Transcript:  It’s interesting, you know, comments about food, how it relates to the environment and different ethical issues when it comes to food.  There are a lot of different facets of that.  The problem is that it’s not my, it’s not about my choice putting things on the menu.  It’s consumer choice.  Americans like to eat meat, you know?  They like to eat meat more than fish and more than vegetables. That’s just the plain facts.  So, you know, if I take my pork chop off the menu, or I take my chicken off the menu, it ends up being a business decision.  You know, philosophically and kind of like environmentally, yeah, I would like to make those choices, but I need people in my restaurant, and I like to make people happy, you know, through cooking, and it’s what, even before I became like Chef Guy.  But that becomes a decision, you know, sure if everyone that walks through the door wanted to claim environmental superiority and only eat tomatoes or whatever, which are also a problem because there’s transport, there’s methane gas that gets used to help ripen them.  You know, meat isn’t the only issue there.  There’s, you know, there’s other areas of food production that have environmental implication, absolutely.  If you had, if you had berries in your cereal this morning, okay, they weren’t grown in upstate New York.  Well, they would have been if it was July or August.  There’s going to be some kind of carbon footprint, you know, that’s there.  You know, there was a restaurant that when— back to my wife, when I first met her, she was doing her masters in Vancouver, and there was a restaurant in Vancouver Island that just fascinated me, and it’s called Sue Carver House.  And it’s a little Inn on Vancouver Island ran by a guy named Sinclair Phillip who only wanted to cook things from the Island, from Vancouver Island, and he was doing it successfully.  And the day I pulled up there for lunch, there were two guys in scuba gear coming out of the water with a bag of sea creatures, and they were cooks that dumped this bag of sea creatures in the tank behind the kitchen.  And I was like, whoa, what is this place?  And they had a garden there and they were growing all kinds of vegetables that this guy, you know, had took from the wild and was now growing them in a garden, and interesting stuff, too, like knotting onions and tuberous nasturtiums and all these indigenous plants.  And we went there in the summertime, and we had this amazing meal with, part of the reason it was amazing was because of the setting and also because there was all this stuff I never saw before.  Well, I went back in March and it was like everything was made with kale and like potatoes and cabbage.  I like kale, potatoes and cabbage, but not a whole meal with potatoes and cabbage.  So, you know, there’s implications when you want to eat locally all year around and it’s truly just choice.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  Not anymore. See, that’s— when we got married in 1999, she was a vegetarian up until the time that I, until just before we got married she was a vegetarian.  And I was cooking a lot of vegetarian food for her. She was on the West Coast at that time and it was, I had to start cooking vegetarian for her or else it wasn’t going to work out, and I wanted it to work out so I had to start cooking up a couple of things.  But I can eat, you know, I can eat vegetarian once or twice a week.  It doesn’t bother me.  It doesn’t have to be a pork fest every night or, you know, you can make some really tasty vegetarian food.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  Yeah, you know, and it’s a pretty high-end restaurant, you know?  And that wasn’t my intention when we opened.  Originally, when I kind of like agreed in a partnership with one of my partners, in my mind I was opening up a Truveo, you know, I wasn’t the only person involved in the whole process of A Voce, and it kind of, there was some expectation about me going out on my own and, you know, I have a very strong customer base that was used to what I was doing before and I was really trying not to do what I was doing before, because I didn’t want Café Boulud II, I wasn’t interested in that.  So I never was thinking A Voce was going to be a high-end restaurant, and, you know, pricing was really something from the beginning that I tried very, very, very hard to control, especially with pasta and things like that.  And I still think for a three star level, we do a pretty good job on offering value.  You know, we’re off, you know, we’re percentages off from last year, but it’s unfair to compare it because 2007 was an amazing year for us.  I mean, at the end of 2006 we had Best New Restaurant in New York, nominated Best New Restaurant James Beard and Bruning put us on his dine around thing. So it was tremendous momentum we had.  So it’s a little bit unfair to compare.  But it’s still good, you know, we’re going to open up the terrace soon so that’s going to be, we’re going to be so busy.  But, you know, it’s affecting everybody in every aspect.  I think that inflation in the food pricing is definitely affecting us also, especially when I’m trying to— you know, because we look at the prices all the time as far as how we compare to my friends and competitors because I don’t want, you know, if Mike White up in Lempira’s, you know, I don’t want him to be charging $10.00 more for a similar type of item that we’re doing so we’ll always look, you know, to see where we stand.  But, yeah, pricing you know, as you can see, especially with, because we use the European items, you know?  You know, we’re using sheep milk ricotta from Sardinia, we’re using Italian flour, other Italian cheeses, you know, it’s-- the Euro really affects us, the flour pricing is starting to affect us and fuel, too, you know, I see purveyors charging fuel charges now.  But it’s, you know, we still do our best to control it the best we can.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  I mean, I’m a pro, okay, and part of being a pro is you’ve got to know what’s going on, okay?  So, you know, are we going to acknowledge that we know?  No, we’re going to do what we do, I mean, it’s a funny process because, you know, A Voce, the second person to walk in the front door was Ruth Richel when we opened publicly.  You know, Frank Bruni came in the second night we were there.  You know, that’s another phenomena that’s happened in New York is that between the internet and the magazines and everything, everyone is rushing to get, everyone wants the story first.  You know, any little crumb of rumor, everyone’s rushing to get that story, and, you know, A Voce, it’s only like six months ago that I was like, you know what, I think we’re pretty good.  I mean, I felt that the food had-- its voice was complete, and we knew where we stood as far as service, where the service met expectations.  And it wasn’t the first 52 days. Our New York Times review came out, which was the last review we received, I mean, we were getting reviewed by, I’ve never even heard of some of these newspapers or websites or whatever and we were getting reviewed, but the New York Times was the 52nd day we were open, and that’s when we got our review.  But we’re five times, I mean, we’re five times the restaurant then we were, you know, at that review, and that’s, or we aspire to be five times the restaurant now, and that changes every service.  But it’s a little bit challenging because restaurants evolve.  So the review process is an interesting one.  But we know, yeah, you know, we know when people come in.  It’s our job to know when people come in.  Do we acknowledge it?  No, you do what you do, you do what you do best and you just be a pro.  You know, I gave a speech to the staff because we had some people, you know, a lot of people on my staff had worked with me before over the years and we had people that never were at a restaurant that got reviewed by The New York Times or New York magazine, and, you know, it’s the same speech I’ve always given in any kind of like review processes, you just do what you do, and, you know, we’ll take care of the rest.  You know, make sure the whole restaurant is having a good time.  The worst thing you can do is panic and drop stuff, you know, and fuss.  I went through a four star review at another New York City restaurant once that has been, the whole process has been much talked about through that particular review because the reviewer thought she was not recognized, but she was so recognized it was not even funny.  And there’s no way that you could have seen that and not known that you weren’t recognized.  But it’s just all part of the culture surrounding the review.  And, you know, there’s some different philosophies coming out now about that is maybe it’s better to be recognized because, you know, the restaurant whether it’s some pasta joint that’s serving $6.00 bowls of spaghetti or, you know, a restaurant that’s trying to really go for it can really show their ability the best they can.  That’s an interesting philosophy.  You know, as opposed to, well, we know who you are but we’re not going to recognize who you are, or opposed to just a random person off the street.  Because, you know, the restaurant community in New York is very small, and it’s going to be two or three times before you’re identified, and that’s just the way it is.  I mean, that’s part of being a pro.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  You know, times have changed also in the critical arena of food journalism.  When I was a kid and I started like reading magazines and reading cookbooks just for recipes and that kind of thing, I mean there was, um, you had Andy Bersh [ph?], you had Gourmet Magazine and Amy Sheraton reviewer at The New York Times.  Now with the internet magazines you have so many outlets for food criticism it’s just, it’s who keeps up with it really, you know?  And, you know, the reviews that matter, you know, The New York Times, New York Magazine, you know, as far as New York goes, and then, you know, the internet is a funny place.  You know, there’s a real difference between Jeffrey Steingarden who has traveled all over and has years and years and years of writing about food then just someone who’s very enthusiastic about food and commenting on it.  Because to really criticize, I think, dishes for what they are, you know, if you’re really criticizing it, you should have perspective and you should have historical perspective, you should have a taste perspective.  You know, before you really can talk about a ramen shop, you probably should go to Japan, then, you know, just commenting on it or criticizing it because if you like it or not, or if, you know, the same thing goes with haute French cuisine or a traditional Italian dish.  But then again, you know, it’s like wine.  You know the wine geeks can talk about wine until they’re blue in the face but my dad, just if it’s good, it’s good.  If he likes it, he likes it.  So it’s a funny situation, you know, because there’s the enthusiasm and then there’s the criticism.  But critics have agendas.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a music critic or a movie critic or a restaurant critic, there is an agenda.  You might like--maybe you don’t like Italian food, or you think Italian food can only reach so high on the excitement meter, or maybe you only really want fine dining restaurants and you don’t want casual restaurants.  There’s always some, you know, kind of agenda and that’s where the personality of, you know, when the writing comes out.  I had a very, very, very famous food writer, who will go unnamed, said that restaurant reviewers only review for other restaurant critics.  A little bit like restaurant designers only design for other restaurant designers, and movie critics only-- it’s kind of a phenomenon.  Some people love what I do and some people hate it.  And that’s always going to be the situation.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  Yeah, you know, San Domenico was an institution in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, especially Paul Bortolota was there.  It was the most important Italian restaurant in New York.  It was the beginning and the end of the Alto Cucina movement, kind of the high-end Italian, you know, I’d say pre-Batali kind of Italian idea.  And it’s, you know, it’s sad in a way.  I’m sure, you know, Tony will probably find another venue for it.  It can be yours for $70,000 a month rent right now, which it is, because I looked at it.  You know, and that’s what changes, you know, people’s tastes change, restaurants evolve, and that’s just another example.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript: I mean, I’m always going to do Italian, I mean, I wanted to do it, and I might do a couple more variations on that.  And I also, you know, I would, you know, I love Bar-B-Q, and maybe I might do a Bar-B-Q again.  And, you know, I’m a pretty good Mexican cook, you know, and there’s a couple of two or three different moles, you know, I’d love to bust out in some way or combine everything together and do something.  Sometimes, you know, uptown I used to do fried chicken dinners to go with some very powerful New Yorkers with, you know, cream corn and collards and Alabama slaw and homemade honey biscuits.  I don’t know, we’ll see.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  You know, sometimes the greatest meal in your life, the greatest meal I’ve cooked in my life was never in a restaurant, and I’ll stand by that 100 percent.  I have had a lot of great customers over the years that love my food, and this particular customer has a couple of houses around the world and one time when I was in Japan visiting, you know, and they were in Tokyo and we went with-- I was going around seeing a bunch of different sites, and I went to Kappabashi, which is like the restaurant row supply row of Tokyo, it’s like two miles long, it’s a crazy place.  And there was a store there that just sold yakitori equipment to make Japanese yakitori.  And she’s a little bit food crazy and she’s like, oh, I’ve got to have some charcoal, I’ve got have some charcoal for my grill in New York and my grill in France.  So she bought like a couple of hundred pounds of charcoal and like flew it to France and to New York.  The following summer, I borrowed their house in the south of France; they let me have it for a little bit.  And at the end of it, as a thank you, I cooked them dinner.  And they have this beautiful outdoor grill that looks over the Mediterranean, and they had a bag of this Japanese charcoal from Tokyo.  So I went to _________ and bought a bunch of vegetables and some produce, and I went to the market in Nice and I bought some fish and some baby lamb, and I cooked everything, all the French ingredients with the Japanese charcoal on this grill.  And my sommelier’s parents, I invited them over and they brought like homemade _________ and homemade lemonchello and there was some homemade wine in the mix.  But the combination of like this Japanese charcoal cooking on the open fire grill and wood burning oven and the French ingredients, it just was amazing.  And the setting was amazing, and the company was amazing, and those sometimes are the most amazing food experiences you could have in your life as opposed to, you know, the super high-end kind of setting.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Question: How has the New York food scene changed since 1990?

Transcript:  The food scene in New York has changed completely.  It’s gone through a couple of different scenes.  I mean, when I came to New York there were seven, eight restaurants if you were a serious cook to eat at, most of them French.  I think, you know, David Burke was at River Café, Charlie Palmer just opened up Aureole, Boulud just got four stars at Boulud.  And they were really the three American guys at the time that had just started to  kind of like do something.  And then there were all the French.  There was ________, there was Cultedraf [ph?] was around, LaCirque, that whole scene.  Now it’s unbelievable.  I mean, there’s a lot of good restaurants around town, good restaurants that are doing 800 covers, and good restaurants that are cooking for 80 people.  There are chefs from all over the world now that have come to New York.  There are small little places that are great.  There’s a lot of great ethnic food also.  I mean, you can go, you know, go all over the boroughs and get some pretty good ethnic food.  So it’s changed like, it’s pretty unbelievable.  So if I was a young cook coming to New York and, you know, people we have that start in our kitchen, we a couple every week, and the first question I ask is, “So, where else are you looking at working?”  And the variety is just unbelievable.  They say, “Well, I’m looking at Daniel and I’m thinking about going to Momofuku, but maybe I’ll go to The Little Owl and maybe I’ll go to Morimoto. I mean, how different can you get as far as ambiance, price point, style of cuisine.  It’s pretty amazing.  

Question: Where will it go from here?

Transcript:  I mean, everyone always asks, well, how many more restaurants can New York City take?  And my answer to that is that if you go to Tokyo, you could live in Tokyo your whole life and have lunch and dinner at a different restaurant every single day and never, ever, ever repeat.  And, you know, New York will always change.  There will always like those iconic favorites, there’ll always been like the hot new spot, and there’ll always be, you know, something coming and something going.  So that’s always going to change.  You know, one thing that has changed is the, I think it’s the class division as it relates to restaurants has really changed, and there’s a lot of transparency between, you know, high-end four star places and like the little place at a corner.  I remember a chef that will go unnamed was complaining one day that-- we were trying to get fresh porcini mushrooms, and this was in the mid-‘90s.  We were trying to get it, we were on the phone, we were trying to get some from the market, and the purveyor just ran out of these mushrooms and there was some discussion, because I think there was a party that requested them, and it was a restaurant that was downtown that just opened back when there weren’t restaurants downtown, or maybe there were two or three, and it was a French chef that was yelling and screaming, “How can these guys open up these restaurants downtown and take porcini mushrooms, because they shouldn’t be taking porcini mushrooms, they should be cooking hamburgers.”  And that’s changed because you can go down Avenue A, or you can go to LES, or you can go to West Village or you can go on Smith Street and you can probably find some wild mushrooms on the menu.  So that’s really changed, is that kind of like the high-end ingredients have made their way to the neighborhood restaurants, and the lower-end ingredients have made their way to the higher-end restaurants.  You know, you have pig’s feet at Daniel, and you’ll have veal head at Per Se, and that’s a pretty interesting phenomenon.

Question: Has dining become more casual?

Transcript:  Right.  I mean, the casualness is really— well, you have classically trained guys or like high-end guys that have done more casual stuff.  It’s funny with me, you know, I met someone who doesn’t have a restaurant now, but was around New York for a long time, and I met her for the first time three months ago and she thought I was Italian.  She didn’t know that I was American because we’ve never met before, but she just assumed because, you know, she might have glanced at something about me that said France and said Italy and said some fancy restaurants and assumed that I was European.  And that blew me away a little bit.  I think that, you know, and I’m not so inspired for myself really to do high-end cooking anymore, you know, at this point for myself and, you know, where A Voce is, I don’t think I’ll go in a higher level than that.  Again, and I want to do different levels of stuff moving on, just because that’s the way I’ve been eating lately.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Question: What ingredients do you always have on hand?

Transcript: You know, these days because I’m in an Italian mood and I’m not always going to be in an Italian mood, you know, moving forward, that’s for sure, but it’s definitely pepperoncini, or crushed red pepper flakes.  I use quite a bit of sea salt.  Calabrine oregano which is the oregano that comes on a branch sort of wrapped up.  I mean, even at home I have a glass next to my stove that has that oregano in it.  Olive oil and vinegar, but that could be a bunch of different kind of vinegars.  And those are like the flavor bombs that I always have around that I’m going to play with the foods, either acidity or the spice factor or salt or kind of like that herbs, you know?

Question: What is your favorite kitchen gadget?

Transcript:  Yes, it could.  You know, I’m going to tell you, there’s a—and this is what I love because this is a piece of equipment that probably, you know, your grandmother had and we use it quite a bit, and we call it, the “Grandma.”  And the Grandma is, you might look at it and say it looks like a masher or it looks like a TV antenna from the ‘50s.  Yeah, it’s that-- see, you knew exactly what I was talking about.  I use that to crush tomatoes when we’re making tomatoes sauce, and you can-- if you don’t use that, the way I make it, if you don’t use that, it just comes out a little bit different.  It looks a little bit more processed if you try to use a blender or you try to use a _________ blender, and we just sit there and kind of mash the tomatoes up inside the sauce to kind of break them up a little bit as they cook.  And I’ve always done it that way, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  You know, there’s a great dish, I mean, what is a great dish?  You know, a great dish could be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a great dish could be, I mean, I’m just thinking of my restaurant and I’m thinking about we do a kind of antipasti of Sardinia and sheep’s milk ricotta that gets lightly whipped.  It has some herbs and some sea salt and some cracked pepper on it, and we serve that with grilled bread.  It gets like a little bit carbonized on the outside and gets rubbed with garlic, very very simple.  But when you do really simple things, you’ve got to make sure the bread is warm, you have to make sure the ricotta is room temperature, you have to make sure you put the salt on just before it goes out.  It’s like all the little details that really make a great dish.  If you were to have a one pot dish of some stewed meat, whatever it is, you know, that could be great, or it could be really, really, really bad just depending on the details or the care that you take in-- it’s like ordering room service in a hotel, you know, you know you’re in a good place when you order a turkey club sandwich and the bread isn’t dry and the turkey doesn’t taste like, you know, shoe, and it was brought to you relatively quickly, and the iceberg lettuce isn’t brown.  It’s about the details I think.  I mean, there are a lot of great dishes, whether it’s northern Thai curry or fish tacos with salsa verde or a bowl of cereal, it’s really just about the details I think and the care of how you do it and how you make it.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Question:  Why is pasta so good?

Transcript: You know, I think that, you know, there’s a certain mouth feel there, and I think there’s also, you know, the right bowl of pasta takes you back to, you know, being a kid a little bit maybe also because kids love pasta, and it’s-- I don’t know.  I mean, that’s just off the top of my head why, you know, people love pasta.  Even in this like, you know, with people worried about carbs and, you know, we still sell so much pasta and people enjoy it so much.  And it’s really, there’s been a, I mean, pasta in this country has come so far in the last 15 years.  I mean, if it’s a small place in Brooklyn or some young guy in Denver that’s like doing Italian food and using like great dried pasta from southern Italy or, you know, making fresh egg-based pasta dishes in all different kind of shapes.  I mean, ten years ago you didn’t see calamarata [ph?] on menus, and you didn’t see, you know, trophia [ph?] on menus, you know, these kinds of like very regional pasta shapes, but you do now.  And that’s great because, you know, there’s some other, you know, thank God there’s some other variation besides spaghetti and meatballs and linguine and calm sauce, not that I’m knocking them, but, you know, let’s try something different. 

Question: Why are the shapes important?

Transcript: You know, the shapes, again, I really think about regional kind of aspects of where the shapes come from.  You know, Trofia, for example, if you’re not familiar with them, is flour and egg, I mean, a flour and water dough that you kind of just roll in your hand like that and they’re like dense little twisted piece of dough.  Usually, you know, it comes from LaGuardia, and you’ll see that with pesto and potatoes and maybe some small green beans. So if I’m going to use that, I’m thinking about that.  You know, calamarata are made around Naples so I’m thinking about Naples.  That’s really how I kind of think about things.  You know, certain shapes capture sauces in a certain way, or there’s a particular preparation that just, I don’t know, it just goes better.  You know, when we’re doing a spaghetti with clam dish that had-- we wanted to do kind of a clams Casino thing, you know, the kind of Continental classic of a clam and some peppers, sometimes some pork with some bread crumbs on it, and we said, let’s do a pasta la clams.  So we had some roasted stewed peppers, we had some bacon, put a splash of cream in there, lots of fresh clam juice, steamed clams and some bread crumbs, really simple.  We were doing the spaghetti and one of my sous-chefs is like, we should be using linguine, I mean, it’s linguine and clam sauce, not spaghetti and clam sauce.  And it just, it just tasted better with linguine, just the way the mouth feel, it was like this smooth kind of mouth feel, and it was really not that much of a difference.  There is and there isn’t a difference, I mean, spaghetti usually has a more rough edge with the dough and linguine has a very like luscious kind of like mouth feel to it, and that was the way to go.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Question:  Why is Italian food so popular in New York?

Transcript: It never dies. And A Voce, you know, when I was at Café Agot, I was there for a good chunk of time, six years, and, you know, people were always approaching me to do stuff, and I was like, “No, no, no, leave me alone, I’m having a good time here.”  And almost exclusively every time it was they wanted to do something Italian.  And I said no to a lot of people for many years on the Italian thing just because there are so many Italian restaurants in New York.  I think it was like 3,000 or something like that at the last count, I mean, including like pizza places and stuff like that.  But they were like, you know, we love your Italian food, we love, you know, the Italian things you’re doing at the Café.  So it was really a kind of like, again, rash decision, we looked at this property and it had a beautiful terrace and I was like, we could do something Italian here.  I mean, the way I approach Italian cooking is a little bit different than other people I respect approach Italian cooking.  It’s my own; it’s very personal to me.  It’s not cookie cutter, it’s not super traditional, it’s just my own kind of personal having a good time with it type of thing.  And the way I do that really is I just get inspired by the places I’ve been in Italy.  I’ve probably been to Italy 25 times and I lived there for a year.  So if I’m thinking about, I don’t know, if I’m thinking about seaside Sicily and I want to do a dish, you know, it’s going to have some wild fennel in it, it’s going to have some orange zest in it, it’s going to have some seafood in it, and it’s really, I try to make, you know, it’s either a dish that’s maybe slightly whimsical and within the Italian context, or it’s traditional in the sense that it’s inspired from a place, and I’m thinking about like the topography and I’m thinking about the history, and I’m thinking about maybe the traffic that was like, you know, there, or just everything about a certain place.  And I try to make the dish provocative in the way of where it is.  Even though I might not call it a, you know, a pesto genavesse, it might have those flavors in it, if that makes sense, I don’t know.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Question: What did you learn from Daniel Boulud?

Transcript: Well, you know, Daniel, when I started, I didn’t work at Restaurant Daniel, he hired me to be the chef at Café Boulud.  So at that point in my career, you know, I had plenty of offers to go do my own thing by myself at that point.  I was 28, I had been working for ten good straight years, a couple of years in Europe, and, you know, I wanted to open and operate a restaurant as the chef, but with another chef to have that, you know, that experience.  So a lot of the things I learned from Daniel were about the business end of things, and he gave me a lot of freedom there, you know, the six years I was there.  I co-opened the restaurant with Alex Lee at the time and then a couple of months later he went to Daniel.  But Daniel gave me a lot of freedom to really cook the way I wanted to cook within the parameters in the restaurant, and it’s really where I, you know, I did what I loved to do, which is I love Mexico, I love Thai food, I’ve been to Japan three times-- not that I believe in fusion cooking, but it was more about, you know, just extracting in a kind of anthropological way the things I love about different countries through the flavor profile and in cooking that way.  You know, my mentors really, you know, I think the biggest mentoring, or the biggest influence really in my cooking life was Gray Kunz at Lespinasse in the early ‘90s.  I worked there for three years and that was really like culinary wise I think the, cooking wise a big big part, besides the European years, but really in New York that kind of shaped me.

Question: What did you learn from him?

Transcript:  Just about layering flavors and, you know, again in the kitchen a certain sense of professionalism, and it’s really flavor building, texture building.  And it was a hot kitchen in the early ‘90s. It was the place to be, and I think a lot of techniques from there have stood the test of time I think, so it was good for me. I think they use the spice, you know, and Floyd Cardoza was working there then as a cook and he, and there were a lot of great cooks that went through there at that time.  But Floyd and Gray started collaborated on a lot of spice usage, which, you know, a lot of techniques that I learned there, you know, Indian techniques, Thai techniques, to treat those things properly I think in the context. You know, cooking something Indian as opposed to cooking something Thai, and you approach a northern Thai curry differently than you would a Goan curry, that they’re not the same, that curry isn’t some ubiquitous word that means spices thrown in a broth and that’s it, there’s a way to approach it, a flavor profile to approach it, which was great.

Question: What did Daniel Boulud teach you about the business side?

Transcript:  Well, I mean, I really think it’s, you know, Daniel really has an empire really, and the way he managed to keep the quality and the way he manages, you know, to keep his concepts successful individually, and it was just really looking at the business from a whole, you know?  Because there’s the art of making food and there’s the business of making food, and it’s really two separate things that have to kind of coexist, and just watching that whole process happen was a real eye opener.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  I went there when I was 18 years old.  And I was either going to go to Berkley School of Music, or I was going to go to CIA.  It was kind of like this big life decision because I was, you know, I studied music my whole life, primarily guitar, but other things too.  And, you know, I got into both and I just made a decision to go to CIA.  I think it was kind of a, kind of a very fiscal decision because I knew a lot of musicians didn’t live in nice apartments and didn’t drive, you know, nice cars.  And I love to cook anyway; it just seems the business of food was a little bit more secure than the business of guitar playing at the time.  I remember definitely making that decision.  I’m glad I went to school when I did.  With everything I know now, necessarily, I don’t know if I would have done that again.  You know, you can really get an education by not going to school.  But when I was 18 and being from Cleveland, like I didn’t know I could go to France, I didn’t know that I could work at pretty established restaurants, I didn’t know that I could tours of the greatest wine places, I didn’t know I could go to Italy and work at trattorias, you know, and I did all that, and I didn’t even think about, you know, coming to New York at the time.  But it kind of gave me a little bit of base to go be able to do other things.  So I’m glad I went when I was 18.  I don’t know that maybe if I was 24 that I would have gone and done that, but for me at that time it was a good thing. I mean, I think it’s really the scope of what the business could be.  I mean, there’s a lot of people that go to CIA that don’t cook anymore, that aren’t even in the restaurant business.  You know, I mean, being a chef really isn’t the only facet of, you know, the whole, especially now, I mean, now there’s, you know, there’s food stylists and private chefs.  I spoke at graduation at CIA about a year and a half ago, and I was amazed at the amount of graduates that were there compared to 17 years ago when I graduated.  But also, you know, what they were telling me.  I was like, “What are you doing after graduation?”  And no one, because when I went to school, like, you know, my kind of group of friends was all about coming to New York and working for the great chefs, and there were like maybe five or six at that time.  No one was coming to New York.  Some were going to be food stylists, recipe testers, some were going straight to food TV, some were getting out of school and becoming consultants without really having a lot of real world experience.  There was private chef people, there were, you know, people that wanted to go straight to hotels.  There’s just a lot of different, you know, there were a lot of other sub kind of genres for working in the business besides being like chef guy. I mean, the apprenticeship, it depends on who your teacher is really.  The way I, you know, deal with cooks now, I think it’s kind of a mix a little bit of, you know, true mentoring and letting them figure things out for themselves.  I mean, I think the apprenticeship process, the old apprenticeship process, in Europe it’s for a little bit closed mindedness a little bit and a little bit less room for growth because you know this way and that’s the only way you know.  What I do like about it is really missing from the culture of like, I would say modern kitchens a little bit, is what the French would call, you know, mentier [ph?] or craftsmanship, or dedication to ones craft, but also the way you behave in restaurants and the way you deal with dedication.  So I think some things are good about that system and some things now in 2008 are kind of antiquated about that system.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  Grandmother’s raviolis are something I was doing for years.  I was doing them at Café Boulud.  And I started them as a Sunday special just because it seemed, you know, within that context of kind of French/American international kind of flavors to have something on Sunday that was kind of comforting.  Are they my grandmother’s raviolis exactly?  No.  I mean, she never used short ribs in them and, you know, didn’t use fresh tomato for the sauce.  It’s kind of like an “inspiration” type of thing.  But I’m Italian and Polish and that’s, you know, two good cooking cuisines.  One doesn’t have a lot of vegetables in it, the other one does, but it’s, you know, two kind of good cooking cultures.   

Question: What’s Polish on your menu?

Transcript: Well, A Voce, I mean, it’s an Italian restaurant so I want to keep it Italian in spirit.  You know, uptown when I was the chef at Café Boulud I had some of my grandmother’s pirogues on the menu, and they were pretty good.  They got some, you know, they got some mentions.  I didn’t really promote them or anything.  I just put them on the menu just because I wanted to make some.  And they were a little bit fancy.  It was like three different flavors and I made a sauce with the juice from the sauerkraut, homemade sauerkraut, and it had like poppy seeds and Julian apple and stuff like that on it.  So it was kind of like a fancy version of the pirogues that we used to buy when I was a kid at the pirogue church which was down the street.

Question: Two dumplings from two different grandmothers?

Transcript: Yeah, it’s an interesting little, a similar thing.  But the Bartines which are the-- half my Italian family is from Friuli, and they were a French family that immigrated from Paris to Friuli in the mid-1800s so my grandmother was half French and she also spoke highly of people like Escoffier and had all of these stories kind of mixed in there.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Question: When did food first spark your interest?

Transcript: You know, I grew up in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, and there was a little bit of that ‘70s health thing going on, and my mom and dad, I mean, they weren’t like health nuts but they just wanted to have good stuff.  And for them good stuff wasn’t, it wasn’t, you know, processed foods.  They wanted just, you know, if it was the winter time and they just wanted like really great grapefruits that maybe didn’t have pesticides on them, and they wanted, you know, we bought some grains from a local, you know, in Ohio we have some mills that make local grain mixes and stuff like that, so we used to go there for that.  You know, we had a garden out back, we called it a suburban garden, and we always planted stuff back there.  They just wanted the good stuff, and the good stuff wasn’t, you know, restaurant food, it was, there were no foodies back then.  But they just-- that’s what they wanted.  And so I think that’s kind of how I got interested in food.  I used to bake with my mom when I was a kid, and then I got my first restaurant job when I was 14 mostly because of the money, and it might be kind of cool.  And that’s kind of how it got started, and then I slowly; I started as a dishwasher and then slowly made my way into the kitchen.  I worked as a busboy, I worked as a bar back, and then I made my way in the kitchen and then just sort of fell into it and then worked for my first chef, and then that’s really kind of how it started. 

Question: Why did your parents pursue “the good stuff”?

Transcript: I don’t think they got it from anywhere.  It was really that, I think really the driving force, if I was really to kind of analyze it, was, you know, the food making process in America I think started to come out in a little bit in the ‘70s.  I remember there was a newspaper article that we had about companies putting marble dust into ice cream, and this was allowed at that time, as a food additive for mouth feel, and how that really really like made, it made my dad so mad, he’s like, “Why are they putting marbles--“ my family’s in the marble business, marble and terrazzo business, and they really, it really made them mad.  And so my dad bought an ice cream machine and we started making ice cream just because he didn’t want to buy anything at the store anymore.  And granted, he would only make ice cream in the wintertime because he didn’t want to buy ice, because it was one of those old time ice cream machines where you would put ice on the outside of it and then spin it, so he never wanted to buy ice in the summer time to make ice cream so we could use snow.  So we were always making ice cream in the wintertime, which never made sense to me even as a kid.

Recorded on: 4/17/08

Transcript:  Well, this is an interesting question that without offending a lot of chefs that I know, you know, every chef is going to borrow something from someone else, and it’s about, I mean, just like I said before, if I go to Oaxaca and I have, you know, some chicken mole that-- I might not have the recipe from it, but the balance between all the ingredients of it, I’m going to remember what they are and I might, you know, reproduce that in some way even though it’s not like a chef or a recipe or even a technique, it’s just a flavor.  You know, and there are definitely things that the chefs that I’ve worked for before, you know, you take, that’s how you get a cooking voice really, it’s about collecting.  But I always think to myself is this a Daniel Boulud dish, because if it is, I’m getting rid of it.  Not because it won’t be good, it’s just because I don’t want to do that.  Or, my grandmother’s ravioli, is that some culinary revolution that was never done before?  Absolutely not.  But it is interesting about culinary trends and proprietary stuff, and because I’ve gone back and forth through Europe over many years and have eaten at a lot of places, there’s a lot of chef borrowing that’s gone over the years that never gets checked by the media because not everyone knows about it.  And there are lots of incidents of, I still see it all the time.  I mean, I’ve been to El Bulli three times now, and there was a particular dish that he did, it was probably like four years ago, it was the apple caviar technique, which was when he started to really consult chemists, and he made this, it looked like caviar, but it tasted like green apples.  And I had that in it was like June, it was like right when they first opened, like the beginning of the season.  And that was a dish that they had introduced that year.  And I came back to New York and about a month later I ate at a restaurant in Manhattan and there was pineapple caviar on the menu already, in a matter of a month really.  There was a dish that I had in San Francisco probably 12 years ago, it was a lobster dish at probably one of the better restaurants in San Francisco, and I thought it was great.  Then I went to go work at a restaurant in Paris for six months and it was their signature dish.  Like the chef’s signature dish.  I saw, on the TV Food Network I saw a chef that you might know doing his famous potato crusted sea bass which Daniel Boulud was doing at LaCirque in 1986.  But, Daniel, to his credit, and even in his cookbook, you know, he says where he got the inspiration for that dish.  He attributed it to Roger Rogets’ potato crusted Roget, and he just adapted it in a way to an American fish and changed the shape and look of it, but he still gave, you know, some credit where credit was due.  And that I always thought was respectful.  So that was cool.

Recorded on: 4/17/08