Dan Barber: What makes a great chef? | Dan Barber | Big Think

Dan Barber: What makes a great chef?

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A great playwright knows the play is greater than the scene.

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Dan Barber:

DAN BARBER is the Chef of Blue Hill, a restaurant in Manhattan's West Village, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, located within the nonprofit farm and education center, Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. His opinions on food and agricultural policy have appeared in the New York Times, along with many other publications. Barber has received multiple James Beard awards including Best Chef: New York City (2006) and the country's Outstanding Chef (2009). In 2009 he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

To expand on his philosophy of cooking with sustainably grown, local ingredients, Dan has been working with such organizations as the Kellogg Foundation, Slow Food USA and Earth Pledge to minimize the political and intellectual rhetoric around agricultural policies and to instead maximize the appreciation of eating good food. Focusing on the issues of pleasure, taste and regional bounty-and how these imperatives are threatened-Dan helped create the philosophical and practical framework for Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and continues to help guide it in its mission to create a consciousness about the effects of everyday food choices.

He is author of the book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Dan Barber: So it seems to me what makes a great chef – the ones that I respect the most – are when all of the vectors when you sit down to a meal aren’t pointing at the chef. They’re pointing something else. Now that might be in the realm of sustainability; but it also might be in the realm of history or some type of culture. You know Mario Batali is very good at that, and he’s one of the greats at that. All of the chefs who, you know . . . who don’t scream, “Me, me, me!” on the plate, I think that says to me there’s something going on that’s larger than just food, which makes the food taste better. It’s not just focused on the ego and on . . . and on the . . . the manipulation of the ingredients, but of something larger. It’s about something. I think those are the chefs that end up making a real mark. And then, you know, there’ s a second part to this too, which is like the editing of a dish, you know which is . . . which is to me like the most critical. Like those chefs that like . . . those chefs who put way too much ingredients, and we’ve all had that. And then there are other chefs on the other end who are minimalists for the sake of being minimal, and it’s very sort of a feat and kind of off-putting. Precious, right? But to strike that balance, it’s like any art. And that sends . . . I hate relating cooking to art because I think that’s pretentious, too. But this is the one place where I would give up to and make the analogy to art, whether it’s writing or painting. You know there are very few like real artists and people at the top of their profession who can . . . who can take out from what they are creating to get to the essence. And they don’t . . . They don’t have, you know, a steel . . . You know in the great chef’s restaurant, there is no great dish – the one dish you have to have. There is . . . You know it’s much . . . The experience is much bigger than that. It reminds me of this Nabokov thing that someone once told me – that Nabokov, when he was writing “Three Sisters”, there was this great scene where one guy says to the other guy, “Tell me about your wife.” And the guy stands up and he does this big speech. “My wife, my wife, let me tell you about my wife. My wife in the morning is dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. My wife by noontime is dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And by the afternoon my wife starts talking about dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” He goes on and on, and everyone in the rehearsal for this thing is ...their firstborn. They love this speech so much at the end of the week right before they’re about to do the performance, someone says to Nabokov, you know that scene might make . . .

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