April Bloomfield
Years Cooking: 20.
Number of restaurants: 5, including the John Dory Oyster Bar in NYC and Tosca Cafe in San Francisco.
Her lunch order: Smoked haddock chowder with house-made crackers.
‘Celtuce is the most underrated vegetable. It’s like Chinese lettuce—slightly nutty and totally amazing’
Sean Brock
Years Cooking: 20.
Number of restaurants: 3, including McCrady's and Husk in Charleston.
His lunch order: Roasted sunchoke salad with escarole and candied sunflower seeds, a side of broccoli rabe.
‘I ate a baked-egg dish the other day. It, like, blew my mind. Soon after, it’s on my menu. It just reminded me, like, yeah, eggs are badass’
Dan Barber
Years Cooking: 20.
Number of restaurants: 2, including Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, NY.
His lunch order: Roasted pumpkin salad with kabocha and delicata squash.
‘The future of healthful
eating is going to be in the hands of chefs, much more
than nutritionists and doctors’
How it Worked: On October 18, 2013, restaurant & drinks editor Andrew Knowlton hosted everyone for lunch at the Spotted Pig in New York City. This is what they had to say* (and eat).
Defining The New Healthy:
What’s more important than having some kind of overarching everyone-should-eat-like-this is to say how people should eat within their place. If you’re in the Midwest, you should have more meat and dairy because you have a lot of farmland. In the South, barbecue is a cultural food because you have a lot of pigs.
It’s what you do for a living, too. People say, “Jesus, I can’t believe Southerners eat that for breakfast.” But you’re in the field for 12 hours, working your ass off!
Yeah, but what if I work in an office? I start eating these rich diets, and I don’t burn off the calories because I take the subway and walk three feet. That’s unhealthy.
Feeding the Fam:
At home I cook for little kids, so I don’t make 12-course tasting menus. We have a lot of one-pot meals. We roast chicken, eat it, and then all the bones go in the slow-cooker overnight for stock. In the morning, the bones go out, beans go in.
Great idea. The kids get to see that?
Yeah. My five-year-old has even gotten to know everyone at the farmers’ market. He’ll taste something and ask, “Who grew this?”
Meat As A Condiment:
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more of a mature cook. I’m eating fewer large cuts of meat and instead, vegetables with a side of meat.
We opened Coi in 2006 and did a tasting menu with mostly vegetables. Even today, we get killed for it. I like meat, but it has to be perfectly cooked and—
Perfectly seasoned.
Yeah, exactly. That’s what I tell my cooks: “We have one piece of meat on the menu. Don’t [expletive deleted] it up.”
Bacon Late Bloomers:
I didn’t eat bacon until I was 15 years old. I never even had a slice of pepperoni pizza.
Are you serious? I didn’t eat bacon either, but I was trying to get bar mitzvahed.
Size Matters:
I was taken aback by the portion sizes when I first came to America.
Yup. A big piece of meat on a Tuesday—that’s a celebratory meal in other cultures. But for us, it’s everyday because our land could support it.
But increasingly, it can’t. And obviously, for our health, it can’t.
America, the Malleable:
If you grow up eating processed food, that’s what you crave. We started a foundation in California with cooking classes for kids. They come in with all kinds of misconceptions. I make braised greens, and they’re like, “Oh, God, that’s going to suck.” But we make it fun and delicious. No preaching.
That’s the great thing about America: It’s very malleable. Take brussels sprouts. In other cultures, vegetables don’t suddenly become interesting and hot and re-examined. The beauty of American cooking is that we have no history. So yeah, for a million years people were canning beets, then all of a sudden: Beets!
Plans for the Future:
I’m concentrating on my new restaurant, Tosca, in San Francisco.
I want to learn as much as possible and pass that information on to home cooks and parents and everybody.
I’m just going to open up a restaurant that serves bacon and things. I’m going to get rich.
Trading Secrets:
If I hadn’t done my book tour, I never would have met Sean. Now we’re like family.
Yeah, chefs are always texting each other. One just asked me: “How do you make hominy?”
I want to make hominy! I’m going to text you every day.