Hello Chefs, This is Chef's PSA podcast.
I'm your host, Andre Natera. On today's episode, we're going
to talk about finding your unique style as a chef.
Stay tuned. So before we get into it, quick
update on something that I'm working on.
I'm doing a super secret popup chef in residence.
I'll share more on my Instagram profile, but coming out of a
quick retirement to have some fun in the kitchen, I'm excited.
Have to make sure I could still walk that talk.
Someone said to me, he said you talked a lot of shit on the
Internet and on your podcast. Can you still do it?
Well, we're we're about to find out if I still got it.
So I'm taking over a restaurant really briefly.
Chef in residence. I did it because I want to have
a little fun. I do miss the kitchen at times
and this allows me to kind of, you know, see, see if I could
still do it, See if I can still hang with the the top dogs in
the city. More to come on that.
I don't want to give away all the details, but I will be
announcing more soon on Chef's PSA social sites.
So keep your eyes peeled. I'll tell you more.
Maybe even for those of you that are looking for work, you might
want to come work with me. It'll be short, but we'll have
some fun. For those of you that are
asking, yes, I I do enjoy doing these things.
Like I do guest chef spots occasionally.
I did one in Dallas and Jose, I still do food festivals when it
makes sense, right? I'm not representing a kitchen,
I'm retired. I'm representing Chef's PSA
podcast. So sometimes it doesn't make
sense for me to be out there cooking.
But for those of you that have reached out and said I'd love to
do a pop up with you, would I be interested?
Yeah, I'd be interested. But you know, the fact of the
matter is I don't have an army behind me like I used to.
Chef's PSA is a one man show. It's just me.
Someone asked me who makes the comics.
I do, Who writes the captions, me, who edits the books, me, who
edits the podcast and the video and the audio and writes the
scripts. Guess who?
Oh yeah, it's all me. But in my quest for world
domination, I think eventually I'm going to have to expand.
I have a couple of surprises coming up on the podcast.
Some collabs. I can't share all the details,
but I think you'll all be happy. A lot of people asked me to talk
on service, a lot of people asked me to talk on pastry
projects and those episodes are coming to.
And for those of you that have been asked now with regards to
the subject matter, finding your unique style as a chef.
When I was a chef, one of the things that used to frustrate me
would be when I hire someone who has zero experience in the
kitchen and maybe I was hiring them for something high end,
right? I've always been a chef of the
higher end kitchens and I've always had a great team of chefs
behind me, Extremely talented sous chefs, extremely talented
chef to cuisines, exec sue and so on.
And when I run a kitchen, I expect greatness.
Excellent. And we're always pushing to be
at the top of the food chain or whatever market that we're in.
And at times I would get frustrated because the new cook
would come in and not even fully understand their own skill set
yet like still trembling and holding a knife.
Can't really dice an onion too well and green and then say
things like when can I get my food on the menu And I'd be
like, what's your food? And then they'd proceed to tell
me and it has nothing to do with the type of restaurant that I
was running. So for example, if I was running
like a high end live fire concept restaurant, they'd want
to tell me about their famous Enchilada casserole or whatever,
right. They said, well, you know, I
just came back from the Caribbean and I was like, this
is into Caribbean restaurant, so my family's from here.
We want, I want to do that food. It's like, great, that's not
this restaurant. It'll blow my mind.
How many people want to do their food, their food?
They don't even have food. Like, they haven't even gotten
to the point where they could create something that would be
on the level of the restaurant where they maybe work, right?
Because maybe they're, they're working as a prep cook and
they're like, when can I get my dish on the menu?
Like, focus on the onion. You got to learn how to dice
those first, right? You got to walk before you can
run these steps. And then occasionally I'd say,
okay, let me see what you got. And they put up like this
terrible dip. They're like, oh fuck, that's
not going on the menu. No way.
I'm, I'm, I'm being, I'm being rude, but the reason I share
this. So there's that.
So my advice, if you're going into a new kitchen, you kind of
got to feel it out a little bit. Is that kitchen the type of
place where it's collaborative? Everyone's inputting ideas, and
there's a lot of kitchens like that.
And I I have kitchens like that where I would encourage people.
We'd have a certain day of the week where everyone was intended
to be putting dishes forward. A lot of times they'd be coached
by some of the sous chefs, but we'd look at all the ideas and
say, okay, this is actually a really cool component, but it
didn't mean that the dishes were getting on the menu.
It's just an opportunity to express every now and again.
So, like, whoa, wasn't expecting that that dish needs to go on
the menu. Other places they meet at the
end of every night, they review the menus, they talk about what
they're going to serve the next day, and everyone's putting an
input. And the final result of the menu
is like this amalgamation of ideas from all those that were
in their input. Other places, they might have a
whiteboard where they write ideas down.
Other places they might have a special, and different cooks are
putting up ideas for the special, or maybe they're
creating the special for the day.
They have a rotation. Whatever the case may be not all
kitchens are like that and there isn't A1 size fits all for every
kitchen. Some kitchens you may never get
a dish on the menu type a personality chef nothing But my
food and other places. It's collaboration with the
billion dollar question what is your food chef run into this
problem When I was coming up as a cook early on in my career,
I've talked about this before. My idols were the Charlie
Trotters of the world, the Thomas Keller's the Ferran,
Audrea's. You know, I was coming up in the
late 90s, early 2000s as a cook and chef, and so those were the
chefs that were the top of the food chain.
And so I wasn't the only one. Every single chef during that
time that wanted to make a name for themselves were all cooking
like Charlie Trotter or Ferran, Audrea or Thomas Keller or
whoever was at that moment, right.
Maybe it was Emeril Agasi or Norman Bacon.
A little bit earlier would have been Mark Miller and Dean
Ferring and Stephen Pyles, but you had all these chefs that
were expressing the ideas of others.
And so a lot of times when they'd say I want to do my food,
you know, I I was guilty of this too.
I remember telling my chef I want to do my food and he's like
present me a dip. And I did a dish right under the
Charlie Trotter cookbook. It was a potato tureen.
I don't remember what else was in it.
It was definitely a potato tureen that I had made and I
served it with a Curry oil. I have to go back and look and
see what that dish actually was. I do remember the Curry oil.
I remember talking to my chef and him saying, why is there
Curry oil on this? And I said, well, Charlie
Trotter does and he's like, you ain't Charlie Trotter.
So what was my food? Was it really my food, or did I
just want to serve food that I wanted to cop food, that I was
inspired food, that I was looking at different cookbooks
and say that's my food, it's not.
I want to cook like Charlie Trotter, so I'm adopting that as
mine or whoever the chef inspiration was.
I want to cook like Gordon Ramsay or whoever Gran Accotts
or Ron Audria. Today you might be wanting to
cook like Rene Redzepi or the Roca Brothers or whoever, right?
So what is your food? Is your food what you grew up
with? Is it the food that was in your
household? Is it what your mom used to cook
for you or your grandmother or your parents?
Is it what the neighbor's parents used to cook for you?
Is it walking up to the little shack on the beach and eating
the food right there? Was it going to the farmers
market and coming back with something?
What is your food? A lot of chefs face this
identity crisis because they don't know what their food is.
You could work for years under a certain chef and you can't wait
to get out of their shadows. So you could express yourself on
a plate to do your food, and then when the opportunity
presents itself, you just end up cooking like the chef you worked
for with a slight tweak on it. But it's still what you were
taught. It's a version of what you were
already shown. If you remember the movie coming
to America, the first one with Eddie Murphy, like they're
McDonald's or Mcdowell's, they had like their version of the
Big Mac or the quarterback. I don't know where it was, but
it was funny, like the exact same thing, just slightly
different. And a lot of times that's what
happens, is you work in a restaurant for so long and
you've gotten really good at preparing a certain style of
someone else's vision, and now you have your chance set back.
What do you do? Do you replicate that vision or
do you truly have a unique style?
I don't know. They tell you.
In most of my experience, when I've worked with chefs and they
come with these ideas, it's normally ideas that they had
from the previous restaurant where they were this chef's PSA
that I say, no matter how well you do something, another chef
thinks you're wrong. And the reason I say that is
because when you're coming up in your career, you're shown
something, whether maybe it's in culinary school and then you get
out into the real world, or maybe it's one of your first
jobs and it's a chef that you really liked.
And they said all stock needs to have oxtail in it to give it
flu. I don't know, maybe it's
something like that. I know my chef said that to me.
And so to this day, sometimes I put oxtail in my veal stock or
in my beef stock. I worked for another chef.
It's all stock for chicken has to be made with whole chickens,
and it's shorter because it keeps it clear.
And I used to do that. I don't do it anymore.
Or other people were would say don't put too much celery in the
stock. And other chefs I've worked for
would say you need to make sure that you're putting pig's feet
and chicken wings and necks. There's more collagen in the
pig's feet. So you got to put that in there,
got to skim the stock a certain way.
You got to brush it with whatever the case may be.
Every chef has a little something that they do.
Grind the Bolognese mirror, plop through the meat grinder.
Others are like, no, no, you got to broom.
What, by hand? No, just put it in the robo
coop. It's best if you do this.
What's the right way? I don't know.
There There really is no right way because someone could argue
against it. No matter how well you do
something, someone else can argue against it that their way
is better because the end result is subjective, especially when
the person is emotionally tied to the product.
So coming up in my career, I cooked in a lot of Italian
restaurants. I cooked in a lot of European
style restaurants, French, etcetera, Mediterranean,
Southwest cuisine. Also at one point in time was
coming up in that Southwest cuisine style, ever wanted to
cook like Mark Miller and Dean Ferry.
And when I finally got my opportunity at bat and they said
you could finally express yourself and do whatever you
want. And now I'm the executive chef
and I'm at the helm of the kitchen, what did I do when I
finally was able to do my own food?
I copied for Anna. I started doing bubble food,
right? So this is like 2005, because
that's what I wanted to do. Was it my food that I work at El
Bulli? No, but I was fascinated from
afar and I had the El Bulli cookbooks and I was watching
what they were doing and I was idolizing that style of cuisine.
And I wanted to understand the alginates, verifications and how
to make mangoes into a bubble, right, and froth up sauces with
less a thin or whatever the case may be, make a spaghetti noodle
out of Agar. It was fun, right?
But it wasn't my food. And so little by little I've had
to start to rediscover who am I as a chef?
What is my style? Is it this or is it that?
And sometimes you get hired as a chef and you take on the
identity of the restaurant that you're hired in.
So an example would be you get hired in a Mediterranean
restaurant. You can't say, well, I do
Chinese food, right. If that's just not going to
work, well, then you're not going to be the chef here.
So sometimes you adapt to the restaurant and to the
environment in which you're placed in.
And other times you run a restaurant where you have
creative control and not only are you driving the brand,
you're also driving the identity of the food and the creativity
of chefs struggle with this. I know.
I struggle with you're always influenced by the current trend.
You're influenced by social media, you're influenced by
what's on TV. Where do your ideas come from?
Do you just fall asleep and then these ideas pop in your brain?
Do they come from external sources?
The reality is almost all your ideas are regurgitated from
external sources. Books, social media, your
training, your parents, your experiences.
Coming up with original ideas is extremely difficult.
You could look at very original chefs, like I said, Farhan
Audra, he revolutionized the world when he came out with the
food that he was doing at Obuli. The molecular gastronomy
movement changed the world. And I don't know if he copied
that and if he did, I don't know who he copied it from because
it's not easy to trace to say, oh, he clearly got it from here.
Or you look at what Renee Rinzeppi was doing.
He went through the whole foraging thing in the Nordic,
the New Nordic. Where did he get that from?
I'm sure historically people have always been cooking like
that, but professionally, people weren't cooking like that on
that level. So he redeveloped that.
Thomas Keller being what he did in Napa Valley at the French
Laundry. No one was doing that before
him. Charlie Trotter, the same thing.
So some of these greats, the mountain Rushmore of chefs,
right, they marched to the beat of their own drum.
They create their own unique style and they create and
everyone borrows and copies or gets inspired by it.
I'm no exception to that. I borrowed from all of them and
then claimed it to be my own style.
What's the what's the expression it takes a thief to catch a
thief. Have you ever heard that people
have to know how to steal before they can catch someone who is
also stealing? Right.
We're all getting inspired by social media.
It's it's it's really easy to police it now, right?
Go back and say, hey, that's the dish that so and so was serving.
And so after all this time, I would say I was looking that
dishes that I was cooking. So I'm working on this this
menu. I talked about it a little bit
earlier in the podcast and I'm creating this menu and it's
basically the greatest hits of my career, just modernized for
2023 in the environment that I'm And as I'm going back and
looking at dishes throughout my career, I'm like, wow, this
looks really bad. I would not, Sir.
I would not played it this way, even stuff that was just five
years ago or four years ago and was very cutting edge at the
moment. I look at it now and say it
looks so dated. It was delicious, but it looked
dated. Plating styles evolved,
ingredient trends evolved very quick.
I would challenge you if you've been around long enough.
So, you know, I know, I know a lot of people.
Maybe you're writing culinary school, so this might not apply
to you, but go back and look at the food that you were making
that you were extremely happy and proud with just a few years
ago. And look at it today and see if
you're still proud of it. And I don't mean, like maybe it
tasted, but just I'm talking about the plating and the
aesthetics of it, the style, right?
So food is like fashion. It's always moving forward.
I think it'd be really interesting to do with chefs to
say post what you did 10 years ago or five years ago, post what
you're doing today and do side by side my food, five years ago,
my food today. I think that would be fun.
So you could see how far you can come, so you could see the
techniques that you've learned. You could document your history.
You could document what you've learned throughout your career.
Much easier, right? Keep good notes, get the
Evernote app, log everything, take great photos of your food,
make notes and save them for later because you're able to
document your career progression.
And So what does that boil down to?
Right? When I came up, as I said, I was
working in French and Italian restaurants, Mediterranean
style, and so now my food is this amalgamation of the thing
that I learned early on on my specific stations that I made.
I noticed that's what I like cooking now.
That's my food and is it my food?
Kind of right. That's what I was taught.
It's the best and the things that I enjoyed most from what I
was taught as a chef and the things that I crave now is like
a properly made lobster bits, tornados, rossini gnocchis.
It's not the complex things that I've made throughout my career
anything. The more complex and showy thing
are the things I'm most embarrassed by now.
And the most simple and delicious things are the things
I'm most proud of. And I still carry with me the
dichotomy of a shot. What's your food?
I don't know. You need to find that out
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