Chef Mark Miller on Food as the Ultimate Intellectual Exploration | Conversations with Tyler

Welcome to this installment of Conversations with Tyler. Today the guest is Mark Miller, who's one of the most extraordinary food minds of our generation. It's hard to even summarize what Mark has done. I think of Mark as the modern founder of Southwestern cuisine. He's well known for having been the driving force behind opening Coyote Café, which transformed the Santa Fe dining scene. In Washington, D.C., where we are now, in the Panda Gourmet restaurant, well, Mark is best known for Red Sage, a Southwestern restaurant that was one of D.C.'s best for a long time. Mark has written numerous books on food, on salsas, on chili. He has the very best book on tacos. If you've ever seen a famous poster of all those chilies, the chilies poster, Well, Mark did that. Mark's been connected with a lot of restaurants. He originally studied anthropology at Berkeley. And I think of Mark's contribution as synthesizing anthropology, cooking, studying food through books, studying food through practice. He's lived in 20 countries, traveled in over 100, and he understands taste and sensation and context of food, its anthropological setting, combined with all this fantastic real-world experience. And on top of all that, Mark has been a food consultant for more companies than I can name. That's just my very brief introduction to Mark, and it doesn't begin to do him justice. We'll start the conversation in a moment. As our questioner for today's segment, we also have with us Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View. Megan is a longstanding friend of mine. In addition to her writing on politics and economics, Megan was arguably the first, very first economics blogger, and she is deeply involved in the food world. Megan, to me, each year writes the single best guide to kitchen equipment, what is new out each year. Anyway, we'll start by chatting with Mark, and then Megan will come in with some questions. So food worlds. I'm very interested in how you think about food worlds and this contrast between the food worlds of China, Japan, Tokyo, and South Korea. You told me you thought Seoul had the most interesting and creative food world of those three, and tell us why you think that.

I've been traveling to all three countries for approximately 40 years or more, so I've really seen them transform themselves, and I've also seen how they adapt and how they acculturate other international influences. So I've been going to Japan since I was a student at Berkeley, for, you know, since 1969 was my first trip. I've been going to China since the '70s. Seoul is the one that I know the least, but I've been following it for about 15 years. Recently, in May, I went to the big Seoul food show where I actually ate 100 food products I had never had before, which is interesting. But the other thing that happened was I realized that Seoul had moved in terms of its transformation of plasticity and creativity. There's a restaurant called Mingles. That every single dish was incorporating Korean ingredients, but in a very creative, modern way. And they were not afraid to move their food outside of the traditional vortex of what was seen as Korean food, and they were using Korean ingredients in a new way that was authenticating a cuisine. Now, in Japan, for instance— and they were doing pizza, they're doing coffee. They were doing very good pizza that's almost as good as you'd find, for instance, in Italy. In Japan, when you go to eat pizza, whether it's Neapolitan, either in Tokyo or Kyoto, you find that they get to a certain level of the form of it, but the flavor and the gestalt and the aesthetic, they can't quite get at it. They remain Japanese. The homogeneity of Japanese culture is its strength. It's also its weakness. In China, I've been going there and I've seen some data of one of the big companies that has 7,000 restaurants. We're seeing that they're using Western restaurants in order to create a sense of modernity and identity. Whether they'll really use it for their own personal things, right now, there is no other alternative. That social space that's open from children through going out, through celebrations and weddings, and the Western brands are the markers for Special— so Korea, though, I was surprised that first of all they've moved so quickly. And I— the last time I was there was 4 and a half years ago. I would have thought to get to this level would have taken them 20 years. Plus the level of Italian coffee, pizza, modern Korean, French was all exactly where we would be in the United States.

We'll get to Japan and China, but more on Korea. The alley food in Seoul and the rest of Korea seems so good to me. So if I walk down a back alley, there will be 20 different places I want to eat. Most of them will be outstanding. It might, for instance, be some of the best fried chicken in the world.

I would agree.

But what's the structure of the food world in Seoul and other parts of South Korea that have given rise to that?

Well, I think that what has happened— it's sort of like Samsung versus Sony. If you actually look at those of technological giants, which one has been able to maintain and innovate. And for some reason, you know, Sony lost its way. We remember when Sony was the innovative, you know, center of electronics. And yet today it's Samsung. I mean, not given— not the last one that came out, but basically I think the Koreans are forced out of their comfort zone because they have North Korea on their border. They have China to compete with, being aggressive, and they have the the finesse of Japan. So their context of competition, just in their own backyard, is such that it makes them— that they can't be in there. Japan is staying alone. It's in its own comfort zone, and it's going to stay there. China wants to move and be global, but it's a big stretch.

So you think Japan, in a way, has painted itself into a corner of perfection.

There's less—

You can have very, very good French food in Tokyo, arguably better than Paris.

Exactly.

It won't ever be getting any better.

But it'll be the same French food that I would have eaten in Paris in 1980.

Or you can have a quite good Mexican mole in Tokyo, I found. Or Singapore laksa you can have in Tokyo. And the person who makes it might have studied in Singapore for 5 or 6 years. He'll come back with the perfected recipe, but there's no other connection to that food world.

In Mexico, if we look at, for instance, part of Mexican food, like when Enrique at Cosme in New York is embracing modern Mexican and yet doesn't want to learn, you know, ancient traditional Mexican. And yet, it's moving beyond its roots, and it's becoming Mexican, whereas Mexico before was trapped in looking at Spain, looking at the US, and looking at other identity systems to validate its own food supply. Give a good example. Mezcal. My good friend Ron Cooper started Del Maguey. That's a company 20 years ago that Mexicans would not drink mezcal because it was associated with peasant Mexican. And today, when you go to Mexico City, the only thing you can drink is mezcal, because people want to be Mexican.

And it's trendy even in Washington, DC.

And soju in Korea. So the other— the problem was Korea was always in Japan's shadow. And they were basically beaten down and defensive. And I think right now, they're not.

So we just had a dialogue with Fuchsia Dunlop, who's written on Chinese cooking. The food world in China now, how do you see it? Is it getting better, getting worse? Is it headed to become— large corporations as in America making a lot of soulless food, or is it still on the way up?

That's a difficult question because restaurants that I know and Fuchsia knows, like Jesse, which is an old restaurant in Shanghai, I was there recently and I've been going to that same restaurant for 20 years, from when it had 4 tables by one family. Now they have multiple, but still. What Fuchsia talked about though is going to stop them is the level of status of someone joining a cooking profession. Din tai fong, the dumplings have gone down. So, what's happening now is even though they have this great tradition of cooking, the workforce is either coming straight from the countryside without being trained, the restaurants are making a lot of money because the people who are going there don't have trained palates, and so they just open up and be better. So, a traditional restaurant that takes a lot of training and to go into that, It's— you're not going to find the workforce. So, I think that they're going to go through a period right now of probably, I would call mediocrity.

But doesn't the low status of cooking in China in some ways protect them? So, it keeps pretensions out of the food world. It means people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds can become cooks. You can have a grandmother or a grandfather being a cook. You can walk along in Shanghai and find a place where they make dumplings and they simply roll them and no one there thinks of what they're doing as an art, but that ultimately enables free entry and gives people a bit of the freedom that they don't have in Tokyo. And thus I would say you should be more optimistic about food in China. Or no?

Except the dumplings that I used to see on the streets, don't forget. You know, I've been going to Shanghai since the '70s, late '70s. They were all over the place. Now they're very hard to find and the Chinese government, by, you know, is afraid of basically health reasons, is now controlling where food is basically exhibited and where food can be bought and sold. And so, a lot of the shops have moved into some of the department stores, for instance, and are there. But there used to be one amazing bao made out of smoked tofu and bitter greens and mustard, and I would just wait for my next trip to Shanghai. And, you know, for 15 years, I would go to the same place. It was in the French Quarter, same corner, and they had the best bao. And, you know, it's gone. And I, you know, looked all over, and I can't even find that bao. I can't find a noodle where I used to put out my hand with coins and people would say— they didn't have money then. And I used to go to the wet markets and just look at what other people were eating. And the last time I could do that was like maybe 15 years ago. I haven't seen a noodle— like 100 noodle stands. In Mexico you can still see it.

Of course.

Yeah.

But even there, street food is being pushed out of Mexico City somewhat.

But you go to a bus station in Monterrey and you can see 100 of the most best tacos in the world.

And we will get to that. But let's—

Anyway.

Asia for now still. Let's say someone comes to you, Mark Miller, you've been to over 100 countries, eaten in them for decades. They say, "I have 2 weeks to do a food tour in Asia. You should pick for me 3 cities." What are your selections?

I would pick— I know I would pick Jeonju— well, no, Jeonju is over. I would pick Seoul for sure. Seoul for sure. Okay, Seoul, that's covered. I would probably— I would pick Bangkok. Yeah. And a toss-up between— and I would pick Tokyo.

And you would pick Tokyo.

Yeah.

So Bangkok. Say someone's in Bangkok. They don't speak Thai. They're puzzled. They don't know what they're doing. They don't have a Thai friend. Conceptually, how should they think about finding the best food in Bangkok?

Go to the night markets. Go to— I mean, they're— but just the food on the street is just amazing. It's probably— the best in the world on the street. And it has the most variety. It's the freshest. The Thai people also are very clean. I've never been sick once. I've been eating food on the street forever. The Chatuchak, the largest market in the world, has 15,000 booths. And probably you can just spend 4 hours and eat 100 dishes. My record in Bangkok one day is 14 restaurants and 75 dishes. And I actually ate them all, not tasted them.

So just get a hotel room.

And probably spent less than we'd spend in Washington in one night.

Get a hotel in that part of Bangkok and just go eat there.

Yeah, I would go— there are some good books. There's a street hawker guide. There's some good bloggers who are out there. But I would not be afraid. And the thing is, always with street food, is always go— so the night food is the night food. The day food is the day food. But even some of that has moved into malls where the Thai people go. And they'll do a som tum for $0.50 or $1.50. And you might see 1,000 people. If 1,000 Thai people are eating there, it's safe to eat there.

But I have a bias against malls when it comes to Southeast Asian food. I tend to think malls are worse than street food.

No, but in Kuala Lumpur, they went through the entire country and they picked the best street food and put it into the mall so that people could experience the best of the entire country in one place. That's the reason that people go to the hotel. And also, when you go in Singapore, the Hyatt— and has streets. They're actually, they have 27 chefs, each from different parts of Singapore, running each station within that one dining room.

Malaysia or Singapore, which has better food?

Well, they're very close. I would say Penang is really interesting. And I would say right now though, Singapore, like Korea, is finally getting out of its straitjacket. I think there's some really modern, young Korean chefs that are incorporating Southeast Asian—

Singaporean chefs, you mean.

Singaporean chefs that are— they know Chinese food, they have access to the best ingredients, they know Western food, and they have their own tradition from Malaysian to the original— help me there— the Straits cuisine.

The Peranakan.

Peranakan cuisine, which is, I think, I always think that those cuisines that are older and that You know, if they have great weavings, they have great cuisine. Because I always say, you know, you're looking at one mentality. If they had a rich aesthetic tradition, I know that they had really interesting food.

So take Indonesia, they have great weavings.

Yes, I was—

I lived in Ubud in 1970, but I'm often disappointed by street food in Indonesia. It seems just the quality standards, a bit like the Philippines. They're not—

yeah, but they have great dishes like balinese duck that has 28 ingredients in it. It's amazing.

Yes.

It's amazing dishes. Those temple foods, those festival foods, I remember 3 days at the Feast of the Temple, the Feast of the Coconut Goddess, there were 127 dishes made in those 3 days.

Let me ask you some questions about chilies.

No, but the variety and richness, and we come back here to the United States and you have a hamburger and a hot dog.

Let me ask you some questions about chilies, the area where you've probably had the greatest impact. Of all food areas. So here I have some mulatto chilies. If you look at a lot of food recipes, if you make a Mexican mole, you will use more mulattos than any other kind of chili. Not always, but quite typically. Say, the Rick Bayless recipe. Yeah, well, why is that? What is it about this chili?

Well, first of all, Tyler, you've got to do what you want. You've got to open— first of all, you have to open them up because 90% of all chilies are mislabeled. Yes, that's one of the problems, so that you may Whatever it says on the package may or may not be true. The point is, is that mulattos, when you hold them up to the light, like this, see it's more purple and more reddish?

Yes, I do.

Port of that. That is not a mulatto.

So they defrauded me.

Yeah, that's an ancho.

Okay.

Because a mulatto will be more coffee-ish and more dark tones. And what a mulatto will do is actually have those flavonoids that are coffee and chocolate. And those in a mole are the undertones of the wide sort of structure, the wide foundation of those flavors that we really like. Now, the fruit tones and the capsicayos, and the spicy tones, are your basically accessories. The ancho is always the workhorse 'cause it carries the most fruit. The mulatto carries the coffee and chocolate, which is those more or less fermented, umami, more complex sort of flavonoids. And then we throw in some guajillos or arbols to brighten it all up and get it going.

So if I make a Mexican mole with these fraudulent mulatto chilies. What exactly will go wrong? You're a supertaster. You can tell the difference. What will be missing?

Well, the thing is, is that— can I— I'm going to taste this for a second.

With you, ish.

We can all taste together. First of all, whenever you taste the chili, you notice there's a vein here. You want to stay away from the veins always. They contain 60% of the capsaicin. So you always stay away from the veins, and even if you can't see them. The other thing is, this is old, you know? And this is what's called a grade C chili. —yes, it's small and it's dried and it's last year's crop, so they lose their perfume. They're like flowers, you know, they lose. So you— what you end up is you end up with the capsaicin. So this is a little bit bitter, do you notice? Correct. Like bitter tea, a little bit like Lapsang Souchong. There's a little bit of that smoky, woody, mushroomy flavor. Where's my coffee and chocolate? Where is it? It's not here. So if you use this in your recipe, you'll say it didn't come out well. You know what you didn't do? You didn't taste your ingredients. So you're not going to get that wonderful warm flavors that mulatto is supposed to have.

And if I want a real mulatto chili, how do I actually get one, given that 90% of it, according to you, is fraud? Well— Or at least misleading, or someone made a mistake.

You need to recognize when— just the— OK, the other thing, when you buy chilies, the thickness of the flesh is the most important thing. So all fruits, where do the tannins come from? Skins, seeds. And stems. So the thicker the flesh, the least percentage of tannin. And that's what Mexicans do. They look for the most pliable, they look how thick it is, and when you hold it up to the light, they can tell how ripe it was before it was dried, how much fruit flavor's gonna be there. Those are the big primeros. So when you're using a mole, you're really reincorporating fresh fruit complex tones into it. This, people, the chilies, the last thing they're looking for is heat. That's the last thing they're looking for.

Now, two other chilies. Here's the—

And also, they notice it's still bitter on the palate. Yes. It's like, yeah. And it tastes a little bit like the fruit leather that's kind of stale.

This one claims to be an ancho, but we're happy to hear your revisionist take on it.

This is bigger, for one. It's bigger. Yeah. And it's a little bit darker. It's got that really dark, dark, dark, almost black, blackish brown look. Well, you need to hold them up to the light as that tells you. So that's red like an ancho, okay? It's pretty even inside. There's no mold. If you get one moldy chili out of 40, it'll ruin the mole. A lot of people don't look for them. And when you rehydrate them, you taste the water. So this one, the leather again. It should taste like a fruit leather. Don't think chilies. See, what we're talking about with fuchsia, the paradigm and What you have in your head when you go after the taste is what you will taste. If you think chilies and go for heat, you shouldn't. You need to think fruit leather. Which fruit? Which fruit do you get? Tell me the fruits you get, not the spicy or not. Which fruits? Oh, it's interesting. Is it cherry, apple, blackberry, blueberry?

It's like a maybe apple, maybe cherry.

Not blueberry, not blackberry. No? But it's definitely like cherry. It's actually black cherry or sour cherry. And it has little bits of, what's in this and this, and there is this blackberry currant cassis, cassis almost, like the French cassis flavor at the bottom. The point is, is that when you work with ingredients, I don't care if it's chili, coriander, I have 4 different corianders from Indian to this, or cumins. When you cook an ethnic food, a poor chef, and I work in Guadalajara, What they're doing is they're controlling their palate. It may look like those ingredients are not important, they're not expensive, but they're very, very important. Of course. And that's why— this is not a bad ancho.

I would say B+. Okay, and here's supposedly a pasilla. Tell us the difference. Well, this is—

should be pasilla negro, should be longer for one thing. Okay, so— And it should be really— get those black currant, black fruits, blackberry. When you, again, think black fruit, Is this just an ancho?

Have I brought you 3 packages of anchos, actually?

Maybe. Seems that's what— Yeah, that's what it is. That's what it is. This is ancho everywhere.

A little thicker. They are really wide, then.

Yeah. A little bit. Mm. This was—

the second one was the best one. Second one was the best one.

Most fruit tones, freshest, and less tannic. What you don't want, like a bitter wine or a bitter— you don't want tannins.

And what's your economic theory of why these different chilies get mixed up and they're all anchos. More like—

notice the amount of licorice though, the amount of black licorice in this one. The reason is, is that the wholesalers, basically, uh, part of it is they're run a lot of times by non-Mexicans. Even if they're run by Mexicans, they only know the chilies that they grow up in their region. Like, I'm teaching in a seminar in Mexico City at the end of the month. Yes. And I can literally take out chilies and hand them to Mexicans that don't know what they are, even though they're from another area of Mexico.

How many different kinds of chiles do you know?

I once had a collection of about 250 in my garage, but they're not, some of them are the same, like arbols. Interesting story, so I was traveling around Bhutan, and I was going from town to town, and I had the chili book, this book with me, and there's this myth in Bhutan that chiles come from Bhutan.

Chili book, there it is.

And so I would show them that they're not from Bhutan and what they are, and they started tasting them. Then the next village I would go in, everybody was waiting for me, all the kids and the chefs. They would say, "Can I see the chili book? Are there really chilies outside of Bhutan? Are there chilies in the rest of the world? Can you tell us about chilies?" And every town I went to, it was the same thing. But here, a whole culture grows up with this history that they actually have had chilies. Of course, the Portuguese brought them into Thailand and then they migrated through the trade routes into Bhutan and that's how they got there. And they're only the cayenne varieties, they're only the arbols and so forth. They don't have any of these chilies. Even if you grow these chilies, for instance, let's say you grow this chili in Washington, D.C., it won't have the right flavor because it won't have the right ultraviolet, which has to be grown in the mountains above 4,000 or 5,000 feet, and it doesn't have an alkaline volcanic soil. That needs to be in— the Central Valley of Mexico makes the best anchos and pasillas in the world, and when you go to the market, San Luis, that one village in that one place makes the best in particular.

In what state is that?

In the state of Mexico. State of Mexico. Yeah. It's amazing, though, that they know their chilies.

Now, there's a debate in Mexico right now, you probably know about this, that China is exporting cheaper chilies to Mexico. They are. But some of the Mexicans don't like this. How will that play itself out? What's going to happen?

They don't have the flavor profile. Part of it is they basically are undercutting the market. So you see them in Oaxaca. They're anchos there, I can tell. They're very, very bitter. They're very alkaline-ish. They don't have a good flavor, but people are buying them because of economic necessity or that they don't really know the difference. But when I work in Sweden with the spice companies, I'm not allowed to buy Mexican chilies, which really offends me, because of the micro levels of bacteria that are on them, and they're not radiated. So we can only use, in Europe for instance, radiated things. They have to come from Peru. We don't buy them from Chile, but we buy them from Peru. But all my sauces I then have to adapt because I don't get great anchos or great mulatos. But you can adapt.

Now here's a jalapeño pepper, very popular in the United States. I can even go into a Giant or Safeway supermarket and they will have these. They seem to my untutored palate to at least be serviceable. Why is the jalapeño so popular in the United States?

It's popular because basically it's the chili of northern Mexico where most of the migrant workers come from. And it was part of the Tex-Mex tradition. It's very simple. You can use it fresh mostly, just right away. It doesn't require— you can, you know, cut it up, use it in the salt, you know, salsa frescas. You put in a blender, you can cook it in eggs. You— it's, it's a very chilli. It has, for me, a lot of flavor that is more akin to the green bell pepper with heat. I prefer poblanos, which I think are richer. And the poblano, as you know, is the predecessor.

We have one right here.

Yes, yes, the poblano. And this is actually where the bell peppers come, you know, well, it's a chili, yucatán, but this has much more depth. It doesn't taste like green pepper, it's not gaseous, and it has what I call real green chili flavor. There's only two in the world that have New Mexico. Yes, the true green chili grown at high altitudes. If you grow it at low altitudes, it's the Anaheim. This one again grows in Mexico So roasted, I think it's supreme. Now, interesting— It's one of my favorites. No, in China, they don't use it. They don't grow it. And even when I see it in the markets in China, I went through China with a chef once, and we bought the chilies, and we would roast them and actually put them into China. We took over the restaurant, because I got tired of eating the food that there was. So we were actually near Kashgar or something, and they couldn't believe of the flavor of a roasted chili that was cleaned without washing, and then strips of it put in a stir-fried lamb dish and how actually good it was.

Here's a habanero, splendid orange color. What's this good for? Nothing?

Isn't it too hot? Well, it's big, which bemoans me that it might not be the right one. So, well, it's got good smell. So, okay, the habanero is in the chinense family, the tropical family. You want to use it for its tropical tone. So what you do is you open it carefully, and capsaicin hits your nose here. You don't actually have to touch it. You can feel it right there. You should know the heat of every one. Go easily across the nose. Now here, though, you get a wonderful orange mango papaya scent. Now this roasted, and with the seeds and the veins taken out, reducing the heat by 60%. It's still gonna be hot because I have 20% left in the flesh, is going to actually round out and pull up all that beautiful tropical aromatic. And that will make that pineapple or salsa or jerk, that'll make it wonderful. You smell the tropicalness. Don't, don't touch where it is, but just smell and think orange, mango, fruit, pineapple. It's amazing.

What's the most underrated chili in the world?

Most underrated chili in the world? I would probably say the poblano. The poblano. Yeah, I can do 100 dishes I can do 100 salsas with this one chili.

How about from Peru, the aji amarillo? That might be one of my favorites.

Rocotos and aji amarillo.

There you go. And what makes them special?

Well, they don't have the depth and complexity. They're more jungle-y, which— chilies don't like high nighttime temperatures. They like cool nighttime temperatures. The rocoto, when you have a terradito, though, I mean, you've got to be in ceviche heaven. When you were just down in Lima— and I go there all the time— Those chilies though, when you make dried sauces out of them, they don't have a marriage of complexity like the Mexicans. The Mexicans, kind of like when you're in Bali and you're looking at a weaving from 1900 that's a triple ikat, the complexity of per knot, per this, is just what Mexicans attain with their sauces. The pre-Columbian Peruvians had every single method of weaving and yet, The Mexicans— the reason I'm attracted so much to Mexican food is that they literally have probably the most complex uses of spices and chilies in the world. No question. Nobody.

In Mexico, where's the best region to eat?

I would still say the 3 regions that I like— Puebla.

Yes, I'll be there in 2 weeks.

I think Puebla is underrated. I like the the mole verdes in the morning and the mole amarillos. Of the 7 moles, the mole amarillos there is better than Oaxaca. People talk about Oaxaca. Oaxaca is good, but not in the city of Oaxaca. It's a little overrated. You have to get outside. The place that has the pasilla de Oaxaca, the great smoked chili, the best smoked chili in the world, smoked for 3 days with 7 different hardwoods, requires 9 hours in a Land Rover to get to that village. So you have— that chili is being still made by one village in the entire world. Nobody makes it. They won't show it to anybody. Even Diana Kennedy has not seen it. We've all been to the village. So you still have products today in Mexico that are actually— not only are they world-class, they don't exist anywhere else in the world. And the Chinese could never duplicate it. Never.

So let's say you can pick not a city but one village in Mexico, and I'm going to send you there for a week. And all you can do is eat, which village do you pick?

Um, all you can do is eat?

Hmm.

In the old days, I would have said Mérida, but not anymore. I would still say, um, I like Puebla today. Near Puebla. Puebla, yeah, that area.

And your take on pre-Hispanic Mexican cuisine? So it has a lot of insects, it has fried worms, it has mosquito larvae.

And those were, as you know, they cleaned the canals. They actually got rid of the diseases that way. The most interesting thing though, you know what it's about it? Is we actually went to the museum and looked at the pre-Columbian metates that were done for the nixtamal. And guess what? They were never washed.

They were never washed. Why is that?

So they all, when you nixtamal corn, it becomes more nutritional because you free up all the amino acids. Yes. So the Italians have polenta, they got pellegra. Yes. Yeah, so, but what happens is people talk about how fat Mexicans are and how pre-diabetic. The reason is, is that they are using a post-industrial diet that wasn't, probiotics weren't put back in. So traditionally the metates were never washed. They had levels of probiotics in there that were put back in and the women, for the texture inside the tortillas, would use wild grasses that actually contain the largest amount of wild yeast. So the reason you look previous to 1925 in Mexico, there's no diabetes, is the probiotic and digestibility, one of the reasons, is of the masa itself. So let's say we send you back— But also the flavor changes. I was up in the mountains with the woman and I had the best tortilla I've ever had in my life and I couldn't figure out why she was getting this flavor. She had a 500-year-old The reason was, what happens when you use probiotics in yogurt and ice cream and tea? You change the flavonoids. Yes. So essentially, not only was it about health, she was making a more complex flavor and interesting dish. Now, the reason that I study— what I go to villages for is to study those perceptual patterns of how and why are they getting more complex flavors. They don't buy things on Amazon to go to the store. Go to Whole Foods, you know, they are actually using their body as this window of opportunity to create complexity.

So I send you back to central Mexico in the middle of the 18th century. A, how good is the food? And B, how recognizably is it like— 1750, let's say. How recognizably is it like, in your opinion, what we would get in the outskirts of Oaxaca today or near Puebla or in Guerrero?

Well, it depends what class you are. We'll say that they're, you know, whether you're in a ranch in northern Mexico— You have enough money. —to buy what you want. I would say it's probably very similar to what— except for the— except for Maseca intervention in 1925 after the revolution, because the government wanted to control the food supply. And that's why tortillas are so cheap. That was the same thing in France. When you go to France today, why baguettes are the price they are. So— but the food, in terms of the— what the Spanish brought was pigs. They brought, obviously, pigs, sheep, beef. Unfortunately, it ruined— the ecosystem of the pre-Columbians, which was not dependent on rooting animals, the same thing they did in the Caribbean, as you know, for trade. Europe could not grow its own food. Europe, if you take Columbus leaving, 30% of the people were starving to death without warfare. If you throw in warfare in the end of the 15th century, 50% of the people would have been dead.

In New York today, why can I not get good New Mexican green chili at a restaurant? Can't they just put it on a plane and fly it over?

They do put it on a plane.

I would pay twice the price, but it's not good. They do put it on a plane. Why is this the case?

Well, maybe it's not roasted then correctly. Maybe they're using— you need a fire roaster. It needs to be done within the same time that it's picked, and it comes at the end of the season in terms of the— the best time is at the end of August. Now, there is a chili that's even better, which is called the chile pasado, which is the red chili. This is from New Mexico? Yeah, when the green turns red, the ristras, right? OK. That chili, before it gets dried, is is actually fire roasted and then peeled and then dried, that chili is sublime. It's called chili pasada. Now we're losing, even in New Mexico or Mexico, that tradition came up from Mexico, it was north of Monterrey. What I'm afraid of is we're beginning to lose those, the palate and those ingredients. When you talk about a historical dish, what I always think is, so when we look at masa, which chef ever told you that you must put the probiotics back into— No one ever told me that. A lot of chefs in New York are talking about organic corn, but they're not talking about really resurrecting the complexity of the flavor of the native people. You know why? Because they don't go to the villages, they don't eat there, and they don't use their brain to think about how are these people achieving that level of complexity. They're not shopping for it. Chefs are shoppers today. Here's a piece of purple corn.

I bought it in the United States, but as you know, in Mexico there are many colors of corn. It's vastly superior to even good corn we get in this country. What's the future of corn? Is the future of corn that the varieties from Mexico somehow will be replicated, spread, evolved, and innovated upon? Or is the future of corn a kind of monoculture where most of it is boring, a few strains of it taste good but are not really that interesting, and the different colors of corn in Mexico eventually disappear?

I did the corn posters after the chili posters. Okay, you did the corn posters. And there are 8,800 varieties of corn. 362 varieties of corn.

And you know all of them?

I don't know them, but they're in the University of Seattle in the gene, whatever, the cryo, you know. The point is, is that as, I think that corn has a lot of, the North American Indians grew 400. So corn, even in the United States, before the winter wheat, we always ate cornbread. Corn was a big part of our culture, not just for ethanol. Yes. But I think as soon as we, I think because of what's happening in the United States about natural, I think that once people put their palates and really cue them up and they can tell the difference in varieties is when we're gonna get much more varietal sort of differentiation in the market. If I give you 6 varieties of corn and I tell you to eat them and you can't tell the difference, then you probably are unwilling to pay for them. If I gave you 6 varieties of red wine, one is a Bordeaux from the first growth and one is basically from Trader Joe's and you can't tell the difference, well, you probably don't—

But this happens that a lot of people can't tell the difference with wine, but we still market the different strands. Maybe people are fooled or it's a placebo effect.

No, but people are interested in change today and what's happening in that place in time. So let's say that the 400 varieties of Native American corn come back to North America. Yes. And let's say that you're in Portland. There might be varieties that can only grow in Portland, only grow in Maine, only grow in New Mexico. The point is, is that corn corn, you will probably, like, for instance, the microbrew industry, we talked about that in Portland. If a community wants to engage its food culture on the community local level, it can be amazing. Portland has 400 beers. Why can't they have 30, 40 varieties of corn just in Portland? It'll come. There'll be a corn restaurant in Portland that'll say, you know what, we are not growing the corn that everybody else has. We do this and we have recipes from from all these cultures that use corn from the Andes to Mexico and we're gonna open a corn restaurant based on corn that grows, that did grow. One of my growers in New Mexico, when I first opened the restaurant in Santa Fe, can't grow this, can't do this, can't do that, regular, can't do anything, right? Well, Elizabeth Barry, my grower, grew 482 varieties of beans without electricity on land that was essentially the Anasazi used to use in the 4th century. To these bean pots. Do we actually know how many beans or the variety or what a diet was? Native cultures, Franz Boas, we get into that, but he collected 254 salmon recipes. A Kwakiutl book would have been 3,000 recipes. The average American housewife does 79 in her lifetime. So who's richer?

We now move to the underrated versus overrated segment of the talk. Okay. You're free to pass on any of these, but I'll just shoot I've chewed out a few things. You tell me if you think they're underrated or overrated. The Michelin Dining Guide.

Overrated now. It's too status-orientated. It's dated. I probably— I bet you the average age of the inspector is over 30. I don't trust anybody in a company if the mean age is over 30, 35 anymore. I think that they're out of touch. I think they're replaying old themes. And I think the Michelin Guide is about status, a reification of a belief system in a particular food and culture system that was based on the aristocracy. The fast food restaurant Chipotle. Well, they just got knocked today, their stock just went down another 7%, you know, they're closing their chop houses, which I knew they would. They can't do that. Chipotle had a good space, it did a lot of education, they developed Neiman Ranch, for instance, The problem with every big food company, not just Chipotle, you have 2,000 restaurants, you say you're cooking the food, but the food comes from 2 plants from a factory like Minyot that does 200,000 pounds a day. So the public transparency, are you actually cooking the food or are you manufacturing it? So I think every big food chain is probably going to face this, I don't know, this gestalt of where if you're cooking, you can't be a chain. So I think the era of big food companies is actually over. And a company like Starbucks used to develop— you would go into a town and you'd see Starbucks and it was familiar and known. Now all you have to do is like, "Oh, I'm in Columbus, Ohio. Coffee. Oh, this guy is doing fair trade, interesting Guatemalan blend. Oh, I'm going to go there." That information is—

You don't need brands, right?

You don't need brands anymore. The consumer used to have to know. We used to have brands as guide and trust. Today there are other ways of developing that. We're in consumer level 3. These consumers are defining brands and how brands get used. I think that the idea of brand is probably— well, you're an economist. What do you think?

It's dated. I agree. The idea of brands is in some ways on the way out. You're a big lover of the culture of the American West. So there's a lot of movies about the Old West. The movie High Noon. Overrated or underrated?

No, underrated still. Gary Cooper is amazing. Gary Cooper is amazing. I mean, it's in my, you know, I think that those are epics. I think that that's our mythology of America, or of America, and, and those are our heroes. Those are our gods from Zeus, you know, our gods from Olympus. And we need those. We always need something like that to grow up with. Otherwise, we're, we're left with whatever's on TV.

Maybe this is a loaded question, but Southwestern cuisine now, is it overrated or underrated?

It's not appreciated. So it's underrated.

Underrated. Because it's hard to get the right ingredients?

It was difficult. It takes a lot of time? Yeah, it was just too difficult, and the chefs today are not interested. You have to translate three great traditions. For me to do modern Southwest, you have to know Mexican. Yes. You have to know Native American. Yes. And you have to know the history of the European influence on the Western traditions, things like the cattle drive and those things, which is you have to know all 3 traditions and all 3 ingredients. I mean, I had to read 400 books just to write this book, and it took a lifetime. That's your red sage book. Red sage book. But I think that even chefs in my own kitchens, for instance, could, even after 11 years, could still not make some of the sauces after 11 years in the kitchen. Some of the sauces have 30 to 40 ingredients, and each ingredient each time has to be tasted. Because an eggplant, like a good— when you're in Japan, why does it take 15 years to be a good tempura chef? 'Cause that eggplant in June is tighter, has less water, is less bitter than the one in August. It requires a different batter, a different temperature. So that 20 courses will require that chef to make exactly over 75, 85 decisions for each meal he does through each week of the year. The sushi bar I go, he knows 1,900 varieties. So if you're a good Southwest chef, I don't think— you have to know at least 40 or 50 chilies. You have to know all your spices, your beans, your vegetables. You have to know game. You have to know drying and roasting. Probably you need to have 300 or 400 or 500 recipes under your belt. What's the most underrated European cuisine?

I think Hungary.

I've been going to Budapest. I think it's— I would say right now Budapest is on fire. I'm having great food, great wine. I think it's amazing. They love the peppers there too. And they love the chilies. Have you been to Kalácska, to the chili museum? No, I have not. It's amazing. I think that— and they're doing amazing things. And they— you know, I would say right now the London is always exciting because it's the most international, most open. But I have had some great food. I've had meals in Budapest for €40 that equal anything in Paris for €400.

And the most overrated cuisine in Europe right now? Haute French cuisine.

Haute French cuisine. Especially in the central part of Paris, that's more of the historically dated, sort of tried and true. I think that even finding a good French bistro, I was in Paris a few, you know, it's difficult. I think that they're in an identity crisis. I think that the French themselves are, again, like the Jap— they're trying to reinvent themselves, but they don't wanna let go. And the younger chefs, the best— we went to Berlou, which is the hottest restaurant. It's a Japanese chef who's lived in Paris. He's got this gastro-modern thing that's going on 3 months, and he's only serving cocktails, no wine. And I took some older French people, and they just couldn't get it. They thought that it was an abomination. He had taken— he wasn't interested in French cuisine. He was reinterpreting where French dining and authenticity is in 2016. So the younger chefs are concerned with authenticity. And the authenticity of their experience for their guests is more important than an authentic technique and recipe.

Where in the world do diners have the most advanced exploratory best palate at the macro level, not for one particular thing? U.S. U.S. Why do you say that?

Because they're just the most— they have the least hangups about identity systems with food. We used to be food morons, right? No, we were food ignorant.

This is the difference. Food ignorant, okay.

Moron means you can't learn. Okay. I think we were— and then we were intimidated by We were kind of colonized by the idea of European culture and French food, Chinese food, and we were, I came from French Canadian and I was told, also as immigrant groups vie for status and power within a society, they generally refer to a third, so the Italians didn't like the French, you know, I lived in Boston. My grandmother, if she saw a piece of garlic, she would have disowned me. But the point was, I think right now as a multicultural society and the chefs are traveling, they're opening, and what's happening in the media is that they're— and because of the immigrant populations, people experience those levels. And the younger immigrants, we're into our third generation. So Kassia, for instance, third generation Vietnamese in LA, got the big write-up in the New York Times. I've been there a couple times. You get other chefs who are extending their own traditions. You know, you talk about Slanted Door, you talk about Cosme in New York City. Right. What we're beginning to understand is what I have fought for my whole life is ethnic food is as complex as any expensive French restaurant is. Or often more so.

Now you teach classes in tasting appreciation, is that correct?

Palate coaching. Palate coaching. Yeah, with companies generally.

And you try to teach the executives or the workers or who is taught?

Well, we try to teach everybody. Everybody depends most importantly if a brand is to have a brand sense. We won't get into branding, but let's say that I'm working with the culinary department, just the culinary department. Some culinary— what we want to do is bring the marketing people in, we want to bring the consumer research people in, we want to bring in the culinary people because we want a lexicon of what is— what are we describing? What is the experience? We're not creating a product. We're creating an experience. And what is the consensus for what we like and don't like and what's good? So women, women have a different palate than men. So if I know that the objective consumer— jerky, for instance, more women are eating jerky. Women don't like to chew. We know that. OK? The point is women also like more natural flavors, not as much dramatic flavors as men. So once we know this fact and we bring everybody in, we create jerkies. We would go through— that's a different— if we have, for instance, a hamburger, that's something simple. 6 layers in a hamburger is 36 possibilities of eating it. So one of the things, like, next time you eat a hamburger, just put it upside down. Take your favorite hamburger from your favorite brand and put it upside down. You'll see that it eats completely different. All the fat receptors are now in a different mode. It's almost like turning something to a mirror. And so the experience and expression of it is completely— people don't think that food Do you have— everybody, I watch people in a restaurant, you know what they do? They eat and they take a glass of beer or wine. They're drowning it out. I say, what you do is you light up and set the stage, take the beer or wine first, and then use the flavors. Really? Yeah, because— but people have bad taste habits. They're not trained to taste.

And what's another of a bad taste habit that a lot of Americans have that you could bring someone out?

No attention. No attention. Well, so we make them put it in their mouth. Right. First of all, texture, temperature, movement, and flavor. Which one is first and second always by the semi-automatic nervous system? You have no control over it. Tell us which. Okay, first one is texture, anything you put in the mouth. Second one is temperature. So obviously, if it's crunchy and hard and hot, you're actually not going to understand the flavor. Your brain is just going to activate its defense system. Is it too hot? What is it? It's a foreign object in my body. Okay, so yeah, I'm gonna be really upset. So am I gonna— the point is, is that if you get it, that's why sushi is kind of interesting, because sushi comes out of this acceptance in Japan of the body and scent and sensual. Yes. And so it's a movement into projecting sensual— and we're getting out— but the sensual space of how we use our body. So you should talk about crunch. What's interesting to me would be about the psychology of why do we have that, because they choose to do something and they choose to not do something else. But anyway, if you put something 10 seconds in the middle, then chew, because you get the retronasal— there's two parts, smell first. First of all, smell, like in a wine thing, get the right software in your head. So is it a fruit or is it a hot dog? Get the right— chew for a few seconds, then stop, and then the enzymatic response is 10 to 15, some flavors take 30 minutes to develop on the palate completely. But I always take 10 seconds and then chart. What I'm gonna ask you— Yes? Is it a fast flavor or a slow flavor? Okay. Okay, so lemon is fast. Okay. Pork fat is slow. Is it long or short? Okay, so for instance—

What do you mean long or short?

Okay, a glass of wine can be very long, it can be very short. But raisins, we always start with raisins. We take something that people know. Right. Okay? So is a raisin long or short? Actually, it's long. How many? Then we go for— so it's fairly slow, it's fairly long, and taste occurs over time and space. Do not use cognitive systems for sensual perception. What you're doing is vocabulary is symbolically compressed in order to be expedited in terms of the way we communicate. Right. However, it does not communicate communicate sensual, otherwise we would have no paintings, poetries, or music. Well, once you tell people not to use words, that really throws— you have to activate other cognitive perceptual systems. So no words. No words. Body temperature. Body temperature. Don't chew. Don't chew. Minimum of 15 seconds. And then memory is important. What I want you to do then is taste it the second time because what you will have missed is that basically it's gone by, you're going to fill in. You know when you scan and you read? Yes. You can actually see, understand by scanning. The brain scans noun flavors. It fills in complexity. You taste it 200th of a second. You have 2,500 taste buds, each one has 10,000 nerve endings. Those 2 million perceptions per second, your brain is going to have to figure out where to put them and how to categorize them. Unless you have preset categories, and scan really quickly, so memory, you've had it and I let you do it the second time, you will see that you can fill it in and you'll be able to get the richness, the complexity, and the length of the flavor. But by telling people taste occurs over time and space, just that sentence is the first one I always start with. You have to move into that perceptual way of thinking about taste. It is not immediate, it's not cognitive, it's not electronic, it's not oral, it occurs in the enzymatic response response of the body for breaking down the flavonoids, it takes time. And what people don't give me is time.

They don't give you time.

They don't give me perceptual time.

So how much does the culinary cutting edge depend on context? Let's say we took a Mark Miller equivalent of 50 years ago and fed that person, not a very young you, but someone your age now, 50 years ago, who knew the foods of that time, fed that Mark Miller the culinary cutting edge of today. How much would he be able to appreciate it?

A lot. A lot? A lot. Yeah. I think because the context of using the body and perceptual space remains the same. Okay. I may have changed from Alegna, from Chez Panisse to Alegna to— we're talking about generations of restaurants. I think that chefs, or I think that what culinary art does is it moves our ability to move our perceptual sense of exploring the world, just as a weaving or a painting does. And it creates other realities that we may not have actually realized that were there, but were there. When I talked about chilies, I was the first person— now, why was I the first person to write a book that chilies had flavors? They've been eating chilies for 5,000 years. I went to Robert Mondavi, we did a seminar, and I proved to him that they were like grapes. And that when you blend chilies in a mole, it took as much art and complexity as a winemaker. And he was actually shocked, but he said, "I was correct." But he had never thought, but he had never tasted, right? So don't go in with the wrong perceptional— don't think that chilies are hot, for instance.

Sometimes I wonder about this. You're what, in my opinion, what is sometimes called a supertaster. You can taste fine gradations and different flavors and items, a level beyond. —how much other people can, even people who might call themselves foodies. You have some special sensory ability.

Well, actually, the term— and you can read how we— supertaster is about the number of actual taste buds per centimeter on your palate. And actually, I am not biologically a supertaster in terms of the number of receptors that I have. I don't think that Beren Berenson, who was one of the greatest art critics or actually had extraordinary eyesight.

But you're maybe better than a supertaster. It's at the cognitive level, rather than on your tongue.

What I try to do is— remember the book "The Shallows" came out? I try to do deep tasting, like deep reading. Are we looking for patterns that exist within the perceptual space that I wasn't looking for before? So all of taste is about part of it's memory, part of it's perception, part of it's connecting those complexities. I would be also, interesting enough, I'm slightly handicapped because I have a little bit of auditory processing disorder. So what happens is when I was a child, all of the world around me was categorized into taste. I can hear fine. But it creates cognitive dissonance. I can't drive the car. The point was because I learned that my brain can actually look at taste and actually make the world around me sensible, that when I looked at a raisin, people said, "What do you mean that there's more flavors in a raisin?" I says, "No, pay attention, listen." Listen carefully. Have you ever listened to a harpsichordist? People can't— their attention span has to be so precise that it's a difference of a 40th of a second. Now, when you play another electronic music, you don't develop that skill set.

How many different flavors or kinds of soy sauce can you distinguish by taste?

Oh, I've done a panel of 40 at a time. I think that I've done— I've had a kitchen home of up to 70 at a time. And you can tell one from the other?

You learn by saltiness, by sweetness.

They're all— they all have a characteristic profile of complexities of umamis, as we might call it, and flavor, dark, rich tones. If you put 10— if you put 15 Cabernets in front of me, I can still tell. You can do that. Anybody can do that. So we generally don't think of shoyu or soy sauces as being that complex. So when we taste it, we don't— when we have— if I tell you this is an $800 bottle of wine, you turn on your complexity sort of perceptual scan. If I tell you that this is a Mexican taco, you don't turn it on. You're already prejudiced. I do, but yes, you do. You do, Tyler. So soy sauce is to me, or when you're in Japan, the pickle on the table will tell me within 20 miles of where you grew up and where you live. And the shoyu at the sushi— each great sushi house, not sushi bars, actually blends their own shoyu.— and I can tell not only whether you're from Edo, but what generation. Are you from the '30s, the '40s, or the '50s? Of what generation did you actually grow up to actually believe that that was the style of the shoyu? And if you're in Kyoto, these people, they— Japan is really good that way because it is literally those 40 regions are so maintaining that isolation that you learn the differences from going from one to another. I can go from— I can take a train of 2 hours in Japan and cover more culinary differences than you can in the United States.

Thank you for those wonderful remarks, Mark. With that, I turn the questioning over to Megan McArdle of Bloomberg. Well, huh, this is—

it's a little weird being the only questioner. Talk about why— you talked about how women and men's palates are different. How is their cooking different? I mean, there is a— Editor I know now at Eater, was at Savor then, who said that male cookery was all sort of knives, guts, and fire. Knives, spice, and fire, I think was how she put it. And that often seems like a fair characterization to me. My guy friends really want to load up the heat. I remember having a guy tell me that the secret to really good cooking was just dump Cajun seasoning all over everything. How do women cook differently?

Well, I mean, we're not gonna get into developmental theory here. No, no. Yeah. I mean, but I can tell you— What are the characteristics? I can tell you that the general broad strokes, women are essentially more concerned with internal experiences. They are more motivated to talk to someone at a dining room table, and a guy will look at the television. You get 4 guys and 4 women will talk to each other. The point is, is that they— early on, there's a better internalization of the phenomenological world inside the body. So they actually begin to recognize those characteristics of things that are what I would call body perceptually. So that tends to be a little bit more subtle, tends to be a little bit more in time, and they don't like the transformative process as much. As understanding the— and this I'm going out of line— but they would prefer to accept the flavor personality as is and understand it, rather than change it into something that I do. So like Xuxa said, if you took that carrot, that pork, that kidney, and just made it spicy, that's what guys— they want to change it and transform it. They want to create something new. They want to actually not allow— if you allowed nature to take its course, then you wouldn't be cooking. You don't have the heat, you're not transforming the spice, and so we're women— except for Lydia Shire in Boston, she's the only one that I could never tell. Women tend to actually believe that the ingredients should be left alone, Alice Waters, or that school of cooking, and that you can literally coax natural ingredients into something that's complex and satisfying and specific. Sophisticated and healthy. And it's sustainable, it's even better. But man, I believe that if we go that too far, that we're not gonna learn how to make moles, that we're not concerned with other black bean soups. I would rather learn how to make— when I lived in Guatemala, every woman in the village made black bean soup. Not one of those women ever told me, "I go to the market and buy organic black beans, so mine's better." Every woman knew how good her black bean soup was. The best woman in the village, she was 37 steps. And she really got me going. So I traded her a wee pill. Now, women tend to be more focused and more creative and more subtle. It doesn't mean that they're not as rich a tradition. It just means that it's a different level of recognition. Does that make sense?

Yes, absolutely. Mezcal or tequila?

Chichicapa by Del Maguey is my favorite mezcal. The world. And when it's tequilas, I still go for silvers, not the— unless you're representing— and a margarita, you should always use silvers because they don't have any wood. And if you're using fruit, whether it's a mango, strawberry, or anything else, that idea of the gold coin or the upscale, that's just a marketing ploy to make more money. But it makes them more money, but it makes worse margaritas. Mezcal, I mean mezcal though was and is a native tradition built on extreme attention to nature. And it's only wild agaves. Each one of the palenques that Ron uses only can produce 400 cases a year. And it's totally out of that village and that tradition. And even though those 20 villages are within 100 miles, they might as well be like 2 continents apart because they express the whole world of— you put 5 painters in Paris in 1900 and you get different paintings in the same building in Montmartre, right?

Your favorite guilty pleasure bad food?

Oh, it's not a bad food, it's ice cream. Ice cream is God's gift to depression.

What flavor? Any particular?

Oh, I like them all. I happen to like cold. I have a very sensitive palate, so I won't eat any hot soups or teas or things. I always eat cold when I can get it, and that's preferable. That would be my preference. And if you had to say, Hot fudge sundae. How's that?

So I am someone who— we talked about this a little earlier— I have never been able to stand the taste of cooked fish, and I have been trying because it's good for me and my husband loves fish, but that fishy flavor makes me gag. How would you advise someone like me? And, you know, obviously this is a broader question than just fish. As someone who has something— I'm generally pretty willing to eat almost anything, but you have that one thing or you have a couple things where you're desperate to, like, be able to tolerate it. How do you go about learning?

Well, we talked earlier that I don't eat cooked fish at night because the enzymes in your body change and I only eat raw fish and shellfish. But you actually may be the supertaster because super— no, supertasters tend to have— and that's probably the problem with parents who don't realize the child— they become very fixated and they like things or don't like things because they're so powerful sensations for them. Children in particular don't really know what to do with that category. So if they had something that was green that was very bitter, that's why they won't eat green beans. They associate then the entire category as something that they're gonna be defensive about. Your question about cooked fish would be, have you ever tried like flame-broiled sashimi in a sushi bar?

Yeah, I can, like a seared tuna, right, that's basically raw inside. —yeah, I can totally eat that. It's when it's like a cooked salmon or something.

No, but how far is it cooked? Do you know how many degrees?

Uh, no, I, I, I'm not, I'm not daring enough to cook my own fish because I hate it.

Flavonoids develop and change over every 2 or 3 degrees. That's why it's a misnomer. The more you cook meat, it's going to get— no, the more livery it's going to get. Fish is exactly the same. So what you want to do is get a piece of fish and find out 130, I bet you the higher, the more objectionable flavonoids have not developed. It's cooked, 135 is cooked, it'll go up 5, but I would just go home and do salmon and halibut. I would start with halibut because it has, it could be the oils, it could be a combination of oils and flavonoids, or we could just make a really spicy fish when we go to Country Mar in Mexico City and just put red and green chili and throw it on the grill and I bet you I wish you would eat it.

It would be wonderful. The sous vide revolution, how do you feel about that?

Well, I've been working with it a long time. I worked with American Airlines in the '80s and '90s. I worked with Cuisine Solutions, one of the— It is an amazing technique, and it tends to be overused by chefs who believe that a perfect texture is preferable to a more complex uneven. Now the brain— actually, it's wrong though, because the brain doesn't know what it is, it knows what it's not. So teaching flavor is not teaching what that ingredient is, it's teaching what it's not. So if I have a sous vide piece of lamb and it's not crusted and it's not browned and there's no Maillard, and then it's not— when you look at lamb and it has a rosé 50%. It will start darker. It'll be more maillard. It'll be cooked. What the brain then has 4 or 5 different perceptual zones to actually understand and appreciate and differentiate. A sous vide piece of lamb that's pink all the way through with one texture with no maillarding and no flavor of the lamb developed because it never went high enough will actually won't be lamby enough and it'll taste like a lamb piece of bubble gum.— or a sponge. Now, I use interrupted sous vide, so I do a Chinese squab that I put an intensity— I used to brine it for 48 hours with 14 spices, mainly cumin and chilies, to get it all the way through the squab, then roast it and then deep fry it like the Chinese. I found that by sous vide-ing it, they went in by 24 hours, so the fresh squab was better. Then I cook it sous vide at a different higher temperature, even after it's in brine, and then I fry it, deep fry it. So I find that what I call interruptive sous vide as a technique, which doesn't— which takes the— you get intensity without preserving some freshness. So let's say that I did scallops, and I do them sous vide. My scallops are cooked for exactly 18 minutes. And with a wine dinner, I want to match the chamomile in a Sauvignon Blanc. Well, how do I do that? Actually, I actually put in some fresh chamomile with the scallops, cook it sous vide, and the aromatic profile goes through. I made a little tostada, do this and that, and that Sauvignon Blanc with that is amazing.

What is the biggest mistake that people make when they go into a Southwestern restaurant and sit down and order?

Well, they want chips and salsa. That's a big mistake. Why? So explain this. Well, I mean, it's a phenomenon that they first First of all, they get it free. Second of all, chips are usually done poorly and then the salsa is usually done poorly. It's a good excuse to sit there and drink beers and margaritas, which is— I don't need that excuse. But what you're looking for is something that comes into— let's say buffalo. We eat more buffalo. I was cooking buffalo. It was difficult to sell back in the '70s and '80s. We know it's healthier. We know it has less cholesterol. So, and the other thing is you want intense small portions of food. You don't want to, you know, so when you're looking at a Southwest menu, you want to look for the sauces, the complexity. You want to look for things that would probably take you, that some things have been cured. Like even Red Sage, what was the first thing that we did? We actually did a carpaccio of venison. We had a tartare mix of venison and buffalo with sage. We made, that was on the first menu at Red Sage in 1990. Now, if you go around the United States 25 years later, you don't find that anymore.

So if you were—

I don't know if I answered the question, but—

No, it's a— if someone came to you, this is a game my family used to play in the car. Someone comes to you and says, I'm a fairy, you are only going to be allowed to eat 3 foods for the rest of your life, 3 dishes, 3 specific dishes, so not like tacos, but a kind of taco. You don't have to worry about nutrition, you don't have to worry about calories, but you have to pick 3 foods and those are the only 3 foods you can ever have again. Which 3 foods?

Certainly lobster, 'cause I grew up in that part of the world, Nova Scotia, cooked in seaweed with butter, drawn butter. I would say my shore dinner, which is lobster, clams, they're all the one meal. They're not 3 foods. Everyone always tries to like— Oysters, fried clams, lobster for sure. I would say my second one would be— yes, I would— oh boy, I would— something spicy. And I vie between Thai and Mexican, you know, as my two favorite spicy cuisines in the world. And I would probably say a Mexican sort of, you know, amazing sort of taco with great salsas and the right kind of, you know, tortilla. The third thing I might say would be, surprisingly, Probably just the chuleta de buey, you know, a 5-year-old cow, northern Spain, roasted completely correctly, and the umami of each piece of meat is better than any other meat that exists in the world. There are better, richer things in Japan, but that part of northern Spain is just amazing.

What part of northern Spain is that?

It's outside of Burgos.

Okay.

Yeah, and it's an extension of the Basque area. Those are working cattle.— and you saw the film on the world of steak, I'm sure. And there's one that I like in Barcelona which actually does the espadrilles out of the sea cucumbers too. But I think that the honesty of Spanish food, even though I went to El Bulli many times, about 7 or 8 times, still remains a cuisine that those— we talked about the hand that Fuchsia found. We talked about ham in the dolomites. I think that we look culturally for our— I think that we're always searching for those foods in our environment that give us pleasure, that extend the body into that space, and that elongate our perceptual way of interacting with the world. So when someone talks about 3-year-old Tabugo, it's not that it's that expensive. It's that complex and that's interesting that it requires so much of you to actually perceive it that you are more alive, you are more there, the ham is more there, that sense of presence is there. And I think that's what a great chef can do. You can stimulate that sense of being there. And we're losing that. The virtual reality that's happening, we're losing our sense of being in presence. Korean tacos. Korean tacos. I know Roy, so that's not fair. I know Roy personally. I think it's a good example of what Roy calls authentic food. He grew up in LA. Roy Choi is Korean. He is LA, which has a lot of Mexican food, and the sense of combining his own interior reality into a projection on that plate to me is perfect food. What a chef should always be doing. I'm not Mexican, and the reason that I created Modern Southwestern I think it would be a lie for me to do a Mexican restaurant. Roberto Santibáñez at Fonda is a good friend and a partner of mine in the salsa company, is Mexican, from Mexico City, and does cook great Mexican food. And I think that you can learn, but you should not co-opt an entire culture or identity. I was at Chez Panisse and I didn't wanna cook like Alice Waters anymore, so I was after— it's nothing wrong with Chez Panisse, but it It wasn't my food. And I was always arguing about it sometimes. But the point is, when a chef really understands the world and ingredients and can bring that reality to his dining public, that's an amazing explosion of creativity and emotion and theater. And it's wonderful, right?

If you had to sum up your food, if you had to, in a couple of sentences, say, this is what this is what my food was and why I needed to go do this. Or is, hopefully. Or is, no, no, no. I meant when you left Chez Panisse, this is why you're here.

No, we all created the menus at Chez Panisse. It wasn't else, even then, no. I was there for a couple, it was only because one of my advisors didn't sign my thesis. Anyway, I was supposed to be there for 2 weeks. So I think that my food is a personal exploration of my own exploration of the world. And I look at the world through my senses, mostly through taste, sometimes smell. I'm not a bad nose. And what I'm trying to do is understand not only the world we live in, but sometimes past cultures. I try to look at pre-Columbian weavings. I try to get a list of all the pre-Columbian foods. And we see, for instance, at Central, which is a very famous restaurant in Lima today, that that complexity of these chuñas and this and things that grow were probably used and stimulate. The problem is, do we actually have the palate to actually go back? Wouldn't you like to live in— I don't wanna just see a Rembrandt painting, or I love, you know, this. I wanna actually go back and eat the food that he was eating in the markets and the cheeses and the things that were done because I wanna try to understand where that painting came from, not only the psychology of the artist. So when I read a cookbook or I go to a restaurant, I'm trying to understand the person or the place or the culture.

Fast food. So, you know, no, this is like a—

The dark side.

Well, but can it be done well?

It is done well. I mean, fast food is done well. In Japan, the places I go, I eat udon. I walk in, it's being made by hand. It costs $2. I decide what I'm going to put on top and I have a bowl and I've timed it. It's 18 seconds. McDonald's, it's a lifetime. Starbucks, Starbucks is 8.4 minutes. That is not— Takes too long. Takes too long. Robot chefs.

I'm putting this into fast food, but you've seen these machines now that they're going to have that's going to dice everything and it won't need any human interaction at all. What do you think of that?

Probably, would anybody notice? I really, you know, I think fast food, I think that our model in the United States because of the real estate and economics of it is completely wrong. I think that a chef should open a restaurant at 10 seats. I think he should charge $100 and I think he should make $150 and he should not pay rent or have labor or have overhead or costs and what you should do is honor the tradition of respecting the individual. So in Japan, they have this policy of not first customer. There's a policy of not taking you because they don't know how you're going to act, they don't know who you are. You're also eating with— you're not eating with— you're eating with 7 or 8 other people as an ensemble. You're not completely separate. So the idea of reinstituting cultural and social space and bonds and honoring. The chef is here and puts something down. There's no waitress. There's no menu. The point is, is that that's the reality of you and— that's a personal connection. It's like your mother. The point is, whether it's— that point to me is that we have to go back to understanding that food is very part of our psychological sense of space, our body sense of space, our pleasurable sense of space. Our own cultural identity. And if we let other people take over that by organic or this or labels or price, then what we've done is given that part of our lives up. And I don't know that we're— I'm just saying this, there's 300 noodle places in Kyoto. Nobody charges more than $10 or $12. They're all really good. They're all a little bit different. And guess who doesn't do well? Chains that charge $10 for noodles that they have to pay high-end real estate, like Ishinoya, there's two of them in Kyoto. I've been going to Kyoto for 50 years, I've never been, I'm never going to go. There's no reason to go. Chains only exist when the local community doesn't provide the same service. So in a street food market, it's accessible. So I can eat in Thailand a quail for $0.75. That same quail in Washington, D.C. or New York City will cost me like $18.95.

Megan, Mark? Thank you very much, Ed.

Thank you very much.