October 16, 2019 • 47 mins
Host Michael Ruhlman talks with Dr. Krishnendu Ray & Chef James Syhabout about "Authenticity".
Dr. Ray's books:
https://www.amazon.com/Krishnendu-Ray/e/B001K8AQ0K
Chef Syhabout's book "Hawker Fare":
https://www.amazon.com/Hawker-Fare-Stories-Recipes-Refugee/dp/0062656090
Host Michael Ruhlman's new book "From Scratch" is available now!
https://www.amazon.com/Scratch-Meals-Recipes-Dozens-Techniques/dp/1419732773
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to From Scratch, a production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Michael Rohlman. I'm a writer but has spent the
past twenty five years in professional kitchens, translating that craft
for the home kitchen. This is a podcast about cooking.
In each episode, we'll talk with one chef and one
non chef about the same theme. On today's episode, we'll
(00:29):
be exploring the theme of authenticity and what it means
to make authentic food For our guest chef, I visited
one of the most decorated chefs in San Francisco's Bay Area.
He shared his astonishing story. We'll learn about his assent
from being a boy in a refugee camp to Section
eight housing in Oakland, to becoming the chef owner of
(00:49):
the most prestigious European style fine dining restaurant in Oakland,
and why he turned back to his roots to open
two casual food joints that feature his other's traditional recipes.
I'll try and recreate one of those dishes, which uses
a technique that flies in the face of traditional cooking rules.
I've never encountered it before, but first I had the
(01:13):
pleasure of speaking with Dr KRISHNANDU Ray one of the
most brilliant minds in the food world. I asked him
to be a guest on this podcast because he focuses
his research on the supply side of the food world
rather than the consumption side. He's also the perfect person
to ask about what it means for a food to
be authentic. To start, I wanted him to define a
(01:36):
word we don't think much about, but we use it often,
and in fact, it's incredibly loaded ethnic. Let's talk about
that word. Good word, bad words. You know, it's a
it's an interesting word. It comes into play by about
the nineteen fifties, especially in journalism, and it's a way
to think about cultural difference without falling into the trap
(01:58):
of race. So there's a sense of that at there's white,
and then there's black, and then there are ethnic people
who are kind of somewhat in between. Give your typical
example who like French food was never considered ethnic. It
was foreign, it was exotic, but it was high class,
upper class. Ethnic food is supposed to be the food
(02:20):
of mostly poor, working class migrants, and so that is
one of the categories. One of the problems of the
categories now, so you can't really have really a high
priced to ethnic food. That's the presumption. Yes, that's been
the historical presumption. So if you if it's very even
now if most people, if you say a high price,
people have a sense that it can be authentic. So
(02:42):
if you're charging more than ten twelve bucks for anything,
it can be authentic ethnic. So there's a kind of
a funny trap there, you know, so you can cook
very good food, and my argument is that kind of
sets up a limitation to what kind of ingredients you're
going to use, what kind of skill you're going to bring,
because the price includes basically the three major thing, which
(03:05):
is rent, which is huge in any city, and then
the kind of ingredients you're going to put into it,
and the kind of labor costs. Okay, that's why if
you trap ethnic food, of food of the ethnics as
cheap food, it is very difficult to break out of
those barriers of good food. But certain cuisines don't stay
(03:31):
categorized as ethnic. So that brings us to a major
focus of Dr Ray's work. He's developed the really useful
phrase hierarchy of taste. I use the hierarchy of taste
as a phrase to think about how American notions of
what is good food and what is expensive food has
(03:51):
changed over time. So what I'm really interested in a
hierarchy of taste is this question of how do Americans
how and why do Americans change their mind about what
is good to eat and what is not good to eat,
and how that has changed in American history. Dr Ray
helped us look at a few examples from American history
that can give context to our search for authenticity. Give
(04:15):
you an example, and if you'll read The New York
Times eighteen seventeen, eighteen seventy two, there's a lot of
discussion about German food and German food is this food
that is has kind of weird things like schnitzel, and
it says in the New York Times describe saying it's
in fact, it's just a feel cutlet with a weird
(04:37):
name called schnitzel, and it is all you can eat,
real schnitzel for fifteen cents in eighteen seventy two. And
there's a lot of discussion about German for instance, beer halls.
The Anglos in New York City are very kind of
suspicious of the Germans because the German beer halls up
(04:58):
and down Bowery. They find that children are there, women
are there because the Germans drink with the family, very
different from say the Irish or the Angulo pop culture
tavern culture, which was a much more masculine culture. Okay,
So that there's a sense of this weird people with
a bit of weird culture. Some of it is exciting,
(05:19):
but most of it we should not do. And despite
the skepticism of their social practices, and I did not
know this, German became the second most used language in America.
German was to the nineteen thirties and forties in the
US what Spanish is to the US today. Okay, the
most dominant language, by the way. Long before that, Ben
(05:40):
Franklin was worried that, in fact, he was going to
be swamped by the Germans because he was in Pennsylvania. Remember,
and who we come to identify as the Pennsylvania Dutch,
who are really the Deutsch, okay, And so German kind
of this antipathy toward Germans is going to turn into
this kind of massive pressure on kind of naming of foods.
(06:03):
That's when the naming will change from things like Frankfurt
to hot dog to a way to americanize these names,
and Germans are going to be in some ways written
out of the American script. But my argument is, in
fact most American food is Germanic food. Think about Laggers
and think about the cheese, things about Hamburger. I think,
(06:24):
in fact it is in some ways. German case is
a very interesting case where what used to be in
some ways of foreign ethnic marker, in this case in
quotation marks uh in some ways is made invisible by
in fact most of us. By the way most Americans,
the largest so called ethnic category of Americans, are German Americans.
(06:46):
There are fifty million German Americans to okay, yes exactly,
and so the German case is an interesting case where
it is both suppressed but also it becomes ubiquitous. Most
American food, in that sense is Germanic food, with some differences.
(07:10):
It's certainly true that German culture has quietly influenced major
food trends for America. It's hard to picture, though, the
Fourth of July without brats, burders and a cold American lager. Fortunately,
for those Americans who may appreciate other flavors and textures,
Japanese cuisine and those who prepare it have fought a
long and difficult battle for relevance in the United States.
(07:33):
There's a beautiful study of Japanese in Hawaii, which is
where we have in Hawaii and on the West Coast,
we have the fust Japanese coming in as immigrants and
relatively poor immigrants and around. If you talked to Japanese
and there's a beautiful study but done by a sociologist
in Hawaii, the Japanese are saying, yes, we know our
food is inferior. The children learn in school that they
(07:54):
should be drinking more dairy and we should be eating
more protein to make us big and strong like white people.
And uh, but you see, I have a bad habit.
I'm of that generation. So my children's habits are going
to become more American and my habit is going to
stay Japanese, and their health is going to improve. This
(08:14):
is about people are talking about. And of course Japan
becomes an enemy in the Second World War, just as
the Germans. By the way, the Japanese case. Similarly, there's
a repression of taste for Japanese things that works towards
the sense that Japanese food is kind of inferior. For
inferior people that begins to flip only in the nineteen eighties,
(08:38):
once Japan emerges as a major economic power. And remember,
I don't know whether you remember, that's the time Americans
are talking about just in time production, how Japanese capitalism
is so much agile and more powerful, and when sushi
came into the matly totally. And that is and by
the way, thing about that where sushi Japanese food comes
(08:59):
in is mostly midtown. Even now you go in Manhattan,
the high end Japanese restaurants are often in Midtown because
this is where the Japanese managers were now really highly valued,
would eat. Okay, And so sushi comes in and suddenly
we begin to flip. And of course, but then also
nutritional knowledge begins to catch up with things like fish
(09:20):
and fermented food, and you begin to say, Japanese food
is the best food in the world. And then we
we we see the data that they lived one of
the longest in the world, so they must be doing
something right. Okay, But the big one for me is
(09:43):
Italian food. I'm married a woman whose family hailed in
the late eighteen hundreds from Napoli. Italians swarmed in through
l as Island and huge numbers from the eighteen hundreds
through really the nineteen forties, and their cuisine is really
really influential in America. What would America be without pizza
and spaghetti? What's that story? Italian is a very good
(10:06):
example because in fact, Italian is one of those cuisines
in American history that falls from the top, flattens out,
and then climbs back. Is climbing back up right now.
What I mean by is this, say with Thomas Jefferson,
who in some ways brings in macaroni and cheese, Okay,
and there's a sense that it is this is an
(10:27):
Italian thing. It's part of the travel through the Mediterranean
and bringing in macaroni, which is kind of a generic
name for any past that at that point of time.
Often they would be registered in restaurants as a slightly
frenchified mac and cheese. So that was considered very high
high culture. In case said, let's say around eighteen What
(10:48):
is fascinating is this, This is what happens is from
about eighteen eighty onwards you have millions of poor Italians
coming in and what you see is this astonishing disdain
towards Italian culinary culture from eighteen eighty to about the
nineteen forties. By the way, nutritionists and all kinds of reformers,
(11:10):
progressive reformers look at Italians and say, oh, they have
a terrible inferior food culture. They eat all this pasta,
they eat all this garlic, very garlicky. By the way,
it's described as with all these spices and inferior foods,
like all these weird greens that you get nothing out of.
And most importantly that is what makes them thirsty for
(11:31):
all this alcohol. And so to cure them of their
alcoholic tendencies, we have to cure them of their food,
and we have to change them into basically a kind
of a white sauce bland food people. Okay, thankfully they
failed to do that. And over the next say two generations,
as Italians move up from a working class population to
(11:52):
a middle class professional they become politicians, they enter the
movie business, for instance, their way players in the movie
business um and they become culturally visible, and you begin
to see the slow shift. Nutritional knowledge begins to catch
up with the Mediterranean diet, arguing that in fact, the
Mediterranean diet may be in fact terrific for people and
(12:16):
by about the nineties seventies you begin to see a
revaluation of Italian food. So my argument is that poor
people's food are often seen as inferior by people. It
has nothing to do with the food. It has to
do with the attitude towards class and race. That's what
the whole hierarchy of taste argument is like. If you
talk to an economist, it's about supply and demand. So
(12:39):
the price is shaped by supply and demand. That is correct,
but that's an abstract model which is worked by taking
time out of the model. As a sociologist, my work
is how do people come to demand and why do
people come to demand some things at certain prices and
unwilling to pay that say, it's very difficult for most
Americans today to pay a hundred bucks when in food,
(13:00):
we're willing to pay for French, we're willing to play
for Italian, but we're not willing to pay that kind
of a price for Indian food. And you can say
that about Thai, you can say that about Vietnamese, and
and we used to say that about Italian. And that's changing,
and that's kind of for me, that change over time
of demand is the most fascinating story about American cuisines.
(13:31):
Thinking about how certain cuisines evolve in the minds of
Americans over extended periods of history really helps keep some
things in perspective. But adding time to the equation of
supply and demand makes it much more challenging to define
what makes a food authentic. In eight when Italian immigrant
workers were eating spaghetti with meat sauce for their daily
(13:52):
meals in my wife's family, they called it macaroni and gravy?
Was that authentic Italian food? Or about when a cuisine
successfully climbs the social ladder and becomes quote high class.
Is the food of Massimo Boutura, a three star chef
in Italy, closer to authentic Italian cuisine? There were critics
who wouldn't show up at his restaurant because they said
(14:14):
it wasn't authentic Italian. He has much more skilled labor
in his kitchens, uses more technique, can afford whatever ingredients
and tools he needs or wants. Surely his expression must
be more authentic with all those resources at his disposal. No.
Dr Ray helped put this discussion to rest or, at
least down for a nap. He says, there are two
(14:38):
kinds of authenticity and food. Yes, there are two kinds
of authenticity, okay, talk to me about Yes. I think
one kind of authenticity that we were we are willing
to pay for is in some ways to think of
the chef as the artist his signature okay, say a
per se or a French laundry okay, which is the
idea of the perfect professional okay, which almost think about it.
(15:00):
He is not supposed to the chef is not supposed
to have any ethnic mark on him. It's just technique,
an ingredient and skill pure wald of in some ways
the world of the perfect ingredient with the best skill
in the world. Okay. That's almost the opposite of the
other sense of authenticity ethnicity, sorry, authenticity. So the first
(15:22):
sense of authenticity is linked to the signature of the artist,
and the other side of it is the idea that
is this someone's grandmother's cooking. It belongs. So the authenticity
there is a test of belonging to a community. Okay.
So it's in a sense so in a sense of
the bottom end of the market we tested by when
we say use authenticity, we say how is it? How
(15:45):
similar is it? Two? When I went to Mexico and
ate this in Puebla, or I went to Ohaka and
ate this is this similar? Is that difference? That's what
we're saying when we're thinking about authenticity at the bottom
end of the market kit at the higher end of
the market, we are thinking about authenticity as the signature
of the artist. In this case, the chef my tie
(16:09):
name is some jit, some kids, some chit, some some
that's chef James sea Boot. We sat down at a
communal table at Hawking Bird, one of his three restaurants. Yeah,
James derived from my loud name at home, Oh mom,
I'll go by again, homes again and James. It was
(16:29):
the kind of the closest thing that our social worker
picked out so culturally, umlao speak loud nationally, I'm tie
my father from in At the end of the Vietnam War,
the neighboring Laotian government fell to Communists. Many people saw
the writing on the wall and did everything they could
(16:49):
to get out, including fleeing into refugee camps. Beginning around
the United States started issuing green cards to Looatia refugees. Yes,
we came from an asylum after Vietnam War. Has refugees.
We landed in Oakland um In. I was about two
years old. Never left. Still here. I like it here,
(17:14):
It's home. James's parents jumped at the opportunity and eventually
settled into Oakland. They both proved to be industrious. His
father worked as an auto mechanic and his mother as
a So I was always around parents working with their
hands and almost a curious boy, you know, running around
with sharp objects and you know, babysitting after school program,
(17:36):
was being in the kitchen his mom, you know, segmenting onions,
dis seeming tied, chilis, peeling, garlic, peeling challatts. I had
the perfect little hands for It's some my mom put
me to work. Yeah, so that's that was my weekends.
You know, remember doing my homework on top of the
bags of rice in the dry storage room. Man, that's
(17:57):
my was my first involving were cooking. And like the
Japanese stories from Hawaii, the Lao community in Oakland did
not shy away from their traditions around food preparations. So
grew up in the Lao community. We always have this
like almost like a c S A a group by
so the whole neighborhood set the whole neighbor was like
(18:20):
loud refugees. So there we go by half a cow,
half a slaughter, a whole slaughter, and we'll divide it up.
It's like, oh, so and so we'll like to have
a hundred dollars worth, So and so we have worth,
and you get the whole thing, awful little sack of
warm beef bial some blood. But the most intense preparation
(18:42):
was James's mother's homemade paddock or fish sauce, which will
make her own. We used to go out fishing in
the Alameda, like crab Cove, and she'll make her own
fish sauce, sauce, um sea salt, ice cream, salt um,
leaders of anchovies and small all crabs whatnot, and in
a dark place in the closet with bricks on top
(19:06):
of the press it. And then you know, you wait
a year later and you have it. That's what your
house smells like. That's what my house smells like. Yeah,
that's what my clothes smells like. That's why I smell
like going to school. So you can imagine, you know,
being elementary school, but with a funny name of some
kid I wasn't. And here's where we discovered another version
of Dr Ray's hierarchy of taste. His mother eventually took
(19:30):
a job as a cook at a successful Thai restaurant
in Berkeley, California. She and her fellow cooks, mostly from
the Lao community, prepared traditional Thaie dishes for American diners. Eventually,
the curious James asked her why, Like, wait, mom, the
food we're eating kind of never made it pass the
(19:51):
kitchen and he was like, He's like, nah, that's not
what people want, you know, that's it's too spicy. And
he's like, the party think it smells and stinks. I'm like, well,
it's sous delicious and so so what is the food
we're serving. It's like, oh, it's Thai food. I'm like, okay,
but you never made pot tire for me. The answer
that James received may not have been satisfactory, but he
(20:12):
couldn't do anything about it yet. After the break, we'll
learn about how James hustled his way up the hierarchy
of fine dining restaurants and the surprising choice he made
after he got to the top. Before the big craze
(20:52):
of the celebrity chef in the nineties, in the US.
There was a documentary TV series called Great Chef of
the World, highly recommended. Find it on YouTube. It was
made by John Bear and John Shoop out of New Orleans,
and what made their program one of a kind was
that they only filmed in real restaurant kitchens, never in
(21:13):
TV studios. It was full of no nonsense, matter of fact,
detailed explanations of dishes by professional chefs just going about
their business, mostly within very traditional French influenced kitchens. Young
James loved it. Write about sophomore year in high school.
You know, if I watch a little bit more TV,
(21:34):
and I remember watching Chefs of the World and I
was starting seeing a French kitchen for the first time
on TV, and it's like, wait a minute, this is
not a look like my mom's kitchen. Like wow, he
just had to have a single speck on his chef's
coat with his nice toke copper. Everything stose without flames.
They're not they're standing up to do prep. They're not
(21:55):
sitting out a little plastic stools and are not the
means And positive wasn't printing two repurpose plastic bags from
the market, So I'm like, wait, restaurants exist like that.
What appealed to you about that? I just everything about it. Um,
the intensity, the focus, um, the discipline. Um. It was
(22:16):
just a first, a higher level that I didn't know of.
Like I told my mom that I want to cook
for a living and there's like school. She's like, you're nuts.
It's like why It's like I was like, I actually
enjoy it. And before that show, I had like, Okay,
I know where she's coming from, you know, the whole
Asian strtypical Asian parent. I mean, when did you come
to America for you to be a cook? You know?
(22:38):
Why do you go to school be a lawyer, to
be a doctor and have a better living for ourselves
and not do what I'm doing. I get it, but
you know, I you know, I think at that time
she was just glad that I wasn't incarcerated or get
in trouble with other kids running in the streets. She's
like sure. So James enrolled in culinary school with the
California Culinary Academy. The first task that really blew his
(23:02):
mind was baking, specifically the precision it requires. Tie or louse.
Cuisine didn't use much dairy and weren't known for their
pastry production actually baking, and that's where I really fell
in love was cooking, was baking because the science and
the preciseness of it. You know before momscu goes intuition,
(23:24):
no recipes, a little dash, it is a handful of
that you asked for for recipes, like, yeah, handful of this,
handful of that that looks about right. James loved the
uniform too, so colmor school like really like I was like, okay,
this is like what I saw on TV. Kind of
confirmed it, right, you know, I got a uniform, got
negla chief toakes right to French style of sut and
(23:49):
making youd like to brigade and how that works right.
It was yes, chef, you know it was. It was
just it's difference in rolling to the military. All of
a sudden, did you like it? I loved it. I
loved it. I was I wanted more of it. After
culinary school, James took the first job he could find.
He cooked a couple of pan Asian restaurants, which really
helped him understand how to cook at higher volumes. But
(24:13):
this still wasn't what he hungered for. I still had
this itch of French cuisine and European cuisine. Then that's
when a fellow cook recommended he applied to a hot
new restaurant in town. He asked James if he knew
anything about Spanish food, Spanish food, like absolutely than not. Know,
Spain's right next to France, and that was that's about it.
(24:37):
You know. He's like, yeah, I was getting more elaborate details.
He's like, yeah, he's doing this thing. You know. It's
kind of malecler and you know, a little bit of both,
and it's a kind of food was kind of cattle on.
I'm like, okay, you say it was food of Spanish influence,
so what's catal on? You know, like getting getting deeper
deeper deeper into it. So um, yeah, So I got
(24:59):
my car, drove m de los Gatos. Now we're driving
from Oakland. Knock on the back door. To this day,
it's common to physically show up at restaurants not during
service please and asked for a stage, which basically means
they trail in the kitchen doing whatever is asked for free.
This way, the kitchen and the stage get to know
one another. James had shown up at a three Michelin
(25:22):
star restaurant called man Teresa and chef David Kinch gave
him a shot. But I remember walking to the kitchen
for the very first time. It was like walking to
like Starship Enterprise. You know, it's like like stainless deal
for miles, copper pots and pans. I'm like a bonnet stove.
(25:44):
I was like, wow, this is a still of us
on TV. It's like, no, no flames, I want to
turn knobs. Many fine dining restaurants used stoves which, instead
of exposed gas flames, over graded areas have what they
call a graduated flattop, one giant iron surface with varying
temperatures depending on where you put your pot. Hot in
the center, cool as you move out. And I was like, okay,
(26:07):
this is like this is like the major leagues. I
feel like I just got drafted into the NBA orself in.
But of course it wasn't easy. It was rough for Yere.
It was just like a rude awakening. James was drilled
in the traditions of a fine dining kitchen, many of
which at first glance seemed pointless. Keep your white towel
folded in four exact folds with a thin orange stripe
(26:27):
facing outward. Keep your small pans in your station at
exactly ninety degree angles. Wiper cutting word after this cut,
but not before that one. There are a thousand tiny
quirky details that are unique to each kitchen and chef. Also,
because of the time pressures in professional kitchens, they don't
really have time to explain why for all of them,
(26:49):
and I don't quite understand. I was like, oh, it's
just like busting my balls because I'm a new guy.
But in time of his time, like it makes sense,
you'all translate to what I would put on the plate.
He's just one one minor detailed that contributes to the
big picture. And that's why I needed. That's yeah, that
that discipline. Being that mind frame, James eventually adapted and thrived.
(27:13):
He stayed for five years, learned every station in the
restaurant backward and forward, and then knew it was time
to move on and did so with the encouragement of
Chef Kinch. He then went and cooked for short periods
of time at multiple prestigious restaurants in Europe. He got
to the top of his game and was having a
blast before he went back to Oakland. He traveled and
(27:34):
ate just traveled around, traveling around, eating and many mission
in star restaurants like I could. That was for me,
that was I coined it as my grad school for school.
That's that's how I wrote it off. When I saw
my credit card bills. Yeah, it's like this is grad school. Absolutely. Yeah.
Single diner you know in Paris appeared one year and
(27:56):
he had a great time. He actually confused many of
the restaurant's staff. It's very rare to have someone come
alone to extremely fancy restaurants in Paris and look so
critically at each detail of every dish. I thought was
a Michelan inspector. But this seemingly strange eating spree was
critical to his success. He knew he needed to know
(28:17):
exactly what goes into a meal at the most prestigious
Michelin starred restaurants. Upon returning to Oakland, he kept cooking
while getting a plan together to open his own fine
dining restaurants. You didn't have investors, had investors with all friends.
And then one disclaimer I had before the signing was like, hey,
just ten thous dollars are you giving me, I'm gonna
(28:38):
lose all of it. Just let you know and We'll
still be cool, right It's like, oh yeah, as a
tax right off, what'll still be cool? On a more
serious note, James was embarking on a quiet path. There
just wasn't much fine dining in Oakland. But you know again,
it's like why not. Why not kinda find dining restaurant
exists in Oakland. It's just no one's done it before,
(28:58):
and you do not think I'm the one to do it.
His new restaurant would be called Comi, which is a
name that I love. Comey is a name for the
very bottom level cook in a French brigade system, basically
means assistant. For James, the name his gorgeous fine dining restaurant,
Comi is playful and respectful. He's two decades removed from
(29:21):
that position, and there are a thousand Comis who would
be honored to work under James now. Comy just celebrated
its tenth anniversary, which is a great run. Also, James
has earned two Michelin Stars for the past four years,
which puts him among a small club. Of the approximately
seven hundred thousand restaurants in America, only forty four have
(29:44):
either two or three stars from Michelin. Despite his humble beginnings,
he's now in a great position. Dr Ray helps us
contextualize this special club. And there's that network at the top.
Would say, that's network of about five hundred thousand people.
It's a very small network. That's a small night. It's
(30:05):
a very small network. And in that network there are
some connections being made. It's like professors. I would almost
call it peer review, peer review amongst five hundred uh
chefs and and evaluators and journalists and restaurant critics. You
can enter the world through that. As a Michelin star chef,
(30:27):
it's a it's a signature of that you have really
arrived in that peer peer review evaluation. Once you do that,
then you allowed a little more freedom to mess around
and play with other categories of food. And especially if
you're not basically a French or an Italian very high
end chef, you will eventually there will be some pressure
(30:50):
in you to go back to your roots. When we
come back, we'll hear why James drastically reversed course after
he reached the top. We'll here how his mom made
him question is hard earned high end cooking techniques, And
I'll cook one of his recipes in my home kitchen,
one that when he told me about it, I bought
the book on the spot so that I could give
it a roll. After a couple of years of success
(31:28):
at COMI, James noticed his mother wasn't doing as well
as she'd like to be. My mother is still running
a tie restaurant. You know. She was tired of the
restaurant business. She was worn out, burnt out, worked hard,
too hard, and she wanted to leave. She wanted to
go back, go home and raise water buffalos and grow
rice again and be with her family and the country life.
(31:49):
You know, I don't blame her. You know, it's like
the time for retirement. But she got stuck on this lease.
And then's like, okay, let me take the lease from you,
and now let me deal with it. I'm gonna tell it,
maybe I'll do something different COMI was. You know, we're
busy at the time, so I was like, okay, let's
just do something maybe a Kumi bistro or something casual.
And but I grew up in that restaurant space, so
(32:09):
I had this like sentimental value to it. I could
let go. It's like, okay, Mom's leaving. I'm like all
these dishes that we cooked in the kitchen that we're
all not on the menu that we fed ourselves. I
had no idea. I never cooked him before, and I
was kind of saddened, like, this is a shame. The
thing that made me fell in love with cooking kind
of turned my back on um for many reasons. One
(32:32):
was like, yeah, it's kind of embarrassed by my own culture.
Yeah it's not uncommon, and it's like I'm getting tired
made fun of, you know, like pre school was like
I'm over it, and but yeah, so I kind of
felt like, man, I'm it's time to make up for
lost time. So he decided that instead of a French
inspired bistro, he would open Hawker Fair Hawker meaning basically
(32:56):
street food. After remodeling, his mother's former dining room, would
become a hip Louisn restaurant which honors his family's cultural heritage.
The space is funky, with neon colors, elaborate wallpaper patterns,
and bright red folding chairs at the communal tables. The
menu is designed to be shared among friends, and they
(33:16):
have a teaky hour instead of a happy hour. But
the hard part wasn't the decorating. It was learning his
mom's family recipes. But you know, those flavors were really
ingrained in my head and I started to work backwards.
You know. My mom was like, hey, she asked me.
You wanted me to teach you anything, let me know
before I go back home. I'm like me being like, oh,
(33:39):
I'm a mission star, show I can figure the ship
out right wrong. Despite his many years of experience with
the highest culinary technique, his initial tests were way off,
you know, like time Jeffer charey there on the ground
scale and just like too analytical. What's what's one of
those dishes? Describe one of those dish? One of the
(34:00):
dishes making Cormie, which is like allow Verona call me.
Is one of those noodle dishes where you eat like
Buddhist holidays. Every time you go to a kid's birthday
and allow kids birthday is always called me. And I
was like, Mom, am I doing it right? It's like, well,
you didn't have enough oil to like how much all
you're putting in the core me sauce? Do you put
oil in the sugar when you're making the caramel? I'm like,
(34:24):
what are you talking about? No, it doesn't work. James
was shocked because here's what they've been teaching in culinary
schools for decades. Caramel is made by carefully melting sugar
in a heavy bottomed pan. It's either cooked dry or
with just a little water enough to make the sugar
the texture of wet sand. As they say, you've got
to heat it very carefully, not stirring, just swirling the
(34:45):
pan as the edges turn brown. If it gets too
high and the sides, the sides can burn, you want
to brush that down with a damp pastry brush. And
then once you get it to the perfect color, then
you add your fat, usually cream, and it foams up violently.
It's all very sensitive and precise. James's mom was suggesting
to do almost the opposite of like, you know what
(35:07):
I should listen to mom, This sounds really bizarre. Yeah. Oil,
you have to fry the sugar. You start a cold pan,
what oil, lots of oil, lots of oil and sugar,
probably like equal parts oil, equal parts oil and sugar
and sugar, and and you cook it until the sugar caramelizes.
And then does it separate from the oil, Yeah, it
separates from oil. Yeah, yeah, but it does, it doesn't
(35:29):
doesn't crytallize anything. I followed the recipe for James Kwamie
from his book Hawker Fair. This is a simple dish
of caramel and oil sauce with aromatics, tossed with medium
rice noodles and garnished with an omelet, bean sprouts, scallions
and cilantro. Ahead of time, I measured out all my ingredients,
(35:51):
slice the shallot, minced the garlic, and cook the omelet topping.
Now it's time to fry some sugar. I've never done
this before, and it's just doesn't make any sense to me.
Here we go a half cup of sugar going into
a Dutch oven and we're gonna put a half cup
of oil in there. This is crazy, all right. So
(36:13):
we've got it. Looks like, you know, spacetry chefs called
it like a wet sand. Look. It kind of looks
like wet sand, but quite a bit more liquid than
the wet sand. I'm afraid it's stiring it too much,
because when I stir sugar and water or just plain sugar,
crystallizes gets crunchy on you. And I guess that's not
(36:34):
going to happen because they're all each all the granules
are coated in oil. Because we add an everything whole.
It doesn't look like anything's it's been about a minute
so far. This is crazy. Yeah, the oils, it is little,
(36:56):
it's kind of crystallizing. It's kind of clumping up and bubbling,
still bright white. I'm just gonna let it sit there
and let the sugar do its thing. Now normally I'm
cooking sugar. I just tilt the pan and swirl the pan.
It's usually edges started to turn brown first. There's some
(37:19):
brown there starting to brown through the hot spot on
the burners, and swirl it around. It's been two minutes
now and it's starting to turn brown, as sugar will
do as the heats up. Now the sugar is sort
of really um coming together and separating from the oil.
(37:41):
But he did say it would separate from the oil.
But it's still sort of a fluid paste and it's
turning a nice gorgeous color. It's turned from granular to smooth,
which means the sugar is melting anyone a nice amber
color because that's ever went a little bit of bitterness,
(38:01):
I presume, but not too much. It's kind of very cool.
I think the deeper brown. You get it, and we're colorful.
We're gonna have it. But we're getting really close. The
color is that it's a deep, deep tan and it's
(38:22):
starting to foam a little bit. So I think we're
getting pretty close. In fact, I'm gonna I'm ready for
the air maats now. And it's just the sweet peas
and ye, half a cup of shallots help the table
(38:44):
stings of barlet, and then we're gonna let those sweat
and cook. And James was absolutely right. The kitchen smells
fabulous now, Okay, So now we're gonna have the seasonings.
We've got fish sauce and oyster sauce. You've got soy
sauce and maybe a half teaspoon MSG mix it around.
(39:08):
So now we've got our air mats in there. We've
made a nice brown sauce with lots of lots of
minced garlic and sliced shalloon in there, and all these
soap noodles go on. They're pretty pliable. And now the
sauces noodles are soaking up a sauce. It looks gorgeous.
I love all these ara mats in there. Yeah, powerful flavor. Look,
(39:38):
I've never tasted before, caramely, salty, delicious. It's gonna beautiful.
I can tell already, man that oil and sugar is
kind of transformative. It looks bizarre at first, but it
makes so much sense in the end. The sugar caramelizes,
You've got great control over the cooking of it. It
(39:59):
turns a beautiful amber. It sinks to the bottom of
the pan. But in the end, when you bring all
the ingredients together, they all mild beautifully and coat all
the noodles, and the noodles absorb all that sweet, wonderful goodness.
It just changed my whole approach to kind of almost everything,
you know. It's just like, there's gotta be a different
way to do this. Yeah, if this, if I didn't
(40:20):
know this, what else do I know? Exactly exactly? It's like,
maybe there's a different way. You know, this is an
amazing dish. I can't wait to introduce this to my wife,
to my friends. Fella cooks, especially the cooking sugar and
a lot of oil. But for James, it means even
more than that. Oh my God, like making these recipes,
just the smells alone, like I feel like I closed
(40:42):
my eyes and I feel like I was in that
room when I was when my mom was making I
was twelve or ten years old. You know, all of
a sudden, all these vivid memories are like Also, I
knew what my mom was wearing that day. You can
remember that just from that dish. Yeah, I just saw
something just like takes you back, almost like a time machine.
Dr Ray found himself craving a similar experience. He needed
(41:05):
essential flavors that he remembered from seven thousand miles to
the east, and flavors that he had never prepared before.
When I first came from Indian in fact, I was
a lower middle class Indian kid, being a male. I
never I did not know any anything about cooking, you know,
And so partly is this nostalgia and partly this absence
that I could not find this food in the most
(41:27):
of the cheap Indian kind of bunglades. She run Indian
joints that were in this town. There were three of them.
So this absence in some ways became the memory of
that absence. So red chili flakes didn't do it. For
chili flakes to do it, I mean, some things works
well about rad cheli flakes, like the chart or something, right,
but a lot of every day like my mom say,
(41:49):
uh fish curry with the mustard sauce, you know, fresh
ground mustard, a little bit of ginger, a little bit
of garlic, and a lot of green chilies, Okay, and
you just basically almost like steam it. That was just
a impossible to get it anywhere. No one was doing
it in terms of an Indian restaurant. And second, not
not that any of the red chilies would not play
(42:10):
that role of replacing that that green slightly citrusy kind
of the green chili tastes. And what were you missing
by not having those ingredients? Really, what what I was
missing was the kind of a sensory memory of another place,
you know, sensory memory of my personhood. Because think about food, right,
(42:32):
Food is the way we incorporate the external world into ourselves,
which becomes us. That's what culture is all about. There's
no other object we absorbed like that. So our sense
of personhood anywhere in the world is built on these habitual,
everyday palettes and flavors and senses. The way we think
(42:53):
about all the senses we use in eating of food,
say in this case, uh fish, say trout with mustard,
sauce with green chilies. Right, is the it's it's the
it's the palette, it's deep inside us, okay, it's inside us.
The smell, the nose, especially retro nasal smell, Okay, and
(43:15):
of course touch. I I still do when I am
eating Indian food. I still use my fingers directly because
forks feel like a cold, metallic barrier to that taste. Again,
this kind of, this whole what you can almost call
what an anthropologist David Sutton cause synesthesia. How all your
senses are pulling together and pulling together into some sense
(43:39):
of personhood. And that personhood, remember, is my relationship to
other substance and my relationship to other people. And that's
what food is about. Food has the power to help
us find our long lost personhood, to connect the unconnected,
to travel, time and space. And one wonderful thing about
(44:01):
the world of cooking is that we can pick and choose,
keep and discard traditions based on what we want for
our lives. James C. A. Boot has done a great
job of keeping vital family recipes alive through his work
as a chef, and in terms of family traditions outside
of his work, James just passed on a special one
(44:22):
to his daughter, who's in kindergarten. Walking school bus, and
I walked my daughter up to school with like six
other kindergarteners in ahead and in some other parents first week,
you know, Oh, Emma, what do you do this weekend?
You know, and and we goes my daddy killed duck.
Like it's like, oh really, It's like, what do you mean, Emma.
(44:44):
It's like my daddy killed duck and didn't because like,
like what does she mean, because like, yeah, we saw
our duck. How does she respond? Um, she just looked
like not in shock, but she's like looking interest. She
has like almost hypnotizing, you know. She'd been to the zoo,
she's been to the petting zoo, you know, taken to
(45:04):
the state fair, you know. But for me, like bleating
up dock, feathering it right, you know, and then cooking
it and she's eating it. So I think it brings
it a kind of full circle to her. Before I
left James and our delightful chat in the middle of
the bustling hawking Bird dining room, I had to ask
him one more question. Fish sauce is one of those
(45:26):
great essences that's like nothing else on the planet. I
had to ask him if he has any homemade fish
sauce projects going on in dark places at his home
like his mother did. No, I figured you got too
much going on and making. I tried wiped him. She
was not too happy. Thank you to our guests Dr
(45:49):
Christi ned Ray and Chef's James Sef. For more information,
to check out Dr Ray's books The Migrants Table, Curried Cultures,
and The Ethnic stratur Also, you will not be disappointed
with Chef Seaboot's book Hawker Fair. And if you're in
the Bay Area, you could try any of his three
amazing restaurants scattered across the hierarchy of taste. Our show
(46:19):
is produced by Jonathan Dressler. Our executive producer is Christopher Hasiotis,
and our supervising producer is Gabrielle Collins. All the music
on From Scratches by Ryan Scott off his album A
Freak Grows in Brooklyn. Also, I've got a new book
out called From Scratch about ten staple meals and all
(46:39):
they can teach you about cooking. We'll have a link
in the show notes, or go to Amazon or any
independent bookseller. From Scratch is a production of I heart Radio.
We're more podcasts from iHeart Radio. Visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. She sh Shore
Welcome to From Scratch, a production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Michael Rohlman. I'm a writer but has spent the
past twenty five years in professional kitchens, translating that craft
for the home kitchen. This is a podcast about cooking.
In each episode, we'll talk with one chef and one
non chef about the same theme. On today's episode, we'll
(00:29):
be exploring the theme of authenticity and what it means
to make authentic food For our guest chef, I visited
one of the most decorated chefs in San Francisco's Bay Area.
He shared his astonishing story. We'll learn about his assent
from being a boy in a refugee camp to Section
eight housing in Oakland, to becoming the chef owner of
(00:49):
the most prestigious European style fine dining restaurant in Oakland,
and why he turned back to his roots to open
two casual food joints that feature his other's traditional recipes.
I'll try and recreate one of those dishes, which uses
a technique that flies in the face of traditional cooking rules.
I've never encountered it before, but first I had the
(01:13):
pleasure of speaking with Dr KRISHNANDU Ray one of the
most brilliant minds in the food world. I asked him
to be a guest on this podcast because he focuses
his research on the supply side of the food world
rather than the consumption side. He's also the perfect person
to ask about what it means for a food to
be authentic. To start, I wanted him to define a
(01:36):
word we don't think much about, but we use it often,
and in fact, it's incredibly loaded ethnic. Let's talk about
that word. Good word, bad words. You know, it's a
it's an interesting word. It comes into play by about
the nineteen fifties, especially in journalism, and it's a way
to think about cultural difference without falling into the trap
(01:58):
of race. So there's a sense of that at there's white,
and then there's black, and then there are ethnic people
who are kind of somewhat in between. Give your typical
example who like French food was never considered ethnic. It
was foreign, it was exotic, but it was high class,
upper class. Ethnic food is supposed to be the food
(02:20):
of mostly poor, working class migrants, and so that is
one of the categories. One of the problems of the
categories now, so you can't really have really a high
priced to ethnic food. That's the presumption. Yes, that's been
the historical presumption. So if you if it's very even
now if most people, if you say a high price,
people have a sense that it can be authentic. So
(02:42):
if you're charging more than ten twelve bucks for anything,
it can be authentic ethnic. So there's a kind of
a funny trap there, you know, so you can cook
very good food, and my argument is that kind of
sets up a limitation to what kind of ingredients you're
going to use, what kind of skill you're going to bring,
because the price includes basically the three major thing, which
(03:05):
is rent, which is huge in any city, and then
the kind of ingredients you're going to put into it,
and the kind of labor costs. Okay, that's why if
you trap ethnic food, of food of the ethnics as
cheap food, it is very difficult to break out of
those barriers of good food. But certain cuisines don't stay
(03:31):
categorized as ethnic. So that brings us to a major
focus of Dr Ray's work. He's developed the really useful
phrase hierarchy of taste. I use the hierarchy of taste
as a phrase to think about how American notions of
what is good food and what is expensive food has
(03:51):
changed over time. So what I'm really interested in a
hierarchy of taste is this question of how do Americans
how and why do Americans change their mind about what
is good to eat and what is not good to eat,
and how that has changed in American history. Dr Ray
helped us look at a few examples from American history
that can give context to our search for authenticity. Give
(04:15):
you an example, and if you'll read The New York
Times eighteen seventeen, eighteen seventy two, there's a lot of
discussion about German food and German food is this food
that is has kind of weird things like schnitzel, and
it says in the New York Times describe saying it's
in fact, it's just a feel cutlet with a weird
(04:37):
name called schnitzel, and it is all you can eat,
real schnitzel for fifteen cents in eighteen seventy two. And
there's a lot of discussion about German for instance, beer halls.
The Anglos in New York City are very kind of
suspicious of the Germans because the German beer halls up
(04:58):
and down Bowery. They find that children are there, women
are there because the Germans drink with the family, very
different from say the Irish or the Angulo pop culture
tavern culture, which was a much more masculine culture. Okay,
So that there's a sense of this weird people with
a bit of weird culture. Some of it is exciting,
(05:19):
but most of it we should not do. And despite
the skepticism of their social practices, and I did not
know this, German became the second most used language in America.
German was to the nineteen thirties and forties in the
US what Spanish is to the US today. Okay, the
most dominant language, by the way. Long before that, Ben
(05:40):
Franklin was worried that, in fact, he was going to
be swamped by the Germans because he was in Pennsylvania. Remember,
and who we come to identify as the Pennsylvania Dutch,
who are really the Deutsch, okay, And so German kind
of this antipathy toward Germans is going to turn into
this kind of massive pressure on kind of naming of foods.
(06:03):
That's when the naming will change from things like Frankfurt
to hot dog to a way to americanize these names,
and Germans are going to be in some ways written
out of the American script. But my argument is, in
fact most American food is Germanic food. Think about Laggers
and think about the cheese, things about Hamburger. I think,
(06:24):
in fact it is in some ways. German case is
a very interesting case where what used to be in
some ways of foreign ethnic marker, in this case in
quotation marks uh in some ways is made invisible by
in fact most of us. By the way most Americans,
the largest so called ethnic category of Americans, are German Americans.
(06:46):
There are fifty million German Americans to okay, yes exactly,
and so the German case is an interesting case where
it is both suppressed but also it becomes ubiquitous. Most
American food, in that sense is Germanic food, with some differences.
(07:10):
It's certainly true that German culture has quietly influenced major
food trends for America. It's hard to picture, though, the
Fourth of July without brats, burders and a cold American lager. Fortunately,
for those Americans who may appreciate other flavors and textures,
Japanese cuisine and those who prepare it have fought a
long and difficult battle for relevance in the United States.
(07:33):
There's a beautiful study of Japanese in Hawaii, which is
where we have in Hawaii and on the West Coast,
we have the fust Japanese coming in as immigrants and
relatively poor immigrants and around. If you talked to Japanese
and there's a beautiful study but done by a sociologist
in Hawaii, the Japanese are saying, yes, we know our
food is inferior. The children learn in school that they
(07:54):
should be drinking more dairy and we should be eating
more protein to make us big and strong like white people.
And uh, but you see, I have a bad habit.
I'm of that generation. So my children's habits are going
to become more American and my habit is going to
stay Japanese, and their health is going to improve. This
(08:14):
is about people are talking about. And of course Japan
becomes an enemy in the Second World War, just as
the Germans. By the way, the Japanese case. Similarly, there's
a repression of taste for Japanese things that works towards
the sense that Japanese food is kind of inferior. For
inferior people that begins to flip only in the nineteen eighties,
(08:38):
once Japan emerges as a major economic power. And remember,
I don't know whether you remember, that's the time Americans
are talking about just in time production, how Japanese capitalism
is so much agile and more powerful, and when sushi
came into the matly totally. And that is and by
the way, thing about that where sushi Japanese food comes
(08:59):
in is mostly midtown. Even now you go in Manhattan,
the high end Japanese restaurants are often in Midtown because
this is where the Japanese managers were now really highly valued,
would eat. Okay, And so sushi comes in and suddenly
we begin to flip. And of course, but then also
nutritional knowledge begins to catch up with things like fish
(09:20):
and fermented food, and you begin to say, Japanese food
is the best food in the world. And then we
we we see the data that they lived one of
the longest in the world, so they must be doing
something right. Okay, But the big one for me is
(09:43):
Italian food. I'm married a woman whose family hailed in
the late eighteen hundreds from Napoli. Italians swarmed in through
l as Island and huge numbers from the eighteen hundreds
through really the nineteen forties, and their cuisine is really
really influential in America. What would America be without pizza
and spaghetti? What's that story? Italian is a very good
(10:06):
example because in fact, Italian is one of those cuisines
in American history that falls from the top, flattens out,
and then climbs back. Is climbing back up right now.
What I mean by is this, say with Thomas Jefferson,
who in some ways brings in macaroni and cheese, Okay,
and there's a sense that it is this is an
(10:27):
Italian thing. It's part of the travel through the Mediterranean
and bringing in macaroni, which is kind of a generic
name for any past that at that point of time.
Often they would be registered in restaurants as a slightly
frenchified mac and cheese. So that was considered very high
high culture. In case said, let's say around eighteen What
(10:48):
is fascinating is this, This is what happens is from
about eighteen eighty onwards you have millions of poor Italians
coming in and what you see is this astonishing disdain
towards Italian culinary culture from eighteen eighty to about the
nineteen forties. By the way, nutritionists and all kinds of reformers,
(11:10):
progressive reformers look at Italians and say, oh, they have
a terrible inferior food culture. They eat all this pasta,
they eat all this garlic, very garlicky. By the way,
it's described as with all these spices and inferior foods,
like all these weird greens that you get nothing out of.
And most importantly that is what makes them thirsty for
(11:31):
all this alcohol. And so to cure them of their
alcoholic tendencies, we have to cure them of their food,
and we have to change them into basically a kind
of a white sauce bland food people. Okay, thankfully they
failed to do that. And over the next say two generations,
as Italians move up from a working class population to
(11:52):
a middle class professional they become politicians, they enter the
movie business, for instance, their way players in the movie
business um and they become culturally visible, and you begin
to see the slow shift. Nutritional knowledge begins to catch
up with the Mediterranean diet, arguing that in fact, the
Mediterranean diet may be in fact terrific for people and
(12:16):
by about the nineties seventies you begin to see a
revaluation of Italian food. So my argument is that poor
people's food are often seen as inferior by people. It
has nothing to do with the food. It has to
do with the attitude towards class and race. That's what
the whole hierarchy of taste argument is like. If you
talk to an economist, it's about supply and demand. So
(12:39):
the price is shaped by supply and demand. That is correct,
but that's an abstract model which is worked by taking
time out of the model. As a sociologist, my work
is how do people come to demand and why do
people come to demand some things at certain prices and
unwilling to pay that say, it's very difficult for most
Americans today to pay a hundred bucks when in food,
(13:00):
we're willing to pay for French, we're willing to play
for Italian, but we're not willing to pay that kind
of a price for Indian food. And you can say
that about Thai, you can say that about Vietnamese, and
and we used to say that about Italian. And that's changing,
and that's kind of for me, that change over time
of demand is the most fascinating story about American cuisines.
(13:31):
Thinking about how certain cuisines evolve in the minds of
Americans over extended periods of history really helps keep some
things in perspective. But adding time to the equation of
supply and demand makes it much more challenging to define
what makes a food authentic. In eight when Italian immigrant
workers were eating spaghetti with meat sauce for their daily
(13:52):
meals in my wife's family, they called it macaroni and gravy?
Was that authentic Italian food? Or about when a cuisine
successfully climbs the social ladder and becomes quote high class.
Is the food of Massimo Boutura, a three star chef
in Italy, closer to authentic Italian cuisine? There were critics
who wouldn't show up at his restaurant because they said
(14:14):
it wasn't authentic Italian. He has much more skilled labor
in his kitchens, uses more technique, can afford whatever ingredients
and tools he needs or wants. Surely his expression must
be more authentic with all those resources at his disposal. No.
Dr Ray helped put this discussion to rest or, at
least down for a nap. He says, there are two
(14:38):
kinds of authenticity and food. Yes, there are two kinds
of authenticity, okay, talk to me about Yes. I think
one kind of authenticity that we were we are willing
to pay for is in some ways to think of
the chef as the artist his signature okay, say a
per se or a French laundry okay, which is the
idea of the perfect professional okay, which almost think about it.
(15:00):
He is not supposed to the chef is not supposed
to have any ethnic mark on him. It's just technique,
an ingredient and skill pure wald of in some ways
the world of the perfect ingredient with the best skill
in the world. Okay. That's almost the opposite of the
other sense of authenticity ethnicity, sorry, authenticity. So the first
(15:22):
sense of authenticity is linked to the signature of the artist,
and the other side of it is the idea that
is this someone's grandmother's cooking. It belongs. So the authenticity
there is a test of belonging to a community. Okay.
So it's in a sense so in a sense of
the bottom end of the market we tested by when
we say use authenticity, we say how is it? How
(15:45):
similar is it? Two? When I went to Mexico and
ate this in Puebla, or I went to Ohaka and
ate this is this similar? Is that difference? That's what
we're saying when we're thinking about authenticity at the bottom
end of the market kit at the higher end of
the market, we are thinking about authenticity as the signature
of the artist. In this case, the chef my tie
(16:09):
name is some jit, some kids, some chit, some some
that's chef James sea Boot. We sat down at a
communal table at Hawking Bird, one of his three restaurants. Yeah,
James derived from my loud name at home, Oh mom,
I'll go by again, homes again and James. It was
(16:29):
the kind of the closest thing that our social worker
picked out so culturally, umlao speak loud nationally, I'm tie
my father from in At the end of the Vietnam War,
the neighboring Laotian government fell to Communists. Many people saw
the writing on the wall and did everything they could
(16:49):
to get out, including fleeing into refugee camps. Beginning around
the United States started issuing green cards to Looatia refugees. Yes,
we came from an asylum after Vietnam War. Has refugees.
We landed in Oakland um In. I was about two
years old. Never left. Still here. I like it here,
(17:14):
It's home. James's parents jumped at the opportunity and eventually
settled into Oakland. They both proved to be industrious. His
father worked as an auto mechanic and his mother as
a So I was always around parents working with their
hands and almost a curious boy, you know, running around
with sharp objects and you know, babysitting after school program,
(17:36):
was being in the kitchen his mom, you know, segmenting onions,
dis seeming tied, chilis, peeling, garlic, peeling challatts. I had
the perfect little hands for It's some my mom put
me to work. Yeah, so that's that was my weekends.
You know, remember doing my homework on top of the
bags of rice in the dry storage room. Man, that's
(17:57):
my was my first involving were cooking. And like the
Japanese stories from Hawaii, the Lao community in Oakland did
not shy away from their traditions around food preparations. So
grew up in the Lao community. We always have this
like almost like a c S A a group by
so the whole neighborhood set the whole neighbor was like
(18:20):
loud refugees. So there we go by half a cow,
half a slaughter, a whole slaughter, and we'll divide it up.
It's like, oh, so and so we'll like to have
a hundred dollars worth, So and so we have worth,
and you get the whole thing, awful little sack of
warm beef bial some blood. But the most intense preparation
(18:42):
was James's mother's homemade paddock or fish sauce, which will
make her own. We used to go out fishing in
the Alameda, like crab Cove, and she'll make her own
fish sauce, sauce, um sea salt, ice cream, salt um,
leaders of anchovies and small all crabs whatnot, and in
a dark place in the closet with bricks on top
(19:06):
of the press it. And then you know, you wait
a year later and you have it. That's what your
house smells like. That's what my house smells like. Yeah,
that's what my clothes smells like. That's why I smell
like going to school. So you can imagine, you know,
being elementary school, but with a funny name of some
kid I wasn't. And here's where we discovered another version
of Dr Ray's hierarchy of taste. His mother eventually took
(19:30):
a job as a cook at a successful Thai restaurant
in Berkeley, California. She and her fellow cooks, mostly from
the Lao community, prepared traditional Thaie dishes for American diners. Eventually,
the curious James asked her why, Like, wait, mom, the
food we're eating kind of never made it pass the
(19:51):
kitchen and he was like, He's like, nah, that's not
what people want, you know, that's it's too spicy. And
he's like, the party think it smells and stinks. I'm like, well,
it's sous delicious and so so what is the food
we're serving. It's like, oh, it's Thai food. I'm like, okay,
but you never made pot tire for me. The answer
that James received may not have been satisfactory, but he
(20:12):
couldn't do anything about it yet. After the break, we'll
learn about how James hustled his way up the hierarchy
of fine dining restaurants and the surprising choice he made
after he got to the top. Before the big craze
(20:52):
of the celebrity chef in the nineties, in the US.
There was a documentary TV series called Great Chef of
the World, highly recommended. Find it on YouTube. It was
made by John Bear and John Shoop out of New Orleans,
and what made their program one of a kind was
that they only filmed in real restaurant kitchens, never in
(21:13):
TV studios. It was full of no nonsense, matter of fact,
detailed explanations of dishes by professional chefs just going about
their business, mostly within very traditional French influenced kitchens. Young
James loved it. Write about sophomore year in high school.
You know, if I watch a little bit more TV,
(21:34):
and I remember watching Chefs of the World and I
was starting seeing a French kitchen for the first time
on TV, and it's like, wait a minute, this is
not a look like my mom's kitchen. Like wow, he
just had to have a single speck on his chef's
coat with his nice toke copper. Everything stose without flames.
They're not they're standing up to do prep. They're not
(21:55):
sitting out a little plastic stools and are not the
means And positive wasn't printing two repurpose plastic bags from
the market, So I'm like, wait, restaurants exist like that.
What appealed to you about that? I just everything about it. Um,
the intensity, the focus, um, the discipline. Um. It was
(22:16):
just a first, a higher level that I didn't know of.
Like I told my mom that I want to cook
for a living and there's like school. She's like, you're nuts.
It's like why It's like I was like, I actually
enjoy it. And before that show, I had like, Okay,
I know where she's coming from, you know, the whole
Asian strtypical Asian parent. I mean, when did you come
to America for you to be a cook? You know?
(22:38):
Why do you go to school be a lawyer, to
be a doctor and have a better living for ourselves
and not do what I'm doing. I get it, but
you know, I you know, I think at that time
she was just glad that I wasn't incarcerated or get
in trouble with other kids running in the streets. She's
like sure. So James enrolled in culinary school with the
California Culinary Academy. The first task that really blew his
(23:02):
mind was baking, specifically the precision it requires. Tie or louse.
Cuisine didn't use much dairy and weren't known for their
pastry production actually baking, and that's where I really fell
in love was cooking, was baking because the science and
the preciseness of it. You know before momscu goes intuition,
(23:24):
no recipes, a little dash, it is a handful of
that you asked for for recipes, like, yeah, handful of this,
handful of that that looks about right. James loved the
uniform too, so colmor school like really like I was like, okay,
this is like what I saw on TV. Kind of
confirmed it, right, you know, I got a uniform, got
negla chief toakes right to French style of sut and
(23:49):
making youd like to brigade and how that works right.
It was yes, chef, you know it was. It was
just it's difference in rolling to the military. All of
a sudden, did you like it? I loved it. I
loved it. I was I wanted more of it. After
culinary school, James took the first job he could find.
He cooked a couple of pan Asian restaurants, which really
helped him understand how to cook at higher volumes. But
(24:13):
this still wasn't what he hungered for. I still had
this itch of French cuisine and European cuisine. Then that's
when a fellow cook recommended he applied to a hot
new restaurant in town. He asked James if he knew
anything about Spanish food, Spanish food, like absolutely than not. Know,
Spain's right next to France, and that was that's about it.
(24:37):
You know. He's like, yeah, I was getting more elaborate details.
He's like, yeah, he's doing this thing. You know. It's
kind of malecler and you know, a little bit of both,
and it's a kind of food was kind of cattle on.
I'm like, okay, you say it was food of Spanish influence,
so what's catal on? You know, like getting getting deeper
deeper deeper into it. So um, yeah, So I got
(24:59):
my car, drove m de los Gatos. Now we're driving
from Oakland. Knock on the back door. To this day,
it's common to physically show up at restaurants not during
service please and asked for a stage, which basically means
they trail in the kitchen doing whatever is asked for free.
This way, the kitchen and the stage get to know
one another. James had shown up at a three Michelin
(25:22):
star restaurant called man Teresa and chef David Kinch gave
him a shot. But I remember walking to the kitchen
for the very first time. It was like walking to
like Starship Enterprise. You know, it's like like stainless deal
for miles, copper pots and pans. I'm like a bonnet stove.
(25:44):
I was like, wow, this is a still of us
on TV. It's like, no, no flames, I want to
turn knobs. Many fine dining restaurants used stoves which, instead
of exposed gas flames, over graded areas have what they
call a graduated flattop, one giant iron surface with varying
temperatures depending on where you put your pot. Hot in
the center, cool as you move out. And I was like, okay,
(26:07):
this is like this is like the major leagues. I
feel like I just got drafted into the NBA orself in.
But of course it wasn't easy. It was rough for Yere.
It was just like a rude awakening. James was drilled
in the traditions of a fine dining kitchen, many of
which at first glance seemed pointless. Keep your white towel
folded in four exact folds with a thin orange stripe
(26:27):
facing outward. Keep your small pans in your station at
exactly ninety degree angles. Wiper cutting word after this cut,
but not before that one. There are a thousand tiny
quirky details that are unique to each kitchen and chef. Also,
because of the time pressures in professional kitchens, they don't
really have time to explain why for all of them,
(26:49):
and I don't quite understand. I was like, oh, it's
just like busting my balls because I'm a new guy.
But in time of his time, like it makes sense,
you'all translate to what I would put on the plate.
He's just one one minor detailed that contributes to the
big picture. And that's why I needed. That's yeah, that
that discipline. Being that mind frame, James eventually adapted and thrived.
(27:13):
He stayed for five years, learned every station in the
restaurant backward and forward, and then knew it was time
to move on and did so with the encouragement of
Chef Kinch. He then went and cooked for short periods
of time at multiple prestigious restaurants in Europe. He got
to the top of his game and was having a
blast before he went back to Oakland. He traveled and
(27:34):
ate just traveled around, traveling around, eating and many mission
in star restaurants like I could. That was for me,
that was I coined it as my grad school for school.
That's that's how I wrote it off. When I saw
my credit card bills. Yeah, it's like this is grad school. Absolutely. Yeah.
Single diner you know in Paris appeared one year and
(27:56):
he had a great time. He actually confused many of
the restaurant's staff. It's very rare to have someone come
alone to extremely fancy restaurants in Paris and look so
critically at each detail of every dish. I thought was
a Michelan inspector. But this seemingly strange eating spree was
critical to his success. He knew he needed to know
(28:17):
exactly what goes into a meal at the most prestigious
Michelin starred restaurants. Upon returning to Oakland, he kept cooking
while getting a plan together to open his own fine
dining restaurants. You didn't have investors, had investors with all friends.
And then one disclaimer I had before the signing was like, hey,
just ten thous dollars are you giving me, I'm gonna
(28:38):
lose all of it. Just let you know and We'll
still be cool, right It's like, oh yeah, as a
tax right off, what'll still be cool? On a more
serious note, James was embarking on a quiet path. There
just wasn't much fine dining in Oakland. But you know again,
it's like why not. Why not kinda find dining restaurant
exists in Oakland. It's just no one's done it before,
(28:58):
and you do not think I'm the one to do it.
His new restaurant would be called Comi, which is a
name that I love. Comey is a name for the
very bottom level cook in a French brigade system, basically
means assistant. For James, the name his gorgeous fine dining restaurant,
Comi is playful and respectful. He's two decades removed from
(29:21):
that position, and there are a thousand Comis who would
be honored to work under James now. Comy just celebrated
its tenth anniversary, which is a great run. Also, James
has earned two Michelin Stars for the past four years,
which puts him among a small club. Of the approximately
seven hundred thousand restaurants in America, only forty four have
(29:44):
either two or three stars from Michelin. Despite his humble beginnings,
he's now in a great position. Dr Ray helps us
contextualize this special club. And there's that network at the top.
Would say, that's network of about five hundred thousand people.
It's a very small network. That's a small night. It's
(30:05):
a very small network. And in that network there are
some connections being made. It's like professors. I would almost
call it peer review, peer review amongst five hundred uh
chefs and and evaluators and journalists and restaurant critics. You
can enter the world through that. As a Michelin star chef,
(30:27):
it's a it's a signature of that you have really
arrived in that peer peer review evaluation. Once you do that,
then you allowed a little more freedom to mess around
and play with other categories of food. And especially if
you're not basically a French or an Italian very high
end chef, you will eventually there will be some pressure
(30:50):
in you to go back to your roots. When we
come back, we'll hear why James drastically reversed course after
he reached the top. We'll here how his mom made
him question is hard earned high end cooking techniques, And
I'll cook one of his recipes in my home kitchen,
one that when he told me about it, I bought
the book on the spot so that I could give
it a roll. After a couple of years of success
(31:28):
at COMI, James noticed his mother wasn't doing as well
as she'd like to be. My mother is still running
a tie restaurant. You know. She was tired of the
restaurant business. She was worn out, burnt out, worked hard,
too hard, and she wanted to leave. She wanted to
go back, go home and raise water buffalos and grow
rice again and be with her family and the country life.
(31:49):
You know, I don't blame her. You know, it's like
the time for retirement. But she got stuck on this lease.
And then's like, okay, let me take the lease from you,
and now let me deal with it. I'm gonna tell it,
maybe I'll do something different COMI was. You know, we're
busy at the time, so I was like, okay, let's
just do something maybe a Kumi bistro or something casual.
And but I grew up in that restaurant space, so
(32:09):
I had this like sentimental value to it. I could
let go. It's like, okay, Mom's leaving. I'm like all
these dishes that we cooked in the kitchen that we're
all not on the menu that we fed ourselves. I
had no idea. I never cooked him before, and I
was kind of saddened, like, this is a shame. The
thing that made me fell in love with cooking kind
of turned my back on um for many reasons. One
(32:32):
was like, yeah, it's kind of embarrassed by my own culture.
Yeah it's not uncommon, and it's like I'm getting tired
made fun of, you know, like pre school was like
I'm over it, and but yeah, so I kind of
felt like, man, I'm it's time to make up for
lost time. So he decided that instead of a French
inspired bistro, he would open Hawker Fair Hawker meaning basically
(32:56):
street food. After remodeling, his mother's former dining room, would
become a hip Louisn restaurant which honors his family's cultural heritage.
The space is funky, with neon colors, elaborate wallpaper patterns,
and bright red folding chairs at the communal tables. The
menu is designed to be shared among friends, and they
(33:16):
have a teaky hour instead of a happy hour. But
the hard part wasn't the decorating. It was learning his
mom's family recipes. But you know, those flavors were really
ingrained in my head and I started to work backwards.
You know. My mom was like, hey, she asked me.
You wanted me to teach you anything, let me know
before I go back home. I'm like me being like, oh,
(33:39):
I'm a mission star, show I can figure the ship
out right wrong. Despite his many years of experience with
the highest culinary technique, his initial tests were way off,
you know, like time Jeffer charey there on the ground
scale and just like too analytical. What's what's one of
those dishes? Describe one of those dish? One of the
(34:00):
dishes making Cormie, which is like allow Verona call me.
Is one of those noodle dishes where you eat like
Buddhist holidays. Every time you go to a kid's birthday
and allow kids birthday is always called me. And I
was like, Mom, am I doing it right? It's like, well,
you didn't have enough oil to like how much all
you're putting in the core me sauce? Do you put
oil in the sugar when you're making the caramel? I'm like,
(34:24):
what are you talking about? No, it doesn't work. James
was shocked because here's what they've been teaching in culinary
schools for decades. Caramel is made by carefully melting sugar
in a heavy bottomed pan. It's either cooked dry or
with just a little water enough to make the sugar
the texture of wet sand. As they say, you've got
to heat it very carefully, not stirring, just swirling the
(34:45):
pan as the edges turn brown. If it gets too
high and the sides, the sides can burn, you want
to brush that down with a damp pastry brush. And
then once you get it to the perfect color, then
you add your fat, usually cream, and it foams up violently.
It's all very sensitive and precise. James's mom was suggesting
to do almost the opposite of like, you know what
(35:07):
I should listen to mom, This sounds really bizarre. Yeah. Oil,
you have to fry the sugar. You start a cold pan,
what oil, lots of oil, lots of oil and sugar,
probably like equal parts oil, equal parts oil and sugar
and sugar, and and you cook it until the sugar caramelizes.
And then does it separate from the oil, Yeah, it
separates from oil. Yeah, yeah, but it does, it doesn't
(35:29):
doesn't crytallize anything. I followed the recipe for James Kwamie
from his book Hawker Fair. This is a simple dish
of caramel and oil sauce with aromatics, tossed with medium
rice noodles and garnished with an omelet, bean sprouts, scallions
and cilantro. Ahead of time, I measured out all my ingredients,
(35:51):
slice the shallot, minced the garlic, and cook the omelet topping.
Now it's time to fry some sugar. I've never done
this before, and it's just doesn't make any sense to me.
Here we go a half cup of sugar going into
a Dutch oven and we're gonna put a half cup
of oil in there. This is crazy, all right. So
(36:13):
we've got it. Looks like, you know, spacetry chefs called
it like a wet sand. Look. It kind of looks
like wet sand, but quite a bit more liquid than
the wet sand. I'm afraid it's stiring it too much,
because when I stir sugar and water or just plain sugar,
crystallizes gets crunchy on you. And I guess that's not
(36:34):
going to happen because they're all each all the granules
are coated in oil. Because we add an everything whole.
It doesn't look like anything's it's been about a minute
so far. This is crazy. Yeah, the oils, it is little,
(36:56):
it's kind of crystallizing. It's kind of clumping up and bubbling,
still bright white. I'm just gonna let it sit there
and let the sugar do its thing. Now normally I'm
cooking sugar. I just tilt the pan and swirl the pan.
It's usually edges started to turn brown first. There's some
(37:19):
brown there starting to brown through the hot spot on
the burners, and swirl it around. It's been two minutes
now and it's starting to turn brown, as sugar will
do as the heats up. Now the sugar is sort
of really um coming together and separating from the oil.
(37:41):
But he did say it would separate from the oil.
But it's still sort of a fluid paste and it's
turning a nice gorgeous color. It's turned from granular to smooth,
which means the sugar is melting anyone a nice amber
color because that's ever went a little bit of bitterness,
(38:01):
I presume, but not too much. It's kind of very cool.
I think the deeper brown. You get it, and we're colorful.
We're gonna have it. But we're getting really close. The
color is that it's a deep, deep tan and it's
(38:22):
starting to foam a little bit. So I think we're
getting pretty close. In fact, I'm gonna I'm ready for
the air maats now. And it's just the sweet peas
and ye, half a cup of shallots help the table
(38:44):
stings of barlet, and then we're gonna let those sweat
and cook. And James was absolutely right. The kitchen smells
fabulous now, Okay, So now we're gonna have the seasonings.
We've got fish sauce and oyster sauce. You've got soy
sauce and maybe a half teaspoon MSG mix it around.
(39:08):
So now we've got our air mats in there. We've
made a nice brown sauce with lots of lots of
minced garlic and sliced shalloon in there, and all these
soap noodles go on. They're pretty pliable. And now the
sauces noodles are soaking up a sauce. It looks gorgeous.
I love all these ara mats in there. Yeah, powerful flavor. Look,
(39:38):
I've never tasted before, caramely, salty, delicious. It's gonna beautiful.
I can tell already, man that oil and sugar is
kind of transformative. It looks bizarre at first, but it
makes so much sense in the end. The sugar caramelizes,
You've got great control over the cooking of it. It
(39:59):
turns a beautiful amber. It sinks to the bottom of
the pan. But in the end, when you bring all
the ingredients together, they all mild beautifully and coat all
the noodles, and the noodles absorb all that sweet, wonderful goodness.
It just changed my whole approach to kind of almost everything,
you know. It's just like, there's gotta be a different
way to do this. Yeah, if this, if I didn't
(40:20):
know this, what else do I know? Exactly exactly? It's like,
maybe there's a different way. You know, this is an
amazing dish. I can't wait to introduce this to my wife,
to my friends. Fella cooks, especially the cooking sugar and
a lot of oil. But for James, it means even
more than that. Oh my God, like making these recipes,
just the smells alone, like I feel like I closed
(40:42):
my eyes and I feel like I was in that
room when I was when my mom was making I
was twelve or ten years old. You know, all of
a sudden, all these vivid memories are like Also, I
knew what my mom was wearing that day. You can
remember that just from that dish. Yeah, I just saw
something just like takes you back, almost like a time machine.
Dr Ray found himself craving a similar experience. He needed
(41:05):
essential flavors that he remembered from seven thousand miles to
the east, and flavors that he had never prepared before.
When I first came from Indian in fact, I was
a lower middle class Indian kid, being a male. I
never I did not know any anything about cooking, you know,
And so partly is this nostalgia and partly this absence
that I could not find this food in the most
(41:27):
of the cheap Indian kind of bunglades. She run Indian
joints that were in this town. There were three of them.
So this absence in some ways became the memory of
that absence. So red chili flakes didn't do it. For
chili flakes to do it, I mean, some things works
well about rad cheli flakes, like the chart or something, right,
but a lot of every day like my mom say,
(41:49):
uh fish curry with the mustard sauce, you know, fresh
ground mustard, a little bit of ginger, a little bit
of garlic, and a lot of green chilies, Okay, and
you just basically almost like steam it. That was just
a impossible to get it anywhere. No one was doing
it in terms of an Indian restaurant. And second, not
not that any of the red chilies would not play
(42:10):
that role of replacing that that green slightly citrusy kind
of the green chili tastes. And what were you missing
by not having those ingredients? Really, what what I was
missing was the kind of a sensory memory of another place,
you know, sensory memory of my personhood. Because think about food, right,
(42:32):
Food is the way we incorporate the external world into ourselves,
which becomes us. That's what culture is all about. There's
no other object we absorbed like that. So our sense
of personhood anywhere in the world is built on these habitual,
everyday palettes and flavors and senses. The way we think
(42:53):
about all the senses we use in eating of food,
say in this case, uh fish, say trout with mustard,
sauce with green chilies. Right, is the it's it's the
it's the palette, it's deep inside us, okay, it's inside us.
The smell, the nose, especially retro nasal smell, Okay, and
(43:15):
of course touch. I I still do when I am
eating Indian food. I still use my fingers directly because
forks feel like a cold, metallic barrier to that taste. Again,
this kind of, this whole what you can almost call
what an anthropologist David Sutton cause synesthesia. How all your
senses are pulling together and pulling together into some sense
(43:39):
of personhood. And that personhood, remember, is my relationship to
other substance and my relationship to other people. And that's
what food is about. Food has the power to help
us find our long lost personhood, to connect the unconnected,
to travel, time and space. And one wonderful thing about
(44:01):
the world of cooking is that we can pick and choose,
keep and discard traditions based on what we want for
our lives. James C. A. Boot has done a great
job of keeping vital family recipes alive through his work
as a chef, and in terms of family traditions outside
of his work, James just passed on a special one
(44:22):
to his daughter, who's in kindergarten. Walking school bus, and
I walked my daughter up to school with like six
other kindergarteners in ahead and in some other parents first week,
you know, Oh, Emma, what do you do this weekend?
You know, and and we goes my daddy killed duck.
Like it's like, oh really, It's like, what do you mean, Emma.
(44:44):
It's like my daddy killed duck and didn't because like,
like what does she mean, because like, yeah, we saw
our duck. How does she respond? Um, she just looked
like not in shock, but she's like looking interest. She
has like almost hypnotizing, you know. She'd been to the zoo,
she's been to the petting zoo, you know, taken to
(45:04):
the state fair, you know. But for me, like bleating
up dock, feathering it right, you know, and then cooking
it and she's eating it. So I think it brings
it a kind of full circle to her. Before I
left James and our delightful chat in the middle of
the bustling hawking Bird dining room, I had to ask
him one more question. Fish sauce is one of those
(45:26):
great essences that's like nothing else on the planet. I
had to ask him if he has any homemade fish
sauce projects going on in dark places at his home
like his mother did. No, I figured you got too
much going on and making. I tried wiped him. She
was not too happy. Thank you to our guests Dr
(45:49):
Christi ned Ray and Chef's James Sef. For more information,
to check out Dr Ray's books The Migrants Table, Curried Cultures,
and The Ethnic stratur Also, you will not be disappointed
with Chef Seaboot's book Hawker Fair. And if you're in
the Bay Area, you could try any of his three
amazing restaurants scattered across the hierarchy of taste. Our show
(46:19):
is produced by Jonathan Dressler. Our executive producer is Christopher Hasiotis,
and our supervising producer is Gabrielle Collins. All the music
on From Scratches by Ryan Scott off his album A
Freak Grows in Brooklyn. Also, I've got a new book
out called From Scratch about ten staple meals and all
(46:39):
they can teach you about cooking. We'll have a link
in the show notes, or go to Amazon or any
independent bookseller. From Scratch is a production of I heart Radio.
We're more podcasts from iHeart Radio. Visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. She sh Shore
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