangkok it’s almost a sure fire guess that where there’s a 7-11, there’s a food stand out front hawking anything from duck noodles to fried frog skins, it all depends which corner you round.

This one had rice noodles and I'm guessing a pork broth.  It was was outrageously good- piled with egg, chilis, lipstick red pork. Oh…and intestines. Perfect.  Just what I love stumbling across at 2 am in my soup.

I literred it with Nahm Prik and some fish sauce- part of the cluster of items that lent themselves to every single table in Thailand- street food or not.  If this is what I could get my hands on at 2 am on- the potential for finding the best food in this hemisphere was great.

But I started off on the wrong foot. We went out late…really late.  My hangover was one for the record books. I’d seen the sunrise in Bangkok before I’d seen the sunset.  And when I woke up- I was desperate to find recognizable food- either by smell or taste.  I grabbed a sandwich in hopes to keep something in my stomach, anything, but even the sandwich didn’t pass the test.

I didn’t actually plan on ever eating something that resembled American food even once this trip, but later in the journey, I found myself following a group of expat friends on their quest for “western” cuisine- They were all teachers having been here as long as two years, and all constantly on the quest for a decent burger.  Tonight, they’d read about a place that had steak- real steak. As Matt said, “Not that sinuey stuff that usually disguised itself as a piece of meat.”  This was by far the worst food I’d eaten in Thailand- or really, the worst food I'd ever eaten anywhere.  I’d regretted every bite I took, seeing it as an assault on what I flew across the world to do in the first place- but the Americans loved it. It was like seeing people starved and desiccated at sea step onto land to take their first drink of water- everyone was rejoicing over the salad- tasteless bowls of lettuce with paired with a gnarly white sauce supposing to be ranch and dark pieces of meat that looked more like spray painted chicken cutlets than steak…and I’ve never seen people so happy about shitty food. That was my final encounter with this so called “western food” while I was in Thailand- not only am I walking away with an appreciation for new food- but an appreciation for what I already know- a good cheeseburger.

When I finally gathered the bravado to step into the streets and endure the intense smells that flood the walkways in Bangkok, my co-pilot in endless food journeys through Thailand, Matt, walked me through my first experience in street food.  I don’t really know how to explain the feeling of turning off their quiet street and onto the Sunset Strip of food. It can be best described as standing outside an empty building, completely dark and silent and swinging open the doors to find a full blown rave going on. It was a rush.

 

If you looked left: hundreds of people pushed down a sidewalk lined with food stands, smoke rolling out over the heads of passer bys.  To the right: what used to be a parking lot was a sea of blue plastic chairs, and spit fires of rotating salt crusted fish. The smells were thick and tangible in the air.

Straight ahead- traffic, lots of it. Our destination- a nameless outdoor restaurant that popped it's structure up on this corner right before dusk, and collapsed itself into the back of a truck when the crowds cleared to come back the next night.

It felt like if I took a step forward, I’d immediately be swept up by a hurricane…so I did, and entered the stream of Thai people fishing their way through the stalls.

Coconuts! Young, green, brown, ice cream, juice…

Fried chicken; chicken legs, feet, and livers- all hot out of the palm oil baths.

Pork of all kinds- literally stands selling pork deep fried 5 different ways and from 5 different parts of the body.

Balls of heaven were being cooked up in what looked like the cast iron togoyaki molds- corn, coconut milk, and rice flour. 

Every single stand was slinging something different, some specialty, some snack- none of which were resistible. That being said, every stand was also filled with constant arrivals and departures of flies, and other various bugs. Massive piles of food lay out in what I could only identify as upside down metal shields, presumably at raging temperatures of 80 plus…needless to say, the sanitary standards we’ve become accustomed to in the States didn’t apply here.  I was at odds with all sorts of  malignant bacteria waiting to use my stomach as a breeding ground. So, I made the intelligent choice- I threw caution to the wind and I consumed my weight in food within one block.

You can’t help but wonder about the health risks when you’re eating off of plates being washed in water you shouldn’t very well be drinking.  It’s not that Thailand doesn’t have food safety standards, because I know they do.  I went to school with a woman named ChaCha back in New York, who is originally from Bangkok. She lives there and runs the culinary school at Dusit.  She teaches food safety, so on our ride out to the old city Ayuthia we talked extensively about the cleanliness and safety of the irresistible food clogging the streets of Bangkok.  Rules are in place- enforcement is not.  She said Thai people are resistant to most of the things Americans come here and fall prey to. This food was designed to keep people like me away- but I wouldn’t let a little food poisoning frighten me. I’ve stumbled across modern day’s most dangerous food borne illnesses right at home in New York City.  Bring on your best Thai strain.

After humoring me and stopping at every stall that smelled halfway decent, we sat down to dinner due left of a grill the size of a hummer, turning chicken and fish over the spit.

I remember thinking- I can’t name one other place in the world that looks anything like this…this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Matt did all the ordering- Tom Yum Goong, one of the chickens crisping away over the flames, sticky rice... and something refreshing- Som Tam, papaya salad.  Holy shit was I in for a rude awakening.  I unknowingly just shoveled the spiciest salad in all of Thailand into my mouth like a bulldozer.  Everything else was similarly hell-firery spicy. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how strong everything was.  Strong might not be the right word- but how would you describe tasting what it would be like if your mouth just switched from black-and-white to full blown color HDTV?  Everything just tasted like what I’d known these flavors to taste like previously…but on steroids.

Matt and I wandered around until we found someone peddling coconut ice cream topped with peanuts, jelly, shredded coconut, and my rekindled long lost love- condensed milk.  Whenever my Dad made key lime pie when I was a kid, he’d find me sneaking swigs of condensed milk from the can.  I think I’d forgotten about that as an ingredient- until Thailand where it was stirred into coffee and poured over mounds of ice cream.  

I found a way to eat mango sticky rice. Every. Single. Night.

Things got sketchier than just street food- I ate just about everything I could find at the Ampawa Floating Market, where the streets are made of water.  A murky combination of gray and green liquid carried these vendors in the shells of their long tail boats to the steps of Ampawa where people dotted the steps down to the water, calling out their orders to cooks. 

Luckily, I had my friend Pai from Lop Buri palling around with me that day.  Any questions I had about the concoctions were quickly translated back and forth all day long.  He fielded questions such as, “Are you feeding the prawns steroids?,” “Can I have one of each,?” “Um…what is this,”? and “How did they get the fragrance of Jasmine so beautifully into these ginko nuts?”

But, the best food wasn’t the snacks on sidewalks or bridges, it was the food I sat down for.

Every place I ate told a different story through food.  The kind of rice they serve explains which region of food you were sampling- North eastern parts of Thailand exclusively grow, and therefore eat sticky rice.  Other parts of the country only cook jasmine rice.  Poorer parts of the country tend to have spicier food where, lacking funds for pricier proteins and relied on the heat of chili to lend flavor to the meal. Where coconuts typically don’t grow, coconuts don’t show up in the food.

The two absolute best food experiences I had in Thailand both happened on Ko Mak- one technically over the Gulf of Thailand on the way to Ko Mak..."Same same but different," As the Thai would say.

Getting to the island was an adventure in itself.  My journey started at 5 in the morning, catching a taxi down to the Ekkamai bus station for the first bus down to the port.  According to everyone I talked to, the bus would take 4 hours.  A dragging 6 hours later, the land stewardess told me in broken English I had to get off the bus- they decided not to go all the way to the port.  Sooo..I got off the bus 6 hours from Bangkok, with zero guesses on distance between the port and where I was standing. I started hunting for a cab.  When I did find him- I tried to enter his car via our passenger side door…his driver’s side door- earning roaring laughs from the pool of drivers on the curb.  Embarrassment and confusion- my two favorite travel partners. When I did make it to the port, I was pretty sure I was boarding a boat to nowhere.  I asked which one went to Ko Mak and when not a single person understood my pronunciation of Ko Mak, they finally just pointed me to a boat and said, “You get on! Twenty Minutes.”  I couldn’t tell if that meant it’ll take 20 minutes to get to Ko Mak, or get on the boat in 20 minutes, but I wasn’t taking any chances on missing my boat to nowhere.  So I got on the boat and was immiediately kicked off.  Apparently she meant get on the boat in 20 minutes.  Got it.

I puttered around until I smelled something heady, burning my nose as I breathed it in. I sniffed out the source.  The same woman directing me to my boat was cooking something bewitching.  She called it Stir Fry Beef with Chili, Egg and Peppers. I call it: Miracle on the Dock.  I think she thought it was funny to send over a mound of chilis hidden between slices of beef- and even though my mouth felt like it was going to burst into flames, jump off my body and quit the eating game- I went back for seconds thinking I may never get to eat something this deliscious again- I might as well do it twice.

Little did I know even better food was waiting on the island.  Matt told me to check out Wong’s Noodle Shop- he said he'd eaten almost nearly every meal at the same place while on Ko Mak. "How incredibly unadventurous," I thought.  Well, go ahead and label me "Incredibly Unadventurous" because I followed him down the same road.

When I got to the island, I rented a bike and peddled my way around the circumferance, then through the diameter of the island.  The island only has 2 piers and a small cluster of beach hotels near them- not more than 15 different hotels and somewhere around 10 eateries on the island.

My room- the one with the hammock looking out onto the waves- was the equivalent of $12 a night.

I parked my bike at the top of the driveway to Ko Mak Seafood and walked down the gravel path until a restaurant hovering on stilts above the water appeared.  When I came upon an empty dining room, I was afraid I'd shown up too late for lunch. After making some laps around the edge of the dining room, watching the fish swim around the slits holding the restaurant afloat, a woman came around the corner of the kitchen and grabbed a menu. My handful of Thai words rendered me helpless with the menu, so when she came over to get my order, I said, “You choose.”  This waitress was also my chef, and my chef was also my fish purveyor.  She has chosen crab and motioned me to come with her.  After a few yards she looked back to see me, confused, still sitting at the table.  She came back, took my arm and walked me over to the pier where a man untangling a wad of nets tangled into a ball on the back of his crab boat.

They chatted for a second and then she pointed to the cage holding hundreds of scrambling blue crabs.  A roar of Thai chatter later and she and I were walking back over the plank connecting the retaurant to the pier to go cook and eat the fresh crab.  Good choice I thought.  Moments later I had crab stir fried with chilies, and lemongrass.  I think it may be redundant at this point to tell you how amazing any of the food is- but for one final time- this was absolutely mind blowingly amazing.

After lunch, I started another bike adventure.  I aimlessly ducked in and out of different huts, inquiring about this infamous noodle shop I’d heard about but received little direction. Since no one spoke a lick of English and I only new derivaties of “deliscious” in Thai, I wasn't getting any closer. When a diving truck with obvious ex-pats pulled up next to me, I asked them for directions and the Australians told me me to take a left at the Starbucks and a right at McDonalds.  Ex-tourists insulting tourists.  That’s a bold move.  The island is only so big- with a little perseverance I finally found Moung's Noodle Shop- and like Matt, every following meal was at Moung's. 

Over the course of a few days, I’d developed a relationship with the sole cook at Moung's- Moung.  On my last night, I stood at the counter next to where she cooked, perusing the menu until she said, “I don’t like anything there” and took it from me.  She said, “I’ll make for you what I like.”

It took me three days of thumbing through David Thompson’s Thai Food book before figuring out what the green shoot was comprising the stir fry she made...actually, in all honesty, I haven't ruled out either Water Mimosa (Pahkacet) or Siamese Watercress (Pak Bung).  It could easily be either one.  Everything I ate everywhere in Thailand did actually have a given Thai name...but the more I wrote them down, the less I found them relevant.  Similar items changed nomenclature between stalls, renaming them for the region they came from and the extremely slight difference in preparation.

The only departure I took from her food was the one night I’d rented a kayak with some german guy I met on the boat over, and kayaked to an island that looked a lot more nearby than it actually was.  We spent an idyllic Thai island day, basking in the sun, snorkeling, drinking the case of Thai beer we brought over...but then as the sun began to set and lightning started to light up the sky, we debated getting home.  The debate didn’t last very long seeing as we were on an island about 12 miles from Ko Mak with nothing but a kayak, the clothes on our back, what remained of the beer we brought over and some no longer necessary sunglasses.  I’ve always has an unnatural fear of sharks- or maybe it’s a fear of anything that swims in pitch black water underneath me and the only light between where we were standing on the nameless shore and the shore of Ko Mak was the twinkle we assumed to be our hotel.  My german friend was obviously scared shitless- But I hoped he might be put at ease if I proceeded gung-ho with this life-threatening plan.  Not so. We pushed the kayak down through the sand and into the small waves hitting the coast.  I was trying to appear collected- I needed him not to be scared or I wasn’t making it across the gulf.  I cracked a joke about tanning our front side on this leg of the trip, and we were off.  I paddled hard for the first 15 minutes, not wanting to look up and see we’d made zero progress.  Annnnd...when I finally gained courage to look up, we’d made zero progress. The german guy and I were already lacking in common vocabularly, but his renditions of "shit" laced every other word of his sentences now. We were both cold, and I can assure you at least one of us were thinking about drowning at sea.  But like looking at a wall of tickets in front of you thinking- “now that’s just not possible,” you remind yourself that it’s not like you’re just going to walk off the line and hide in the locker room… just grab a pan, or a paddle, and dig in.  That makes the rest of the kayak trip sound like it played out to be very epic and triumphant...It wasn't. About halfway through, the waves kept pushing the boat sideways, causing us to only need aggressive paddling on one side...we basically splashed around like newborn ducks in a pond until finally exhausted. We'd made it close enough to shore now to recognize we probably wouldn't die and coasted our way onto shore.  We dragged out boat under some trees- looked around and recognized what really mattered next- our next meal.

A day spent eating in China Town-

The "Wet Markets" (Thai for- "Outdoor market with thousands of fish/meat parts you've never seen before, probably still living with generally 3-5 inches of unidentifiable waterstuffs around your feet so you probably shouldn't wear flip-flops to a knee-deep fish fest stupid American")

Ignorance is bliss...

I got on the plane home from Thailand thinking almost exactly the opposite of what I’d thought when I'd arrived- food is not like math at all, it just so happens all the food I've been exposed to follows a lot of the same rules. Instead of a common language, it’s more like a medium that exists all over the world…kind of like water.  What water is for electrical current, food is for culture, history, passion…a person, and everything they’ve cooked up until that moment.

If for even for a second you might not love what you’re doing...you’re not sure why you got in it the first place- Go somewhere, see things you don’t understand- and if it stirs the coals of that passion, you've probably found the right one, you just need to feed it's fire.

If you recall the first few lines- I had just taken a job in Chicago at Next. And I write the ending to this, just over a month later from a cabin in the woods of eastern Tennessee near Blackberry Farm.  I’ve since concluded the short, incredibly intense stint in Chicago. I learned priceless lessons that I'll carry with me through out my culinary career…and then some less priceless lessons like how to vacuum like your in the Indy 500 making laps around prep counters.  I’ll write more about the experience there, but first- I’ll catch my breath over something more grounded…Pulling my prep straight out of the dirt.