Secrets of Restaurant Design: An Insider Tells All



Christopher Kimball: This is Milk Street Radio from PRX, and I’m your host. Christopher Kimball, today we’re looking at restaurants from all the angles for architect David Rockwell, a good meal begins with great restaurant design.

David Rockwell: And there’s many, many things that go into designing a restaurant and having be successful that you’ll never see, like service stations being close enough that they can see the guests, or the kitchen being situated where the food gets there, warm, the lighting, presenting the food in the right way. Those are all elements that go to creating this unique creation that then takes a life of its own:

CK: Anatomy of a well-designed restaurant that’s coming up later in the show, but first, we’re starting with a menu. Author, Nathalie Cooke joins me now. Nathalie, welcome to Milk Street.

Nathalie Cooke: Thanks so much. I’m delighted to be here.

CK; I’ve spent a fair amount of time around menus, but you have a phrase called a cryptic menu. What is a cryptic menu?

NC: Yeah, there was something we discovered called an enigmatical bill of faire. We’ve discovered 1000s of them, actually, and they were menus, all in riddles, typically British from the 18th and early 19th century. And when I first found one, it was a handwritten in a manuscript book. And I didn’t give it a second glance, but it was a colleague who came and said, wait a minute, look at what that item is. And it said, you know what Adam gave Eve, instead of actually a piece of food. And then we realized that this whole table setting was actually in riddles, and that, to my mind, is an official cryptic menu. You don’t get food you get a riddle.

CK: And this, obviously, this was, you had to be quite wealthy I assumed to be having enigmatic or cryptic menus, right?

NC: Yeah, absolutely. We discovered them in the papers of a large mansion from Doncaster, England. But we’re not sure if the riddles were sent out as invitations, or if, you know, for example, you didn’t get the food unless you were able to guess correctly.

CK: Well, that’s what I was thinking, like, what Eve gave to Adam, and you go, like, grapefruit? No, I’m sorry, you’re, you’re not getting the apple pie tonight.

NC: That’s right or, actually, technically, it would be a spare rib, I think,

CK: Very good. Actually, that’s, that’s even better

NC: Right. I mean, I think it’s a trick, because you think, Apple first of all. Right,

CK: So, I would go hungry. Okay, are there examples, I assume, of some of these questions or cryptic menu items to give us a sense of what they were like, besides the Adam and Eve.

NC: Sure. So why don’t I actually pose a couple of questions and see how you fare. There’s a horrible one, a woman’s weapon, which we think is tongue or the divine part of man boiled. You could probably get that one can you?

CK: The divine part of man,

NC: the divine part of man, boiled

CK: Soul something? Soul stew?

NC: Yeah, yeah. We think it’s stewed sole, yeah, okay,

CK: Okay, yeah. The thing I like is that people had the time to create these cryptic menus, and the people would actually sit around a table with each other, without a phone or a TV, and actually interact with each other and have some fun doing it, which I guess is very old fashioned of me, but obviously it’s appealing to you as well.

NC: Think of how wonderful it would be to have a riddle in front of you that was a built-in method of ensuring that there was conversation between different people, (yes) So if things got into real trouble, you would say, so.

CK: So, let’s stand way back. Are there other things about menu design that you learned that would be interesting from the diner’s point of view?

NC: Yeah, One of the interesting things was when Western diners started to use chopsticks and started to think about different ways of actually eating their food, and so there was a lot of instruction that was going on in menus explaining how you’re meant to actually approach a particular item that was unfamiliar to you, and so menus work as instructional menus, which is quite fun, and sometimes they do the opposite. There’s a restaurant in Bangkok called Gagan which has a menu and emojis, and it’s wonderful to look at. It’s colorful. It looks absolutely fabulous. And some of the things are pretty obvious. You know a picture of an egg, you know what you’re going to be getting, but what does it mean to have a tulip or to have a palm tree? And so, in some ways, I think those emojis are almost functioning like the riddles, that it’s a bit of a guessing game.

CK: So, what looking back over, let’s say, 100 years of menus, what do you take away? What do you learn? What’s changed? What does it tell you about humanity? What does it tell you about different decades? What does it tell you about how we relate to food? There’re some really interesting things you’ve noticed on menus that made you sit up and go like, oh, you know that’s that’s not what I thought it was going to be.

NC: So, what I thought was that we were going to see huge differences. It seemed logical to me. I mean, I was shocked to see cigarettes on menus, for example. And I’m sure in decades, centuries to come, we’ll be shocked to see alcohol on menus. But having looked for and expected to see that kind of divergence what actually surprised me was the opposite. It was just how consistent it’s been over time. We I’m constantly seeing menus trying to tell stories about food, like turning meals and moments of eating into meaningful moments, moments that have pieces of conversation that we can share together. To go back to your point, you know, rather than having the iPad, let’s have the conversation at the table. Let’s make meaning together by breaking bread. And that seems consistent over time and over these different, you know, we were looking at menus of people going to space, or royal menus, you know, what do people eat in castles? And it was really amazing how consistent that was. You know, I loved a collection in the New York Public Library that’s annotated by a man called Bernard Freed and he went to random restaurants. He just he never went to the same one twice, but I mean just the local Chinese restaurant or the local hamburger place. And he solemnly annotated all of the meals of mid 20th century in his New York neighborhood, right, including the brand of cookie he had at home, if he didn’t have dessert at the restaurant.

CK: Well, were his reviews any good? Or he was just just describing what he had?

NC: Just describing and he described if the particular item he ordered was warm or hot, or if he liked it, or, you know, what his wife said about it. But that’s incredible. We just we don’t have that kind of information. You know, who would have taken the time just to describe and discuss the average restaurant in mid-century New York? You know, the fact that we have menus from 100 years ago already means that we’ve defied the logic of what those menus are and were that somebody has actually kept them. So, these things that were meant to be ephemera have defied the test of time because somebody’s gone to the trouble not just of saving them but figuring out how to curate them and preserve them. So, in and of itself, that’s already interesting.

CK: Nathalie, thank you. This has been fascinating. I’d love to see some of those beautiful menus. A few of them still exist. I think Grand Véfour if it’s still open in Paris, probably still has one of those big ones. But it’s, you know, it tells us a lot about who we were and who we are. Nathalie, thank you so much.

NC: Thanks so much. Lovely to have a conversation.

CK: That was Nathalie Cook, author of Taste and Traditions, a Journey Through Menu History. Now it’s time to take your questions with my co-host, Sara Moulton. Sara is, of course, the author of Home Cooking 101 and the star of Sara’s Weeknight Meals on public television, Sara, here’s a question, you have to be honest now, yes, what’s the one thing that really annoys you the most if you go out to dinner, besides any campaigns? But is there some little thing that really gets you something on the menu, something the waiter or the wait person says, or whatever.

Sara Moulton: Well, one of them has nothing to do with the food, so this is not what you’re looking for. It’s the noise. (Oh yeah, that’s true) and it’s not just because I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I go out with young people and we’re all screaming across the table. It’s stressful, so that. I am really sort of over performative dishes, you know, where it’s all bells and whistles and look at it and how it’s structured. You know, I’d rather eat a good bowl of pasta in a rustic Italian restaurant than some fancy little tasting menu, and the waiter comes out and tells you 500 things about it, and you’re you I’m get on with it. You know, it’s just boring.

CK: Well, I used to complain continuously about restaurants because I just like complaining and like, those are some of the things. But I have to say, I feel so bad that, you know, the cost of food is high. It’s really hard to find people. The labor costs have gone up. Running a restaurant, these days is really so hard, and so I have, which is totally out of character for me. I’ve decided I’m just going to give everybody works the restaurant a break, because it’s such a hard business, it’s possible, and they’re charging so much money now, so which is hard for the you know, customers. And I just wish people would not try to fancy up a dish and just keep it simple yeah, right. But, boy, that’s a tough business. So anyone who works in that business, yeah? God bless them. Yeah. All right, there we go. Take a call.

SM: Welcome to Milk Street. Who’s calling?

Caller: Hey, this is Carly from Fredericksburg. How are you?

SM: Good. How are you?

Caller: I am awesome. Thank you. And

SM: And you have a question for us.

Caller: I do. So, I’m getting about 12 gallons of milk every week from my dairy goats, and I normally make cheese and yogurt, but I seem to have gotten a little bit bored, and I was just wondering what you would do if you had a bunch of milk. I’m running out of creative ideas. Wow,

SM: Wow, that’s an awful lot. Do you have to use up all 12 gallons in an alternative fashion every week?

Caller: Well, I mean, we drink some like that, you know, I make my husband chocolate milk, and he drinks that. But aside from that, I’m just turning it into dairy products. And, you know, you can only eat so much cheese before you are like, you know, I’m done with cheese right now. So,

SM: Wow, this is like a bad dream

CK: How big is your flock of milker goats?

Caller: So, I only have three goats milking right now. I could have up to 10 at any given time

SM Oh, dear.

CK: Oh lord. Friends of mine in Vermont, in my town, have usually three or four milkers at a time, and they make cheese. But having 10 sounds like

SM: Well, I think you’d have to go into the goat cheese business. I think it’s time to set up shop.

CK; Can’t you sell the milk to somebody who makes cheese?

Caller: I could, if I wanted to jump through a whole bunch of legal hoops. So, there’s the raw milk issue in Virginia.

CK: Or you could buy a couple of pigs and feed it to the pigs, or your young bull calves. Someone mentioned to me once about making evaporated goat’s milk (that turns into carrot milk?). And then you can it.

SM: Oh, can it.

CK: Yeah, it probably has to be done under pressure.

SM/CK: Then what does she do with the cans? Well, they will store forever. she could stack them up, open the friends out of room, a huge store of evaporated coat milk, I don’t know.

Caller: The interesting thing about that is that I don’t believe that you can officially, safely pressure can any dairy products. You know, there’s the whole rebel canning movement that says that you can can anything you really try. I would be a little bit hesitant about that. I’ve been trying to make a bunch of chowders. I made your yogurt flatbreads,

CK: Right. Well, that doesn’t use much, yeah, if I was doing this, I would find a farmer nearby who could use the milk to feed whatever they’re raising and have him or her pick it up every week. That’s what I would do. And then you do a little barter, right? You get something back from them

Caller: Oh, maybe I can turn it into bacon. That’d be awesome.

CK: Yeah, you give milk and you get bacon back. I mean, that’s how it would work in our town, just a barter arrangement, yeah, that’s what I would do. It’s

SM: It’s just, I mean, you could do anything with goat milk that you do with milk, but it’s still vast amounts.

CK: I’ve got it. (What?) Cleopatra didn’t she used to take baths and milk. (There you go). Take a 12-gallon bath every week. (Yeah, I like that). Now. There you go and live it up. I thought it is wasteful, but, you know, life is short… anyway

SM: I think that was the best suggestion.

CK That was pretty good. Yeah,

Caller: I think going in for bacon would be pretty miraculous as well.

CK: I think that’s what I would do.

Caller: Yeah, I’ll try them both

CK: Goats milk into bacon. All right,

SM: Right, there you go. All right.

Caller: All right. Thank you.

CK: Take care.

SM: Yes, yeah, bye.

CK: Welcome to Milk Street. Who’s calling?

Caller: This is Natalie from Menominee, Michigan.

CK: How are you?

Caller: I’m perfect thanks. How are you?

CK: I’m not perfect. So that’s good. This will be good. How can we help?

Caller: Great. Well, I’m trying to maintain a vegan diet, but I’m allergic to or reactive to vinegar, lime, lemon. What the heck do I make salad dressing out of

CK: Wait, wait, wait, wait, so what happens if you have lime juice in something, you start to sneeze, or something, or your stomach bothers you, or

Caller: No, my whole nose will just clog up, and then I can’t breathe. And if it’s close to nighttime, then that’s like sleep apnea. It’s in trouble. I just rather not have that. Yeah, it’s awful.

CK: This is the tough one. Well, okay, let me start with this. My wife’s family, some of them live in Austria. They often dress salads with just grape seed oil. They have almost no vinegar on them at all. So, you can dress lettuce with oil. You don’t have to have vinegar. There’s lots of other things you can add. You know, like olives and capers, but they’re all going to have some amount of acid or something in them, mustard, which I know the French love to put in their dressings. Are you allergic to mustard?

Caller: Well, mustard has a little vinegar in it, so I don’t know if I’m reactive to that or not. I could try a little bit and see,

CK: Yeah, if you put a little mustard in with oil and whisk it up with a little salt, etc, see if that works too. I mean, you can make a creamy dressing out of any number of things, and you can just skip the acid all together, right? I mean, you could use silken tofu, you could use right mayonnaise. You could do yogurt, lots of other things. It’s always nice to have a little sharpness in there, but you could just forego it, right? Sara?

SM: Yeah, I mean, I was going to ask you, is orange juice also verboten?

Caller: I can have orange juice. I can have pineapple. It’s just so weird.

SM I’ve done dressings where I’ve reduced the orange juice. Of course, I’ve also added a little bit of acid to it, but even that would bring you some acid without, I guess, hurting you. Reduced it gets thicker, you know. So, it’s sort of like the orange juice version of balsamic, but it’s orange juice that might be something you want to consider. You could also maybe add something like horseradish, graded fresh horseradish, (grated fresh horse radish that’s what. Either way, after about half an hour), loses all its potency. So, you have to grade it fast. You have to grade it to order. Or ginger is another thought, because ginger can really we’re looking for something sharp in your salad dressings that will point things up. If you were trying to get some flavor from somewhere, you could add a tiny bit of toasted sesame oil, which would also point up the flavor. That would go beautifully with reduced orange juice. And then there’s one other thing, but it’s not so easy to get, which is called Virgo juice. And it’s the Pressed Juice of unripened yeah, it’s French, fresh juice of unripened grapes, and it’s very low acid. That is another thought. (That’s a good idea), yeah, for sure, what Chris said to begin with is, it’s amazing what salt can do to replace other things. So, you know, at the very least, make sure you have some good quality salt. Malden and salt.

CK: That makes me think. When I do salad dressings, I sprinkle very coarse salt, like sea salt, on the lettuce and toss it and you get those pops of salt. I don’t use a kosher salt or a fine salt big, big, big grains of Sarah said Malden or whatever. Yeah, sprinkle that over. That’ll help too. Yeah, that’s a good tip.

SM: So anyway, good luck. All right, you’re in a bad spot, yeah. Okay,

Caller: Thank you for this. I’ll let you know if anything works. All right, yes, take care. Bye, now

SM: Bye, bye.

CK: This is Milk Street Radio. If you’re having trouble with supper or breakfast or lunch, give us a ring. The number is 855-426-9843 one more time. 855-426-9843, or just email us at questions at milkstreetradio.com. Welcome to Milk Street who’s calling?

Caller: This is Sarah in Lexington, Kentucky.

CK: How are you?

Caller: I’m great. This is wonderful to talk to you.

CK: Well, you’ll never know it could go south at any second. How can we help you?

Caller: Well, we live in Lexington now, but our family is from Wisconsin and does a lot of fishing, mostly for panfish. I don’t know if you’re familiar with panfish, but they might be sunfish or bluegills or crappies, they’re wonderful. Our family has always generally breaded and fried them, and we get gifted a few bags of frozen pan fish filets. Just the filets themselves. I’m hoping that you all can help with other suggestions of recipes I can look for to use these wonderful pan fish filets. I look for recipes for white fish, but a lot of times they’ll call for really thick filets, like a one-inch-thick filet of cod. And I just don’t think I can use these in recipes like that, since, you know, we’re lucky if they’re a quarter inch thick, and they can be really thin out to the edges, so I really don’t want to end up with a sad, overcooked fish dish. And I’m wondering if you can think of styles of cooking or dishes or recipes that you think I might be able to use this pan fish in place of the fish that’s called for.

CK: I have one great idea, one medium idea, one bad idea. So, I’ll just prefer, sorry, I just got back from Italy. So, my best idea is, of course, in Italy, as you know, they tend to fry whole, very small fish, and they’re phenomenally good as a first course. And I’ve had perch, for example, you know, small white perch, those, if you breaded them or flour them, excuse me, and fried them would be crispy and just absolutely delicious. I was at a restaurant on a lake in Umbria, and they make a tomato base, tiny bit of garlic, some onion, etc, some herbs they had, like birch there, and they threw in some filets at the end with some other fish. They used whatever they had, and essentially made a soup, or, I guess, a fish stew out of that, my bad idea, we’re not bad. Was a Panzanella, which was a bread tomato salad, you know, with herbs, and it was delightful, and everything else, a little bit of onion. And one version she made was with fish added to it, cooked fish. I kind of would prefer to stick with the tomatoes in the bread. But Sara, do you have three ideas? One of them terrible.

SM: I don’t know if I have three ideas, but I will say that my favorite fish to cook is a very thin fish, like the kind you’re describing. I love fish, but when you get a thick piece of fish, white fish in particular, like a cod fish or something, it’s sort of boring in the middle. You know, years ago, when Paul Prudhomme was doing his blackened fish in New Orleans and I attempted a few times at home, you know. So, what that was is he dipped the fish in Cajun seasoning, or Creole seasoning, and then, you know, get the skillet really, really hot out cast-iron skillet, and then put it in and basically blacken it on both sides. I actually do that fairly frequently, and the fish you’re talking about is perfect for that. So, you can get your favorite creole or Cajun seasoning. And, you know, you season the fish first with that. And then I always dip, particularly a thin fish like that in instantized flour, which gives it a little bit of a granular texture. And then I don’t cook it, you know, in really, really high heat and blacken it, but I sauté, and it’s yummy. And the husband loves that little squeeze of lemon or lime. Is great. Also, that kind of fish is classic maniere, which is the French maniere means, in the style of miller’s wife, because it’s flour, you know, if you just did plain flour, season it, first, put it in the flour, sauté it, then you do a lifetime supply of brown butter, you’d be like Julia Child.

Caller: Well, I love brown butter, (yeah). Oh, it’s always good.

SM: Oh, it’s and it’s what’s so great about it, besides, you get a higher ratio of outside flavored inside fish is it takes no time at all to cook two minutes a side. (Okay) yeah, so it’s just really don’t overcook them.

Caller: I do like the idea of soup and the tomato-based dish that you were talking about earlier, too, Chris, because it would be a completely different flavor profile than what we’re used to.

CK: It’s also improv dinner, right? You can make a tomato base in 15 minutes,

SM: very quickly.

Caller: Yeah, I’ll try to be adventurous.

SM: We’ll all try to be more adventurous. Let’s face it, we get stuck in ruts. Yeah,

Caller: I will definitely do that. That sounds wonderful.

CK: All right, thanks for calling. Hopefully that was helpful.

Caller: Thank you so much. That was wonderful.

SM: Thank you, Sarah, okay,

CK: You’re listening to Milk Street Radio. If you’re looking for more culinary inspiration, we put together a collection of our all-time favorite Milk Street recipes. You can find that at Milk Street, Radio.com, coming up how a world-famous architect thinks about restaurant design. This is Milk Street Radio. I’m your host, Christopher Kimball, right now, it’s my conversation with David Rockwell. He’s a world-renowned architect, also the creative mind behind the Dolby Theater, the Jet Blue terminal at JFK and the redesign of Grand Central Station. He’s also designed over 500 restaurants around the world. David, welcome to Milk Street.

David Rockwell: Well, thank you. Nice to be here.

CK: So, growing up, I loved Abbott and Costello, and I noticed. I just have to ask about this. Your mother was a vaudeville actress, (yeah) who toured with Abbott and Costello.

DR: She did. I’m the youngest of five boys, so by the time I came around, you know the theater history had turned into theater myth. But she had toured with both George Jessel, (really) and Evan and Costello. And we don’t have enough time to go into all of that, but I had wanted to do theater for, I mean, since I was a kid, studied architecture, also studied theater, just because I was so in love with. the Community Theater she created.

CK: So, when I walk into a restaurant, there are things I look for right away, which are telltale signs to me of a well-run restaurant or well-designed restaurant. So, in the first 10 or 15 seconds you walk in the door, what are the types of things you notice that I probably would not pick up on.

DR: Well, I do think, from a design point of view, the first 10 or 15 seconds are critically important in the same is true in a theater performance, where I think you get a sense of whether there’s a distinct point of view that feels like it’s about you, that feels like it’s welcoming. So, you know, there are things I look for, like, what’s the quality of light? Is it a room that has multiple rooms that you’re going to sequence through? Where are the great seats? Is it a restaurant where there are bad seats? But mostly it’s a feeling. And I think you know, if a designer really does his job well, and we understand the concept and the food and the chef and the location, I think when you come in, you feel a sense of welcome, even if it’s a very buzzy, noisy place. In that case, you’re leaning forward instead of leaning back. But I think it feels consistent and authentic. And I am, personally, one of my idiosyncrasies is very tuned to color temperature. But I do think color temperature in a restaurant, and lighting in particular, has a lot to do with painting the room when you come in and looking at what kind of focus there is at the table, so you’re looking at the big view and the little view at the same time, and sort of calculating where is your place in that.

CK: You know, one of the things I’ve thought about is, when you walk in a restaurant, do you feel immediately that you’ve been welcomed into the belly of the beast? Right? You walk in and there’s a bar right there, and there are people at the bar, and you’re sort of almost in the middle of the scene versus a restaurant in Boston. I won’t name where you walked in. You couldn’t see past the podium. There was a wall behind it. It was all gray, and you had no sense that you were in a restaurant. So is being welcomed into the society of that restaurant an important first impression for you.

DR: It’s the number one thing. And I think each restaurant requires a different version of that, trying to create a place that feels like you’re welcomed into what that place is and what their point of view. You know, Union Square Cafe having been such a fan of the original when we were asked to do the new one, you can imagine the amount of thought and backstory I put into with Danny and his team, thinking about what was the DNA of that welcome.

CK: So how did you and I like it a lot, but how did you manage to go from small and compartmental to big, high two levels, lots of light, very different space. How do you deal with that big space?

DR: Well, we always start with lots and lots of research. And in the case of Union Square, you know, we had the living research there, I had been a guest for many years, and Danny likes to tell the story, which may be true, that for many years, I kept going there for lunch, saying, when are we going to work together? I don’t remember quite like that, but it’s possible that, you know, I was pushy about it because I loved what he did. You know, my whole studio is based on trying to create places where people really want to gather, and Danny seemed like a master of that. So, there were a couple things we looked at to take that space and kind of infuse it with Union Square Cafeness. One of them was the bar is the length of the original bar in the floor. For instance, the flooring is a series of rectangles and squares that are related to the proportions of the room in the original Union Square Cafe. So, we just went piece by piece with a model, not big gestures, but a series of smaller gestures that started to weave together how this new place would take on the continuing life of the original but have something new as well.

CK: You know, the world of restaurants, fine dining has changed a lot since COVID. How do people thinking about starting a restaurant or renovating restaurant, think about the investment, you know, at the height of the restaurant craziness, you know, millions of dollars would go into this. Do people think about smaller budgets now, or is this a very stratified business where the top people still spend oodles of money, and then there’s fewer of those places now?

DR: Well, I haven’t met the people who don’t care about spending the money. We haven’t gotten to that stage yet, and the reality is so much of the money, such a high percentage of it, is in everything that the public doesn’t see, mechanical systems, kitchen ventilation, power requirements, and those are the elements that, in some ways, create the armature for being comfortable. You know, all of the basic human comforts that go to how you feel in the space, forgetting about what it looks like, and the higher end restaurants are spending more on better systems for all of that, and then you’re left with, you know, maybe 30% of the budget that goes to everything the customer touches and feels. And the smaller the space, the more precision you have to have about where you’re going to put those resources. And what are those elements that create that sense of memory? I do think in some ways it’s good to study what places create those memories. What are those light fixtures like? What height are they at? All of those things that are part of creating an experience where you just have a great memory of the meal and the room supported that.

CK: I will not eat in a restaurant where I can’t hear my partner, my wife, whatever friend talking at the table, or I have a hard time hearing them. But on the other hand, in most cases, I don’t want, you know, silent as an oyster restaurant, (right) How do you dial that in properly? And what are some of the techniques you can use to dial in the exact amount of noise you want?

DR: Well, you know, restaurant tours have wildly different opinions about that. And there’s, there’s many factors. Is that architect you can suggest or provide. One is sound absorption. So, you know, traditionally, fabric walls, which La Tête d’Or has those upholstered walls, and then there’s a million different ways to do acoustical material on the ceiling, from cork to fabric wrap panels to something called tectum tablecloths help, although, you know, I guess the majority of the restaurants we’re doing right now don’t have tablecloths. And then, you know, there are sound you want. You want the clink of glasses. You want the sense of like urban life. The things that will ramp up the level of sound in a restaurant also is density of tables, how close the tables are together. But there’s a number of strategies we try and use, and you just try and do your best to balance those.

CK: So, I assume the dining public exists in all sorts of different categories. That being said, if you look back over your career, are there distinctly different periods where people wanted different things in terms of restaurant design, or there has always been a very eclectic group.

DR: I think New Yorkers are a demanding group. And I think you know what I fell in love with about New York when I was 11, and first came here and had my first meal in New York and went to my first show was the magnetic quality of the ground floor of New York. I mean, if I think back from the beginning my earliest thoughts about restaurants, I certainly was always interested in sense of entry and drama. So, at Sushi Zen, we embedded glass rondelles in the floor. It was 25 feet wide with no natural light and a silk dimensional mural that we had from the Santa Fe Opera Festival. And I think that sense of welcome that happens with the glow of a back bar works is a very contemporary language or is thinking about the Odeon or ___ when we are sort of classic restaurants. So, I think by the time you and I could talk about a trend and isolate as a trend, it’s sort of moved on and morphed to something new. But that sense of entrance and being able to make an entrance feels like a very new work experience.

CK: How do you measure or balance the success of a restaurant between the design, the food and the overall point of view? Is it because when all things align, it is successful, and when they’re out of alignment. It’s not or how do you consider that?

DR: Well, it’s a great question, because, you know, you can control where walls are. You can control a million elements of what we do. What you can’t control is the sort of net sum of all of it. Danny Meyer likes to say, David, you know, you you birth the kids, but we have to raise them. So, I think, like, the building block of what makes up a place where you want to be in public and have kind of that sense of instant community that happens in a restaurant has always been the thing that’s interested me, and no one issue taking too much foreground, like you really don’t want to go see a musical where you come out saying, boy, those sets were great. That’s not a good thing for a musical, and it’s not really great for a restaurant when the environment steps over the hospitality and there’s many, many things that go into designing a restaurant and having to be successful that you’ll never see, like service stations being close enough that they can see the guests or the kitchen being situated in where the food gets there that’s warm, the lighting presenting the food in the right way. Those are all elements that go to creating this unique creation that then takes a life of its own.

CK: David, this has been, this has really been interesting. You know what a journey 30 40, years through restaurants. Thank you so much.

DR: I appreciate it. Thanks for talking to me.

CK: That was architect and designer David Rockwell. You know, restaurant architects do their best to enhance the dining experience, but sometimes things get really out of hand. Dinner in the Sky, for example, serves food on a platform 150 feet above the ground under in Norway is partially submerged. Or visit the Maldives where you can eat totally underwater, surrounded by sharks. Other restaurants are located on the top of the mountains, floating on the ocean, or they’re built from scratch every year out of ice and snow. But when dining in the sky, I do have one question, if I drop my napkin from a platform 15 stories high, is someone going to retrieve it? You’re listening to Milk Street Radio up next; Adam Gopnik celebrates a culinary icon.

Hi, I’m Christopher Kimball, and this is Milk Street Radio. I’m joined now by JM Hirsch to talk about this week’s recipe, tiramisu. JM, how are you?

J M Hirsch: I’m doing great.

CK: You were in Italy recently for quite a long time. And I think one of the most interesting journeys you made was to find quote, unquote, authentic tiramisu. So, you know, tiramisu can be ethereal and heavenly and it can be, well, pretty awful. I think it’s one of those dishes where the good ones and the bad ones have a massive gulf between them. So where did you go? And what is the real tiramisu like?

JMH: Yeah, you know, I went to Italy thinking I didn’t like tiramisu, and that’s just because I’ve only had it here in the United States. So I went to Treviso, which is a very small town in the Veneto region in northeastern Italy and is the town where it is supposedly from now. As for the origin story of tiramisu in this town, a lot of people say it’s actually a recent creation, probably dating back only to the middle of the last century, but my favorite story is that it goes back to the 1800s where tiramisu was served as an aphrodisiac in a local brothel, and that for years after, because of this association, people would only eat it at home because of the shame associated with the dish. I’m not entirely sure that that story is true, but I just like it better.

CK: Look, I get oysters is an aphrodisiac. I don’t know, on some level, that kind of makes sense. But you know, mascarpone and biscuits and sugar. I think you probably just sit there and eat tiramisu all evening. I don’t know, you

JMH: You know, but I think one of the reasons I liked it so much is that it is so much simpler, so much lighter, so much cleaner tasting than the tiramisu’s we get here. You know, I went to Camellia bakery, which has been deemed to have the best tiramisu in all of Italy, and they are adamant that there should only be six ingredients, and that is egg yolks, mascarpone, cocoa, powder, sugar and espresso. That’s it, of course. The way they combine those ingredients. Ingredients matters greatly, and so one of the really important differences is that there’s no cooking, no cooking whatsoever. A lot of times in the United States, when the sugar and the egg yolks are whipped together, they’re cooked, and that creates a zabaglione. But in Italy, they never do this. They do not cook the eggs and the sugar. They whip them raw, and the difference is a much cleaner, much lighter cream filling for the tiramisu. After they whip the sugar and the eggs, they then whip in a tremendous volume of mascarpone. And that’s really one of the important differences here, is that the eggs and the mascarpone by volume far, far outweigh the amount of sugar. So, the resulting dish is actually far less sweet than what we’re used to, and I think it’s really one of the reasons I loved it so much. You could actually appreciate the nuances of the flavor, because you weren’t just getting blown away by a sugar bomb,

CK; And you probably weren’t getting a piece that was bigger than your head. I assume it’s a more modest serving.

JMH: Absolutely, you know, here in the United States, we’re accustomed to tiramisu being more like a trifle that, you know, you kind of scoop a serving out of, but in Treviso, it’s all single serve. So, it’s almost like going to an ice cream shop where you get, you know, a small cup of ice cream. But that’s how it’s assembled. They literally assemble each individual tiramisu in a single serve portion, and that assembly is actually a very important part of the recipe as well. You know, we think of it as kind of saturated with espresso, but in fact, the biscuits, or the lady fingers, as we often call them, that are layered with that kind of cream filling, are only ever so briefly soaked in espresso like fraction of a second, and then they’re layered with the cream filling. And then the important part, again, is the aging of the tiramisu. You never assemble it and eat it on the spot. It’s very important that after assembly it is refrigerated overnight. And the reason is, these lady fingers, these biscuits, should never have any crunch or texture left by the time you eat it. They’re supposed to almost just merge with the mascarpone filling, and so they refrigerate them overnight, and only just before a serving does the cocoa powder get dusted on them.

CK: Yeah, that sounds like on every level, a big improvement. I guess it’s one of those things you don’t want to let sit around for two or three days either, because then does get a bit soggy, but my guess is leftover tiramisu is not something that’s ever happened. History of tiramisu. JM, thank you. A journey to discover the real tiramisu, less sugar, smaller portions and more authentic flavors. Thank you.

JMH: Thank you. You can get the recipe for [email protected]

CK: This is Milk Street Radio. Now it’s time to check in with the ever-thoughtful Adam Gopnik. Adam, how are you?

Adam Gopnik: I am well, Christopher, I had a joyous occasion not long ago, which is that I got to celebrate my father’s 90th birthday in Berkeley, California. And while I was in Berkeley, something happened that made me think of you.

CK: Oh, I was there back in the late 60s, by the way. Did someone remember what I was up to?

AG: Yes, absolutely. It’s a little piece of People’s Park that still has your name on it. (Probably) Well, actually, it’s not unrelated to the late 60s, because the lovely thing that happened is that we got to sit down to dinner with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. I’ve known Alice for a long time, when she was trying and failing to get a restaurant project started in Paris. It coincided with the years we were living in Paris, and I have a keen and poignant memory of having my daughter Olivia, then six months old or a little older, maybe eight months old, on my lap stuffing foie gras and green beans into her mouth and Alice, who could not imagine a more beautiful sight in the world, literally broke down in tears at this beautiful moment, the sun pouring in all of us in Paris and a baby relishing the joys of French cuisine. So, we’ve been friends for a long time, but we had never actually sat down together at her legendary restaurant. So, it was astounding to spend time with her and hear her talk about what it was like to start a restaurant in 1971 whose core definition from the beginning was that it would be an expression not of a chef’s recipes, and certainly not of an imported cuisine, French or Italian, but that it would be about the American farm. It would be about the local terroir of Northern California. And I read, when I was thinking about her, a lovely thing that Greil Marcus, the great rock and roll critic who was around at that time, Greil wrote that every dish was to be made to bring out the essense of what it was. Each serving of fish or chicken or asparagus or nectarines be a thing in itself, made to orchestrate, to dramatize what it was, made to give up its secret, lovely piece of descriptive prose by a writer whose major preoccupation is usually the esthetics of punk rock.

CK: But I’ve spoken to Alice about the beginning, and what she said to me was she really started it to have a meeting place for artists and writers. It was supposed to be a place where you very French, you sat around and talked. And I think that was at the heart and soul of Chez Panisse wasn’t it

AG: That’s exactly right. And one of the things she said over the course this lovely dinner, was that the key to the whole place, which nobody understood at the time, and to some degree, people still don’t understand, is not that it’s a restaurant, but that it’s a house. (Yes) it’s a home. Now, that was an entirely new idea then, and it was central. She didn’t want to do it. And any place whose architectural, and if you like, spiritual identity wasn’t just, as you say, a home or a house. In the first instance, Alice talked about two things, Chris. She talked about farmers, local farmers, local fishermen, and what they could provide you. And she talked about homes. She talked about Chez Panisse, as I said a moment ago, as a house, not as a business. She talked about her commitment, which in those days, was very unusual. You know, was still a time when, if you were at an expensive French restaurant in New York, they boasted about having flown the Dover sole in from France. Hard for us to believe now, because our tastes and our temperaments have been so revolutionized by Alice and her legacy.

CK: Well, I did ask her, Alice, does this mean you never eat French cheese? I mean, I think she’s open to eating foods around the world. It’s just an emphasis on local but I don’t think she’s giving up all French cheese and wine at this point.

AG: No, I don’t think she’s giving up French cheese, and she’s certainly not giving up all French wine. And I think you’re absolutely right, because, and it’s important to point out that she’s not a she’s not pious at all, not pious about the strictures of localism, more the absolute religion of seasonalism. But it was just, it’s a reminder to spend time with her of how very, very different the food world was, and every sense before she came along to help reform it, she combines to a degree that I find always inspiring, enormous purity of spirit that isn’t puritanical.

CK: Well, here’s what I my takeaway is from her, right? She’s been doing this for 50 years, right, right? And what she has, which is, I think what America loves is sticking to-its. She stuck to her beliefs, she stuck to her food, she stuck to her restaurant she wasn’t opening you know, in other places around the world,

AG: there’s no airport Chez Panisse,

CK: There’s no airport Chez Panisse. And so I think that’s her great strength, is consistency, and going the full length of her career with the same principals in the same restaurant, that’s what I take away from her, because there are times when she did sound a little pious, you know, in the Edible Schoolyard, I’m going like, well, that’s Berkeley, but she stood her ground and convinced me. The last time I spoke to her, I came away feeling very deeply about what she’s done because she keeps doing it, and that, and that’s what I admire most about Alice Waters.

AG: Well, that’s a beautiful point. You know, Alice is an instance of the power of passionate perseverance.

CK: Yeah, and the problem is to do something simply is the hardest thing in the world.

AG: Yes, and it’s something we all struggle with. And that Alice, I think, would be fair to say, believes you build simplicity on a foundation of virtue, you get the rewards of simplicity if you are unsparing with yourself and your suppliers and your whole team about the perfection of ingredients. We had a wonderful conversation about ripeness, because she is deeply offended by what she sees as the fake ripeness of so much fruit that we’re sold, which is made to seem soft but is not actually ripe in the sense of being sweet and ideal, right, exactly. But let me just add, if I might, the last time I had been in Berkeley was to be at a lecture by a wonderful Canadian philosopher named Rachel Barney that was all about art and craft. You know what makes an artwork, an artwork and a work of craft, a work of craft. And one of the things I was saying in my response was that it’s always a snaking, fluid history, something that’s art form at one point, tapestry making becomes a craft at another point, and then is revived as as an art. There’s no simple division. But I also was making a point that I think is true, which is very often in the history of modern times, when we try to turn back to craft, when we. celebrate the artisanal. There’s often an element of comedy about it, because we live in modern times. We don’t live in a time where the handmade and the hand crafted is necessarily the optimal or certainly not always the available. But you know what, Chris and this speaks to your craft and to mine. That’s not true about cooking. They’re the artisanal succeeds. They’re the belief in the power of the handmade, of the self-wrought, of the thing that you bought at 10am and are now preparing at 6pm there’s nothing precious about that. That’s a living experience for you and for me, for millions of home cooks around the world, and that was significantly accented that artisanal Revolution by Alice, and I, bless her, for it.

CK: Well, I think you might say about cooking, which is maybe unique. It’s something you do with your hands, and it’s something you do with your head, and it’s both of them have to be there, right?

AG: Yes, exactly. Cooking you can’t do conceptually. You have to do it artisanally with your hands. And the only thing I’d add to your formula, Chris is you have to do it with your hands and your head and your heart. And Alice Waters does that

CK: Hands, head and heart, that goes pretty well together. Thank you so much.

AG: Always a pleasure to talk to you, Chris.

CK: That was Adam Gopnik, staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery. That’s it for today to hear all of our episodes. Please go to Milk Street Radio.com, or wherever you find your podcasts, we put together a collection of our all-time favorite recipes, from Mexican sweet corn cake to no fry Neapolitan, eggplant parmesan. You can find that collection at Milk Street Radio.com can also follow us on Facebook at Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. On Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We’ll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen questions and thanks, as always, for listening.

Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio is produced by Milk Street in association with GBH co-founder Melissa Baldino, executive producer Annie Sensabaugh, senior editor Melissa Allison, senior producer Sarah Clapp, Associate producer Caroline Davis with production help from Debby Paddock. Additional editing by Sidney Lewis, audio mixing by Jay Allison and Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole Massachusetts. Theme music by Toubab Krewe, additional music by George Brandl Egloff, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio is distributed by PRX.





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