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“All the best food in the world was made by grannies.”
At Eve in Fremont, Matt and I happily, luxuriously agree to add two poached eggs and avocado to the iconic Hot Bowl. To want to add more to a dish already brimming with grains, seeds, dandelion greens, vegetables, and a sesame vinaigrette is a move that feels safely bougie. Yet it’s justified considering the privilege of being served after Matt and I worked in our respective restaurants all week. Matt, a current cook at Seattle’s acclaimed Italian restaurant, Spinasse, agreed to meet with me to talk about something on my mind.
I had been thinking about home cooks’ obsession with the secrets of restaurant chefs to improve their own cooking. These stem from the Food Network days I grew up on, like Ann Burell’s Secrets of a Restaurant Chef to Netflix’s Salt Fat Acid Heat show and cookbook.
Working in Sawyer, the upscale restaurant in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood helmed by chef Mitch Mayers, I gravitate towards the server’s station to polish plates or silverware. It provides the perfect view over the open kitchen where I can indulge my curiosity for how restaurants work.
One evening, I decided to pester Matt, who used to work there. He efficiently sprinkling pickled mustard seeds over an apple and beet salad and piped marshmallow meringue onto Choco Tacos. I asked Matt, “What do you think restaurant chefs should take away from home cooks?” He replied immediately, “They should fucking relax.”
The momentum had begun and I couldn’t stop thinking about this divide between home and restaurant cooks. I’ll be the first to correct anyone who calls me a “chef” simply because I know my way around a home kitchen. However, our fetish for the knowledge of restaurant chefs is emblematic of the elevated status of European technique as the echelon of proper cuisine. Recognizing where chefs draw inspiration from is inverting this status quo.
Culturally, we are obsessed with what professionals do, be they chefs or CEOs, and how the peasantry can poach that knowledge. Bon Appetit has mastered this through their Back to Back challenge with Carla Lalli Music and their mini series about “the techniques they swear by, the ingredients they can’t live without, and the mindsets that keep them going,” in which Molly Baz tells home cooks to have their mise en place (shit ready) and use salt! (Literally everyone cool it with the salt! The only chef chef I’ve heard say to use less salt is Greens’ Deborah Madison and things seem to be going well for her. . .)
“Even if you’re not making food for people you love, you should pretend that you are.”
But I found myself wondering, what is the inverse of this series? What is the mindset of a home cook that a restaurant chef would benefit from? In a way, there are many similarities. Dishes should be able to be made quickly (hungry customer : hungry children) and perform well (more reservations : full bellies). Chefs know this and use it when creating their menus, Matt explained. “All the best food in the world was made by grannies.”
David Chang’s Ugly Delicious uses interview to show this, too. “Home cooking, or ugly-delicious food, as I call it, has now become the food that I also want to make in the restaurant,” he explains. This is radical for several reasons, one of which being that food is heavily photographed, so the visualization and free marketing you get from social media platforms of your customers is seen as an essential. Stews and casseroles are not pretty, so they are less likely to make their way onto restaurant menus or food publications, explains Megan Gordan, the Director of Marketing and Sales at SimplyRecipes.com in our recent conversation. Bringing these dishes to the limelight is also radical because it illustrates the importance of home cooking from many homes.
For as long as French haute cuisine and American’s obsession with skinny french women, Chang, as well as other brown chefs like Samin Nosrat, Michael Twitty, and Yotam Ottolenghi, asserts the importance of food from their homes. The pattern has shifted from the elevation of European haute cuisine to the elevation of haute cuisine with home inspiration. Or as Samin set off to find out for her show: What do grandmothers in the Yucatan make everyday, why is it so delicious, and what can home cooks do with this information?
Pixar’s Ratatouille epitomizes the power of home cooking in the eyes of the chef. When draconian food-critic “If I don’t like it, I don’t swallow” Edgar Ego forks a morsel of the “peasant dish,” ratatouille, in his mouth, he is whisked back to his warm childhood home. For as much as we put white, European-trained chefs on a pedestal, the food with the most influence comes from grannies. The rise of fusion-forward restaurants is indicative of this, despite the credit going to typically white and male chefs that popularize it.
Beyond using the food of grannies to make food better, the love put into cooking for families is fuel that Matt suggests chefs use. While he unabashedly got into the industry to make money, he takes pride in his work. “When I go into a restaurant, I will be the hardest worker there.” He expressed disgust that some chefs who are also in it to economically survive “don’t even taste the shit they make anymore.” Matt’s key takeaway for chefs is this: “Even if you’re not making food for people you love, you should pretend that you are.”
