 Welcome to this installment of Conversations with Tyler. Today the guest is Mark Miller, who's one of the most extraordinary food minds of our generation. It's hard to even summarize what Mark has done. I think of Mark as the modern founder of Southwestern cuisine. He's well known for having been the driving force behind opening Coyote Café, which transformed the Santa Fe dining scene. In Washington DC, where we are now in the Pandagorme restaurant, well, Mark is best known for Red Sage, the Southwestern restaurant. That was one of DC's best for a long time. Mark has written numerous books on food, on sauces, on chili. He has the very best book on tacos. If you've ever seen a famous poster of all those chilies, the Chili's poster, well, Mark did that. Mark's been connected with a lot of restaurants. He originally studied anthropology at Berkeley, and I think of Mark's contribution as synthesizing anthropology, cooking, studying food through books, studying food through practice. He's lived in 20 countries, traveled in over 100, and he understands taste and sensation and context of food, its anthropological setting combined with all this fantastic real-world experience. And on top of all that, Mark has been a food consultant for more companies than I can name. That's just my very brief introduction to Mark, and it doesn't begin to do him justice. We'll start the conversation in a moment as our questioner for today's segment. We also have with us Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View. Megan is a long-standing friend of mine. In addition to her writing on politics and economics, Megan was arguably the first, very first economics blogger, and she is deeply involved in the food world. Megan, to me, each year writes the single best guide to kitchen equipment, what is new out each year. Anyway, we'll start by chatting with Mark and then Megan will come in with some questions. So, food worlds. I'm very interested in how you think about food worlds and this contrast between the food worlds of China, Japan, Tokyo, and South Korea. You told me you thought Seoul had the most interesting and creative food world of those three, and tell us why you think that. I've been traveling to all three countries for approximately 40 years or more, so I've really seen them transform themselves and I've also seen how they adapt and how they acculturate other international influences. So, I've been going to Japan since I was a student at Berkeley, you know, since 1969 was my first trip. I've been going to China since the 70s. Seoul is the one that I know the least, but I've been following it for about 15 years. Recently, in May, I went to the Big Seoul Food Show, where I actually ate 100 food products I had never had before, which is interesting, but the other thing that had happened was I realized that Seoul had moved in terms of its transformation of plasticity and creativity. There's a restaurant called Mingles that every single dish was incorporating Korean ingredients, but in a very creative, modern way. And they were not afraid to move their food outside of the traditional vortex of what was seen as Korean food, and they were using Korean ingredients in a new way that was authenticating a cuisine. Now in Japan, for instance, and they were doing pizza, they're doing coffee, they're doing very good pizza that's almost as good as you'd find, for instance, in Italy. In Japan, when you go to eat pizza, whether it's Neapolitan, either in Tokyo or Kyoto, you find that they get to a certain level of the form of it, but the flavor and the gestalt and the aesthetic, they can't quite get at it. They remain Japanese. You know, their homogeneity of Japanese culture is its strength, it's also its weakness. In China, maybe I've been going there and I've seen some data of one of the big companies that had 7,000 restaurants, we're seeing that they're using Western restaurants in order to create a sense of modernity and identity. Whether they'll really use it for their own personal things right now, there is no other alternative. That social space that's open from children through going out, through celebrations and weddings and the Western brands or the markers for special... So, Korea, though, I was surprised that, first of all, they've moved so quickly. The last time I was there was four and a half years ago. I would have thought to get to this level would have taken them 20 years. Plus, the level of Italian coffee, pizza, modern Korean, French was all exactly where we would be in the United States. We'll get to Japan and China, but more on Korea. The alley food in Seoul and the rest of Korea seems so good to me. So, if I walk down a back alley, there will be 20 different places I want to eat. Most of them will be outstanding. It might, for instance, be some of the best fried chicken in the world. I would agree. But what's the structure of the food world in Seoul and other parts of South Korea that have given rise to that? Well, I think that what has happened, it's sort of like Samsung versus Sony. If you actually look at those technological giants, which one has been able to maintain and innovate? And for some reason, you know, Sony lost its way. We remember when Sony was the innovative center of electronics. And yet, today, it's Samsung. I mean, given not the last one that came out. But basically, I think the Koreans are forced out of their comfort zone because they have North Korea on their border. They have China to compete with or being aggressive. And they have the finesse of Japan. So their context of competition, just in their own backyard, is such that it makes them that they can't be in there. Japan is staying alone. It's in its own comfort zone and it's going to stay there. China wants to move and be global, but it's a big stretch. So you think Japan, in a way, has painted itself into a corner of perfection. You can have very, very good French food in Tokyo, arguably better than Paris. It won't ever be getting any better. But it'll be the same French food that I would have eaten in Paris in 1980. Or you can have a quite good Mexican mole in Tokyo, I found. Or Singapore laxa you can have in Tokyo. And the person who makes it might have studied in Singapore for five or six years. He'll come back with the perfected recipe. But there's no other connection to that food world. In Mexico, if we look at, for instance, part of Mexican food, like when Riquette Cosme in New York is embracing modern Mexican and yet doesn't want to learn, you know, ancient traditional Mexican. And yet it's moving beyond its roots and it's becoming Mexican. Whereas Mexico before was trapped in looking at Spain, looking at the U.S. and looking at other identity systems to validate its own food supply. Give a good example. Moscow, my good friend, Ron Cooper, started Del Miguel. That's a company 20 years ago that Mexicans would not drink Moscow because it was associated with peasant Mexican. And today, when you go to Mexico City, the only thing you can drink is Moscow because people want to be Mexican. And it's trendy even in Washington, D.C. And Chocho and Korea. So the other, the problem was Korea was always in Japan's shadow and they were basically beaten down and defensive. And I think right now they're not. So we just had a dialogue with Fuchsia Dunlop, who's written on Chinese cooking. The food world in China now, how do you see it? Is it getting better, getting worse? Is it headed to become large corporations as in America making a lot of soulless food? Or is it still on the way up? That's a difficult question because restaurants that I know and Fuchsia knows, like Jesse, which is an old restaurant in Shanghai, I was there recently and I've been going to that same restaurant for 20 years from when it had four tables by one family. Now they have a multiple, but still. What Fuchsia talked about though is going to stop them is the level of status of someone joining a cooking profession. Didn't I fang? The dumplings have gone down. So what's happening now is even though they have this great tradition of cooking, the workforce is either coming straight from the countryside without being trained. The restaurants are making a lot of money because the people who are going there don't have trained palates and so they just open up and be better. So a traditional restaurant that takes a lot of training and to go into that, you're not going to find the workforce. So I think that they're going to go through a period right now of probably, I would call, mediocrity. But doesn't the low status of cooking in China in some ways protect them? So it keeps pretensions out of the food world. It means people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds can become cooks. You can have a grandmother or a grandfather being a cook. You can walk along in Shanghai and find a place where they make dumplings and they simply roll them and no one there thinks of what they're doing as an art, but that ultimately enables free entry and gives people a bit of the freedom that they don't have in Tokyo. And thus I would say you should be more optimistic about food in China. The dumplings that I used to see on the streets, don't forget. I've been going to Shanghai since the 70s, late 70s. They were all over the place. Now they're very hard to find and the Chinese government is afraid of basically health reasons, is now controlling where food is basically exhibited and where food can be bought and sold. So a lot of the shops have moved into some of the department stores for instance and are there but there used to be one amazing bao made out of smoked tofu and bitter greens and mustard and I would just wait for my next trip to Shanghai. And for 15 years I would go to the same place. It was in the French Quarter, same corner and they had the best bao and it's gone and I looked all over and I can't even find that bao or I can't find a noodle where they put out my hand with coins and people would say they didn't have money then. And they used to go to the wet markets and just look at what other people were eating and the last time I could do that was like maybe 15 years ago. I haven't seen a noodle, like 100 noodle stands. In Mexico you could still see. Of course. Yeah. But even there street food is being pushed out of Mexico City somewhat. But you go to a bus station in Monterey and you can see 100 of the best tacos in the world. And we will get to that. But anyway, for Asia for now still. Let's say someone comes to you, Mark Miller. He's been to over 100 countries, eating in them for decades. They say, I have two weeks to do a food tour in Asia. You should pick for me three cities. What are your selections? I would pick, I know I would pick John, well no, I would pick, I would pick Seoul for sure. Okay, Seoul for sure. I would probably, I would pick Bangkok. Yeah. And a toss up between, and I would pick Tokyo. And you would pick Tokyo. Yeah. So Bangkok. Say someone's in Bangkok. They don't speak Thai. They're puzzled. They don't know what they're doing. They don't have a Thai friend. Conceptually, how should they think about finding the best food in Bangkok? Go to the, you know, go to the night markets. I mean, the food on the street is just amazing. It's probably the best in the world on the street. And it has the most varieties, the freshest. The Thai people also are very clean. They're very, I've never been sick once. I've been eating food, you know, on the street forever. The cha-cha-cha. The largest market in the world has 15,000 booths. And probably you can just spend four hours and eat 100 dishes. My record in Bangkok one day is 14 restaurants and 75 dishes. And I actually ate them all, not tasted them. So just get a hotel. And probably spent less than we'd spent in Washington one night. Get a hotel in that part of Bangkok and just go eat there. Yeah, I would go, there are some good books. There's a street hawker guide. There's some good bloggers who are out there. It's, you know, but I would not be afraid. And the thing is, is always with street food is always go. So the night food is the night food, the day food is a day food. But even some of that has moved into malls where the Thai people go. And they'll do, you know, a som tam for 50 cents or a dollar and a half. And you might see a thousand people, if a thousand people, if a thousand Thai people are eating there, it's safe to eat there. But I have a bias against malls when it comes to Southeast Asian food. I think malls are worse than street food. But in Kaila Lumpur, you know, they went through the entire country and they picked the best street food and put it into the mall so that people could experience the best of the entire country in one place. That's the reason that people go to the hotel. And also when you go in Singapore, you know, the Hyatt and Hess streets, they're actually, they have 27 chefs each from different parts of Singapore running each station within that one dining room. Malaysia or Singapore, which has better food? Well, they're very close. So I would say Panang is really interesting. And I would say right now that Singapore, like Korea, is finally getting out of its straight jacket. I think there's some really modern young Korean chefs that are incorporating Southeast Asian... Singaporean chefs, you mean? Singaporean chefs that are, they know Chinese food. They have access to the best ingredients. They know Western food and they have their own tradition from, you know, Malaysian to the original, help me there, the straights cuisine. The Peranakan cuisine. Peranakan cuisine, which is, I think, I always think that those cuisines that are older, you know, if they have great weavings, they have great cuisine because I always say, you know, you're looking at one mentality. If they had a rich aesthetic tradition, I know that they had really interesting food. So take Indonesia. They have great weavings. Yes, I lived in Ubud in 1970. But I'm often disappointed by street food in Indonesia. It seems just the quality standard. It's a bit like the Philippines, though. Yeah, but the great dishes, like Balinese duck that has 28 ingredients in it, it's amazing. It's amazing dishes. Those temple foods, those festival foods, I remember, you know, three days at the Feast of the Temple, the Feast of the Coconut Goddess, there were 127 dishes made in those three days. Let me ask you some questions about chilies. Those are done with the variety and richness, and we come back here to the United States and you have a hamburger and a hot dog. Let me ask you some questions about chilies, the area where you've probably had the greatest impact of all food areas. So here I have some mulatto chilies. If you look at a lot of food recipes, if you make a Mexican mole, you will use more mulattoes than any other kind of chili. Not always, but quite typically, it's a Rick Bayless recipe. Now, why is that? What is it about this chili? Well, first of all, first of all, you have to open them up because 90% of all chilies are mislabeled. Yes. That's one of the problems. Whatever it says on the package may not be true. The point is that mulattoes, when you hold them up to the light, like this, do you see it's more purple and more reddish? Yes, I do. That is not a mulatto. Mulatto will be more coffee-ish and more dark tones. What a mulatto will do is actually have those flavonoids that are coffee and chocolate. And those in a mole are the undertones of the wide sort of structure of the wide foundation of those flavors that we really like. Now, the fruit tones and the capsicias are the spicy tones, or you're basically accessories. The ancho is always the workhorse because it carries the most fruit. The mulatto carries the coffee and chocolate, the umami, more complex sort of flavonoids. And then we throw in some guajillos or herbals to brighten it all up and get it going. So if I make a Mexican mole with these fraudulent mulatto chilies, what exactly will go wrong? You're a super taster. You can tell the difference. What we'll be missing? The thing is, I'm going to taste this for a second. We can all taste it together. First of all, whenever you taste the chili, you notice there's a vein here. You want to stay away from the veins always. So you always stay away from the veins and even if you can't see them. The other thing is, this is old. This is what's called a grade C chili. It's small and it's dried and it's last year's crop. So they lose their perfume. They're like flowers. So you would end up is you end up with the capsaicin. So this is a little bit bitter. Do you notice? Like bitter tea. A little bit like lapsang shu chong. There's a little bit of that smoky, woody, mushroomy flavor. Where's my coffee and chocolate? Where is it? It's not here. So if you use this in your recipe, you'll say it didn't come out well. You know what you didn't do? You didn't taste your ingredients. So you're not going to get that wonderful, warm flavor that mulatto is supposed to have. And if I want a real mulatto chili, how do I actually get one? Given that 90% of it according to you is fraud. Or at least misleading or someone made a mistake. You need to recognize when just the the other thing, when you buy chilies, the thickness of the flesh is the most important thing. So all fruits, where do the tannins come from? Skins, seeds, and stems. So the thicker the flesh, the least percentage of tannin. And that's what Mexicans do. They look for the most pliable. They look how thick it is. When you hold up to the light, they can tell how ripe it was before it was dried. How much fruit flavor is going to be there? Those are the big premieros. So when you're using a mole, you're really reincorporating fresh chilies into it. The chilies, the last thing they're looking for is heat. That's the last thing they're looking for. Now two other chilies. And also they notice it's still bitter on the palate. Yes. And it tastes a little bit like the fruit leather that's kind of stale. This one claims to be a nonchal, but we're happy to hear your revisionist take on it. This is bigger for one. And it's a little bit darker. It's got that really dark, dark, dark, almost black, blackish brown look. You need to hold them up to the light because that tells you. So that's red like an oncho. It's pretty even inside. There's no mold. If you get one moldy chili out of 40, it'll ruin the moley. A lot of people don't look for them. And when you rehydrate them, you taste the one. So this one, the leather again, it should taste like a fruit leather. Don't think chilies. What we're talking about with fuchsia, what you have in your head when you go after the taste is what you will taste. If you think chilies don't go for heat, you need to think fruit leather. Which fruit do you get? Tell me the fruits you get. Let's spice you up. Which fruits? It's cherry, apple, blackberry, blueberry. It's like a maybe apple, maybe cherry. Not blueberry, not blackberry. It's definitely like cherry. It's actually black cherry or sour cherry. And it has little bits of bitterness in this. And there is this blackberry current cassisamos, like the French cassis flavor at the bottom. The point is that when you work with ingredients, I don't care if it's chili, coriander. I have four different coriander's from Indians to this or Cumans. When you cook an ethnic food, a poor chef, and I work in Guelma, what they're doing is they're controlling their palate. It may look like those ingredients are not important. They're not expensive, but they're very, very important. And that's why this is not a bad anchovy. I would say B plus. Okay, and here's supposedly a persilla. Tell us the difference. Well, this should be a persilla. It should be longer for one thing. And it should be really get those black current, black fruits, blackberry. When you, again, think black fruits. Is this just an anchovy? Have I brought you three packages of anchovies, actually? Maybe. Yeah, that's what it is. A little thicker. They are really wide then. Yeah. A little bit. The second one was the best one. The second one was the best one. Most fruit tones, freshest, and less tannic. But you don't want like a bitter wine or a bitter, you don't want tannins. And what's your economic theory of why these different chilies get mixed up and they're all anchos? The amount of black liquids in this one. The reason is that the wholesalers basically part of it is they run a lot of times by non-Mexicans. Even if they're run by Mexicans, they only know the chilies that they grow up in their region. Like, I'm teaching in a seminar in Mexico City at the end of the month. And I can literally take out chilies and hand them to Mexicans that don't know what they are even though they're from another area of Mexico. How many different kinds of chilies do you know? I once had a collection of about 250 in my garage. But some of them were the same, like Arbol's interesting story. So I was traveling around Bhutan and I was going from town to town. I had the chili book, this book with me. And there's this myth in Bhutan that chilies come from Bhutan. And so I would show them that they're not from Bhutan and what they are and they started tasting them. Then the next village I would go in, everybody was waiting for me, all the kids and the chefs. They would say, can I see the chili book? Are there really chilies outside of Bhutan? Are there chilies in the rest of the world? Can you tell us about chilies? And every town I went to was the same thing. But here the whole culture grows up with this history that they actually have had chilies. Of course, the Portuguese brought them into Thailand and then they migrated through the trade routes into Bhutan. And that's how they got there. And they're only the Cayenne varieties. They're only the Arbols and so forth. They don't have any of these chilies. Even if you grow these chilies, for instance, let's say you grow these chili in Washington, D.C. because it doesn't have flavor because it won't have the right ultraviolet, which has to be grown in the mountains, above 4,000 or 5,000 feet. And it doesn't have an alkaline volcanic soil. That needs to be in the central valley of Mexico, makes the best anchos and paseas in the world. And when you go to the market, San Luis, that one village in that one place makes the best particular... In what state is that? In the state of Mexico. It's amazing, though, that they know their chilies. That China is exporting cheaper chilies to Mexico. They are. But some of the Mexicans don't like this. How will that play itself out? They don't have the flavor profile. Part of it is they basically are undercutting the market. So you see them in Oaxaca. There are anchos there I can tell. They're very bitter. They're very alkaline-ish. They don't have a good flavor. But people are buying them because of economic necessity or that they don't really know but when I work in Sweden with the spice companies, I'm not allowed to buy Mexican chilies. It's really offense me because of the micro levels of bacteria that are on them and they're not radiated. So we can only use in Europe, for instance, radiated things. They have to come from Peru. We don't buy them from Chile, but we buy them from Peru. But all my sauces, I then have to adapt because I don't get great anchos or great moladas. But you can adapt. Now here's a jalapeno pepper, which I can even go into a giant or safe way supermarket. And they will have these. They seem to my untutored palate to at least be serviceable. Why is the jalapeno so popular in the United States? It's probably because basically it's the chili of northern Mexico where most of the migrants, workers, come from. And it was part of the Tex-Mex tradition. It's very simple. You can use it fresh mostly just right away. It doesn't require, you can cut it up, use it in salsa frescoes, you can put it in a blender. You can cook it in eggs. It's a very chili. It has, for me, a lot of flavor that is more akin to the green bell pepper with heat. I prefer poblanos, which I think are richer. And the poblanos, you know, is the predecessor. We have one right here. The poblano, and this is actually where the bell peppers come. Well, it's a chili in Yucatan. But this has much more depth. It doesn't taste like green pepper. It's very delicious. And it has what I call real green chili flavor. There's only two in the world that have New Mexico, the true green chili, grown at high altitudes. If you grow it at low altitudes, it's the Anaheim. This one, again, grows in Mexico. Roasted, I think it's supreme. Now, interesting, no one else... This is one of my favorites. No, in China, they don't use it. They don't grow it. And even when I see it in the markets in China, I went through China with the chef once. We actually put them into China. We took over the restaurant because I got tired of eating the food that there was. So we were actually near Kashgar or something. And they couldn't believe of the flavor of a roasted chili that was cleaned without washing and then strips of it put in a stir-fried lamb dish and how actually good it was. Here's a habanero, splendid orange color. What's this good for? Nothing? Isn't it too hot? Well, it's big, but it's a good one. So, well, it's got a good smell. So, okay, the habanero is in the Chinese family, the tropical family. You want to use it for its tropical tone. So what you do is you open it carefully and capsaicin hits your nose here. You don't actually have to touch it. You can feel it right there. You should know the heat of everyone. Go easily across the nose. Now here, though, you get a wonderful orange mango papaya scent. Now, this roasted seeds and the veins taken out, reducing the heat by 60%, it's still going to be hot because I have 20% left in the flesh, is going to actually round out and pull up all that beautiful tropical aromatic and that will make that pineapple or salsa or jerk. That'll make it wonderful. You smell the tropicalness. Don't touch where it is, but just smell and think orange mango fruit pineapple. It's amazing. What's the most underrated chili I would probably say the poblano. The poblano. Yeah, I can do 100 dishes. I can do 100 salsas with this one chili. How about from Peru with the yahi yamorillo? That might be one of my things. Rucotos and ahi yamorillo, there you go. And what makes them special? Well, they don't have the depth and complexity. They're more jungle-y, which chilies don't like high nighttime temperatures. They like cool nighttime temperatures. The rucoto, when you have a Teradito, though, when you were just down in Lima and I go there all time. Those chilies, though, when you make dried sauces out of them, they don't have a marriage of complexity. The Mexicans, when you're in Bali and you're looking at a weaving from 1900 that's a triple e-cut, the complexity per knot for this is just what Mexicans attain with their sauces. The Pre-Columbian Peruvians have every single method of weaving, and yet the Mexicans, the reason I'm attracted so much to Mexican food is that they literally have probably the most complex uses of spices and chilies in the world. No question. Nobody. In Mexico, where's the best region to eat? I would still say the three regions, I like Puebla. Yes, I'll be there in two weeks. I think Puebla's underrated. I like the mole verdes in the morning and the mole amarillos of the seven mole, the mole amarillos there is better than Oaxaca. People talk about Oaxaca. Oaxaca is good, but not in the city of Oaxaca. It's a little over 80 now. You have to get outside. The place that has the Pasea de Oaxaca, the great smoked chili, the best smoked chili in the world, smoked for three days with seven different hardwoods, requires nine hours in a land rover to get to that village. So you have, that chili is being still made by one village in the entire world. Nobody makes it. They won't show it to anybody. Even Diana Kennedy has not seen it. We've all been to the village. So you still have products today in Mexico that are actually not only in the world class, they don't exist anywhere else in the world. Then the Chinese could never duplicate it. Never. So let's say you can pick not a city but one village in Mexico. And I'm going to send you there for a week and all you can do is eat. Which village do you pick? I don't know. In the old days I would have said Merida but not anymore. I would still say I like Puebla today. Puebla, yeah, that era. And you take on pre-Hispanic Mexican cuisine. So it has a lot of insects. It has fried worms. It has mosquito larvae. And those were, as you know, they cleaned the canals. They actually got rid of the diseases that way. The most interesting thing though, you know what it's about is they went to the museum and looked at the pre-Columbian metates that were done for the nixtamal. And guess what? They were never washed. They were never washed. So they all, when you nixtamal corn, it becomes more nutritional because you free up all the amino acids. So the Italians have polenta. They got pellegra. But what happens is people talk about how fat Mexicans are and how pre-diabetic. The reason is they're using a post-industrial diet that wasn't probiotics were put back in. So traditionally, the metates were never washed. They had levels of probiotics in there that were put back in. And the women, for the texture inside the tortillas, would use wild grasses that actually contain the largest amount of wild yeast. So the reason you look previous to 1925 in Mexico, there's no diabetes, is the probiotic and digestibility. One of the reasons is that it doesn't have the mass itself. So let's say we send you back to the stage. But also the flavor changes. I was up in the mountains with the woman and I had the best tortilla ever in my life. And I couldn't figure out why she was getting this flavor. She had a 500 year old farm. The reason was what happens when you use probiotics in yogurt and ice cream and tea? You change the flavonoids. So essentially, the reason that I study what I go to villages for is to study those perceptional patterns of how and why are they getting more complex flavors. They don't buy things on Amazon or go to the store or go to Whole Foods. They are actually using their body as this window of opportunity to create complexity. So I send you back to Central Mexico in the middle of the 18th century. A, how good is the food? And B, how recognizable is it in your opinion what we would get in the outskirts of Oaxaca today or in your Puebla or Guerrero? Depends on what class you are. We'll say that you're in a ranch in northern Mexico. Do you have enough money to buy what you want? I would say it's probably very similar to what, except for the Maseca intervention in 1925 after the Revolution because the government wanted to control the food supply and that's why tortillas are so cheap. That was why baguettes are the price they are. But the food, in terms of what the Spanish brought was pigs. They brought, obviously pigs, sheep, beef. Unfortunately it ruined the ecosystem of the pre-Columbians which was not depend on rooting animals. The same thing they did in the Caribbean as you know. For trade. Europe could not grow its own food. Europe, if you take Columbus leaving, 30% of the people were starving to death there. If you throw in warfare in the end of the 15th century, 50% of the people were dead. In New York today, why can I not get good New Mexican green chili at a restaurant? Can't they just put it on a plane and fly it over? I would pay twice the price but it's not good. Why is this the case? Maybe it's not roasted then correctly. Maybe they're using, you need a fire roaster. It needs to be done within the same time that it's picked and it comes at the end of August. There is a chili that's even better called the chili passata which is the red chili. This is from New Mexico? When the green turns red the resters. That chili before it gets dried is actually fire roasted and then peeled and then dried. That chili is sublime. It's called chili passata. Now we're losing, even in New Mexico or Mexico, that tradition came up from Mexico. It was north of Monterey. What I'm afraid of is we're beginning to lose the palette and those ingredients. When you talk about a historical dish what I always think is, when you look at Massa, which chef ever told you that you must put the probiotics back into a lot of chefs in New York are talking about organic corn but they're not talking about really resurrecting the complexity of the flavor of the native people. You know why? Because they don't go to the villages, they don't eat there and they don't use their brain to think about how are these people achieving that level of productivity. They're not shopping for it. Chefs are shoppers today. Here's a piece of purple corn. I bought it in the United States but as you know in Mexico there are many colors of corn. It's vastly superior to even good corn we get in this country. What's the future of corn? Is the future of corn that the varieties from Mexico somehow will be replicated, spread, evolved and innovated upon? Or is the future of corn a kind of monoculture where most of it is boring? A few strains of it taste good but are not really that interesting. And the different colors of corn in Mexico eventually disappear. I did the corn posters after the chili posters and there are 8,862 varieties of corn. And you know all of them. I don't know but they're in the University of Seattle in the whatever the cryo. The point is is that as I think that corn has a lot North American Indians grew 400. So corn even in the United States before the winter wheat always ate corn bread. Corn was a big part of our culture, not just for ethanol. But I think as soon as we, I think because of what's happening in the United States about natural I think that once people put their palates and really queue them up and they can tell the difference in varieties is when we're going to get much more varietal differentiation in the market. If I give you 6 varieties of corn and I tell you to eat them and you can't tell the difference because they're unwilling to pay for them. If I give you 6 varieties of red wine one is a Bordeaux from the first growth and one is basically from Trader Joe's and you can't tell the difference, well you probably don't. But this happens that a lot of people can't tell the difference with wine. But we still market the different strands. Maybe people are fooled or are simply seen. But people are interested in change today and what's happening in that place and time. So let's say that the 400 varieties of Native American corn come back to the North America. And let's say that you're in Portland. There might be varieties that can only grow in Portland. Only grow in Maine. Only grow in New Mexico. The point is that corn you will probably like for instance the micro-brew industry. We talked about that in Portland. If a community wants to engage its food culture on the community local level it can be amazing. Portland has 400 beers. Why can't they have 30, 40 varieties of corn? Just in Portland. It'll come. There'll be a corn restaurant in Portland that'll say, you know what? We are not growing the corn that everybody else has. We do this and we have recipes from all these cultures that use corn from the Andes to Mexico and we're going to open a corn restaurant based on corn that grows, that did grow. One of my growers in New Mexico, when I first opened the restaurant Santa Fe, can't grow this. Can't do this. Can't do that. You know, can't do anything, right? Well, Elizabeth Berry, my grower, grew 482 varieties of beans without electricity on the land that was been sensually the Anasasi used to use in the fourth century. So these beanpots, do we actually know how many beans or the variety of what a diet was? Native cultures, friends Boas, we get into that, but he collected 254 salmon recipes. A quacutal book would have been 3,000 recipes. The average American housewife does 79 in her lifetime. So who's richer? We now move to the underrated versus overrated segment of the talk. You're free to pass on any of these, but I'll just shoot out a few things. You tell me if you think they're underrated or overrated. The Michelin Dining Guide. Overrated now. Why? It's too status-orientated. It's dated. I bet you the average age of the inspector is over 30. I don't trust anybody in a company if the mean age is over 35 anymore. I think that they're out of touch. I think that replaying old themes. And I think the Michelin Guide is about status. A reification of a belief system in a particular food and culture system that was based on the aristocracy. The fast food restaurant Chipotle. Well, they just got knocked today. Their stock just went down. They're closing their chop houses, which I knew they would. They can't do that. Chipotle had a good space. It did a lot of education. They developed Neiman Ranch, for instance. The problem with every big food company, not just Chipotle, you have 2,000 restaurants. You say you're cooking the food, but the food comes from two plants of a factory like Miniat that does 200,000 pounds a day. So the public transparency, are you actually cooking the food? Or are you manufacturing it? So I think every big food chain is probably going to face this gestalt of where if you're cooking you can't be a chain. So I think the power of big food companies is actually over. And a company like Starbucks, used to develop you would go into a town and you'd see Starbucks and it was familiar and known. Now all you have to do is like, oh, I'm in Columbus, Ohio. Coffee. Oh, this guy is doing fair trade. Interesting Guatemalan blend. Oh, I'm going to go there. You don't need brands, right? You don't need brands anymore. The consumer used to have brands as guide and trust today that there are other ways of developing that. We're in consumer level 3. The consumers are defining brands and how brands get used. I think that the idea of brand is probably you're an economist. It's dated. I agree. The idea of brands is in some ways on the way out. You're a big lover of the culture of the American West. There's a lot of movies about the old West. The movie High Noon. Overrated or underrated? No, underrated still. Gary Cooper is amazing. I think that those are epics. I think that that's our mythology. Of America. Those are our heroes. Those are our gods from Zeus. Our gods from Olympus. We need those. We always need something like that to grow up with. Otherwise we're left with whatever's on TV. Maybe this is a loaded question but Southwestern cuisine. Now, is it overrated or underrated? It's not appreciated. Because it's hard to get the right ingredients? It takes a lot of time. It was just too difficult and the chefs today are not interested. You have to translate three great traditions. For me to do Modern Southwest you have to know Mexican. You have to know Native American. You have to know the history of the European influence on the Western traditions. Things like the cattle drive and those things. You have to know all three traditions and all three ingredients. I had to read 400 books just to write this book and it took a lifetime. That's your Red Sage book. But I think that even chefs in my own kitchens for instance even after 11 years could still not make some of the sauces after 11 years in the kitchen. Some of the sauces have 30 to 40 ingredients and each ingredient each time has to be tasted because an eggplant like a good when you're in Japan what does it take 15 years to be a good tempura chef? Because that eggplant in June is tighter, has less water, is less bitter than the one in August to raise a different batter, a different temperature. So that 20 courses will require that chef to make exactly over 75, 85 decisions for each meal he does through each week of the year. He knows 1900 Verizon. So if you're a good Southwest chef I don't think, you have to know 350 chilies. You have to know all your spices, your beans, your vegetables. You have to know game, you have to know drying and roasting. Probably you need to have 300, 400, 500 recipes under your belt. What's the most underrated European cuisine? I've been going to Budapest I think it's, I would say right now the Budapest is on fire. I'm having great food, great wine. I think it's amazing. I love the peppers there too. Have you been to Kalashka, to the Chili Museum? No, I have not. It's amazing. I think that they're doing amazing things. I would say right now London is always exciting because it's the most international, most open but I have had some great food. I've had meals in Budapest for 40 euros that equal anything in Paris for 400. And the most overrated cuisine in Europe right now? Oat French Cuisine. Oat French Cuisine. Especially in the center part of Paris where it's more of the historically dated sort of tried and true I think that even finding good French at Bistra, I was in Paris was difficult. I think that they're in an identity crisis. I think that the French themselves are again like the Japanese they're trying to reinvent themselves but they don't want to let go. And the younger chefs the best we would in Bernu which is the hottest restaurant it's a Japanese chef who's lived in Paris he's got this gastro modern thing that's going on three months and he's only serving cocktails, no wine and I took some older French people and they just couldn't get it. They thought that it was an abomination he had taken he wasn't interested in French cuisine he was reinterpreting where French dining and authenticity is in 2016. So the younger chefs are concerned with authenticity and the authenticity of their experience for their guest is more important than an authentic technique and recipe. Where in the world do diners have the most advanced exploratory best palate at the macro level, not for one particular thing? U.S. U.S. Why do you say that? Because they're just the most they have the least hang-ups about identity systems with food. We used to be food morons, right? No, we were food ignorant. Food ignorant. More on means you can't learn. I think we were and we were intimidated by we were kind of colonized by the idea of European culture and French food, Chinese food and we were, I came from French-Canadian and I was told also as immigrant groups vie for status and power within a society they generally referred to a third, so the Italians didn't like the French, you know, I lived in Boston. My grandmother, if she saw a piece of garlic she would have disowned me. You know and I think if you were, but the point was I think right now as a multicultural society and the chefs are traveling they're opening and what's happening in the media is that and because of the immigrant populations people experience those level and the younger immigrants we're into our third generation so Cassia, for instance, third generation of Vietnamese in LA, we've got the big right up in New York Times, I've been there a couple times you get other chefs who are extending their own traditions you talk about Slanted Door, you talk about Cosmique in New York City, what we're beginning to understand is what I have fought for my whole life is ethnic food is as complex as any expensive French restaurant is or often more so now you teach classes in tasting appreciation is that correct? with companies generally and you try to teach the executives what companies are, who is taught? Well, we try to teach everybody depends most importantly, if a brand has to have a brand, we'll get into branding but let's say that I'm working with the culinary department just the culinary department culinary, what we want to do is bring the marketing people in we want to bring the consumer research people and we want to bring in the culinary people because we want a lexicon of what is what are we describing a product, we're creating an experience and what is the consensus for what we like and don't like and what's good, so women women have a different palette than men so if I know that the objective consumer were jerky for instance more women are eating jerky women don't like to chew, we know that the point is women also like more natural flavors not as much dramatic flavors as men so once we know this fact and we bring everybody in and we create jerkies we would though go through if we have for instance a hamburger, that's something simple six layers in a hamburger is 36 possibilities of eating it so one of the things like next time you eat a hamburger just put it upside down take your favorite hamburger from your favorite brand and put it upside down, you'll see that it eats completely different, all the fat receptors are now in a different mode it's almost like turning something to a mirror so the experience and expression of it people don't think that food everybody I watch people in a restaurant you know what they do? they eat they take a glass of beer or wine they're drowning it out, I say what you do is you light up and set the stage take the beer or wine first and then use the flavors, really? yeah, because but people have bad taste habits they're not trained to taste and what's another of a bad taste habit that a lot of Americans have no attention span so we make them put it in their mouth first of all texture, temperature movement and flavor which one is first and second always by the semi-automatic nervous system you have no control over first one is texture, anything you put in the mouth second one is temperature, so obviously if it's crunchy and hard and hot you're not going to understand the flavor your brain is just going to activate it's defense system, is it too hot what is it, it's a foreign object in my body so yeah, I'm going to be really upset so the point is that if you get it, that's why sushi is kind of interesting because sushi comes out of this acceptance in Japan of the body and sensual and so it's a movement into projecting sensual and we're getting out of the sensual space of how we use our body so you should talk about crunch what's interesting to me would be about the psychology of why do we have that because they choose to do something and they choose to not do something else but anyway, if you put something 10 seconds in the middle then chew because you get the retronasal there's two parts, smell first first of all, smell, like in a wine thing get the right software in your head, so is it a fruit or is it a hot dog chew for a few seconds then stop and then the enzymatic response is 10 to 15 some flavors take 30 minutes to develop on the palate completely but I always take 10 seconds and then chart, what I'm going to ask you is it a fast flavor or a slow flavor so lemon is fast pork fat is slow is it long or short what do you mean long or short a glass of wine can be very long it can be very short raisins, we always start with raisins we take something that people know so is a raisin long or short actually it's long so it's fairly slow it's fairly long and taste occurs over time and space, do not use cognitive systems for sensual perception what you're doing is vocabulary is symbolically compressed in order to be expedited in terms of the way we communicate however it does not communicate sensual otherwise we would have no paintings, poetry or music well once you tell people not to use words that really throw that you have to activate other cognitive perceptual systems so no words, body temperature don't chew minimum of 15 seconds and then memory is important what I want you to do then is taste at the second time because what you will have missed is that basically it's gone by you're going to fill in you know when you scan and you read you can actually see, understand by scanning, the brain scans known flavors it fills in complexity you have 200th of a second you have 2500 taste buds each one has 10,000 nerve endings those 2 million perceptions per second your brain is going to have to figure out where to put them and how to categorize them unless you have preset categories and scan really quickly so memory you've had it and I let you do it the second time you will see that you can fill it in and you'll be able to get the richness the complexity and the length of the flavor but by telling people taste occurs over time and space the first one I always start with you have to move into that perceptional the way of thinking about taste it is not immediate, it's not cognitive it's not electronic, it's not oral and the enzymatic response of the body for breaking down the flavonoids it takes time and what people don't give me is time they don't give you time they don't give me perceptual time so how much does the culinary cutting edge depend on context let's say we took a Mark Miller equivalent of 50 years ago and fed that person, not a very young you but someone your age now, 50 years ago who knew the foods of that time fed that Mark Miller the culinary cutting edge of today how much would he be able to appreciate it? a lot, a lot, a lot I think because the context of using the body and perceptual space remains the same I may have changed from Alenya from Shepanese to Alenya we're talking about generations of restaurants I think that chefs or I think that what culinary art does is it moves our ability to move our perceptual sense of exploring the world just as a weaving or painting does and it creates other realities that we may not have actually realized that we're there, but we're there when I talked about chilies, I was the first person now, why was I the first person to write a book that chilies had flavours? they've been eating chilies for 5,000 years I went to Robert Mondavi, we did a seminar and I proved to him that they were like grapes when you blend chilies in a mole it took as much art and complexity as a winemaker and he was actually shocked but he said I was correct but he had never thought, but he had never tasted so don't go in with the wrong perceptional, don't think that chilies are hot for instance sometimes I wonder about this, in my opinion what is sometimes called a super taster you can taste fine gradations and different flavours and items a level beyond how much other people can even people who might call themselves foodies right, you have some special sensory ability well actually the term super taster is about the number of actual taste buds per centimeter on your palate and actually I am not biologically a super taster in terms of the number of receptors that I have I don't think that Baron Bernstein was one of the greatest art critics or actually had extraordinary eyesight but you may be better than a super taster it's at the cognitive level rather than on your tongue what I try to do is, remember the book The Shallows came out, I try to do deep tasting like deep reading, are we looking for patterns that exist within the perceptional space that I am not that I wasn't looking for before so all of taste is about part of its memory part of its perception part of its connecting those complexities I would be also interesting enough, I'm slightly handicapped because I have a little bit of auditory processing disorder so what happens is when I was a child all of the world around me was categorized into taste I can hear fine it creates cognitive dissonance I can't drive the car, the point was because I learned that my brain can actually look at taste and actually make the world around me sensible that when I looked at a raisin people said, what do you mean that there's more flavors in a raisin, I said no pay attention, listen listen carefully, have you ever listened to like a harpsichord people, their attention span has to be so precise that it's a difference of a 40th of a second now when you play another electronic music you don't develop that skill set how many different flavors or kinds of soy sauce can you distinguish by taste I've done a panel of 40 at a time, I think I've had a kitchen home of up to 70 at a time you can tell one from the other by saltiness, by sweetness they all have a characteristic profile of complexities, of umami's as we might call it rich tones if you put 10 if you put 15 cabernets in front I mean I can still tell, you can do that anybody can do that, so we generally don't think of soy sauce as being that complex so when we taste it when we have, if I tell you this is a $800 bottle of wine, you turn on your complexity sort of perceptional scan if I tell you that this is a Mexican taco you don't turn it on you've already prejudiced you do, you do so soy sauce is to me or when you're in Japan the pickle on the table will tell me within 20 miles of where you grew up and where you live and the shoyu at the sushi each great sushi house not sushi bars actually blends their own shoyu and I can tell not only whether you're from Edo but what generation are you from the 30s the 40s or the 50s what generation did you actually grow up to actually believe that that was the style of the shoyu and if you're in Kyoto these people, Japan is really good that way because it is literally those 40 regions are so maintaining that isolation that you learn the differences from going from one to another I can go from I can take a train of two hours in Japan and cover more culinary differences than you can in the United States and I will remark-smark with that I turn the questioning over to Megan McCartle of Bloomberg well, this is it's a little weird being the only questioner talk about why you talked about how women and men's palates are different how is their cooking different I mean there is an editor I know now an eater was at Svore then who said that male cookery was all sort of knives guts and fire I think was how she put it that often seems like a fair characterization to me, my guy friends really want to load up the heat I remember having a guy tell me that the secret to really good cooking was just dump Cajun seasoning all over everything how do women cook different I mean, we're not going to get into developmental theory here I can tell you that the general broad strokes women are essentially more concerned with internal experiences they are more motivated to talk to someone at a dining room table and a guy will look at the television you get four guys and four women will talk to each other the point is that they early on there's a better internalization of the phenomenological world inside the body so they actually begin to recognize those characteristics of things that are what I would call body perceptionally so that tends to be a little bit more subtle tends to be a little bit more in time and they don't like the transformative process as much as understanding the this I'm going out of line but they would prefer to accept the flavor personality as is and understand it rather than change it into something that I do like you just said if you took that carrot that pork, that kidney and just made it spicy that's what guys they want to change it and transform it they want to create something new they want to actually not allow if you allowed nature to take its course then you wouldn't be cooking you don't have the heat you're not transforming the spice and so we're women except for Lydia Shire in Boston she's the only woman that I could never tell women tend to actually believe that the ingredients should be left alone Alice Waters or that school and that you can literally coax natural ingredients into something that's complex and satisfying and sophisticated and healthy and it's sustainable it's even better but man I believe that if we go that too far that we're not going to learn how to make Moles that we're not concerned with other black bean soups I would rather learn how to make when I lived in Guatemala every woman in the village made black bean soup not one of those women ever told me I go to the market by organic black beans so mine's better not every woman knew how good her black bean soup was the best woman in the village she was 37 steps and she really got me going I traded to her we peel now women tend to be more focused and more creative and more subtle it doesn't mean that they're not as rich a tradition it just means that it's a different level of recognition does that make sense? Yes absolutely mezcal or tequila Chichacapa by Delma Gay is my favorite mezcal in the world and when it's tequila I still go for silvers not unless you represent in a margarita you should always use silvers because they don't have any wood and if you're using fruit whether it's a mango, a star or anything else that idea of the gold coin or the upscale that's just a marketing employee to make more money but it makes them more money but it makes worse margaritas mezcal I mean mezcal though it was an is a native tradition built on extreme attention to nature and it's only wild agaves each one of the palanques that Ron uses only can produce 400 cases a year and it's totally out of that village in that tradition and even though those 20 villages are within 100 miles they might as well be like two continents apart because they're they express the whole world of you put five painters in Paris in 1900 and you get different paintings in the same building in Montmartre right your favorite guilty pleasure bad food oh it's not a bad food it's ice cream ice cream is God's gift to what flavor any particular oh I like them all I haven't to like cold I have a very sensitive palette so I won't eat any hot soups or teas or things I always eat cold when I can get it and that's preferable that would be my preference and if you have to say um hot fried something how's that so I am someone who we talked about this a little earlier I have never been able to stand the taste of cooked fish and I have been trying because it's good for me and my husband loves fish but that fishy flavor makes me gag how would you advise someone like me and you know obviously this is a broader question than just fish is someone who has something I'm generally pretty willing to eat almost anything but you have that one thing or you have a couple things where you're desperate to like be able to tolerate it how do you how do you go about learning? Well we talked earlier that I don't eat cooked fish at night because the enzymes in your body change and I I eat raw fish and anchovies but you actually may be the super taster because super no super tasters tend to have and that's the problem with parents who don't realize they become very fixated and they like things that don't like things because there's so powerful sensations for them children in particular don't really know what to do with that category so if they had something that was green that was very bitter that's why they won't eat green beans they associate that the entire category is something that they're going to be defensive about your question about cooked fish would be have you ever tried like flame broiled you know sashimi and sushi? Yeah I can like a seared tuna right that's basically raw inside yeah I can totally eat that it's when it's like I cooked salmon or something. But how far has it cooked do you know how many degrees? No I I'm not I'm not daring enough to cook my own fish because I hate it. Flavonoids develop and change over every two or three degrees that's why it's a misnoma the more you cook meat it's going to get no live more livery it's going to get fish is exactly the same so what you want to do is get a piece of fish and find out 130 I bet you the higher on the more objectionable flavonoids have not developed it's cooked 135 was cooked it'll go up 5 but I would just go home and do salmon and halibut I would start with halibut because it has it could be the oils it could be a combination of oils and flavonoids or we could just you know make a really spicy fish when we go to Contramar in Mexico City and just put red and green chili and throw it on the grill and I bet you would eat it it would be wonderful the sous vide revolution how do you feel about that well I've been working with a long time I worked with American Airlines in the 90s I worked with cuisine solutions one of the it is an amazing technique and it tends to be overused by chefs who believe that a perfect texture is preferable to a more complex uneven now the brain actually it's wrong though because the brain doesn't know what it is it knows what it's not so teaching flavor is not teaching what that ingredient is it's teaching what it's not so if I have a sous vide piece of lamb and it's not crusted and it's not browned and there's no my art and then it's not when you look at lamb and it has a rosé 50% it will start darker it'll be more my art it'll be cooked what the brain then has four or five different perceptional zones to actually understand and appreciate and differentiate a sous vide piece of lamb that's pink all the way through with one texture with no my art and no flavor of the lamb developed because it never went high enough will actually won't be lamby enough and it'll taste like a lamb piece of bubblegum or a sponge now I use interruptive sous vide so I do a Chinese squab that I put an intensity I used to brine it for 48 hours with 14 spices mainly cumin and chilies to get it all the way through the squab then roast it and then deep fry it like the Chinese I found it by sous vide they went in by 24 hours so the fresh was squab was there then I cook it sous vide at a different higher temperature even after it's in brine and then I fry it deep fry it so I find that you know that what I call interruptive sous vide as a technique which doesn't which takes you get intensity without preserving some freshness so let's say that I did scallops and I do them sous vide my scallops are cooked for exactly 18 minutes and with a wine dinner I want to match the chamomile in a sauvignon blanc well how do I do that actually I actually put in some fresh chamomile with the scallops cook it sous vide and the aromatic profile goes through I made a little to start I do this and that sauvignon blanc with that is amazing what is the biggest mistake that people make when they go into a southwestern restaurant and sit down in order well they want chips and sauce so that's a big mistake so explain this it's a phenomenon that they first of all get it free second of all chips are usually done poorly and then the sauce is usually done poorly it's a good excuse to sit there and drink beers and margaritas which is I don't need that excuse what you're looking for is something that comes into let's say buffalo we eat more buffalo I was cooking buffalo it was difficult to sell back in the 70s and 80s we know it's healthier we know it is less cholesterol and the other thing is you want intense small portions of food you don't want to so when you're looking at a southwest menu you want to look for the sauces the complexity you want to look for things that would probably take you that some things have been cured like even red sage what was the first thing that we did we actually did a carpaccio of venison we had a tartar mixed of venison and buffalo with sage we made that was on the first menu at red sage in 1990 now if you go around the United States 25 years later you don't find that anymore so if you were if someone came to you this is a game my family used to play in the car someone comes to you and says I'm a fairy you are only going to be allowed to eat three foods for the rest of your life three dishes three specific dishes so not like tacos but a kind of taco you don't have to worry about nutrition you have to worry about calories but you have to pick three foods and those are the only three foods you can you can ever have again which three foods certainly lobster I grew up in that part of the world in Scotia cooked in seaweed with butter drawn butter I would say my short dinner which is lobster clams they are all the one meal everyone always tries to like oysters fried clams lobster for sure my second one would be yes oh boy something spicy I buy between Thai and Mexican my two favorite spicy cuisines I would probably say a Mexican taco with great salsas and the right kind of tortilla and the third thing I might say would be surprisingly probably just a chelete de bue a five year old cow Northern Spain roasted completely correctly and the umami of each piece of meat is better than any other meat that exists in the world there are better richer things in Japan but that part of Northern Spain is just amazing it's outside of Burgos and it's extension of the Basque area those are working cattle and you saw the film on the world of steak I'm sure and there's one that I like in Barcelona which actually does the espadrilles out of the sea cucumbers too but I think that the honesty of Spanish food even though I went to El Bolí many times about seven or eight times still remains that those those we talked about the ham that Fuchsia found we talked about ham in the Dolomites I think that we we look culturally for I think that we're always searching for those foods in our environment that we give us pleasure that extend the body into that space and that elongate our perceptional way of interacting with the world so when someone talks about three year old Hugo it's not that it's that expensive and it's that complex and that's interesting that it requires so much of you to actually perceive it that you are more alive, you are more there the ham is more there that sense of presence is there and I think that's what a great chef can do you can stimulate that sense of being there and we're losing that the virtual reality that's happening we're losing our sense of being in presence Korean tacos Korean tacos, I know Roy so that's not fair I know Roy personally I think it's a good example of what Roy calls authentic food he grew up in LA Roy Choi is Korean he is LA which has a lot of Mexican food and the sense of combining his own interior reality into a projection on that plate to me is perfect food what a chef should always be doing I'm not Mexican and the reason that I created Modern Southwestern I think it would be a lie for me to do a Mexican restaurant Roberto Santa Benes at Fonda was a good friend and a partner of mine a salsa company is Mexican from Mexico City and does cook great Mexican food and I think that you can learn but you should not co-opt an entire culture or identity I was a and I didn't want to cook like Alice Waters anymore so I was after it's nothing wrong with shade but it wasn't my food I was arguing about it sometimes but the point is when a chef really understands the world and ingredients and can bring that reality to his dining public that's an amazing explosion of creativity and emotion and theater and it's wonderful right? If you had to sum up your food if you had to in a couple of sentences say this is what this is what my food was and why I needed to go do my thing no no when you left Shape and Ease we all created the menus at Shape and Ease it wasn't Alice but even then no it's only because one of my advisors didn't sign my thesis anyway I was supposed to be there for two weeks so I think that my food is a personal exploration of my own exploration of the world and I look at the world through my senses mostly through taste and smell and what I'm trying to do is understand not only the world we live in but sometimes past cultures I try to look at pre-Columbian weavings I try to get a list of all the pre-Columbian foods and we see for instance at Central which is a very famous restaurant in Lima today that that complexity of these chunyas and this and things that grow were probably used and stimulate the problem is do we actually have the palette to actually go back wouldn't you like to live in I don't want to just see a Rembrandt painting or I want to actually go back and eat the food that he was eating in the markets and the cheeses and the things that were done because I want to try to understand where that painting came from not only the psychology of the artist so when I read a cookbook or I go to a restaurant I'm trying to understand the person or the place or the culture of fast food so the dark side well but can it be done well it is done well I mean fast food is done well in Japan the places I go I eat Udon I walk in it's being made by hand it costs two dollars I decide what I'm going to put on top and I have a bowl and I've timed it it's 18 seconds McDonald's it's a lifetime you know Starbucks is 8.4 minutes that is not robot chefs everyone curing it it's in the fast food but you've seen these machines now that they're going to have that's going to like dice everything and it won't need any human interaction at all what do you think of that probably with anybody notice I I really you know I think fast food I think that our model in the United States because of the real state and economics of it is completely wrong I think that a chef should open a restaurant at 10 seats I think he should charge $100 and I think he should make $150 and he should not pay rent or have X have labor or have overhead or cost and what you should do is honor the tradition of respecting the individual so in Japan they have this policy of not first customer there's a policy of not taking you because they don't know how you're going to act they don't know who you were they didn't you're also eating with you're not eating with you're eating with seven or eight other people as an ensemble you're not completely separate so the idea of reinstituting cultural and social space and bonds and honoring the chef is here and put something down there's no waitress there's no menu the point is that that's the reality of you and that's a personal connection it's like your mother the point whether that point to me is that we have to go back to understanding that food is very part of our psychological sense of space our body sense of space our pleasurable sense of space our own cultural identity and if we let other people take over that by organic or this or labels or price then what we've done is given that part of our lives up and I don't know that we're I'm just saying this there's 300 noodle places in Kyoto nobody charges more than 10 or 12 dollars they're all really good they're all a little bit different and guess who doesn't do well they charge 10 dollars for noodles that they have to pay high end real estate like Ishanoya there's two of them in Kyoto I've been going to Kyoto for 50 years I've never been I'm never going to go there's no reason to go chains only exist when the local community doesn't provide the same service so in a street food market it's accessible so I can eat in Thailand a quail for 75 cents that same quail in Washington D.C. New York City will cost me like 25 Megan, Mark, thank you very much thank you very much