Transcriber: Kristaps Kadiķis Reviewer: Denise RQ
Food.
As a chef, food has been a delicious medium
to many, if not most of my life experiences;
both those that I wish I could taste again
and those that I wish I had never tasted in the first place.
These experiences and memories have not only shaped
my personality and my cooking style
but have also led to a greater understanding
of how food, and how my particular approach
to feeding a society in an alien environment
has allowed me to integrate on my own terms
and cultivate what I see as very unique relationship
with my adopted home away from home, Latvia.
I don't have a solution to any world problems,
I'm not going to present a revolutionary idea
that's going to change the world; I'm just a chef,
a simple guy cooking simple food with a whole lot of love.
Instead, I hope to present a challenge to our chefs, to our food community,
basically, anybody with a mouth who likes to eat.
(Laughter)
I challenge you to appreciate and place more value
in life's simple pleasures.
I grew up in Seattle, Washington,
basted in the American Latvian community,
and its valiant efforts to keep the customs and traditions
of a free Latvia alive in its adopted country.
My mother would often remind us that we also had Swedish roots,
but the reality is my youth was profoundly American.
These influences are obvious and evident with me
wherever I go, wherever I cook.
My earliest and fondest food memories:
- that's me, the little dude on the shoulder up there -
it would be by my "mormor", my Swedish grandmother,
rolling cookie dough and pie crust off the counter
and preaching her own gospel of baking.
Or there was my "omamma", my Latvian grandmother.
She was a bit more resourceful in her cooking
that was influenced by a life of hardship and uncertainty,
but she was always giving my other grandmother run for her money.
So my father, Pop,
always preferred Latvian meatballs as opposed to Swedish meatballs.
(Laughter)
There was no room for argument, this was a fact, not an opinion.
(Laughter)
My mother, well, mom...
Mom was just trying to get four hyperactive kids
to sit around the table and taste her latest attempt
at the newest Julia Child recipe,
while Dad was on the grill, grilling plan B just in case.
(Laughter)
The sincerity, the simplicity, and the love that went into this food
would have a lasting impression on me
that I would not understand or appreciate for years to come.
I myself began cooking at the age of 15.
I fell in love with the instant results
of seeing what hard work, passion, and teamwork could create.
I went on to complete Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in San Francisco.
At the age of 19 I worked my way through Michelin-starred restaurants,
local mom-and-pop Italian joints and small sidewalk cafes
that catered to the "ladies who lunch".
Very early on in my career, I realized
that food was much, much more than just fuel.
Food had power,
food had an amazing ability to bring people from all walks of life together.
Food was a timeless human ritual that had evolved over the years
to become the culture that it's recognized as today.
But more important for me, food opened doors.
Whether it was shucking oysters for Pearl Jam's frontman Eddie Vedder
or taking a staff retreat to Whidbey Island
where I learned how to grill frog legs and make a Jamaican jerk sauce
and have my first glass of white wine at the age of 16,
while watching a sunset over the Olympic Mountains of the Puget Sound,
my mind was blown.
The world was my oyster,
or perhaps, more accurately, the oyster had become my world.
(Laughter)
Mollusks aside.
(Laughter)
I made an important personal discovery.
Food could take me anywhere I wanted it to.
I thrived in the restaurant environment, but eventually youthful restlessness
and the desire to see the world got the best of me.
I packed my knives, bought a ticket, got on my bike, went to France,
and cycled my way through France, Italy, Spain
- I got hit by a bus in Barcelona -
and then I bummed it from North Africa to Poland.
Eventually, I found myself here in Riga, Latvia,
looking for a kitchen team to join.
Now, this was all ten years ago,
and I remember I immediately found myself
struggling to be attracted to, or let alone, be offered,
anything resembling the local flavor that I had hoped to discover.
I recall being recommended a great place in the center of town by my friends.
They said it's cheap, it's easy, it's good.
I found the place, it was empty. Whatever, I sat down anyway.
"Ah, they seem to specialize in American breakfast and sandwiches."
I ordered a cheeseburger as I'm an American, that's what we do.
(Laughter)
After a 40-minute wait,
and countless inquiries as to the state of this burger,
I was presented with a plate with a bun sliced on the diagonal,
- trendy - (Laughter)
cheese, melted, tomato, wilted lettuce, excessive mayonnaise.
Bun, cheese, no burger.
"Ma'am, my cheeseburger is missing the burger."
(Laughter)
A blank face responded, "No, sir, that is a cheeseburger.
Trust me."
(Laughter)
Not really knowing how to deal with this situation,
I left my slow cooked, grilled cheese sandwich
on the counter, and walked out, and never been back since.
It became evident to me
that perhaps the restaurant culture, that melting pot
and endless variety of cuisines that I immersed myself in
that had inspired both me and thousands of other young chefs in the United States
did not exist here, at least not on the same grand scale.
It seemed that the food and the environments
were either so traditional that it was to the point of being cheesy and painful,
or on the other side, so pretentious, overpriced, and out-of-reach
for the average Joe like me that I just wrote it off completely.
I seemed to be witnessing the dawn of a truly disturbing food revolution,
and it sucked.
Sushi/Italian/kebab/ grill/strip club/restaurant?
Hundreds of items coming out of one kitchen?
What the hell was going on here?
How can any of this be fresh?
How could one chef be responsible of such a broad range of flavor profiles?
It only took one bite to find out they weren't.
(Laughter)
It did not take long for me to become a chef's worst nightmare.
An unadventurous eater, picky,
distrustful of any food that I had not made myself.
I became "that customer", the one I hated to serve.
The one that wait staff and complain about,
with all those food, and menu alterations, and picky suggestions,
and often brutal comments about the food.
This happened. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
(Laughter)
I instead found work managing a hostel for backpackers and British stag parties
which led to five years of some of life's most memorable and most blurry moments.
(Laughter)
After a few years, my mom, well, orgot what I looked like,
so she asked me to come back to Boston,
so I repacked those dusty knives and headed back to the States.
Not knowing anything but kitchen work back home in the States,
I returned to cooking.
I was instantly inspired and in awe of the dining public's acceptance
of a less stuffy, amazingly casual,
no frills and product-driven dining experience.
It seemed so real, so honest, and so rooted in what really mattered:
the food and the drink.
This was only amplified by all those people behind it
that had devoted their life to the service and to the customer.
And they were greatly appreciated by the community at large
and respected for what they did.
There was a level of trust in the skill of the chefs and the servers
that allowed people to be opened up
to so many new experiences through that medium of food.
I thought to myself, "How had I forsaken this all so easily?"
Of course, I did miss my friends, and experiences,
and the exotic lifestyle abroad.
And soon enough, chef Mārtiņš Sirmais called and invited me to come back
and open a restaurant in a trendy neighborhood in Riga.
What a great, exciting opportunity for a young chef, I thought.
I relished at the chance, a new challenge to actually do something
to perhaps influence what I saw as a lack of diversity, authenticity, and integrity
in the emerging local dining scene.
I remember it was years earlier
when I was in culinary school in San Francisco, there was a chef.
He told us great chefs do not just feed people.
Great chefs create memories. They influence the moment.
There was another chef who would often tell us, almost on a daily basis,
that God gave you hands to burn them,
but that has nothing to do with this story.
(Laughter)
Food is a common denominator between people from every walk of life.
Food is central in so many of life's greatest, most notable occasions
whether it's weddings, or funerals, graduations, or christenings,
makeups, or breakups,
an adulteress, a fair, a wholesome family gathering.
I took it upon myself to make my return to cooking in Latvia
with an open mind, and more importantly, an open mouth.
I began to trust the people who wanted to show me a piece of their culture
on the end of the fork or in a shot glass, or a glass for that matter.
And the diversity and range of flavors that I soon discovered
was unbelievable and truly unforgettable.
I fell in love with the Riga Central market
and the jolly ladies who'd been producing
smoked meats, smoked fish, and the most delicious pickled vegetables
one could imagine since I was nothing but a wink in my father's eye.
Or for instance, that time I met a Ukrainian veteran
of the Soviet–Afghan War out in some field.
He got me blitzed on his potato moonshine and home-style beer.
After we both were nicely pickled,
he convinced me to eat this mysteriously sinewy meat.
It was dowsed in this spicy Russian mustard sauce.
It was so delicious I tucked in for more, second helping.
After a few more shots of the moonshine
we're sitting there, he points across the field,
and he says, "You see that bull?" I say, "Yes."
He said, "We just ate his testicles."
(Laughter)
Talk about farm-to-table, right?
(Laughter)
Unforgettable, delicious. (Laughter)
Or there's that other time in Latgale, more recently,
where a Latgalian bread-making goddess
just convinced me that this loaf of rye bread
was God manifested into a loaf on the table.
We then washed down God with shots of haufi, a pine needle extract
that was developed by scientists at the Latvian Research Institute.
What a delicious and healthy waste of research funds, I thought.
(Laughter)
This was what I was looking for, what I thought was missing.
The roots of this beautiful region's peasant cuisine,
the same roots that are the roots of all of the world's greatest cuisines.
Derived from the salt of the Earth,
the people for whom food is more than fuel,
but is rather a link to their past than a means to their future.
I became distraught
that only a small handful chefs were embracing this
and in turn smaller portions of the food community had access to it
in anything but its most watered-down state.
I found it odd that popular food culture
had so quickly abandoned these flavors and techniques
for what often seemed to be nothing more
than a show of status, and pomp, or convenience.
It seemed that we had begun to cultivate a landscape of forgettable food.
There's so much wrong with food in the world right now,
but there is so much right
about what food is and has been here for generations.
Latvia is farm-to-table, head-to-toe,
organic, seasonal, and always has been.
Latvia already is the future of the world food movement.
Let's not take that for granted. Let's not screw that up.
Laying a foundation based on simple done well
is something to be proud of.
Something that is harder and harder to find with each passing day.
It is something that is uniquely ours
and does not need a half-assed (Latvian) "euro renovations".
As a chef, I find
my average customer's comfort zone extremely boring and unadventurous.
But I get it, you guys don't trust me yet.
A chef must earn his customer's trust.
I can't vouch I'm 100% local or organic,
but I can do what I can
to put what is available at that time on the table,
but more importantly, I take the time to instill in young chefs
the importance to nourish, educate, and challenge the dining community
by leveraging the familiar
to open people up to new experiences and broaden their comfort zones.
It often seems to me that young chefs out there fear being different,
that there's something wrong with it.
Well, good food takes good time, I get that,
but do we really want to live in an environment
where the Caesar salad, tartars and crème brûlées dominate menus?
Why are we still serving food that has nothing to do with us?
It's not even understood by the very people who are producing it.
There's nothing wrong with curiosity, but please let's not butcher that cat.
Can we please ditch the 20-page leather-bound menus
of the same ingredients scrambled into 25 different items?
Can we aim to create one page of truly creative and inspired food?
Latvia has produced chefs who are focusing
on showcasing the world's food on television shows.
Chefs who are influencing the youth's healthy eating habits,
and even chefs that have paved the way
for our very own contemporary Latvian cuisine.
(Latvian) Hats off.
But let's not let those efforts be in vain by limiting how we interpret and demand
what a dining experience should and could be.
Otherwise, we will continue to get nothing more than (Latvian) "normal".
(Laughter)
And I know we're all a bit tired of that.
Less is more.
Let's strip food down to its essence and ask,
"How authentic and inspired is the food that our chefs are putting on our plates?"
Let's demand consistency of quality and content.
Not convenience, packaging, and pomp.
Now that all sounds simple enough for me to chew on,
but the question, Latvia, is "Can you swallow it?"
(Applause)