Wow. Thank you so much. It's so exciting to be here. I had a dream. I had a fantasy.
I was fearful. I had a vision. These words very often begin the narrative of aspiring
young chefs and successful chefs, and they're always thrilling to hear. It always really
moves me, especially when, you know, as we just heard from Paziana, it ends with this
incredible success story. But what about the diner, the pesky guest? What about their dreams
and aspirations and fantasies? So I was very excited when the wonderful mad team invited
me to speak from the other side of the table to represent the diner and their dreams. But
before I go into a little bit about my profession here, it's history and my impressions. I wanted
to tell you about a dream that my mother had for most of her life. We come from the former
Soviet Union, which means a country that now vanished from meps, which means we lived for
the longest time without access to foreign travel or foreign cuisines if you don't count
socialist Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia, and even that was rare. So my mom had this dream,
and I knew it from her face when she would sit on my bed with this kind of sad desperate
eyes. She dreamt that she turned into a bird or a fly, and she flew over the border. No
one asked her for documents. She escaped from the Iron Curtain, and she ended up in Paris.
My mom was a very cultured lady. She read Balzac, she read Spruce, she dreamt of Paris,
and she knew that she could never see Paris because for a Soviet citizen it was impossible
to travel. And here she is circling as a BL fly, she's circling over this beautiful cafe
that is so achingly recognizable to her from literature and from painting. She smells some
delicious smells. She sees people sitting outside. She's desperate, desperate to be
inside and to see what it's like. And at that point my mother always woke up. Woke
up on the wrong side of the door, woke up behind the Iron Curtain, woke up knowing that
she would never be able to experience what she fantasized so much about. And I remember
my mother watching my mother with great difficulty grind, you know, the really, really tough
grizzly goulash meat into these little meatballs. She'd throw them in broth. It was very, very
humble. And she would say, oh, this is potash printonniere. Or she would get a can of tinned
meat called Tushonka that you all took to the dacha. And she would say, I made an olia
podrida. I read about it in Cervantes. Oh, I made potafa. And I remember that these words,
you know, these names filled us both with this just incredible, romancing longing. When
we completely run out of money, which was on Sundays, because my mom just lived on the
alimony, my mom would crack a couple of eggs into a skillet. And she would tell me some
magical fairy tale about the king's chamber and golden eggs. And suddenly our drab, you
know, little apartment was transformed for me. And this is when I understand that cooking
could really transfigure reality, that could transport you to a different place, that it
could elevate us from our drab, Soviet grind, into a different reality. And I often wonder
whether I became a food writer because or despite of my socialist childhood. Anyway,
back to restaurants. One of my first assignments was going around, I was in the mid-90s, was
going around French three-star restaurants to see, you know, the state of French cuisine.
And our first stop was a very famous restaurant in Paris, run by a very famous chef who was
still very famous. And we arrived there and the lady at the reception kind of rattled
her pearls and said, oh, we cancelled your reservation because you weren't staying at
a hotel, because we were staying at some like bat around this month with relatives of friends.
But she said, okay, have a table for you, follow us. And we got kind of stuck in this
like horrible corner space next to the bathroom. And then we encountered the smirking Somalia.
And the smirking Somalia sold us some horrible expensive bottle of wine, which you would
not come to replenish. But when I reached for the wine, I almost got this. And then
the pigeon arrived. Of course, I wanted it rare. I just remember, you know, the blood
gushed out onto some kind of potato. And here I was, you know, at the plate full of blood,
not being able to pour my own wine. There was this distinct feeling that we were trespassing.
The rest of the adventure went, you know, in the same fashion. Although there were moments
of absolute brilliance, I'm still so grateful that I got to taste Freddy Gerardez cooking
before he retired. That was, you know, adventure foraging with Mark Vera. But I came out of
this month-long thing, understanding very distinctly what cooking should not be. Because
the whole thing was like an exercise in it being trapped. I realized that cooking, you
know, cannot be the sort of fossilized, over-codified, over-bureaucratized ritual that, you know,
leaves the diner essentially victimized by the chef's ego, ego, and by all the protocol.
And then in 1995, I went to an assignment in Catalonia. And people started whispering
to me about this incredible chef that just got three stars. So finally, someone made
the reservation, and it was El Buye. It was lunch. It was completely empty other than another
journalist who was there. That was 95. And people often ask me what it was like to eat
at El Buye, you know, back in those early days. And all you can say was really life-changing.
I'm not going to talk about the dishes and the techniques, because these are well-documented
and Albert is right here. But it made me appreciate and understand that there could be another whole
dimension of cooking, that cooking could have the polemical force, you know, the iconoclastic
energy, the wild creativity of a real cultural avant-garde. And soon, you know, it spread
all over Spain. You could go to Asturias, or you could go to, you know, the bundas in
Andalufia and tasted deconstructed gazpacho, or, you know, a trompe l'oil, favada. It was
absolutely thrilling. And there was this thing, that while it radically, radically altered
what was on your plate, it did not change the relationship between the kitchen and the
diner. If anything, it made the experience more authoritarian, even though it was in
a fun way. Even when the cuisine was brilliant and witty, it came with explanations, you
know, inhale it through your nose, exhale it through your ear, catch it midway, you know,
cut it with a knife in the air, you know, you give it exactly three seconds. And the
other thing, you know, like every avant-garde, art, you know, which is difficult, it required
this incredible cognitive engagement. You know, you had to concentrate. So again, you
know, there was a sense of feeling kind of trapped. And it also, you know, the whole
kind of publicity of Ferran as the mad genius, even though he's the sanest person you ever
meet, it legitimized the figure of chef as auteur, as an artist, you know, and it gave
even more power, in a sense, to the kitchen. And the diner, you know, it expected engagement
from the diner, and the engagement was one way. You were supposed to engage with the
food, but what about you? So I began to seek different kinds of experience, and it's sort
of an experience that I still really love. It's going, you know, for Sunday lunch, to
sort of a neo-traditional bourgeois restaurant somewhere in Spain and in Italy, where the
mater zero, the chef, helps you create the fantasy as you go along, you know, where
you negotiate for real, where you say, oh, the anchovies just arrived, oh, how about
a couple of anchovies? Oh, how about one and a half portion of pasta, and maybe another
one portion of ravioli just for the table, and then he says, well, I think it's too much,
well, maybe just a tahliatina, or some little thing, followed by salad. So the kind of process
of creating your own meal, I just find incredibly pleasurable. Well, you know, finding, finding
isn't a difficult place right now. You know, people, the clients, you know, those pesky
clients are, you know, defecting to dives, to food trucks, because, you know, eating
at the food truck, you know, surrounding by the people creates a sense of community.
And you know, chefs spend a lot of time and a lot of calibrations and calculations before
opening a restaurant. They try to figure out, you know, the best kind of music, they spend
a lot of effort into the logo, how the menu reads, you know, the typeface, the wine list.
Everything. But in all these calibrations, I feel that what gets forgotten is what Tatiana
just said so beautifully, is that the point of cooking is to nourish, to feed. It is to
create a fantasy of a life that is better than in reality, where everyone, as my friend
Daniel Patterson once said, is where everyone is happy to see you, where everything tastes
better than it should in real life, where everything is perfect. And whether it's a
modest restaurant or an ambitious one, and we need ambitious restaurants more than ever,
because, you know, a great restaurant sets an example. A great restaurant is a laboratory
from which ideas and techniques trickle down to more casual places. A great restaurant,
great chef like René or Alex, they create national cuisines. They inspire other young
chefs. You know, it is really important not to lose the experience. But what I would like
to urge all the young chefs or all the young talents is to leave just a little room in
their fantasy for the diner. And it's a very humble proposal. And finally, I want to end
with the fantasy that I, myself, had when I just was in Modena doing a piece with Massimo
Bottura, the brilliant Massimo from Australia, Francescana. It was Saturday night, the place
was completely booked out. There's no way I could get a table. And I was hungry and tired
and was raining outside. And Massimo said, you know, just come into the kitchen and,
you know, at least I'll show you a little bit of what I was doing. So we were just kind
of standing there like this squeeze, you know, there was no space. Everyone was just like
rushing through. And Massimo would appear every once in a while with a tablespoon or
a little plate of something he had just created. And, you know, it was just like, it would
go like this, you know, you taste the thing. And there was just absolute visceral, primal
thrill in being actually fed by a great chef. You know, it kind of made me, without any
intermediaries, without any kind of bureaucracy, without the Mater D and the sommelier and the
whole thing, it really made me reconnect with restaurant cooking in the most incredible
way. And I said to Massimo, and I said to myself, wow, wouldn't that be amazing if restaurants
like Francescana, like Noma, restaurants that are really expensive for average people,
restaurants where it's really hard to get reservation, if they would just put a little
bench in a bag somewhere and maybe sell tickets, you know, to students, to young chefs, you
know, to people who otherwise, you know, have no access, and just bring up, you know, five,
six little dishes at a time for people to have. I know, I'm sure it's logistically impossible,
and I'm sure the chefs would howl and protest, but I can't get the idea out of my mind. And
so, I thank you for your time.
