Column, Published April 2008
It starts with a misunderstanding and ends with butter. It starts when I meet John, my friend who is a boy, and we’re talking the usual getting-to-know-each-other talk, and I mention that I like cooking a bit, and he mentioned that he likes food, too, and once cooked dinner for 18 people. And so, from this I infer, given my state of absolute unabashed limerence that leads people in these situations down all kinds of inferring roads, that John is a brilliant chef. I do not pay attention to the fact that John doesn’t cook when we’re at his house. Ever. I only pay attention to what I hear, and what I hear is that he is a cook, and a good one at that.
So, for six months, we scramble for dinner. We order in. We go out. Somehow, int hat New York way, we never really focus on what we’re going to eat, or really ever have complete meals. But here and there, we cobble together our survival.
And then I realize that I miss messing around with bowls and spoons, so I start small, with a few things. I tell him I’d like to use his kitchen for some experiments, if he doesn’t mind, and so I start experimenting, but only with things I know how to make, like pancakes. And then, New Year’s Day, I look in his fridge and see that his butter expired. A long time ago. Like, in 2005.
I’m shocked. I ask him. And we clear things up. It turns out that by “cook dinner for 18” he had meant “put something big in the oven.” By “like food” he had meant “like to eat it.” And, immediately, my confidenge goes through the roof. I buy for his bookcase (but really for myself) Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food. I inform John that, fmor now on, things are going to be different around here. I tell him to get ready for a few missteps but even readier for a few hits (w don’t have to talk about the Tuscan white beans with kale, but I see a lot of cardamom bread pudding ahead). When I truly overstep and we have a few grand failures, I realize that I should probably scale back and start with the basics, lose my ego and gain some knowledge. As a baker, I want to loosen up in the kitchen and become more of a cook, so I buy Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking, which takes me out of my béchamel sauce-making, Daniel Boulud recipe-following overconfidence, and reminds me that it just might be a good idea to get good with the basics. Which are, I learn from Ruhlman, essentially heat and salt.
I slow down. I stop cooking over my head and start cooking things I know I can manage. Spinach and chickpea stew. Macaroni and cheese. Vegetable lasagna. These are easy dishes broken up into even easier steps, and I start understanding what’s happening when I drain my grated potatoes for latkes (the starches are, um, doing something) and when I catch myself whisking a white sauce with my right hand while pouring in milk with my left, I think I’ve got this down.
Halfway through this re-development of my cooking confidence, I have dinner at Allen & Delancey (even the most newly enthusiastic chef needs the night off). And there, 14 lines down a menu that is full of words like “shavings” and “fingerlings” and “caviar” is a dish described only as “cabbage, beef, and onion.” I know I have to have it. It’s not that I particularly like cabbage, or brake all that much for beef, or really cry over onion. It’s that I know, somehow, that this dish was cooked and named with confidence. And that’s also what it’ll take to order it. So I do. And it’s amazing. It isn’t as simple as the name suggests – the chef, Neil Ferguson, tells me later that it’s one of the most complicated dishes on the menu – but it’s delicious: both refined and elemental.
So I ask Ferguson about confidence. I think he’s a good one to talk to because he used to work for Gordon Ramsay, arguably the King of all Ego, and because when he took over Allen & Delancey it had been languishing under delays and drama for so long that people were starting to mumble that it would never open, and if it did, that it would most likely fail. (It hasn’t.) I suggest it must have taken a serious dose of confidence for him to jump in and immediately start putting cabbage, beef, and onion on the page, sure of the customers’ confidence in him, but it turns out it isn’t so simple.
“I really tear myself apart when I write a menu,” Ferguson says, talking about not just the titles of his dishes, but the essence of the combinations themselves. “It’s not as easy as many people think sometimes.” Most dishes, he points out, are changed at least five times before they complete the cycle from mind to kitchen to road test to menu. And it’s knowing when to stop that’s more than half the battle. “Having that mechanism in you that says ‘that’s enough,’ that’s confident cooking,” he says. I think of some of the stranger dishes I’ve had recently, ones that were the restaurant versions of my multi-stage multi-course failures, and Ferguson jumps right in.
“You’ll find a younger cook, and they’ve got all these great ideas and worked in all these great places, seen all these amazing things, so they try and put them on a plate and you end up with a mess,” he says. “Whereas the more seasoned, experienced, and confident cook is going to have better judgment on when a dish is finished and ready to go.” The confident chef, Ferguson argues, is one who knows how to tell a good ingredient from a bad, an excellent source from a terrible. It’s one who knows when to stop.
Ferguson’s confidence makes sense given his history in storied kitchens, but I think of another chef, Michael Psilakis, whose 2005 opening of Onera spearheaded what became a full-blown Greek revival. No one was feeling Greek food on the level that PSilakis was doing it when he first showed up, but it’s three years later and he’s reopening a version of the shuttered Greek-Italian Dona with proven-track-record partner Donatella Arpaia, and flying high on the success of the ultra-refined Anthos. I ask him about how he found his confidence to stick with such a then-risky move.
“I think there has to be a certain amount of ego for you to be able to produce at the highest level,” he says. “But on the flip side, there can’t ever be a time where you lose sight of the fact that if you start to believe in that ego too much, what ends up happening is that you don’t have balance.” He says it wasn’t until a year and a half ago that he found the maturity to arrive at a level where he “wasn’t trying to impress as much anymore – I was just trying to create things that were going to be beautiful.”
Now that takes guts.
