Burying the Hatchet Job, Part II

On the Todd English style…

RICHMAN: Will you explain to me why your cooking is so good? I’ve never been able to figure it out. Will you tell me why it’s good? Because these complications are unlike any other complications. They’re not subtle complications. They’re complications in which everything should clash with everything else, but they never did.

ENGLISH: Sometimes they did, but most of the time…. The philosophy was that the most important thing was right here [gestures to mouth]. When you brought it to your mouth, when the tongue hit the palate, that flavor—that’s where you remember, and it was all about a lot of different things. It was about hot and cold, it was about texture, it was about salt, sweet, sour. It was all those things. It was crunch, it was soft, it was always, always bottom-line moist. It was nurturing. You’d feel good eating it.

RICHMAN: I think a lot of chefs thought they were doing what you were doing, and it didn’t match up just right. And it does [match up]. At least it did for me. I never found a mistake.  

ENGLISH: I studied music early on in my life, classical music, and one of the things I remember a teacher teaching me was the same thing. He was obsessed with Mozart and it was very simple things that made one big sound. You think about the music, and I applied that to the food I made. I didn’t know any better. I just did it. Let me just try all these different flavors. Getting the peak flavor out of whatever that was, and then combining it with that.

TRAVERSO: Do you have clear memories of how things taste?

ENGLISH: I can taste everything in my head. You can talk to me about food right now and I can taste it.

RICHMAN: It’s not very easy, but if you can imagine it then you can eliminate dozens and dozens of dishes before you even make them. I remember Gilbert Le Coze [of Le Bernardin]…

ENGLISH: He was the best.

RICHMAN: …but he’d make a thousand dishes before he’d put one out. He was great, but he didn’t have that. Whereas…

ENGLISH: I remember him doing some of the most stellar dishes. He blew me away. I remember going there and I sat next to Dolly Parton, which was, like, a bonus. A double bonus! I’ll never forget that, but I remember the dishes. It was the first time I had sea urchin.

RICHMAN: It was the first time I ever had sea urchin, too.

ENGLISH: Nobody was doing carpaccio of fish. Bass pounded out, with just a very simple dressing, but they came over with a pepper mill of coriander seeds and cracked fresh coriander over the top. Oh my God.

RICHMAN: No one had ever done that. But that was all about trying and experimenting. He wasn’t…he was a fisherman, really. But his food was perfect.

ENGLISH: Yeah, he was really amazing.

RICHMAN [to Traverso]: Can I tell about something [English] did recently? At Vegas Uncork’d [a food and wine festival] for Bon Appetit, they had this game: celebrity chefs against local, good chefs. So this was last year…

ENGLISH: First of all, let me preface this. I didn’t know Alan was going to be a judge. I said, “Oh shit, I’m screwed.”

RICHMAN: Because most of the time, he knew me for making fun of chain restaurants and expansionism and he never knew quite what to make of that “Boston Glob” story, whether I hated him or not. So I’m there and I’m a judge and they give a secret ingredient [to the chef], about which they probably had some indication, but they didn’t know exactly. That’s correct, isn’t it?

ENGLISH: Yeah.

RICHMAN: And his was cactus.

ENGLISH: I maybe worked with it once. Maybe.

RICHMAN: And this other guy takes a strip of beef and a strip of cactus and cooks them together, you know, the regular chef, and it’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with it. And what the hell, do you remember what you did with it? It was so great. You hollowed it out and used foie gras and then you had cactus with meat over the top and did this construction that should’ve taken six months to develop. You don’t remember what you did?

ENGLISH: I did a play on, I remember, it was like I made cactus French fries.

RICHMAN: But you also hollowed out a cactus and put some liquid in the center.

ENGLISH: Yeah, I don’t remember that.

RICHMAN: Well, I remember. It was a thing where I said, “This is the only guy who could’ve done that. I don’t know another chef who thinks in that way.” It was delicious and it blew the poor old ordinary chef away. It made no sense.  I don’t know how he thought of it, and he doesn’t even remember it.