- I'm in New York city with Eric Ripert,
widely regarded as one of the best chefs on earth.
- The minute you start to think about being the best
or anything like that, you suddenly are lost.
- You have to deliver excellence, night after night.
- Yes.
- Plate after plate.
- Yes.
I mean, in the kitchen, it's not like it's a walk in a park.
You have to be extremely focused and it's intense.
- Do you have a certain approach to cooking?
- I want to have a wow effect for me and the team
when we taste it.
And therefore I trust that the client
will have a wow effect hopefully.
- I'm Monica Langley.
This is "The Inflection Point".
Thank you for inviting us to Le Bernardin.
This is a special place.
- It is special.
And thank you for being here, of course.
- Now, what is your inflection point
when you realize things were so different for you
and would change your life forever?
- Well, I had many,
but one that was probably the most important
was in culinary school.
It was a two-year program.
So the first year we were learning how to be a waiter,
and cook and many other things.
So they wanted me for the second year to become a waiter,
and I wanted to become a chef, to study how to cook.
So they decided to compromise with me, and they said,
"We're gonna invite your parents,
and they're gonna see you in a dining room,
and then with your parents, we will discuss it,
and hopefully we all agree
that you're gonna become a waiter."
So my mother sits here,
and right here, it's a general from the French army,
with his wife and a party.
And I order the cocktails and so on.
And my mother is watching.
And I come, and I don't know what happened,
but I dump the tray of the cocktails
on the neck of the general.
So I clean the general, I go back to the bar,
come back with the cocktails, I start to serve.
And it was an ice cube on the floor.
I slid on ice cube, the tray goes on his wife,
the entire tray.
But at that point, start to scream,
and I'm sent to the kitchen forever.
- So it turned out great for you,
'cause look where you are today.
You are considered Eric Ripert,
one of the best chefs in the world.
What does that mean to you?
- It means a lot for the team that is working with me.
And for me also as well, it means that I'm rewarded
for doing what I love the most, which is cook.
So it's amazing to have compliments like that
and to live the dream basically.
- Do you feel a special pressure
because that's what you're called?
You're the best!
- No, I don't feel pressure.
When I come to work, I think about what I'm supposed to do
with the team in the kitchen, create,
be with them to make sure that we execute properly
in a timely manner
to basically please the clients and so on.
And that takes all my attention, energy, efforts.
So therefore I have no space for stress.
I think the minute you start to think about being the best
or anything like that, you suddenly are lost.
You're not doing your task.
- Do you have a certain approach to cooking?
- I like very, very high quality ingredients.
They can be modest ingredients, but very, very fresh
or very special.
And then cook in a simple way
that's gonna elevate those ingredient to the next level.
- I've been fortunate to eat here at Le Bernardin.
To me, there's nothing simple about it.
It seems like the most sophisticated meal
I ever had in my life.
How is that simple, Eric?
- It's simple because we master the techniques.
When you know the techniques, the process is very simple.
And we do not overcomplicate the presentation in the plate
because I think that the more you put in the plate,
the more you're gonna lose
the essence of the principle ingredient,
which is at Le Bernardin's food.
- Tell us about Le Bernardin, when you took over.
It was sudden, was it hard?
I mean, you were 29 or so when you took over,
because the co-owner died of a heart attack.
- Yes.
- What was that like for you?
- It was very emotional when Gilbert Le Coze passed away.
It was also a surprise.
He had a heart attack on an afternoon
and then never came back to the kitchen.
So it was very difficult.
And I missed him tremendously
because not only he was my boss, but he was my dear friend.
And then his sister who was his business partner as well
asked me to take over completely the kitchen
and to create my style and to completely change the menu.
And it's what I did, and so on.
And the menu evolved with the experience
that I have in my life by traveling,
by eating somewhere else,
by interacting with other professionals and so on.
- Do you want anyone who walks in and sits down
and have a meal to feel an emotional connection
with what they're eating?
Do you even think of it like that?
- I don't think about the client having
an emotional relationship with the lobster, for instance.
(both laughing)
I think about making the lobster delicious,
and then I'm confident that something will happen
in between the client and the lobster.
- But you sometimes have an emotional experience
with some of the food you cook.
- Yes, of course.
Sometimes the experience is not that good.
It's emotional in a bad way.
And we work on it and work on it and work on it,
and sometimes we stop and change
and decide to have another style of recipe.
Or most of the time we continue until we reach the level of,
I will say, contentment, but it's much more than that,
or level of being like, "Oh, wow!"
I want to have a wow effect for me and the team
when we taste it,
and therefore I trust that the client
will have a wow effect hopefully.
- You can talk so easily about being a chef,
but part of what you have to do at Le Bernardin
is also run the business and be creative
and innovative as a chef.
These seem like such different skill sets.
- They are very different.
So, creativity is something that you cannot control.
You cannot push a button and say, I'm creative,
and push a button and stop creativity.
So usually, I have a pen and a piece of paper.
And when I have an idea, I take notes and-
- 'Cause it just comes to you.
- It comes to me like that and then it disappears.
And out of 100 ideas, usually 90 are bad, 10 are good.
But then it's pretty fine.
- Yeah.
- Then the days are very long.
So I spend time managing the business.
I spend time in the kitchen.
I spend time in creativity.
I spend time for myself.
I spend time with my family.
And this is kind of a holistic approach to my life
and to the way I manage the business in harmony
with staying sane and also giving back to my family.
- A lot of celebrity chefs, and you are a celebrity chef,
everybody knows your name,
so a lot of them would exploit their name
or the name of their business
and go put their names on other restaurants,
expand to, we could have a Le Bernardin at Las Vegas.
We could have an Eric Ripert fish sauce or something.
Why have you not done that?
- It doesn't make me happy to go-
- It could make you money though.
- Money is not happiness.
Money can contribute to happiness,
but not necessarily happiness.
No money can buy the happiness that I have
with having one restaurant
and being most of my time at the restaurant
- Which is named the top restaurant
in all of the United States and all of the world.
- We are part of that family.
- Okay, let's talk personally about you.
- Yeah.
- Food has always been, it seems to me,
the center of your world.
- Yes.
- Tell me how food has played a role in your life,
starting with your childhood.
- At age four, I am in a kitchen
with my grandmothers and my mother, and I wanna help,
they don't want me to help of course,
but I'm eating a lot of things.
I'm a glutton and I'm a quagmire, and I'm everything.
- At four years old?
- Oh yes.
And five and six and seven and eight.
My grandmother has cooked soul food
from Italy and from France.
My mother is very influenced at the time
by a modern cuisine, which was nouvelle cuisine in the '70s,
and cooked fine dining for me.
So I'm in heaven when it comes down to eating at the table.
- You're speaking about heaven and food,
but your childhood was anything but heavenly.
Your good friend Anthony Bourdain
said it was heartbreaking, horrifying and inspiring.
Your parents divorced when you were how old?
- Five years old.
- Okay. Then your dad died when you were?
- 10 years old.
- And then you had a stepfather that was-
- He was not my friend.
So it was definitely challenging, for sure.
- Then Chef Jacques came into your life.
- Yes.
- That seemed to be a very pivotal moment.
- It was a very pivotal moment.
Jacques was a legionnaire, retired legionnaire,
that was a chef.
He had a small restaurant, 20 covers.
He was by himself in the kitchen and his wife
in a dining room.
And he had a temper and he was very well known
where I grew up, Andorra, which is a small country
to have that temper and to accept clients
or to fire clients in the middle of their meal and so on.
He was very-
- Temperamental.
- Yes, it was like a Broadway show.
But he liked me a lot.
So he let me go to his kitchen.
He let me try the food.
And he showed me simple recipes and so on.
And I was tremendously inspired by him.
And instead of studying at night, I was reading cook books.
So I had bad grades.
- Bad grades.
- I was reading recipes from famous chefs
like Paul Bocuse and so on.
And when I was 15, I ended up in a principal office with mom
and they said, "Your son cannot go further in his studies.
It's really bad.
He has to choose
what they call a vocational college school."
And it was culinary school,
and I was delighted,
I was so happy.
- And then that's where you went
and your training officially began?
- Yes.
- Okay, so what was that training like?
- So, culinary school was a little bit boring
on the beginning, but I knew I had to go and pay my dues
and learn and cut my fingers and burn my hands and so on,
which I did of course.
And I finally, two years later, graduated from that school
and was ready to go work in restaurant.
So I ended up in La Tour d'Argent.
1982, they were celebrating their 400-year anniversary.
- Wow.
- And I was the youngest,
I was 17 years old in that kitchen,
and it was very, very, very challenging and difficult.
We were working like 16, 17 hours a day,
six days a week eating very little
because we didn't have time,
and it was a lot of verbal abuse in the kitchen.
We were being screamed at all day long.
I mean, a lot of physical abuse too
in a sense that they were kicking our butt,
punching us in the shoulders,
throwing plates at us and so on.
- And you took it?
- Yeah, of course I took it
because it was the only way to learn from the best.
It was no other way.
It was not such a thing as a civilized, kind kitchen.
- When you became a chef of your own kitchen,
did you emulate that to some degree at the beginning?
- So in the beginning, yes, I emulated what I had learned
from some of my mentors.
So I was screaming in the kitchen,
I was throwing plates on the floor when the-
- Well, what?
If the food came out and it didn't look right?
Didn't taste right? - Yes.
- You were like, "What?"
- I would take the plate and throw it on the floor,
and I was treating the cooks with no respect, basically.
And I learned very quickly that, first of all,
they were all leaving,
especially the best cooks were leaving the team,
and nobody wanted to work with me.
And I was miserable in my life,
and one night I was home thinking,
what's wrong in my life?
And I realized it was all coming from me
being the bad guy that I was,
the bad person that I was.
- What was behind this attitude and behavior?
- So, I was young.
I had a temper.
I had definitely some anger.
And until I realized that anger is not a quality,
anger is a weakness.
And when you realize that, suddenly everything change.
An angry chef is not someone powerful, it's someone weak.
Overnight, I decided to switch and change
and I said, "I am totally wrong.
Starting tomorrow, we're changing completely
the culture of the kitchen."
And it took a bit of time, but we did it successfully.
And I have the kitchen I think that I always wanted today.
- You have to deliver excellence night after night.
- Yes.
- Plate after plate.
- Yes.
- Can you be that chill?
- I mean, in the kitchen,
it's not like it's a walk in a park.
You have to be extremely focused and it's intense.
- Do you ever lose your temper in the kitchen?
- I do not lose my temper in the kitchen,
I do not lose my temper in my private life,
but I'm very demanding with myself and with the team.
And I can be very firm,
at the same time I'm always very respectful,
but it doesn't mean that I'm gonna accept something
that is not right.
- Has Buddhism helped you in your life or your kitchen even?
- So for me, Buddhism has been very important.
I discover that religion, philosophy, science is just,
for me is the three, but it's very personal.
It changed my life completely, yes,
and today, I still every morning, wake up very early
and meditate, and practice, and read, and educate myself,
and then the day starts.
- Let's talk about cooking beyond Le Bernardin.
What do you eat at home?
- It depends on the season.
It depends on the time.
- What's your go-to?
If you want comfort food, what do you pick?
- In my house I have always in the fridge,
'cause I'm French, some Camembert and Sosiso
and things like that.
So in the middle of the night
or if late at night, I'm hungry,
I'm gonna slice a bit of dry sausage,
a bit of cheese, some toasted bread,
and I have few snacks like that.
- So you wouldn't get a bowl of cereal
and pour some milk over?
I mean, you wouldn't have a bowl of cereal?
- I don't think I ever had a bowl of cereal. (laughs)
- In your life?
- In my life.
- Oh my God, I'm sending you some cereal.
- Send me some chocolate.
(both laughing)
- Okay, do you have chocolate in the house?
- Oh yes.
- Okay.
- I love chocolate.
- Okay.
- There's not a day in my life that I don't eat chocolate.
- What is the most fun you have when you cook?
- I have fun all the time when I cook.
I can be peeling potatoes and I have fun.
However, I have to say, playing with the sauce,
it's something that really give me great pleasure
because sauce capture flavors, right?
And it's untangible, it's like music.
You cannot measure flavors.
You cannot say, "Oh, in that sauce
I'm gonna put half an ounce or teaspoon of rosemary flavor."
It's all in your head, it's all playing with it.
It's all making sure that the flavors will be in harmony,
and will not fade or grow, and so on.
So sauce is very complex.
It's like playing jazz.
- So a recipe-
- When you make a sauce, you are playing jazz.
- And you're the one who said you like simple food
and you just said, it's all complexity.
- But jazz is simple for the jazz men.
- Eric, what's next for you.
You have spent the last few decades
reaching the heights of the culinary world.
What excites you, one of the top chefs in the world,
in the world of food?
- What excites me it's to live my passion,
make people happy, and mentor my team.
And when I see members of the team that leave us
and are successful on their own,
it's a great, great pleasure for me.
It's a great honor to be the one who taught them to succeed
and be happy in their lives.
Simple.
- Thank you for joining me, Eric.
- Thank you so much.
It was a great pleasure.