CHRIS YING: My name is Chris Ying,
I'm the editor in chief of the Lucky Peach magazine.
Welcome, to your own campus.
[LAUGHTER]
Another authors at Google event, this time
with Chef Thomas McNaughton of Flour + Water,
Salumeria, and Central Kitchen in San Francisco.
Three wildly successful places, that I imagine many of you
have visited.
AUDIENCE: Yummy.
CHRIS YING: Yummy, we got a yummy back there.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yay.
CHRIS YING: And we're here to kind of talk
and celebrate your new cookbook, "Flour + Water: Pasta."
Let's just jump right in, unless you
want to say more nice things.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: No please, that's perfect.
CHRIS YING: So the first thing I found interesting
about this book was that the very first voices we hear from
are not yours.
They're from your two business partners--
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Right.
CHRIS YING: --kind of giving the background of how Flour +
Water came to be, and their sort of somewhat circuitous path
to be restaurateurs.
Can you tell us a little bit about that decision
and that story, I think that one of the-- the book
is really in three parts, and the idea behind those three
parts were, the first one is that it
had to be a story of behind the scenes.
And I think in this day and age, you know with reality TV,
and everyone wants to see what goes on behind the scenes.
And we really wanted to kind of tell
the story of how the restaurant, Flour + Water,
came to fruition.
And that really started with my two business partners,
David White and David Steel.
And the author, Paolo Lucchesi, he
wanted to have some sort of rhythm to it.
And so, if you open the book right off the bat.
It has rhythm, and it has, it's supposed
to kind of draw you in little bit.
And I thought it was great, it kind of-- just slightly
different type face-- and it kind of hops back and forth
their story and how it kind of intertwines.
And one starts in Ireland, one starts in South Jersey,
and how my two partners met at that time.
CHRIS YING: I mean, it's sort of like a classic tale,
in restaurants of the chef, and his business partners
never seeing eye-to-eye on things.
But it seems, based on the story you tell here
that you guys have a very different relationship
and that--
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: I think that to-- a restaurant is a crazy,
it's a crazy business venture, it's
a crazy experience every single day,
and we are three people that come,
we approach a restaurant three completely different ways.
And I think that we value each other's experience.
It's very much, I'm kind of jumping ahead,
but it's how the restaurants run a daily basis,
that it's a complete collaborative nature.
And really, every single decision along the way
funnels down to the three of us, and there's a veto power.
You need two, you need to votes out of three,
to pass the law that is being passed
that day, and that collaborative nature, in that kind of trust
so we have each other.
I think it's certainly unique.
It doesn't mean that-- the meeting may
start with us arguing for 45 minutes prior to it,
but um-- Yeah, we each approach something different,
we bring different perspectives.
Outside perspective, from outside of our industry
is really, really important to us.
It's staying away from the humdrum nature of this
is how it's done in a restaurant,
and this is how it's done in a professional kitchen.
So, we value that collaborative nature
of being able to sit around a roundtable
and talk about something.
And then, like I said, arguing 45 minutes
and then we come up with a solution.
CHRIS YING: And the way that you first got this job,
was pretty unorthodox too.
Can you tell us about where you were, and how that happened?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, I was traveling a lot in Europe,
and they call it staging.
So staging at a restaurant means that you can go there
and you work for free.
It's like working for a blacksmith.
You can watch them work, and get hands on experience.
And there's an intellectual property
that goes on with cooking and professional restaurants,
but there's also a physical.
It's a craft.
You have to use your hands.
The more that you use your training them,
and so that was always incredibly important to me.
And I was in Bologna, working at a pasta laboratorio,
at the time and I just had to go back to San Francisco.
The honest story is my girlfriend
was here at the time, and I really
wanted to move back to San Francisco,
and working at these amazing restaurants and on some farms.
I saw a random Craigslist ad for a chef, for a restaurant,
and I just emailed back.
It was like two sentences.
It was like, I don't have a resume.
I worked at Gary Danko, La Folie, and Quince.
I'm coming back to to Marin and I really want to goat farm.
And that was it.
And it was like, two sentences long,
and I think I even capitalized "I really want to goat farm."
And then, my now business partner Dave White
e-mailed me back, because we previously
worked together at Quince.
And he's like, Tom is that you?
What the hell are you talking about?
You want to goat farm?
And we just started to evolve the conversation.
It was perfect timing.
I was in Bologna, which is the heart of-- Emilia-Romagna
in Italy is really the heart of what most Americans think
of as Italian food.
You know, it's Prusciuto de Parma, Tagetelli Bolagnase,
lasagna, fresh rolled egg doughs, Parmesan Reggiano,
balsamic vinegar and he was talking
about opening this incredibly rustic Italian restaurant,
and it was focused on pizza.
I thought that Flour + Water was the worst name ever
possibly made up for a restaurant.
I'm still dealing with it right now.
Nobody ever forgets it though, which is a great thing.
And it was just perfect timing.
It was being in Emila-Romagna.
My majority of my restaurant background
was from more fine dining restaurants.
And I just fell in love with that.
The rustic nature of the food, but also
the culture of how Italians eat and their philosophy on food.
We want to go back to San Francisco.
There's so much aligned with the values in San Francisco,
and dealing with food as well, that it was just
kind of really, really good timing.
But I wasn't going to-- I refused the partnership.
And I wasn't going to be a partner.
And I was just going to act like consulting chef.
And then after the first couple of months
it just, so much of like, blood, sweat,
and tears went into producing Flour +
Water that the partnership just kind of seemed natural.
CHRIS YING: And do you have a goat farm now, or?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: We do not have a goat farm.
We're so close.
CHRIS YING: So you're a bit of a failure.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, absolutely.
CHRIS YING: Achieving that dream.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: I just keep getting back up.
CHRIS YING: No, but so that trip you took to Italy,
you know, you had been cooking in very high quality
restaurants in San Francisco in the Bay Area,
and then you made this sort of decision to go to Italy
and do something a little bit less
refined to get in touch with something else.
And in a lot of ways you were making the same journey
that Alice Waters or Jeremiah Tower
had done 30 or 40 years before you.
And they had had that same epiphany
that change the way they cook.
So, what was that you encountered
in these places in Bologna and Emilia-Romagna
that struck a chord with you?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: I think that just kind
of traveling the whole time that, if you--
growing up and having a completely ADD nature as a kid,
I wanted to try a little bit of everything.
And I first fell in love with kitchens
because they just coincided with my personality.
So you're never a master chef.
You're never going to master cooking and food.
And that's what really led me to want to travel,
to see different cultures.
If you want to stage and learn actual techniques,
I tell most of our young cooks stay in America.
There's no language barrier.
You can be in front chefs.
You can articulate the things that you want to say to them,
and for you to grab as much knowledge as possible.
But I always say that going to France, even Italy, Spain,
Germany, working three-star Michelin restaurants,
I wasn't nervous at all, because there's a common food language.
I don't need to speak German to understand
who's an hour behind in the kitchen.
You could just see it on their face, who needs the most help.
Or you see somebody picking fava beans.
Like, I know how to pick fava beans.
I can just belly up and pick them as fast as I possibly can.
So there's a common food language
within kitchens that breaks down that language barrier.
And going to Emilia-Romagna and going
to pasta laboratorio, where there's machines.
Pasta machines are all over Italy.
The metal hand-cranked machines, they're all over Italy.
They don't exist in the old walls of Bologna,
and everything's rolled out by a giant matterello.
It's a massive rolling pin.
And it's like watching like an artistic show,
as they roll it out.
It's something completely different.
And it was the first time I was so incredibly nervous
in a kitchen.
Because it was old ladies that have been doing it for 40,
50 years of their life.
They go there to gossip every single day.
They don't even think about the motions that they go through.
And that craft, that one single craft,
to put it under a microscope, was terrifying to me.
I was shaking the first time they
let me pick up one of the rolling pins.
It was just so specific, so specific to that culture,
that I was enthralled with the entire process.
CHRIS YING: Can you explain for everybody
this idea of the pasta laboratorio?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Pasta laboratorio
sounds like it's Google robots coming in, napping pods.
CHRIS YING: They probably have a laboratorio somewhere
here-- a pasta lab.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: But it's a bunch of wooden tables.
And it's essentially just a bunch of wooden tables.
And it's something that they produce.
So a salumeria is something that is based off
of historic shops in Bologna that sell cured meats,
and they sell pasta by the pound.
Some will specialize in a little bit more cheese.
Some may do sandwiches from it.
But essentially, it's cured meats
and it's pasta that they sell by the pound.
Every single one of those salumerias
has a pasta laboratorio that's associated with it, producing
literally 200 kilos of fresh pasta a single day.
And the one that I worked at, Bruno and Franco,
was just 12 old ladies working around various wooden tables.
And every single thing is rolled out by hand.
Which means that it's created over a four-foot rolling pin.
And they roll out a sheet of pasta
that's three feet by four feet.
And they do it in about 15 minutes per sheet.
And it's just something that-- also why
I've always connected with Italian food
is that it's so based off of culture.
The nuance of what goes on from a rolling
pin to a wooden table, it's two porous natures.
It's really porous.
It's not like flat metal.
And so it goes down to the science
of how that pasta behaves, and how
it's treated with the sauce, and why
that's so important to them.
But that's not the main reason why they do it.
They do it based off of what their grandmother did,
what their great-grandmother did.
It's based off of tradition.
Some you could ask, why do you roll it out with a pin,
you'd get this really, really archaic-- you just don't ask.
We roll it out by pins.
And then some answers would talk about the nuances of the wood.
It's a very special place that you don't see a lot.
CHRIS YING: It's interesting.
I spoke to the chef Massimo Bottura
from this three Michelin star hypermodernist
restaurant in Modena.
And there they use roto vaps and all sorts of crazy contraptions
when it comes o making the tagliatelle.
They will only do it on a wooden table
with a wooden rolling pin, because for whatever
grandmotherly reasons, plus the real reasons that you're
talking about, it does matter.
You can't improve upon this thing.
That seems very rustic.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Very, very shortly on I
had to calm my American-esque questions to them.
It was like, well, how come you guys don't stay an hour longer
and roll out another 25 kilos, and then you'd make this money,
and then you can buy this machine?
And why don't you have an automated dryer for the pasta?
And they just weren't interested in it.
It was like, I'm going home to cook to feed my family.
That food culture-- or even a culture--
is so directly connected with food.
That's why I thought traveling was so important.
It's not just training yourself for a chef,
or working on your knife skills, or learning
how to roll something by rolling pin.
Culture is so interrelated with food.
It's the common denominator of every single person
in this room, is that we all have to eat.
We all don't have fancy cafeterias
that make this amazing food on a daily basis.
But we're constantly-- whether you
aren't that interested in food, you're
talking about food on an weekly basis.
Maybe where do we eat tomorrow night?
CHRIS YING: Do you feel like it's
difficult to translate that kind of spirit
of Italian eating culture to the San Francisco restaurant
culture?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: It's great.
The reason why, when we were first
approached to write the book, it was we
want to do a Flour + Water cookbook.
And it never really made sense to me.
I was like, well, such a young restaurant.
And I just didn't like the scarcity of it.
And when we finally decided to do pasta,
it made so much sense to me.
Because I think there's a mystery behind pasta.
There's a mystery behind pasta, because not a lot of people
replicate it.
We may have all, in this room, been in the backyard
and thrown a steak on a grill.
And we're a little bit more comfortable with that.
And we've produced that before.
There's a mystery behind pasta.
And people, especially in San Francisco,
love Italian, rustic Italian restaurants,
because it's not something that they make every single day.
It's not a part of that daily culture to, like, OK.
Let's get the rolling pin and start rolling out.
I think that you certainly see a resurge of people putting more
time into creating their meals throughout the day.
But I think it's based off of something good,
and that's post-war how do we have the family work?
How do we can items?
How do we can something and have it available
all across America?
And that American mentality of making
it faster and faster and faster.
I think it's kind of reached a point where people are slowly
stepping back and saying is this a food culture
that were proud of?
Not to say there's something wrong with it.
It's based off of something good.
It's just going home and cooking for two hours with a family
is engraved in them there.
And it's something that they don't necessarily
question that.
And sure, you can get a really fast panini
and a cappuccino on the street.
But that daily exercise of cooking,
I think that it's interesting to see it, maybe, slightly
evolve in America.
CHRIS YING: And, like you said, there
is no real shortage of that rustic Italian restaurant
in San Francisco.
People go nuts for pasta.
And I want to hear why Flour + Water stands out.
But you also mentioned that originally the Davids
had a different vision for what Flour + Water was going to be.
And it evolved into something what it is now.
Can you talk about what it is now and how it became that?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: What is now?
I don't even know what it is now.
The train has gone off the tracks.
But the original vision, first, when
I would buy two hours with the phone cards in Italy,
and just sit in a phone booth and talk
to them about the business plan and how
we were developing the business plan.
They wanted incredibly, incredibly rustic Italian food.
It was your antipasti was a bowl of marinated beets,
and that's it.
Just marinated, and it's rustic, and it's sitting in a bowl.
Pizza is a huge focus of the restaurant.
When we first opened up, everyone
thought we were a pizzeria.
And we were selling a billion pizzas every single night.
In the first week, we sold four times the amount of pizzas
nightly than we do now, because pasta's
taken such a forefront to the menu.
And my approach was, why can't we
have a seemingly rustic atmosphere in nature
of a restaurant and still have refinement on the plate?
And it's something that I think so many restaurants strive for.
And a lot of it, you can't really explain.
It's like how can you have a pizza whizzing by your head,
and it's cramped, an it's crowded,
and it's uncomfortable to wait for a table.
And then have something that's put on the plate
that maybe you could swap out at a Michelin star restaurant.
I got increasingly-- not annoyed,
but increasingly I want to feel as normal as possible.
I want to feel as comfortable as possible.
And if I have to put on a suit that I wear once a year,
and I sit down at a formal table and feel like I
have to whisper the whole time.
Someone comes over and you're like, oh, sorry.
Why can't we have this incredibly rustic nature
of an atmosphere, and then still have refinement on a plate?
Michelin-starred restaurant in New York City
that serves a burger.
That burger's so incredibly rustic.
It's not made very differently than most burgers.
But it's that attention to detail.
I want that burger perfectly cooked.
I want that bun perfectly toasted,
that blue cheese should always melt
a certain way on top of it.
I think having a rustic restaurant doesn't
mean that you have to lose that attention
to detail in every single thing.
How clean the floor is in the kitchen,
and having a kitchen that can run
like a Michelin-starred restaurant,
I think, affects the food.
CHRIS YING: I wanted to go back--
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Did I-- I don't even
think I answered that.
CHRIS YING: Enh, doesn't even matter.
I don't even know what I asked.
No.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: We're back.
We're back.
CHRIS YING: Just kidding.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: We're coming back.
CHRIS YING: We did a great job.
I want to go back to those formative experiences
you were having in Bologna.
You talk about, in the book, going
beyond just like to the trattorias on the street
and just the tourist places, and finding these experiences that
are under the table.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Sure.
CHRIS YING: And I wondered if that's
something that your average person can go to Italy
and find, or if being a chef, being a cook, doing stages,
opens those doors for you?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, certainly.
I was so fortunate when I rented an apartment in Bologna.
I didn't realize that I was renting an apartment
from someone that does culinary tours.
And it wasn't like him on a big bus.
It was him taking people in his car
and bringing them to the prosciutto factories,
to where they make Parmesan, seeing them firsthand.
And certainly in southern Italy, there's different dialects,
there's a really rude comment to somebody
is, you're the type of person that eats at a restaurant.
That's slang for you have no idea what you're
talking about when it comes to food.
And so much of the amazing experiences
that I had were at people's table.
And, also, understanding that culture.
When it comes to pasta, I've been at tables
where someone's started grating a truffle on top of a pasta,
and half the table's in an uproar.
And they're like, what the hell are you doing?
That doesn't belong on the pasta.
And like for me, it's like, keep shaving.
Just keep shaving.
More truffle.
That culture, and how it interplays with that dining
atmosphere, is so important.
It's like being in San Francisco and seeing people--
I'll see tourists walking through there,
I'm like, how did they get to this neighborhood?
This is terrible.
Not saying like they're in a not-cool neighborhood.
They're going to Fisherman's Wharf.
And they're like, well, I had this chowder bowl,
and this is San Francisco food.
This is crazy.
I think it's just that I love understanding
what goes into a city.
I would never want to travel to a city
again that I didn't have that insider viewpoint.
I think that's so important.
I think I was really fortunate enough
to find that in a foreign country.
CHRIS YING: It's funny to me, given
how much Americans-- and San Franciscans, specifically--
love Italian food, and how much influence Italian food has
had on California cooking, how many things get crazily
mistranslated when they're brought here.
And I think that things like from Emilia-Romagna
and Bologna-- like tortellini, for example--
feels like one of the most tortured things in the world.
What is that supposed to look like?
What is tortellini about?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Tortellini in brodo
is like the pinnacle of Bologna or Emilia-Romagna food.
It's used as a standard of whether it's
sub-par or traditional.
I think that you can't take-- I keep going back to culture,
but you can't take a trattoria in the middle of Italy
and place in San Francisco and it be a success.
You can't take Flour + Water and put it in the middle of Rome
and think that it's going to be a success.
Because there's different-- maybe Italian and American food
is easier to compare, but think of textures
of certain Asian cultures, and some of those dishes
not really relating to an American palate.
I think it's the same thing with any sort of food culture.
And it kind of gets adapted.
And maybe it starts as a good thing,
adapting it to a different culture.
But balsamic vinegar is one of the most protected processes
in Italy.
You can't have Extravecchio 25-year-old balsamic,
has to be a jar, or has to be put into a bottle, that's
specific to where that bottle and that glass is blown.
It's a very, very specific shape.
An then it has to get a seal of approval.
And then it's Extravecchio balsamic vinegar traditionale.
It's so protected.
You go in the supermarket here, and you
get a gallon of caramel.
It's literally like caramel that has acid introduced to it.
Middle America that's only seen that big thing
of balsamic vinegar, do they really
understand the culture of balsamic vinegar?
And it kind of gets bastardized.
I think that, too, it's like, more, bigger, more.
CHRIS YING: You worked in Italian restaurants
before you made this seminal trip to Bologna.
And then you talk about when you're in Bologna,
just that really opening your eyes
to how pasta is supposed to be eaten.
How did your view of cooking it and eating it change?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: I just think going to that source
is so enlightening.
For the cookbook, we bugged the hell out of Harold McGee--
if anybody knows "On Food and Cooking"--
we would just keep buying him lunch at Salumeria.
Come on, we'll buy you lunch.
And we'd entice him out.
We'd just basically interview him
the entire time for the cookbook.
"On Food and Cooking" was written a year
after I was born.
And it's still the most stolen cookbook from our test kitchen.
Because it has so much relevance today.
He was one of the first food scientists
to really put food forward.
It's understanding how it behaves, and just
being incredibly inquisitive about just
such a specific item.
It's just pasta.
How does it behave?
How does it eat?
What are the traditional sauces that it's accompanied with?
There's something that's protected
with that pasta that's like, truffles don't belong on there.
I love that how that forces somewhat
of a different creative nature.
So stick to the tradition.
And we say that the food at Flour + Water
is regional Italian food without turning our backs on California
ingredients.
You're not going to see that many avocados over there.
And I didn't go to Bologna to be like, wow,
they use avocados here, too.
This is great.
Let's bring it back to Flour + Water.
But it was that Italian sensibility--
what grows around you, treating it simply.
So much of that has to do with how pasta is treated there.
How it's behaving.
And then from a restaurant setting, it's like, well,
how are they slightly drying it?
How do they store it?
CHRIS YING: How does that creative process at Flour +
Water work?
Does everything begin with the traditional references,
every shape preexisting?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: We buy our food from small farms.
And the tagline that everyone uses now--
small farms and whole animals.
And we don't really think of a dish and then order in food.
We just order the best possible food we can,
and we say, OK, well, what do I want to do with that lam?
Today it's lamb shoulders.
Tomorrow it's lamb belly.
The next day it's lamb leg.
That feeds the creative nature to the menu.
As far as the pasta program goes,
we want to adhere-- we don't want
it to be too much of a blasphemy about that pasta.
Tortellini in brodo.
In my opinion, it's tortellini in brodo.
It should be served in brodo.
So it shouldn't be picked up in a cheesy Alfredo sauce.
It's tortellini in brodo.
It's meant to be in brodo.
Well, we're in California, and we
have 12 extra cases of tomatoes that a farmer gave to us,
and they're really beautiful.
We can make tomato water and serve around
that tortellini in a broth, but that
broth we made of tomato water.
We can serve it as a lightened dish inside of summertime.
So it's still sticking to that tradition,
saying well, it's brodo, but what
do we have around us right now?
Let's create this broth out of tomato.
I think that we tried to adhere to it,
but then we always put that little California twist
on the end of it.
CHRIS YING: Do you ever get hardliner Italian people
in there who are just like, this isn't Italian?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Italian people
are the worst people to cook for in the world.
Whether they're Italian American or whether they're straight
off the boat, they want to tell you how their mother did it.
This is good, but my mother-- Yeah, certainly.
And I think that the biggest compliment that we get--
and it seems like we get it all the time-- is when Italian
comes in, they order something that is seemingly not
traditionally Italian, and the response
is, this is so Italian.
And maybe that avocado salad, but that sensibility
of what goes into it is that Italian sensibility.
And that, to me, is the ultimate compliment.
It's not like, my mother used to put a little bit more
nutmeg in the broth, and you know.
But yeah, it's a huge compliment to hear that.
CHRIS YING: One of things I really
love about this book is just how in-depth you
go with these things.
We've probably heard lots of fresh pasta dough recipes,
but then there's four pages of pretty small type describing
it.
And I also really like the thinking
that goes into arriving at these methods.
You talk about your experience with in the laboratorio,
and the women only wanting to rest their dough
for 18 to 24 hours.
But 30 minutes is enough here.
Or one of my favorite things is this idea
that I had never even read about in a cookbook of absorption
versus adsorption.
Actually, will you just explain that a little bit?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: That was a Harold McGee lunch
where we were like, well, what goes on here?
I think that to back it up, the book--
pasta-- I'll open a pasta cookbook,
and it's just written word.
And I have no idea what it's saying.
I'm like, it's so complicated.
It's like right lateral triangle into.
You have to do math to figure out how to create this shape.
It was so important to us that, like, let's
get as geeky as we possibly can about this subject,
but make it as PC-friendly as possible.
As friendly in nature of someone that
knows pasta and wants to learn something about it to
we've just used flour and eggs for the first time.
How do we dive into the subject and still engage people?
And it was written word, and we found
that photos were so important to us.
Because you can have this completely elaborate
thought-out paragraph, and then you turn the page,
and it's like, oh, OK.
Because I'm such a visual person.
But it's that single subject, diving in as much as possible.
We created a dough room to create all this pastas
and breads.
And then we created a test kitchen for the cookbook.
And we really like-- this is permanent.
You can do little edits.
Maybe we make it to a second printing.
But it's permanent.
It's out there.
And that was it's terrifying to me, because I really
wanted to A, make sure all the recipes actually worked,
then anything we said that we're held accountable to.
And there's cookbooks that I read that's like, oh. man.
That's just wrong.
It's crazy that that went through all the edits.
And one of the things that I was teaching all of the cooks
is, I do say I was culinarily abused
as a child in South Jersey.
And my mother used to boil spaghetti,
to take the lid off of the Prego can and heat up the sauce,
and then put the spaghetti in a bowl
and then just pour the sauce on top of it.
And forever, I was teaching, we cook
all of our pastas 80% of the way in pasta water,
and then 20% of the way in the sauce.
It's always so important to me.
And I was always teaching these cooks
there's two things that happen.
The pasta itself is weeping a little bit of the starch
into the sauce itself.
It's helping to stabilize the sauce
and concentrate the sauce.
And also, two, the pasta's absorbing all this flavor.
So it's heavily salted water.
It's absorbing that salted water.
You put it in the sauce, it's absorbing all the flavors
of that amazing way-braised pork shoulder.
CHRIS YING: And this is super common.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Common knowledge,
is what I was taught.
I said that to Harold, and he starts laughing.
You're wrong.
You are just wrong.
And I was saying that it was absorbing all that flavor.
Starch is water-soluble.
So starch and that pasta and that wheat-based product
can only absorb water.
It can't absorb any fats.
You can't cook pasta in a fat and then
have it hydrate, right?
It'll absorb it all.
Everything that's romanticized and amazing about that braise
is mostly essential oils that come off of the herbs,
all these things, the fat that's rendered off from the product.
What it is is that the pasta is only absorbing water.
It's literally you have all this braise,
and it's literally just hydrating itself
with just water.
If you cook spaghetti in red wine
and you look at that spaghetti, there's
really only a red wine ring around it.
It's only pulling out all the H2O from the braise itself.
Adsorption with a D is a term that he taught me,
that it's how products adhere to the outside of that noodle.
So that matterello makes an amazing texture
on the outside of that noodle, because you're rolling it
from that wooden rolling pin on the wooden board.
Its porous nature is putting all of these little crevices,
these little nooks and crannies, around all of that pasta
that you can barely even see by the eye.
And that's giving adsorption the upper hand,
because it's able to link more things
on the outside of that noodle.
So the concept of finishing in the pan was right.
The fact of absorption and absorption
was completely wrong.
CHRIS YING: I just love how the entire story is
in this book of something that we all-- if you're a cook,
or if you read cookbooks, it's just
that's something you think.
Oh, it absorbs the sauce.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: No, totally.
Yeah.
CHRIS YING: And then you kind of explode that theory,
but still give the reason why it truly
is good to finish your pasta in the sauce.
Among the other things I liked about this book
is that you answer a question-- which
I'm sure you get all the time-- which
is what's your favorite pasta?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Is that in there?
CHRIS YING: It's in there somewhere.
Which was the bigoli.
Can you tell us a little bit about that dish?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: You can't really talk about Italian food,
and you certainly can't talk about pastas,
without talking about how regional Italy actually is.
Northern Italian food and southern Italian food
are two completely different things.
And that goes from not only each region to region,
but also town to town.
My favorite pasta in the world is called bigoli.
And bigoli really comes from a hand-cranked machine
called a torchio.
It's made of brass, has a brass die.
It's very similar to spaghetti, but it's hand-cranked,
and it goes through this brass die,
and it puts this incredible texture
on the outside of the dough.
The dough itself is made with semolina.
It has butter, cream, eggs in it.
It's incredibly enriched.
It's almost like an enriched udon noodle.
But when it comes out of this machine,
it looks like a dreadlock, almost.
It's got this crazy pulls and textures to it.
I love the texture of that noodle.
And it adds so much about how that grips with the sauce.
But the last time, right before I wrote this book,
I was in Italy.
And I was in Rome trying to go to all these restaurant
supply stores because my friend wanted a torchio
to bring back with him.
It's that hand-cranked machine.
And I was going around, like, do you guys have torchio?
And every single response is like, what is that, American?
What is it?
What are you talking about?
And I was like, no, no, no, it's from the Veneto.
It's from Venice, from Venice, up north.
And it's like, no, it's from the Veneto.
It's a hand-crank machine.
Every single response was like, dude, you're in Rome.
No.
We don't have that here.
It was just incredibly enlightening
about how that plays on with those regions.
It just doesn't exist down there.
Torchio is unimportant to them.
CHRIS YING: I sort of implied that I
would know when time was coming to an end,
but I have no idea what time it is whatsoever.
SPEAKER: Few more questions if there's anything you--
CHRIS YING: Yeah.
I have more questions, but if you guys have questions.
Does anybody want to--
AUDIENCE: I live a block away from Flour + Water,
so I feel like I'm your neighbor.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Say hello sometime, will you?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I know.
Seriously.
We eat there pretty regularly.
And I wanted to hear about the neighborhood.
Because you guys have been playing
a huge role in neighborhood, especially now expanding
to Salumeria and Central Kitchen.
It feels like Gourmet Alley's going on.
I wanted to know what's your vision for it and of how
it's evolved?
I've heard a lot of stories about 09.
You guys kind of put yourself in the middle of nowhere.
And now you've created a spot in San Francisco.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Sure.
It's a great question.
In '09, obviously, it was not the best economical times.
You hear of 12 restaurants a month, now, opening.
And that's crazy.
And there wasn't a lot of restaurants
opening at the time.
And we were really lucky how we went about it.
And that neighborhood I likened to-- it sounds cheesy,
but it's like Brooklyn.
All of a sudden, people started finding out about it.
And it was kind of on the outskirts.
It had big warehouses.
Rent was cheap.
There wasn't a lot of people moving out of there.
But there was not a lot of people moving out there,
because it was not the nicest neighborhood the world.
We have an amazing picture of Flour + Water
before we broke ground on construction.
And it was abandoned for 10 years.
And it was this old El Salvadorean restaurant.
People still come in to the restaurant,
and they're like, oh, six years ago,
we went to the best rave of our life inside this building.
It was taking a chance.
It was gambling on that neighborhood.
It's this huge, amazing juxtaposition
of amazing old Victorian homes and then industry.
Industry of businesses that are throughout that neighborhood.
And we just thought it was a great mix.
And fortunately, everything on 20th Street
is actually the same landlord.
So we started with Flour + Water.
We always wanted a salumeria.
We always want somewhere to sell our cured meats,
to sell the products that we're proud of,
the salts, the olive oils.
And so Salumeria sits at the corner of an old German sausage
factory.
And so it really just started with that tiny little 500
square foot.
And then there was more building behind it.
And we were like, oh, what could we do here?
Than there was a little bar space that wasn't a bar yet.
It was like, what could we do here?
And then Sightglass moving in.
And we actually took over the whole building,
and then helped divide up the leases.
So we didn't want a Burger King.
And Burger King would never move in there.
But we didn't want a Burger King moving into this spot.
And so we helped orchestrate that whole building,
which was really big at the time.
There's not that many more plans.
We're opening Cafe du Nord in Upper Market.
So Cafe du Nord is in the Swedish American Hall.
It opened in 1907.
Cafe du Nord, since 1907, has continued to operate as a bar,
even through Prohibition.
It's got these weird crazy things about it.
So we're partnering, again, with the bon vivants from Trick Dog.
Fun, underground, lively bar.
And then we're opening another restaurant
above that called Ache, which is a Spanish restaurant that we
just made our longtime chef de cuisine, Ryan
Pollnow, a partner in the restaurant group,
to help him open his own restaurant.
So besides that, nothing.
We're doing the whole roof.
It's going to be a crazy year.
Above Trick Dog, the bar, is a 4,000-square-foot roof.
And we just got done retrofitting
that whole roof to have a 4000-square-foot garden.
AUDIENCE: And you had some influence over that.
Everything there is very high quality.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yeah.
We didn't buy the building.
We took over the master lease, and then orchestrated it
from there.
It was just important to us.
It's like that collaborative nature
of how we run the business, how the cooks come up
with a menu with me.
It's like well, what do you want to work with today?
Do you want to work with this?
And that collaborative nature is very much
that neighborhood as well.
It's just getting good people to do what they're good at.
Sightglass is just good people that do good at what they do.
I think that was really, really important to us.
I live above Flour + Water.
I live, literally, above the restaurant.
AUDIENCE: So we are neighbors.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, we are neighbors.
Come over for a beer, yeah?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: I couldn't imagine
having these restaurants in other parts of the city.
It's crazy.
I'm terrified of du Nord, because it's a 10-minute drive
away.
And it's amazing to be able to be
on that street and just kind of hop around.
I don't even have a home anymore.
I just hop around from restaurant
to restaurant putting out fires.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Could you talk more about the staging process,
and how maybe amateurs or regular people would
go about doing that, if that's an option?
Because I imagine it's probably selective
for certain restaurants.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Certain restaurants
are really, really strict about it.
The higher-end restaurants, the higher you go,
sometimes they're more and more strict about it.
If you're going to stage, you have to sign a piece of paper,
and you have to stage for at least 30 days.
Because they put so much time and effort into having you
there, that they want it to be beneficial for both
the restaurant and yourself.
Find the restaurant that you want
to stage at, and then just bug the hell out of the chef.
That's it.
Write him a bunch of emails.
The more novice--
CHRIS YING: Make sure you tell them
Thomas told you to do that, though.
I'm sure they'll really appreciate that.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, no, I've never met that guy before.
The more novice you are, it depends on the restaurant.
If the restaurant's kitchen is like this little shoebox,
it might be very, very difficult to take you on,
because it takes time.
And when you're there, it's like the two-way street.
I love it.
We have an open door policy.
And it's great, because when someone's asking somebody
a question, it's forcing them to retrain themselves.
So if you're on garde-manger with a cook,
and you're like, well, why do you do that?
The cook's like, well, why do we do that?
Why don't we just put it there?
But it depends on the space.
The smaller the space, the more difficult.
And every single restaurant's different.
Sometimes they'll just be like, you
have to stand in that corner.
And you're literally not allowed to leave the corner.
And it just depends on the restaurant.
AUDIENCE: So what's Flour + Water's policy on this?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Just email the chef and just bug the hell
out of him.
I'm terrible at email.
I'm really bad.
It depends.
We have a ton of stages.
And then, if you just contact the restaurant-- just
info@flourandwater-- and then it fits in with the time--
If it fits in with the time means
there's not a ton of stages there, or depending
on what's going on, if there's a ton of events,
if it fits the timing.
And then open-door policy.
Open-door policy for one day.
And then beyond that one day, depends how you do.
CHRIS YING: Becomes a closed-door policy.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yeah.
But don't be offended if it is.
But it just depends on that individual.
There's certain people that come to the restaurant group
with zero experience, and they're amazing.
They're awesome.
They just have a good attitude.
They want to be taught what to do.
They want to get in there.
They have no problem just jumping in.
And they're amazing.
There's people that come to the restaurant with 20
years of experience, and they're just a jerk.
They don't fit in here.
So it depends.
Every single person's completely different.
AUDIENCE: So I studied in Florence in college,
and my host grandmother would make this just plain marinara.
It was the best thing in the world.
And she would often joke.
She gave me the recipe, and I've made it every summer since,
and it never tastes as good.
So I think part of it might be just nostalgia.
But she often joked that it's the soil in Italy,
and it's the very specific types of tomatoes
that you're using and whatnot.
And so I was curious-- are there any dishes or any flavors
that you've struggled to recreate in San Francisco
that you tasted or enjoyed in Bologna?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Yeah.
I think that terroir is a real thing.
It's not just about growing grapes.
You can take the same grapevine, and you can grow it
in three different locations, and it's the same grape.
It comes from the same vine.
And it's three completely different glasses of wine
when you're all done with it.
That's true with anything.
We use San Marzano tomatoes.
We use incredibly, incredibly local ingredients.
Our pigs come from 45 minutes above the restaurant.
That is because of the terroir that is those pigs.
Could we buy some crazy, crazy acorn-fed pork from Spain?
And it's incredibly-- the marbling's ridiculous.
That's not our pork here.
I'd much rather use our local ingredients.
And it just adds a nuance, or a flavor nuance, to each dish
that you can't really explain.
And it's the same thing with any food.
The San Marzano tomatoes, San Marzanos.
you can grow the same variety in California,
but they're San Marzano style.
Because those San Marzanos in Italy
have come from a very volcanic enriched soil.
So there's truth to every product.
That's why I fell in love with San Francisco and California
the first time.
Because when I first moved out here, it was like,
well, shit-- this is what sage tastes like?
Or that's the most amazing turnip
I've ever had in my life.
That's crazy.
And it was just sage, and it was just a turnip.
Most of our pork comes from Devil's Gulch.
It's in Nicasio.
That's awesome for us.
It's a 45-minute drive.
We can go feed them apples, and he'll
be on the menu in the next couple of weeks.
It's amazing to see that full circle.
And then also, he, now, because we have such a relationship
with them, he grows pigs for us.
He grows pigs, quails, lambs for us.
And we have control over it-- from size
to weight to what they feed the actual pigs, like the apples
and stuff like that.
And so, it's cool.
That, to me is a responsibility of a chef
in northern California.
It's going beyond.
Because we're capable of sourcing amazing ingredients,
it should be a part of the job description.
AUDIENCE: When's the last time you've
had dried store-bought pasta?
And--
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Uh--
AUDIENCE: Oh, go ahead.
You can answer.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: No, no, no--
AUDIENCE: The second one is in the restaurant,
do you use SF tap water when you're making pasta?
And maybe talk a little bit about the flours you use?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Sure.
The dried store-bought pasta is not a bad thing.
We focus more on northern Italian regions,
certainly with pasta.
When it becomes summertime, and we
start growing the things that are grown in southern Italy--
tomatoes, chilies, peppers-- our menu
takes more of a southern Italian influence in the summertime.
But when you think of fresh pasta-- pappardelle,
garganelli, tagliatelle-- all those things?
That fresh pasta is from a region in northern Italy.
Every single thing that you see in the supermarket
is southern Italian pasta.
So spaghetti, bucatini, rigatoni--
all those things are southern Italian pasta.
Just because it's dried doesn't mean it's bad.
There's some amazing companies that
are in America that have dried pastas.
We have an extruder.
All that comes from an extruder.
Means it's pushing out through a die.
It's a mechanism.
And we extrude fresh.
So instead of having dried spaghetti,
we make spaghetti every single day.
And it's fresh.
It's pliable.
It has a completely different texture.
So dried pasta isn't a bad thing.
It's just specifically from southern Italy.
And that's how it's bought and sold there as well.
But no, there's some good brands of dried pasta.
The
AUDIENCE: Water?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Oh, the water.
The argument with the water is that it is more bread-making.
So there's zero yeast inside of pasta.
Anything that's yeast-related.
So bagels is a big argument.
There's not a single good bagel in San Francisco.
And then the nutrients, or lack of nutrients, in that water,
and how it behaves with yeast.
And so, yeah, we use San Francisco
tap water for everything.
And our bread's different.
We make all the bread at the restaurant, too,
and it's different than if we were making it
on the east coast.
But like I said, there's people that fly in.
There's people that fly in water to certain parts of the world
to make that New York-style bagel.
Yeah, it's just kind of crazy to me.
I love a good bagel from the east coast.
CHRIS YING: All right.
Well, thank you guys for coming.
Thank you, sir, for coming.
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: Thanks for having us.
CHRIS YING: You're going to sit around and sign some books,
or you have to go do a thing?
THOMAS MCNAUGHTON: We're going to sign some books, yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
CHRIS YING: Well, thanks, guys.