Question: What makes a great restaurant?

Transcript: The world of great restaurant very often are difficult to define. You know you will have a restaurant which opens, and everyone goes, and it’s fantastic, and you’ll go back and everything is great – from the food, to the service from the first moment you’re there. Someone will say, “I want to do the same thing.” You open another restaurant. You go there and everything is fine, but somehow it doesn’t click exactly. And you’ll tell people, “Did you like it?” And they’ll say, “Yes, it was excellent.” “How was the service?” “The service was very good, too.” “Would you go back?” “Yeah, I probably will go back,” but there is none of that excitement that you may have in that first restaurant. And sometimes it is something which is very, very difficult to define exactly. But certainly the quality of the food, the quality of the service, because you have to be felt welcome without people being condescending to you. So those are what make great restaurants, yes. There is never a dish which is absolutely perfect, you know? There can always . . . Sometimes you get close enough that you are very satisfied with yourself; but again it has to do with your own palate. Without any question if you decide on the 10 best restaurants in New York, or the 10 best restaurants in France, and if I go to those 10 restaurants, five . . . maybe five, six of them I’m going to think are absolutely extraordinary. Two or three of them I’m going to think they are quite good; and a couple of them I’m going to say, “I don’t understand why those people are three star.” And what I’m saying there is that you cannot escape yourself. So those four or five that I absolutely adore just happen to coincide exactly with my sense of taste, with my sense of aesthetic. So it’s purely a narcissistic reflection, if you want, on my own taste because that coincides with what I like. And the other one I’m not as familiar with it. So, as I said, to a certain extent, you can work with many different people, but you cannot escape yourself. At some point you are who you are, and that will be expressed in the food. That’s what I tried to tell the students at BU for example. I have a class of 10, 12 students, hands-on. And I do a class of two hours. I say, “I am going to do the perfect meal for you today – a roast chicken, I boil potato, and a salad.” But it has to be done exactly the right way – basting the right way. The salad has to be cleaned up the right way, set at the right temperature, with the right dressing, with the right oil, with the right amount . . . the right temperature. The potato has to be done “this” way, and so forth. Fine. So they do that, they taste it, then they go to the store and do it. Now they have two hours to duplicate my dish . . . my three dish. And I always say, “Don’t try to be original. Don’t try to outdo one another, too. Don’t try to be different than someone else because you are different. And whether you like or not, for the better or for the worst, I’m going to have 10 different chicken. A couple of them practically perfect. A couple cold. A couple undercooked. A couple overcooked. A couple . . . whatever. They will be different because you are different, and you cannot escape yourself. So you don’t have to torture yourself to find that dish to make sure that people know you’ve done it, because it will be different anyway.” Home is the best. Home is always the best restaurant around. Yeah there are many others. As I said, I mentioned Jean Georges in New York as well as Daniel . . . you know, Keller . . . you know Thomas Keller is extraordinary. Those are extraordinary restaurants, and there is only a few that I mentioned there. There is many, many more in New York and all over the country I mean.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript:  Bernard Kouchner that man would probably be the man that I would want to ask him because he’s a great hero for me.  He’s a humanitarian, and he will probably have the recipe, or could have the recipe to feed the starving, and to go in areas of the world that no one has done because he knows that type of subject, and he’s been doing it for 30 years.  So I will want to speak with him.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Is sustainable, organic farming feasible for a country of 300 million?

Transcript: Oh it’s absolutely feasible because, as I said, my mother was an organic gardener without even knowing the word because we didn’t have any of the other, you know, chemical fertilizers and so forth. So we know how to do it. We know what’s sustainable. We know how to vary crops so that we don’t, you know, diminish the quality of the earth and so forth. So we know how to do that. We know how to use natural fertilizer and all that. So it’s not that we don’t know. It’s a little more work. And the food is cheap . . . The food is too cheap in this country. If it was a little more expensive, people would come in droves and the . . . the organic market is working 20% up every year now. So it’s been moving at incredible speed, but it’s still very expensive for certain people. By the time that it will be only 30% or 40% more than regular products, people are going to move in droves to organic products. And we should.

Question: Can healthy, organic food be mass-produced?

Transcript: I believe so.  Even when I worked at Howard Johnson, there are things that you can produce well, especially now with new techniques of _____ and other innovations in technology that come about.  If it’s done with the best product to start with, it will cost money . . .  I mean there are great products now that come from Spain, for example – canned products with new way of canning which don’t have to be retorted, that is cooked so long that it diminish a great deal of the taste in those.  So there is all kind of new innovation, yes.  I absolutely believe that technically we will be able . . . we are already able to do food which tastes great, and are healthy, and are good for you, and are absolutely delicious, which is what’s happened for me.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript:  Well the perspective on that . . .  I mean it’s a deplorable situation.  I mean we add close to 2,000 book published this year in America – cooking book, diet book.  We didn’t have any diet book published 25 years ago.  And since 20 or so years ago, I would venture to say there has been over 10,000 or 15,000 book on dieting with the net result that we are 35% fatter than we were 20 years ago.  So obviously it doesn’t work.  So you have to go back to the beginning.  You have to go back . . .  It’s very important to start with the children when they are small.  There is no place more secure than the kitchen for a child who come back from school.  You know because the noise of the kitchen, the smell of the kitchen, the voice of the mother or the father, all of that are going to create memories, you know – effective memories which will stay with you for the rest of your life without any question.  I think it was a Chinese philosopher who said, “What is patriotism but the taste of the dish that you had as a child?”  And that is very, very true.  Because you see those young kids in Iraq now.  They go back to mother’s apple pie, or ice cream, or something that brings them . . .  There is something secure in this.  There is something comforting to do this.  So we are going back to those tastes of our youth.  And certainly that’s what Proust discussed in the effect of memory.  And so certainly for me as a cook, the memory of the senses, the effective memory that is the eye, the nose, the smell, you know, the taste as well as the touching of the food is much more important than the memory of the intellect.  If you asked me, you know, to try to remember where I was eight years ago at a certain time by working my brain a lot I remember where I was.  But it’s a different type of recall, a different type of memory that when I walk in the wood, and all of a sudden I smell something and I am six years old, or I am seven years old smelling that mushroom or whatever, that memory of the senses is very immediate.  It’s very powerful.  You know it overrides any other type of emotion that you have at that point.  And those memories, that’s what you create with a child, you know, in the kitchen when that child is an infant.  From the beginning that’s where a child should be doing his homework – in the kitchen next to his parents.  And after sitting down around the table . . .  And it’s not . . .  I remember when my daughter was small, you know, to sit down every night and recall what happened in school, and eat.  It’s not necessarily pleasant.  Sometimes it’s not.  But yet unless you do that, you don’t communicate with your children, you know?  So you have to do that.  It’s absolutely necessary.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript:  Well it has changed it for both – you know, worse and better.  I mean everything at the fingertip of your hand.  Now you can get, you know, raspberry from Peru in January.  When your eyes tell you that they are raspberries, often you palate doesn’t believe it because it is not the time of the year for raspberry.  But it is true that now we are . . .  And the process of ________, for example, or other process of handling the food will make it better and better so that we can have fresher and better product as new innovation and technology happen.  So this is a plus.  On the other hand, it seems that that globalization has taken a great deal out of . . . out of individual cooking; out of ethnicity; out of expression.  And the food will be . . . or people would express themselves with the food of their own not only country, but their own village or their own small place in France where they live, you know?  And that has kind of been damaged by this to a certain extent.  I am positive, and I am an optimist in life.  So I think that we are moving to a better thing; yet what we have to do more than anything else is to try to feed other people in the world.  We have enough food in the world to feed the whole world.  But it has to be distributed.  It has to be taken there without lord or bandit in Africa and all of that, take a hold of that food and bargain with it while children are dying of hunger, you know?

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript:  As I think I mentioned, Levi-Strauss before who said that cooking is the process by which, you know, nature is transformed into culture.  And European civilization, you know, certainly you can go back.  And anything can be filtered through the food itself.  I mean anthropology, history, sociology, even politic you know?  You have political decision like the tax in _______ in France in the 17th century which put a tax on salt.  Those are political decisions who decide where the food goes, or how the food is going to be consumed; or the embargo of Carter in the ‘70s.  Again the gran embargo against certain country in Europe.  This political decision as we see in Africa and other parts of the world will determine where the food goes, who dies, and who starves.  And who dies and who lives.  So those are . . .  Whether it’s political . . .  Religion.  You know food can be a . . .  The Bible is an enormous source for food, or for history of food if you want, you know.  So whether it’s sociology, there is no part of social science which cannot be really filtered through food.  And to a certain extent now, it becomes a subject which is more not only relevant, but more respected.  I mean at Boston University, we’re offering our Master of Liberal Arts with a concentration on Gastronomy.  I mean that would have been totally unthinkable 20, 30 years ago and even less than that.  When I came to America and I worked at the Le Pavillion, which is considered the greatest French restaurant here.  I was part of Local 89, and Local 89 was the dishwasher, the chef, the cook, to everybody in the same basket.  There was no difference.  And at that point, you know, I have to say that after . . . after the Le Pavillion, I worked for Howard Johnson.  I worked with a lot of black people.  Black chef behind the stove.  That’s where I the most into the kitchen.  And now that the cooking had exploded and had become very glamorous, and inspired, and even genius-like, you know, then you, for some reason – and I think it’s a loss for the country – don’t have many black who are into cooking now.  A couple, you know, but not many.  But many young American chefs are in that business now, which as I say years ago they would not even . . . that was considered a low, uninspired type of job which now it’s exactly the opposite.  So we have the peregrination of the chef.  It’s quite interesting because something happened in the same way in the 17th, 18th century in France.  In fact there was a book written by Meneau in the first half of the 18th century which is called Le Nouvelle Cuisine France – The New French cooking.  So you see the nouvelle cuisine which erupted here in the ‘70s, was already existing in the 18th century.  And it went down and up.  Cuisine was at apex again during the . . . during the end of the 19th century at the time of the belle epoque.  Then it went down and up again.  So it’s an interesting take, again, to look at this story of cooking.

Question: How has technology changed cooking in the last 50 years?

Transcript: Well technology certainly has changed a great deal of the cooking.  And it’s changing maybe even more so now.  There is good and there is bad.  Certainly things like the food processor, saran wrap and plastic . . . or rubber spatula are, for me, great innovation of the last 30 years.  But it is like this, you know.  We always manipulate food.  And our ancestors, you know, didn’t have anything to eat.  And what we call wheat now was actually a wild . . . a wild weed which through cross-breeding, and changing, and manipulation we end up now with this.  I mean not that long ago when I was a child, you could not eat string beans.  _________ on one side, and the other side which I tried to do . . . And I had to do a couple of _________ or whatever it was that my mother wanted me to do.  My brother and I tried to cut the end of it with a scissor, too, which of course those beans were absolutely uneatable.  So now there have always been some manipulation to make it better without the string; or to make the animal fatter, or not as fat, or more tender, or this and that.  So those manipulations have existed all the time.  Now bio-engineered food is something else, you know, that we get into other areas which have to be controlled.  I am not, by definition, opposed to anything.  Because I think to feed the world we need that type of improvement.  But it has to be extremely controlled, you know?  But without any question, if you can do an egg which tastes like an egg for me – as good as an egg – and it has half the amount of cholesterol, why not?  You know if you can have a tomato, that because of some manipulation, doesn’t need to be sprayed with an insecticide or pesticide or anything, being resistant to this, why not?  That may be a plus.  But as I say you have to do that with circumspection.  You really have to control it, you know? Well it has changed it for both – you know, worse and better.  I mean everything at the fingertip of your hand.  Now you can get, you know, raspberry from Peru in January.  When your eyes tell you they are raspberries, often you palate doesn’t believe it because it is not the time of the year for raspberry.  But it is true that now we are . . .  And the process of ________, for example, or other process of handling the food will make it better and better so that we can have fresher and better product as new innovation and technology happen.  So this is a plus.  On the other hand, it seems that that globalization has taken a great deal out of . . . out of individual cooking; out of ethnicity; out of expression.  And the food will be . . . or people would express themselves with the food of their own not only country, but their own village or their own small place in France where they live, you know?  And that has kind of been damaged by this to a certain extent.  I am positive, and I am an optimist in life.  So I think that we are moving to a better thing; yet what we have to do more than anything else is to try to feed other people in the world.  We have enough food in the world to feed the whole world.  But it has to be distributed.  It has to be taken there without lord or bandit in Africa and all of that, take a hold of that food and bargain with it while children are dying of hunger, you know?

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript: Well technology certainly has changed a great deal of the cooking.  And it’s changing maybe even more so now.  There is good and there is bad.  Certainly things like the food processor, saran wrap and plastic . . . or rubber spatula are, for me, great innovation of the last 30 years.  But it is like this, you know.  We always manipulate food.  And our ancestors, you know, didn’t have anything to eat.  And what we call wheat now was actually a wild . . . a wild weed which through cross-breeding, and changing, and manipulation we end up now with this.  I mean not that long ago when I was a child, you could not eat string beans.  _________ on one side, and the other side which I tried to do . . . And I had to do a couple of _________ or whatever it was that my mother wanted me to do.  My brother and I tried to cut the end of it with a scissor, too, which of course those beans were absolutely uneatable.  So now there have always been some manipulation to make it better without the string; or to make the animal fatter, or not as fat, or more tender, or this and that.  So those manipulations have existed all the time.  Now bio-engineered food is something else, you know, that we get into other areas which have to be controlled.  I am not, by definition, opposed to anything.  Because I think to feed the world we need that type of improvement.  But it has to be extremely controlled, you know?  But without any question, if you can do an egg which tastes like an egg for me – as good as an egg – and it has half the amount of cholesterol, why not?  You know if you can have a tomato, that because of some manipulation, doesn’t need to be sprayed with an insecticide or pesticide or anything, being resistant to this, why not?  That may be a plus.  But as I say you have to do that with circumspection.  You really have to control it, you know?

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript:  Most important tool are your hands without any question.  And then after you need a knife; you need a knife to board to shuck on; you need a _____, and that’s basically what you need.  That being said of course, I have about 150 knives at my house; but you need basically three knives – a chopping knife; and then a utility knife, about seven inch; and a paring knife, you know?  So  . . .  And preferably sharp one, too.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript:  Well certainly what defines a great dish is your own taste to start with, and your own palate, and how discernable you are, and if you like that type of dishes, you know?  Ingredient may be the most important part of a dish for me.  Too much has been said about chef; not enough has been shared about farmer to grow the ingredient, because we are absolutely nothing without the farmer, you know?  And he doesn’t get the credit for it.  So if you have extraordinary ingredients, and if you don’t mess it up by doing too much with it or overcooking it and all that . . . if you are pretty calm about it, then you probably will have a great dish.  I mean it can be just an extraordinary tomato at the right temperature with the best possible oil, best possible onion with it.  And that’s what we look for.  You know and very often, people think in terms of great dish in the context of complicated dish, when in fact I often discuss with a young chef and I say, “Okay.  I will test you by doing a lobster roll, maybe a hamburger, maybe a hot dog, maybe a BLT.  Any of those which are very, very modern and very simple.  You can always have a bettera bread, a better mustard, a better piece of meat, a better way of cooking it.  You can always work in depth rather than otherwise . . . and get something better.  And you do . . .  We have a place next to me in Connecticut where I go and have lobster roll – where I have a friend of mine, Jean Claude, who is my dearest friend and who was with me when I worked for the French President.  So we’ve been cooking together 51 years.  He’ll come and he’ll say, “Let’s go and have a lobster roll.”  He’ll remember that lobster roll where the guy takes those Philadelphia flat roll that we started at Howard Johnson actually when I lived there, and brown them on each side properly, and add just plain lobster that he poached himself or steamed himself with butter on top, salt, pepper, and he put it, and that’s it; but it’s good quality.  And you’ll remember it and you go back to it.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript: Well if I open the refrigerator, I’m going to have eggs.  I’m going to have onion.  I’m going to have certainly a shallot.  Probably two or three type of vegetable or salad.  I always have plenty in my refrigerator along with beer, and milk, and probably some cream as well.  So those are ingredients that are in the refrigerator.  And in the pantry I have a fair amount of cans . . . from canned tuna . . .  But again they are quality – from extraordinary tuna in cans from Portugal or somewhere else.  I had not long ago some apricot in can from Morocco.  They were just fantastic, you know?  And so again . . .  Or beans.  I mean different types of beans.  And there is nothing wrong with canned beans, because if I cook beans I will take beans, water and salt and basically that’s what I’m going to have in that can.  There is nothing foreign in that can that I wouldn’t want to have in term of chemical product or whatever.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Question: The Art of Cooking

Transcript:  Usually at the kitchen you start with a glass of wine.  It helps, you know?  Sometimes two.  But there are people who are slightly allergic to the process of cooking, but not many really.  Frankly everyone eats.  It’s a condition that people are . . .  Contrary to what people believe, there is many people who are not interested in cooking in France, as well as in Italy and so forth.  And there are people who are totally passionate about it here, you know?  So if you like cooking, you can always learn certainly with . . .  You always have a friend who cook, and you can always say, “Look.  If I come for dinner next week, can I come an hour earlier?  And I’ll bring a bottle of wine, and I’ll do the dishes or whatever you want.  I want to see how you do this.”  And by the time you learn that you can put a chicken in the oven with a bit of salt and pepper on top of it, and forget it for an hour, and it is pretty good providing the oven is on, of course, at like 400 degrees, you will be kind of astonished.  You’ll say, “Wow!  That’s not . . .”  And then you get confident.  You know you have to get into confidence doing one dish after another.  And the best way to do that is really to feed your friend, or your family, or your parents or whatever.  And let’s say you give a lot of yourself when you cook, and it’s a good thing to do.

Question: How do you transmit that in your cookbooks?

Transcript: Well I combined what I show in La Technique . . . those were in color . . . by showing people from the beginning that I went fishing for skate to show them that you cannot buy a whole skate ; you buy only the wing of skate.  I wanted to show you how to take the wing out of the skate.  Or I had a whole baby lamb . . . to bring out the whole baby lamb so that I could use the leg in one way, the breast in another way and so forth.  So really starting at the beginning.  Or a leg of veal, for example, which I break down into the top round, and bottom round, and eye round, and top knuckle and so forth.  And with those different muscles do different dishes, and explain why you would use that cut for that particular dish.  Now if you’re not interested in doing all that work, you can go directly to one of the recipes and directly do THAT recipe.  And go buy a piece of ….  So I think it was very complete, and it kind of satisfied my very Cartesian mind.  I like things organized.

Question: How has cooking changed in your lifetime?

Transcript: Like I have a series now – Jacques Pepin: Fast Food My Way – it’s to show people how to cook good, simple, healthy food in a very minimal amount of time.  And it’s a question of thinking about it, whether I want to go through the process of doing everything myself in term of technique.  Or certainly in a few years – because it has become easier and easier to do – use a supermarket or the prep cook, which is what I do in Fast Food My Way.  I can go to the supermarket, get a skinless, boneless breast of chicken, pre-sliced mushrooms, pre-washed spinach.  I have a non-stick pan.  I put it on the stove.  I put that in it, and in five, six, eight minutes I have a dish.  And that’s cooking from scratch.  When I was an apprentice, cooking from scratch was to light the stove, to start with, with paper and wood and then coal.  And to keep that stove hot, which was the responsibility of the commis was a very difficult thing in the kitchen.  And the chef would get out of his mind by the time the people start sitting down and the stove kept getting lukewarm.  So to keep that thing really hot, hot, red on top and in the oven was a situation.  And then that whole apprenticeship within itself doesn’t exist anymore.  And then if you didn’t have to catch the chicken, you at least had to pluck it, eviscerate it.  You cook it in a pot where everything sticks, in an oven where you didn’t have any calibration, or temperature, or whatever.  You had to turn it.  You had to baste it.  This was a big deal, as I say, to cook a chicken . . . roast chicken from scratch.  Now as I say, to do a roast chicken from scratch with the skinless, boneless breast of chicken, sliced mushrooms takes five minutes.  But you see the world is entirely different.

Question: How has technology changed cooking in the last 50 years?

Transcript: Well technology certainly has changed a great deal of the cooking.  And it’s changing maybe even more so now.  There is good and there is bad.  Certainly things like the food processor, saran wrap and plastic . . . or rubber spatula are, for me, great innovation of the last 30 years.  But it is like this, you know.  We always manipulate food.  And our ancestors, you know, didn’t have anything to eat.  And what we call wheat now was actually a wild . . . a wild weed which through cross-breeding, and changing, and manipulation we end up now with this.  I mean not that long ago when I was a child, you could not eat string beans.  _________ on one side, and the other side which I tried to do . . . And I had to do a couple of _________ or whatever it was that my mother wanted me to do.  My brother and I tried to cut the end of it with a scissor, too, which of course those beans were absolutely uneatable.  So now there have always been some manipulation to make it better without the string; or to make the animal fatter, or not as fat, or more tender, or this and that.  So those manipulations have existed all the time.  Now bio-engineered food is something else, you know, that we get into other areas which have to be controlled.  I am not, by definition, opposed to anything.  Because I think to feed the world we need that type of improvement.  But it has to be extremely controlled, you know?  But without any question, if you can do an egg which tastes like an egg for me – as good as an egg – and it has half the amount of cholesterol, why not?  You know if you can have a tomato, that because of some manipulation, doesn’t need to be sprayed with an insecticide or pesticide or anything, being resistant to this, why not?  That may be a plus.  But as I say you have to do that with circumspection.  You really have to control it, you know?

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript: When I was young and when I lived in France, and at some point between 1956 and 1959 I worked for the French President . . . actually under three French Presidents because under the fourth republic the government was changing at a quite rapid pace when I finished with General De Gaulle.  At that point, however, I dealt with the lady of the house.  In that case it was Madame De Gaulle, where I would set up the menu for the week.  And there was a kind of security in the kitchen which may not be there anymore.  By this I mean that there is so much fame with the chef now, that he goes into the dining room and get the kudos, and get all the criticism or whatever.  So you have that whole part of cooking which did not exist then.  We never went into the dining room.  We were never accepted or asked to go there.  It was a totally different type of world.  So you had a certain security in the kitchen doing your thing the way you thought it would be without having to wonder too much, or worry about what they would say in the dining room or whatever.  Certainly when I did head of state at that time like Eisenhower, and McMillan, or Tio, or Nehru, I would discuss with the protocol as well as with Madame De Gaulle, and often only with the protocol, the dinner of the head of state coming, whether it has to be long or short; whether one or two meat, the number of course, the number of wines.  Certainly there is some limitations that you may have, you know, with religion or other type of taboo.  I mean you’re not going to serve, you know, a pork chop to the king of Morocco or something like this.  So I mean there are . . .  I don’t think the protocol will tell you to be careful and to stay . . .  Or maybe the President may have been invited already three times, and they plan the menu.  So you don’t want to have like striped bass maybe three times in a row or whatever.  So those types of limitations within this, you would try to show what you know how to do the best, and show the season.  And certainly in the case of me when I was at the President’s, show your country as well, which is what you should do.  If I were at the White House, that’s what I would do.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Question: The New York Food Scene

Transcript:  It’s not always easy for a young chef who fights for the clientele with other young chefs in the same town, and everyone wants to create something new, something different, something and that.  And very often that’s where some very complicated cuisine comes from.  And the fact that we are now able to get product from all over the world, and there is less and less border, and we’re exposed to all kind of cuisine.  Certainly in a place like New York where there are over 20,000 restaurants, the multiplicity of ethnicity that there is is absolutely amazing for exposing to those other cuisines.  It opens a whole world, you know, especially with young American chef who haven’t been trained necessarily only in classical French cuisine, or Italian cuisine.  So they take a little bit from everybody, and that kind of fusion cooking can be very exciting.  It can also open, of course, a Pandora’s Box.  And that’s often why you end up with maybe a bowl of Roquefort with a slice of . . . with a bowl of ice cream on top of it.  As I say, who would ever have thought of that, you know?

Question: Can New York restaurants compete with French restaurants?

Transcript: Absolutely.  Even better in some way now, because you know for a European, very often they will look at American cuisine . . .  Well it’s changing a great deal, but certainly 30, 40 years ago at Americans eating like four things: hot dogs . . . I mean frankfurters, hamburger, fried chicken, and maybe canned macaroni and one of those things.  And you do have people – what you may call the the mall crowd– who will eat those type of dish and repeat over, and over, and over, and over again.  So in that context, that type of culinary spectrum, if you want, is very limited compared to what you have in Europe for a European.  Conversely, however, if you’re in a place like New York and one night you eat Turkish, and another night you eat Taiwanese, and another night you eat Chinese, and French, and Italian and so forth, your spectrum of taste is going to be much larger than most Europeans.  Because even though there are Chinese restaurants in another kind of different type of cuisine restaurant in France, it might be a good restaurant, but yet 99.9% of French people eat French; 99.9% of Italian eat Italian, and so it goes in Germany and so forth, and in Belgium because that’s part of the tradition.  That’s part of an almost . . . something that you’re born with; something which is visceral; something which . . . and part of us sitting down at the table with the family for all of those years.  So it built up that type of culinary culture as I have, you know?

Question: Do you think Americans are fickle about food trends?

Transcript: I don’t think Americans are fickle about food trend.  You’re talking about New York to a certain extent.  And New York 20,000 restaurants and San Francisco in those place . . .  It used to be that 30 years ago you used to go to a restaurant before going to the theater.  Now the restaurant has become the theater.  You know you go there to be seen, to see people, to discuss new food trend.  And that extends way beyond the food itself, you know?  

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript: First usually when I determine what to cook, it’s usually going to be determined by the market, what’s there.  And I go to the market because I think, “Maybe I’ll do a roast duck,” and I come back with a leg of lamb and artichokes because they were on sale, they looked good, and fine I’m buying it.  So the market will determine various times what I’m cooking.  Throughout the year, however, your taste changes.  Your metabolism change.  And as I get older, I tend to take away from the plate rather than add to the plate.  By that I’m saying that very often as a young chef, you know, you do a roast, then you put a can of sauce on top of it, then that type of herb, then another herb, then another garnish, then a little bit more of this, and a little dot of this, a little ______ of that.  You know you throw all that sauce around.  And as you get older, you know, maybe you change.  Your metabolism certainly change, and you go to the essential . . . you know to the important.  And in that way you can take away just to be left with what’s essential on that plate. I suppose that I do.  I don’t know whether I could define it.  I mean the creative process, again, will start at the market with the ingredient.  And then when you do recipe . . .  When you do recipe for a book or whatever, you can really taste the recipe in your head, I mean for me.  I can visualize a recipe and taste it in my head by adding this, this and that and so forth.  I get pretty close to it by the time I actually do the recipe; but I may not, you know, hit the nail on the head exactly; but with a couple of corrections, I am there.  So I can really transgress the recipe by thinking about it, and that would be the type of creative process that I do, which comes with years of practice to a certain extent, you know?  Practice, practice.  Then you can think about the food and visualize it.  But certainly the ingredient itself will define whether the dish comes out good or not.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Question: Seasonal Food

Transcript:  Well for me, I would detail what goes into a restaurant by the season, you know?  I mean there is no other way for me to . . .  I believe very strongly that we should go back to organic ingredient.  We use as much as we can local product.  You don’t have to pay for the transport, so it’s less expensive.  Usually when you use something in season . . . when you have that tomato which is in full season, it is probably one of the best in terms of taste, which is what I’m the most interested in.  But certainly on a nutritional point of you, it’s reached it’s peak, and that’s one of the best.  And in terms of money it’s probably one of the least expensive.  So now, even though now the seasons are kind of blurred at the supermarket by the provision of product that will come from all over the world, you know, but I still like to go . . .  Like I’m going this weekend to get corn and get tomato when I have a lot of tomato in my garden myself, and salad; but I like to go to farmer.  I mean it’s part of a ritual where you get ideas as well.

Question: Why is it important?

Transcript: Always there is a miracle in the garden of spring, in the growing of things in that season.  It’s something which is fascinating – to see something which does make you believe in God.  I mean as Voltaire used to say, there is a clock so there must be a clock maker.  And the clock for me is maybe nature.  So that’s why I say I’m probably a pantheist in that sense. I feel that all season are extraordinary.  I mean the winter season as well.  There is dishes that you will do in the winter season – from cassoulet to onion soup that you are not going to have in full summer.  So I think that the seasons are extremely important for me.  I could not live in a place where I don’t have the season.  And I’m looking forward to any season, whether it’s the oyster in the fall, you know, or the game in the fall; or then certain type of vegetables that I eat only in winter.  And of course I’m dying to wait by mail June for the first strawberries as well as the peas out of the garden.  So the season is a great part of my cooking.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Question: What makes a great chef?

Transcript: Well there is great cook and great chef.  Certainly the cook itself or a great chef in some restaurants very often don’t have that much to do with the cooking anymore.  You go to the Waldorf Astoria for example, then the chef will have to contend with several banquets of 1,000     . . . 1,500 people.  So he will go organize, of course work out his menu, taste here and there, but that’s about it.  So that’s what . . .  If you wanna make a distinction between, in a sense, a pencil chef and a skillet chef, you know – and the skillet chef being someone who will have a small restaurant . . . someone like Thomas Keller here, and will be behind the stove cooking day after day, you know morning after morning.  So that’s really someone who is involved in the cooking itself.  Both of those are chefs.  But by definition I am not a chef unless I work in a professional kitchen with other people who are working for me.  Then I am called a chef – which is the “chief” in France – to run that kitchen.  When I go back at home I am the cook there.  My wife is the chef.  You know it’s different.

Question: How has a chef’s training changed?

Transcript: I mean there is so many young chef coming now, and are exciting with what they are doing.  I mean even at the French Culinary Institute where I teach here in New York, I am amazed by those young chefs, what they can do in six months of the program, which is 600 and something odd hours . . . what they can do at the end of those 600 hours, I would never have been able to do that after three years of apprenticeship.  Even after five years.  We learned in a totally different way.  When I was a child, we stole the trade with . . .  That is, you would ask the chef, “What is this?”  And he would answer some type of stupidity.  You say, “What is that sauce called?”  And you would say, “A sauce non not,” which means nothing at all.  He would never tell you how to do anything.  And one day he would tell you.  Tomorrow, you start at the stove.  So you learn through a type of osmosis, looking, and eventually you know how to do it.  You become very proficient with your hands, because there was a lot of technique and a lot of manual work to do – shopping, slicing, mincing and so forth . . . cleaning of the kitchen and so forth.  Now in a place like, for example, the French Culinary Institute and most of the school, it costs first a fortune.  So you cater to the people.  You show them.  You explain and all that, meaning that they learn much, much faster.  However they are not quite as proficient with their hands as we would have been . . . as we were.  You know when I was an apprentice, it was a different type of learning way, you know?

Is the apprenticeship process still important?

PEPIN:           It’s absolutely, extremely important, yes.  Because like any type of manual trade, you have to learn the technique.  You have to be a good technician, and this is what I concentrate on in my teaching, in the technique.  You know and things which are very often difficult to explain in word that are very visual . . .  I mean from shucking an oyster, to doing a caramel cage, or boning a chicken, or doing an omelet and so forth – this is technique that you have to repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat so much that by the time you absorb them, then you cannot afford to forget them.  And then you can afford to think in terms of what the vegetable . . .  I’ll do maybe the texture will go well with that.  The color will go well with that.  Maybe I’ll sauté that.  You think in term of the future, the dish in your hand, work automatically and prepare those things.  As long as you are totally obligated . . .  You know if you want by the slicing of an onion, and someone comes around and says, “Do you have any parsley here?” and you say, “Don’t disturb me,” because you are working on that kind of menial task of slicing the onion, you cannot move forward.  You have to get rid of that.  And by getting rid of that you have to practice, practice, practice it enough so that you cannot afford to forget it.  Just like if you’re a painter, you know, you work two or three years in a studio, and you learn how to . . . the law of perspective.  And you learn how to mix yellow and blue to do green.  And you know you can do “that” with your thumb and with a spatula and all that.  So you kind of learn the trick of the trade, meaning that after three years you can stand outside and you can do one painting after another.  Does that make you a great artist?  No.  You’re a good technician.  That’s what you are.  Well in the kitchen, likewise.  You know you have to become a good technician.  And I’m sure a surgeon as well as a mason first have to become good technicians before they move forward, you know?

Question: The importance of technique.

Transcript: Behind the technique itself – that is, the knowledge of whatever trade it is – then there is, of course, talent.  And there is . . .  There is also someone . . . the willingness of doing this, and you have to keep at it.  And there is a certain discipline involved in that.  So the discipline . . . as long as with the talent, with the proper technique, with a certain openness to learn with other people, eventually you reach to a certain level where you can express yourself.  Because in the kitchen, certainly all you have to say is “Yes chef” as an apprentice.  That’s all you have to learn, you know.  Because a chef is not going to ask you your opinion.  You go work at Daniel or Jean Georges in New York, or any of the great restaurants and you are going to do what the chef wants there.  Because the kitchen has been set up by someone with a great chef and has a vision of the way the food should be.  So you are there to learn.  So you absorb and you learn, and you change a year later and work with someone else who will not do exactly . . . probably who will not do the same thing in the same manner.  So you learn another way, another point of view, another way of looking at things.  And after you do that for a number of years . . . seven, eight, 10 years, then you have absorbed an enormous amount of material which you kind of regurgitate if you want ______.  You get that through your own sense of aesthetic, through your own sense of idea.  And then you start creating your own kind of cuisine with your own ideas at that point. 

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript:  Well there is great cook and great chef.  Certainly the cook itself or a great chef in some restaurants very often don’t have that much to do with the cooking anymore.  You go to the Waldorf Astoria for example, then the chef will have to contend with several banquets of 1,000     . . . 1,500 people.  So he will go organize, of course work out his menu, taste here and there, but that’s about it.  So that’s what . . .  If you wanna make a distinction between, in a sense, a pencil chef and a skillet chef, you know – and the skillet chef being someone who will have a small restaurant . . . someone like Thomas Keller here, and will be behind the stove cooking day after day, you know morning after morning.  So that’s really someone who is involved in the cooking itself.  Both of those are chefs.  But by definition I am not a chef unless I work in a professional kitchen with other people who are working for me.  Then I am called a chef – which is the “chief” in France – to run that kitchen.  When I go back at home I am the cook there.  My wife is the chef.  You know it’s different.

When I was a child, the chef or the cook was at the bottom of the social scale, and any good mother would have wanted her child to marry a doctor, a lawyer, or an architect but not a cook.  Now we are a genius.  A lot has happened in the last 30 years so it’s totally different.  And now the young chef contends with publicity, with PR people, with having their name all over the newspaper and so forth.  And this is good in some way, not too good in other way because a lot of young chefs will go into the business to “become Emeril Lagasse, Bobby Flay”, or of course to become famous, which probably will never happen.  When in fact you should go in that business only for one reason, and the reason is because you love it and you feel verified by it.  But if you don’t you will sweat a lot.  You’ll still work Saturday, Sunday.  You’ll still work 16 hours a day.  You’ll still probably have varicose veins by the time you are 40 years old, and you don’t really make much money.  However if you’re verified by it, and if you love it, then it’s worth all of this.

It’s not always easy for a young chef who fights for the clientele with other young chefs in the same town, and everyone wants to create something new, something different, something and that.  And very often that’s where some very complicated cuisine comes from.  And the fact that we are now able to get product from all over the world, and there is less and less border, and we’re exposed to all kind of cuisine.  Certainly in a place like New York where there are over 20,000 restaurants, the multiplicity of ethnicity that there is is absolutely amazing for exposing to those other cuisines.  It opens a whole world, you know, especially with young American chef who haven’t been trained necessarily only in classical French cuisine, or Italian cuisine.  So they take a little bit from everybody, and that kind of fusion cooking can be very exciting.  It can also open, of course, a Pandora’s Box.  And that’s often why you end up with maybe a bowl of Roquefort with a slice of . . . with a bowl of ice cream on top of it. As I say, who would ever have thought of that, you know?

I would tell them do it for love, absolutely.  Don’t do it for anything else.  Because ultimately that’s what that will amount to.  You have to be gratified with what you do.  I mean I have the best of all possible worlds.  I make a living out of something I love to do, and probably would do for free, you know?  And people pay me for it, so I’m very lucky.  I never regretted to be in my business; but don’t do it, as I said . . .  You could become famous and all that, because it may happen; but it’s likely that it may not.

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Question: Food and Identity

Transcript:  I cook.  That’s what I do.  And certainly for many people . . . for most people who know me, whether it’s on television, through book and so forth, I’m defined by my culinary identity.  That’s who I am.  And that . . . my culinary culture certainly.  And that culture is expressed in the ritual.  Like I go mushrooming in the wood, or fishing for frog, or playing lawn bowling which is “petanque” or “bol” in France.  And those rituals in term of express very often in tradition, traditional recipes – like certain types of dishes that go with the occupation and all that.  So it’s a kind of down the line culinary culture for me.  And certainly that’s what I try to instill in my daughter because cooking is extremely important for us.  It defines, as I say, ourselves.  And I could quote Levi-Strauss there who said that the process of cooking is the process by which nature is transformed into culture.  And I think, for me, it’s a very profound statement because that’s what we are.  And so many of the deals . . . so many of what we do happens around the table. When I am at home with my wife, we sit down together . . .  I’ve been married 41 years, and it’s a ritual that we’ve done for 41 years where we sit down and share a bottle of wine and eat at night.  But then I may do a simple roast chicken, a salad, and so forth.  Now that’s what you may call “country cooking”, you know?  And then if she calls me and I’m at the market, and she says, “Oh I just saw such-and-such and I told them to come over for lunch or dinner,” so I may add a garnish to that or two garnish to my menu.  I may put another bottle of wine on the table, and maybe a napkin.  And the chicken I may deglaze with a little bit of white wine and some mushroom, and that becomes bourgeois cooking.  And by the time I deglaze it with cognac and I add truffle with it, and we put flowers on the table, and we put champagne, it’s still the same chicken, but that’s haute cuisine, you know?  So very often the definition of cuisine is marginal to the cooking itself.  I think that in my case, we probably remember the catastrophe that you have more than the great success that you have.  And otherwise, you know, one goes into the other.  There is never a dish which is absolutely perfect, you know?  There can always . . .  Sometimes you get close enough that you are very satisfied with yourself; but again it has to do with your own palate.  Without any question if you decide on the 10 best restaurants in New York, or the 10 best restaurants in France, and if I go to those 10 restaurants, five . . . maybe five, six of them I’m going to think are absolutely extraordinary.  Two or three of them I’m going to think they are quite good; and a couple of them I’m going to say, “I don’t understand why those people are three star.”  And what I’m saying there is that you cannot escape yourself.  So those four or five that I absolutely adore just happen to coincide exactly with my sense of taste, with my sense of aesthetic.  So it’s purely a narcissistic reflection, if you want, on my own taste, because that coincides with what I like.  And the other one I’m not as familiar with it.  So as I said to a certain extent, you can work with many different people, but you cannot escape yourself.  At some point you are who you are, and that will be expressed in the food.  That’s what I tried to tell the students at BU for example.  I have a class of 10, 12 students, hands-on.  And I do a class of two hours.  I say, “I am going to do the perfect meal for you today – a roast chicken, I boil potato, and a salad.”  But it has to be done exactly the right way – basting the right way.  The salad has to be cleaned up the right way, set at the right temperature, with the right dressing, with the right oil, with the right amount . . . the right temperature.  The potato has to be done “this” way, and so forth.  Fine.  So they do that, they taste it, then they go to the store and do it.  Now they have two hours to duplicate my dish . . . my three dish.  And I always say, “Don’t try to be original.  Don’t try to outdo one another, too.  Don’t try to be different than someone else because you are different.  And whether you like or not, for the better or for the worst, I’m going to have 10 different chicken.  A couple of them practically perfect.  A couple cold.  A couple undercooked.  A couple overcooked.  A couple . . . whatever.  They will be different because you are different, and you cannot escape yourself.  So you don’t have to torture yourself to find that dish to make sure that people know you’ve done it, because it will be different anyway.”

Question: How are American eating habits different from those of Europe?

Transcript: Well it’s changing a great deal, but certainly 30, 40 years ago at Americans eating like four things: hot dogs . . . I mean frankfurters, hamburger, fried chicken, and maybe canned macaroni and one of those things.  And you do have people – what you may call the mall crowd – who will eat those type of dish and repeat over, and over, and over, and over again.  So in that context, that type of culinary spectrum, if you want, is very limited compared to what you have in Europe for a European.  Conversely, however, if you’re in a place like New York and one night you eat Turkish, and another night you eat Taiwanese, and another night you eat Chinese, and French, and Italian and so forth, your spectrum of taste is going to be much larger than most Europeans.  Because even though there are Chinese restaurants in another kind of different type of cuisine restaurant in France, it might be a good restaurant, but yet 99.9% of French people eat French; 99.9% of Italian eat Italian, and so it goes in Germany and so forth, and in Belgium because that’s part of the tradition.  That’s part of an almost . . . something that you’re born with; something which is visceral; something which . . . and part of us sitting down at the table with the family for all of those years.  So it built up that type of culinary culture as I have, you know?

Recorded on: 9/4/07

Transcript: I would ask the question, “When was the last time that you sit down at the table with your children and have dinner and conversation?”  Ask yourself that type of question.  That’s an important question.

Recorded on: 9/4/07