MALE SPEAKER: Good afternoon.
Let's welcome Chef Daniel Patterson, owner of Coi,
Plum, Plum Bar, Haven, and the forthcoming Alta California
restaurant in San Francisco's Mid-Market Neighborhood.
He's also the author of the recently released "Coi, Stories
and Recipes from the Kitchen," "Aroma,
The Magic of Essential Oils in Foods and Fragrances."
He is also a noted writer on food in the kitchen and beyond,
and has written for a number of publications,
including "Lucky Peach" and "The New York Times Magazine."
Let's give a round of applause for Chef Patterson.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: I'm going to let you take the helm.
And you're going to do a little presentation discussing
your book, which is pretty exciting.
DANIEL PATTERSON: Thanks.
MALE SPEAKER: We look forward to hearing you.
DANIEL PATTERSON: Thank you very much.
Thanks so much for coming down.
As he said, I have a little restaurant
in San Francisco called Coi.
My background is I started working
in restaurants when I was 14.
I was a dishwasher and then a prep cook.
And then I worked my way up.
I opened my first restaurant when I was 25.
I had a couple of restaurants.
And then I opened Coi in 2006.
One question I get a lot of is Coi, what does it mean?
And so it's an archaic French word.
They ask for where did I find it.
I found it on the internet in a search engine, basically.
It's an archaic French word that means
tranquil or quiet, from the Latin root quietus.
It hasn't really been used since the Middle Ages.
It transferred to Middle English and became
coy, C-O-Y. While coi fell out of favor,
quietus became anglicized.
It's not that nice of word.
To bring quietus to someone means to kill them.
And then it's very close to koi, K-O-I,
which is like a Japanese carp.
So to this day, people come into our restaurant
every once in awhile wondering where the sushi is.
So I picked a name for the restaurant
that no one knew what it meant.
It hasn't been used for hundreds of years.
No one knew how to pronounce it.
And it's very like another name.
And so they were always very confused.
Which was actually a monumental failure of branding,
but it turns out that it was pretty accurate for what
the restaurant was to become, which was something
that I didn't realize at the time,
but we crossed a lot of categories of things.
And I'd like to think we've brought a little clarity to it.
But I'm not sure.
I guess the restaurant really started in my mind in 2005.
So I was in between jobs.
When I say in between jobs, I really only
had one job in the last 20 years.
I've owned my own restaurants except one time
I tried to take a job and then I got fired.
And I couldn't find another one.
And so in the summer of 2005, I'm
from Massachusetts originally.
And I moved out here in 1989, a month
before the earthquake-- had nothing to do with it.
And after 16 years, I couldn't figure out
exactly my place here.
And at that time, I was dating someone
who would then become my wife.
And I had a lot of time on my hands.
So during that time, her mother was very sick.
She had cancer.
And we went up to visit her a lot.
Her mother lived in the foothills of the Sierra
Nevadas, about 4 and 1/2 hours northeast.
And I don't know if you've ever been there,
but it's incredibly beautiful.
It's like completely untouched by people.
There's more animals, I think, than there are people.
Her mother was an archaeologist.
And she studied Native American culture, especially
the Maidu tribe.
And so if you were going to build a house, say,
on a land where nothing had ever been, you would contact her.
And she would go and make sure it wasn't a special place.
And so while we were there, we would take a lot of walks.
And she would show me plants and other things
that I didn't think were edible-- trees,
acorns, all kinds of things that have
been eaten for thousands of years.
So California's pretty new.
So California's been around 150 years.
Before that, it was Mexico.
People have been living in California thousands of years.
And so somehow, when I was talking to her,
I started to understand this place where I lived.
I knew almost nothing about it.
All I knew was really the last 50 years.
And so I started to study a little bit.
And then one day, I got a call.
I was down in Santa Cruz with a friend.
My wife called and said, you've got to get up here.
And so I did.
And I got there.
Her mother had passed.
And it was this incredible moment
where I had no idea what to say.
It was this very powerful reaction
when I opened the door, this grief, which was so palpable.
And I had no idea what to do.
But everyone was hungry.
And I knew how to cook.
So I started cooking.
And she was there, her sister, her mother's best friend,
and her mother's partner.
And for four days, I cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
And restaurants are a funny thing.
It's like you're feeding people, but there's
an element about them, and especially if you're
cooking very high-end food, which was always what I did,
it's about consistency.
And it's about this level of professionalism
that sometimes you lose track a little bit of what
it means to cook for someone.
And that's what I thought about, what it means to cook--
So that was where I started thinking
about what I wanted Coi to be.
I remember it very distinctly, sitting there
in my fiance's mother's house with her crappy stove,
going through her pots and pans trying
to find something that wasn't hopelessly dented,
and going through her cupboards, and going to the one
local store that there was, thinking
about what it means to cook for someone.
So when I started Coi, I wanted something very small, very
personal, and something that felt a little bit like you're
going into someone's house.
And so that's what we opened.
It's in a terrible neighborhood.
I don't think I could have chosen
a worse location in retrospect.
But it's in North Beach.
It's also next to a strip club.
So for three years, at least every single review,
the first line was, it's next to-- I'm like,
there's actually more to the restaurant than that.
Fine.
But North Beach is one of my favorite places,
I would say my favorite place in San Francisco.
So down the street-- so in the corner of that picture
is City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Across the street is Tosca and Vesuvio.
I mean, this is where the beat poets used to hang out.
Down the street from that is Carol Doda, who
was this incredibly famous burlesque performer
with these great stories that came out
of this place, The Condor, like the couple
that was having sex on the piano, the hydraulic piano that
broke, and they just kind of went up to the ceiling
and trapped them there.
I mean, The Hungry Eye, which was Enrico Banducci.
Lenny Bruce used to play there in the '50s.
And Woody Allen.
There was The Jazz Workshop where Thelonius Monk recorded
one of his most famous albums.
The whole area has been this foment of creativity
for so many years.
It's become something a little different now.
But for me, it still has a little bit
of that spirit to it.
And so we're on the edge of North Beach, Telegraph Hill,
and Jackson Square.
So Jackson Square used to be the edge of San Francisco.
And so it's a part of the city that's easy to get to.
It's kind of central, but also historically in San Francisco.
It's got a lot of substance to it.
And so when we opened, I knew that the restaurant
had to fit into the community.
And so I thought a lot about that.
I'm like, well, how am I going to do this?
So one thing I thought is using a lot of the wild ingredients
that I'd been learning about.
I wanted to cook for San Franciscans, people
who grew up here.
And if you imagine taking a walk and brushing by or just
being near a wild bay tree, like California bay in the summer
and that kind of menthol, eucalyptus aroma,
and then bringing that into the dining room,
that sense of place, very vividly on their plate.
That's one thing I thought of.
And then I wanted to use the best ingredients
that we have here.
So I'm only going to use local ingredients that
are recognizable.
So that means mostly plants.
That's our best ingredient.
It means there's not a lot of fin fish.
So I wrote a whole book with no fin fish in it, only shellfish.
It means a lot of wild plants, but it also
means lot of cultivated stuff and meats raised on grass.
And people that I'd dealt with her for 10, 15 years, producers
like Soyoung Scanlon, who is, I think, probably the best
cheesemaker in the country who does all of our cheese for us.
So bringing in people who had a lot of meaning to the area,
to me, and bringing that into the food.
And then, it's funny, this idea of local.
Back then this idea of Californial cuisine
didn't really exist.
So then this idea like even more that we would work only
with local ingredients-- at that time
there was pretty much a kind of a schism between haute cuisine,
like very high in food, and then casual food.
And we kind of scrambled everything.
Restaurants are a lot about symbolism.
And so we took the symbols from both things
and mixed them together.
We have fuzzy pillows and nubbly fabrics
on our banquettes, handmade pottery,
a lot of things that really were associated
with the more rustic style of food.
But we served a highly personal tasting menu at a time
when there was no highly personal modern cooking
in the city.
And there really wasn't a lot of idea
that there was a need for it.
And all my friends called me and they were like, you're crazy.
You're going to go out of business.
And we almost did for the first two years.
It was really hard.
But what was interesting to me was--
so there's this great movie from 2003.
Lars von Trier made a movie called "The Five Obstructions."
And the premise is kind of a documentary.
And there's a very famous older filmmaker,
a Danish filmmaker called Jorgen Leth.
And the premise was he'd kind have gotten a little depressed.
He'd kind of lost a little bit of his spirit.
And Lars when to him and said, I want to do a movie together.
I want you to re-make your most famous movie, which
was from 1967.
It's called "The Perfect Human."
And I want you to re-make it five times
with each time with an obstruction.
Obstruction meaning like the first time,
I want you to remake the movie, but left
like long, langerish shots.
He's like, each cut needs to be only 12 frames,
which is like [SNAP] [SNAP].
And what was amazing was he did it.
And he did it somehow with his voice,
with his honest expression intact.
It was extraordinary.
And that's how I felt about working
with this tight constriction of ingredients,
is that it really forced creativity.
Because it's easy enough to put a bunch of caviar on a plate
and have people be happy.
But if you're going to give people
a carrot instead of caviar, it has
to be a really fucking good carrot, you know?
And so that was from the very beginning
the foundation of our cooking, is
that we're going to start with a carrot
and make it as good as caviar.
And we worked really hard at it.
I think now it's almost eight years later.
I think our restaurant as come to be
known a lot for creativity.
And I guess I have three thoughts about creativity.
One is that creativity is the pursuit of truth.
And I think at its best, something
that is creative and successful reveals something
that is essentially true about a form, about an ingredient,
about a person, about something universal.
I think the second thing is that creativity is not
an end in itself.
It's there only to discover something.
So creativity is taking form that's known
and reshaping it so it does something new,
not to do something new, but to discover something that's true.
And then I think the other thing about creativity
is it requires courage.
And courage is like a word that seems really old-fashioned.
I don't think anyone uses it anymore.
I don't think anyone's used it probably in 20 years.
And it sounds kind of stilted.
But for me, it has meaning still.
So when I was a kid, I learned how
to speak French when I was pretty young.
And somehow, I think I was in seventh grade,
I ended up in a French class that
was a little bit below where I was.
And I was bored stiff.
So there was this poster on the wall,
and I memorized it because I think
I read it 10,000 times because I couldn't pay attention
in the class.
And it was a picture of Robert Kennedy getting off
of a plane and this great quote.
And I always remembered it.
The answer of the world's hope is to rely on youth, not a time
in life, but a state of mind, temper of the will,
quality of the imagination, predominance
of courage over timidity, and the love of adventure
over the life of ease.
And I kind of always remembered it, the predominance of courage
over timidity, because I think a lot of people feel like courage
is not being afraid.
And I think it is being afraid and doing something anyway.
Creativity requires risk.
And risk necessitates failure.
I think the best thing we've done at Coi,
the thing I'm most proud of, is we failed a lot.
That sounds terrible.
But I don't think that a person has
been invented that can take risks without failing.
And that's definitely not me.
And so one of the things that we did a lot at the restaurant
is we failed over and over because we were trying
to evolve a culinary language that was ours,
that seemed like our expression.
And it took a lot of work.
And there was a lot of times where, I have to say,
it was a little bit nuts.
I was getting all the ingredients.
I was doing all the foraging.
I was writing the menus.
And I was cooking.
And it's funny because a lot of good chefs
have come out of our kitchen.
And I'm really proud of that.
And it's funny to go back and talk to them.
From the early years, the people who,
when we worked together there, we just laugh about some
of the stories.
Like I was putting like 150 new dishes on the menu a year, 200.
It was just this constant, constant thing.
They weren't all good.
And sometimes I'd be like, OK, we're
going to change four dishes tomorrow.
And my sous chef kind of, ahem, Chef,
you remember like last time, you told me
that last time it didn't go so well.
And you told me to tell you the next time
that you shouldn't change four dishes.
And I was like, no, no, this time
it's really going to go well.
And so what happened was it really
did take seven years to discover what was our language.
And then when I finally wrote the book,
what the book ended up being was a story
about that process, a story about discovery.
So I brought a few slides.
And we're right near Chinatown, which
is like my other favorite part of San Francisco.
And this is our alley.
I brought a couple pictures just to show you.
Our restaurant is like, for me, it's super warm.
And at its best, it's a place where
I want people to have a good time.
I don't want them to feel like they
have to talk in hushed voices.
It's not a temple of fine dining.
It's a place for people to enjoy the table.
Because food, like cooking, is like one
of the most human things we do.
We cook reach other, for ourselves, for families,
for our friends.
The emotion of the table, sharing stories and experiences
together, and how that makes us feel about our community
and about where we live, is the most central thing.
And so every day when we come into the restaurant--
and I'll probably say "we" a lot and it's not
because I'm using the "royal we" but because we have
a lot of people who work in the restaurant,
a lot of people considering how small the restaurant is,
and everyone, I think, feels the same way.
And everyone feels like when I opened,
I said, OK, all we're going to think about is the people that
come in the door every day.
That's who is the most important people in the world to us.
We never think about press or awards.
That's not why we cook.
We cook for the people who come in.
And I think to this day that has remained
the most central tenet in the restaurant.
I want people to the come in, have a good time,
feel very comfortable.
And you can see, the kitchen is right next to the dining room.
So I brought a few slides to talk about some of the food
and use that as a way to talk about how we evolve dishes,
some of the ideas, and some of the,
I guess, philosophical aspects of how we cook.
So more than wild ingredients and local ingredients,
I also wanted to understand and incorporate
a lot of tropes that are common to this area.
So this is the dish that everyone gets right
when they sit down.
We call it California Bowl.
It's kind of a joke.
It's brown rice, sprouts, and avocado.
So we took typical hippie Californian food
and transformed it a little bit.
I think one thing that's really important about dining
experiences like this-- and it's so funny.
I keep getting asked about the tyranny of tasting menus,
as if people are being shackled, dragged
into these terrible places, these dungeons,
and being left to languish there for hours.
And I think it's true.
A bad tasting menu is like a prison sentence.
No one wants that.
The one thing we work really hard on
is making it fun, kind of like when you're writing a book.
The way I put it is it would be like saying,
if there's plenty of good short stories in the world, why would
you need a novel?
Well, the form allows expression that's
entirely different, more complex.
And the constituent components don't
have to carry as much responsibility.
In the case of a restaurant meal,
you need to leave with enough food in your stomach
or you're not going to be happy.
So if you want to serve smaller portions,
very intense flavors, maybe something that
doesn't taste good when you get to the end of it.
Maybe it's super temperature sensitive
and you can't have more than three bites
without it disappearing.
You have to do that within a longer menu.
That being said, our menu is 2, 2 and 1/2 hours.
We try and keep people moving through.
We're an urban restaurant.
We're not a country restaurant.
People got places to go.
And so we're very cognizant of that.
But when they come in, the most important thing
is we wan them to feel comfortable.
I mean, this references chips and dip.
It basically it's a welcome.
It's not a challenge.
We want people to settle in, have a glass of champagne,
have a few bites to eat, a and chill out
while they're getting ready to eat.
So the rice is overcooked, pureed, spread very thin,
dehydrated, and fried in oil.
And oil so hot that literally it goes in for a second
and you're pulling it out of the oil and it's blistering.
And the oil that's clinging to it is still cooking it.
And so it's super, super light, like a chicharon.
Avocado that's charred and mixed with a little lime juice.
And then sprouts.
So the sprouts we grow ourself.
And it's to have something fresh.
It's to have something alive.
and also capturing that moment of energy
when a plant is just starting to grow.
One of the things that I think is
really essential to how we cook is
to take-- I guess one thing you can do if you want to have
the shock of the new-- because if you talk about creativity,
if you talk about an expectation of a sense of discovery,
one thing is to find something that no one's ever seen before
and present it.
Well, of course, then you're going
to get the shock of the new.
But it's not going to have any of the emotional content
because there's no sense of familiarity along with it.
So it just kind of comes across your radar.
And then it's gone.
It doesn't have any staying power.
But to take something that's very, very familiar,
and to make it look new again, I think,
then you get all of the emotional connection
of the familiarity and the newness at the same time.
So we work a lot with humble ingredients,
things that are very, very ordinary.
And we work really hard to make them new.
So this came from my partner in the business, Ron Boyd.
We were talking about a dish.
And he said, what about beet and rose?
And he was thinking about the flavors.
For some reason, I just started thinking about what
if I made the beet look like a rose?
This is the most difficult dish to produce we've ever done.
There's no molds.
It's all done by hand.
It is so tedious, so labor intensive-- roasting,
slicing, compressing, putting it together.
Underneath it, a little bit of yogurt.
And then the ice on the side is rose petals.
So if you imagine like a rose petal tea
with a little bit of honey and lemon.
So bright, fresh, like a soda on a hot day.
Like you take a bite and you keep wanting more.
It kind of draws you in.
So it's a first course.
It's meant to reset people's expectations,
like a sense a surprise.
A lot of the ideas that would come in the rest of meal.
We cook with a lot of acidity.
We cook with a lot of brightness.
For me, one of the things we talk about
is energy a lot in the book.
And the idea of energy to me is partly in the products
you work with and partly it's how you cook.
And so acidity makes things jump.
It makes things alive a little bit.
So this is a dish that, in a way,
it's not just about elevating, but within the kitchen
it's about how hard it is, and how much you
have to respect the effort of making a simple form.
So I wrote a book in 2003, came out in 2004,
with a natural perfumer named Mandy Aftel.
I met her in 2001 through a mutual friend.
This is a woman who has basically
taken an art form that's thousands of years old, that's
disappeared for 100 years, and has almost single-handedly
brought it back, which is making perfume
out of natural essences.
Because nothing you find in a supermarket
is made from anything natural.
They started figuring out how to synthesize the top two or three
notes out of hundreds.
So what makes food so complex is its incredible organic
chemistry that you can actually mimic pretty easily,
but you don't get any of the richness.
It doesn't change.
It's very static.
And so when we met, she showed me about essential oils,
which I'd never worked with before, but even
more about the relationship between what
we eat smell, taste, and remember, and how what we smell
is most of what we taste.
And this dish is cucumber and melon, so biological cousins.
There's two forms.
One is a drink.
It's melon juice, cucumber juice, and a little bit a lime.
And then a little salad of compressed melon,
cucumber, and little borage leaves,
which have a cucumber-y flavor.
So this dish, you see that there's
that little thing that says "mint."
That's a spray that Mandy made.
We've collaborated together on a lot of things over the years.
But this was, basically, we had a plate.
We sprayed it with this mint.
And we put two things on top of it.
So you get it.
There's no mint in the dish.
You smell mint.
So the first thing that happens is you have the smell of mint
and the taste of cucumber and melon.
By the end, your taste buds have been totally fooled.
So you're tasting mint in the food
even though there's no mint in the food.
And so it's really fun.
And it's also kind of a sensory trompe l'oeil.
So this dish I made as a joke for a friend.
Massimo Bottura is an Italian chef, a very great time
Italian chef, has a restaurant in Modena.
And he took one of the famous dishes
of Emilia Romagna, his region, Bollito Misto.
And he made a dish called Bollito Misto, No Bollito--
so Boiled Meat, Not Boiled.
And so at first, his region was just appalled.
It's a very traditional region.
And to take something that's a traditional touchstone
and reinvent it?
Oh, that was just-- no one liked that.
Well, over time, it caught on and it
became one of his most famous dishes.
And then I was talking to him one time.
And he was laughing that it had become so copied,
people were even making Frito Misto, No Frito.
And so he came to eat at my restaurant.
I made Fried Egg, Not Fried.
And so it's an egg yolk poached in smoked oil.
And then around it is bread crumbs
that have a little bit of smoke.
Different kinds of brassica, so cauliflower and broccoli,
stuff like that.
And then the sauce is this very intensely acidic,
because the egg is very rich, emulsion
based on steamed egg white.
And so he came in.
And I did it for him.
And he loved it.
But even more, I loved the dish that came out of it.
Then over time, what the dish evolved into
is actually a dish that we serve now at the restaurant, which
is that same yolk, no breadcrumbs, and a little bit
of caviar, a little bit of whipped creme
fraiche, and chives-- so, so simple.
One of things we discovered, I think, in earlier times,
I really wanted to challenge people more.
And now I changed my mind about that a little bit.
I think at the beginning of the meal
is a good time to be very comforting.
So we're a two Michelin star restaurant.
I never set out to make a two Michelin star restaurant.
But that's what we are.
And so more and more, I feel like, well, shit,
if that's what we are, I think we
need to provide a little bit more
of the kinds of things, a few moments that people expect,
of luxury, of a nod to tradition.
And so caviar, this egg yolk that's cooked in smoked oil
to almost a custard consistency, creme fraiche, and chive--
right down the middle of the road, perfectly done.
Everyone loves it.
And a lot of people at the end of the day,
they'll go, everything was so great, especially that egg.
Well, maybe five years ago, I would've looked at them
and like, oh, no, but I did so much else that was so much more
interesting.
I can't believe you loved the crowd-pleaser.
And now I just like, great.
Because that's what it's there for.
It's there for people to love.
So this is how even when we're-- for us,
food is part of like a continual evolution.
And so what started out as something totally different
has turned into something, like the main part of it
turned into something we serve every day.
I'm not going to talk too much about this.
This is a morel dish.
I was at Full Belly Stand in Marin.
And they had new potatoes that had just come in.
Next to the new potatoes they had popcorn.
They just happened to be having it side by side.
And then I thought, mushroom, potato, corn.
Makes sense.
Why not?
I've never cooked with popcorn before.
I came back.
I made this dish.
A little popcorn, sauce, and some basil sprouts.
So it was a very nice dish.
But what was interesting about it was the dish
demanded a very elegant popcorn sauce, very smooth.
But right before blended it, I kept looking at it.
And the process is very simple.
It's popcorn, water, butter.
Bring it up to a about 30 seconds.
Strain it.
That liquid?
So if you took butter and water, heat it, cool it
in the refrigerator, and then remove the butter so it's just
water, that water is going to taste like butter.
So the flavor of fat is water-soluble.
So we do that a lot.
We cook things with fat.
We take the fat out.
The liquid carries the flavor.
And so in this case, we kept using that liquid
to cook more and more popcorn.
And the popcorn that was saturated, we passed it.
And this is a dish, I mean, to a dish
is a little bit of a stretch.
It's a fun little thing that we throw into the menu sometimes.
A basket strainer, and a pot, and a spoon-- that's
what we use to make this.
So it's very low tech.
We pass through a basket strainer.
What comes out of the other side is exactly like grits.
So basically, this is grits made from popped popcorn.
One of the things that I think about a lot
is what it means to be an American cook.
I think our traditions are very new.
Our country's very new.
And we're mostly made up of immigrants.
My family is a family of immigrants.
Three generations ago, none of my family was in this country.
And I think that's true of most of this country.
And so what does it mean to be an American cook?
And what does it mean to work within traditions
that aren't our traditions?
And how do we make them our traditions?
So very early on, there was starting
to be a regional identity.
The South, I think, is much more developed
than most other parts of the country.
And grits is one of our most iconic regional dishes.
Popcorn, I mean everyone knows popcorn.
Everyone goes to the movies.
It's one of our most well-known pop culture sensory memories.
So combining the two-- grits made from popped popcorn--
you take two things that are incredibly familiar
and make something new.
So I think maybe that's kind of-- I
don't know-- something about American food in that.
The other part of our culture-- and our culture
here in San Francisco-- and I talk
a lot about San Francisco and California's history,
and our history, and here-- is that we
have an incredible swirl of people from all over the world
here.
Part of being a very new city is that, I mean, the people who
grow our food, they're from Japan, China, South America,
France, Italy.
And they come with their seeds.
They come with their backgrounds their ideas.
And so, we have the flavors of the world here, grown here.
And so we study a lot about-- sometimes
I see a product that I don't know, I'll ask.
In Italy, how do you make that?
What do you do with this in Japan?
And we learn a lot about new ways to look at food.
I think an ingredient, a lot of people
think it's like a piece of paper, right?
You got two sides.
I think that it's like a diamond.
It's like so many facets.
And we're constantly turning things over
to find a new facet.
It's the same thing.
It's just you're looking at it in a different way.
And so this dish came out of a series
of dishes called Earth and Sea.
I went through a period where I was
naming things more poetically.
I stopped.
I got really bored with that.
But this stuck with me because when I first
moved to San Francisco, I was at the edge of the city.
I mean, I grew up on the ocean in a little town called
Manchester in the North Shore of Massachusetts.
And it's right next to a fishing town
called Gloucester, which is made famous
by Sebastian Yunger's "Perfect Storm."
And then I think they made a movie, which is probably
more famous than the book.
And the ocean, the smell of the ocean, and of seaweed drying
on the rocks, of the feeling of what
it's like to be on the coast is so deeply ingrained in me
that I don't think I could ever live too far
away from the ocean.
And so where I lived was right on the edge of San Francisco,
right where this incredibly dramatic moment
where the water comes in.
There's a little bit of beach.
And then the forest starts.
We have a lot of dishes that try and capture this moment,
this energy that happens right where the two things meet.
And so the little circles are tofu coagulated with seawater.
So this is something that our pastry
chef Matt Tinder brought into the kitchen.
It's very traditional.
It's done all through coastal areas in Asia.
They'll use actual seawater to coagulate instead
of the boiled down chemicals or minerals.
And this is like fresh ricotta.
It's not pressed.
We make it ourselves.
And it's really, really a delicate, incredible product.
When we make it, it separates into curds and whey.
We take the whey, mix it with tomato water,
so kind of like a sweet clear elixir of tomato, chopped sea
weed or sea lettuce, I should say,
and then a bunch of different kinds of fresh seaweeds.
Fresh seaweed is something I had this fixation about.
I couldn't find any for years.
And finally we were working with a company down in Monterey Bay
called the Monterey Bay Abalone Company.
I was talking to them in 2007.
And they were talking about all of the different kinds
of seaweed they were feeding to the abalone.
And I was like, wait a minute.
You have fresh seaweed.
I want fresh seaweed.
It was like, can you send me the seaweed with the abalone?
They said, sure.
And so that's when we started working with it.
And it took a long time to figure out how
to-- A lot of them are carrageenanphytes.
So when you go to a place and they've
used carrageenan or something to thicken,
those come from seaweed.
So if you don't treat the seaweeds in a certain way,
they will just ooze a snail trail or something.
It's really gross.
And so fresh seaweeds and then a little bit of olive oil,
pungent but not overwhelming.
And so it was really funny about this-- and then a little bit
of cherry tomato-- so I took this to a table.
It had been on the menu about a month.
A table [INAUDIBLE], I put it down.
I do one in the dining room.
And I never used to.
But now I find that I really like to see people.
They may or may not want to actually talk to me.
But I think if they do, or it's just
nice to know that someone's cooking your food, I guess.
And so I put it down.
And they look at me.
And they're like, this is great.
We've been eating this all week.
And I was like, thinking to myself, whoa,
they've been eating tofu coagulated
with seawater, seaweed, and tomato all week?
This is like crazy.
I looked at them like, really?
They're like, yeah, tomato, mozzarella, olive oil.
Because that's kind of what it looked like.
And so a lot of our food has this--
like the little nesting dolls.
It's like an idea inside an idea inside an idea.
So the connectivity is what draws people in.
A lot of different kinds of people
can recognize different things within the food.
And I think that's really important.
So this to me is like a dish that's like California,
like San Francisco, like a part of our culture.
This is another thing that we-- I love tarts.
And I was making very traditional tarts
for many years.
And then one day I wanted to do something different.
So I flipped it over-- crust on top,
filling in the middle, the top on the bottom.
And actually the way it eats, everything about it was great.
So I went through a few iterations.
There's three of them in the book.
This was the last one.
And it's the weirdest one and definitely my favorite.
So the top crust is buckwheat, sheep's milk fromage blanc
underneath.
And then Ron cooked fennel, a little burnt fennel oil.
There's wild fennel pollen, so a lot
of anise flavors in the chervil.
The sauce around it, wheat grass.
So again, trying to work with iconic things,
but wrap it into a sensibility that's delicious.
Because at the end of the day, if it's not delicious,
it may or may not be a good idea,
but it's definitely not worth serving.
I put these pictures in here just to show you a little bit,
because they're in the book, about how
we put a dish together.
I'm not going to go through the dish too much.
It's salsify, black trumpet mushrooms,
and wood sorrel with lichen vinaigrette.
So it's a dish of the forest in winter a little bit.
So you can see a little bit about how much detail
goes into putting these dishes together.
And so what you get is this.
And it looks very, very simple in a way.
Well, we don't scatter those things all over the plate.
This is on a light table.
But really, when you get it at the restaurant,
you would get this and the vinaigrette.
And it looks so simple.
It's easy to eat.
It tastes good.
But what goes into it is all of these layerings of things.
But the lichen vinaigrette-- so lichen's
a fungus that grows on trees.
It's like mushrooms, basically.
And it's not something we really worked with before.
But just by accident, I found myself in a forest.
And I found a piece that would look beautiful.
I ate it.
And the nice thing about cooks-- we' we're very curious.
I mean, I'm amazed that I'm still alive.
I eat anything.
If it moves, it doesn't move, I'll try it.
I start chewing on it.
It didn't really taste like anything.
And all of a sudden, this really deep, mushroomy, earthy, really
delicious flavor came.
And I'm like, huh, this could be a cooking ingredient.
And then so I took it back.
I learned that you need to boil lichen.
And by the way, this is a kind of called Parmotrema.
Most of the hundreds of kinds of lichens are edible.
A few aren't.
It's not like something you should go and really do
like I did because you just don't want to.
But we boiled it, dehydrated it, and ground it into a powder.
And what was amazing was when we boiled it, at a certain point,
the bitterness boiled away and you're
left with something earthly.
It tasted like black trumpet mushrooms
and kind of like truffles.
Super, super labor intensive.
Then we coated the beef.
And the beef is from Prather Ranch, so grass-fed beef.
The same people I've been dealing with for so many years
because it just tastes good.
They take care of their animals well.
And they have their own slaughtering house.
Beginning to end, their process is totally controlled.
This is the dish of tradition.
So all of our dishes are built in some way, shape,
or form on tradition.
It's like I am a tiny speck in this long continuum of cooks.
And I think if you don't know what
came before, you can't affect what comes after.
And so this is basically Boeuf Bordelaise.
And it doesn't look anything remotely like that dish.
But for me, that's what it's built on-- beef, mushrooms,
spinach, marrow sauce.
Except the mushrooms, there's some mushrooms.
There's some chanterelles.
And sometimes we've done it with porcini.
But the mushroom, the main mushroom, is the lichen.
And the spinach is a coastal spinach, so
kind of salty and mineraly.
And then the bordelaise is infused with native spices.
So wild bay with its minty, menthol kind of aroma.
The citrus of Monterey cypress, kind
of a fresh, green anise from wild fennel.
And a deep earthy licorice from angelic root.
A ton of lime juice, a shocking amount of lime
juice, even though it doesn't taste acidic,
and a little bit of rice wine vinegar.
So it looks like every sauce you've ever had,
very dark and kind of brooding.
It tastes bright and fresh and green.
So it's exactly what the tradition has been,
but exactly 100 times opposite from it.
And so somehow, I think, for me, that's what we try and get,
is this connection to people, this connection to tradition
shown in a new way, synthesized through our own sensibilities.
One question I get a lot is, oh, you wrote a book.
You've had this restaurant all this time.
What's next?
And I guess what's next is cooking in my restaurant.
And there's this thing with the media that's
like new, new, new, new, new.
But there's something beautiful about a restaurant.
I mean, if you really love a place
and you put your heart into it, over time
it's like any relationship.
Right at first, you have this flush of newness
and it's so exciting.
But the depth of feeling you get over time as you
get to know this person, this place more and more,
it becomes so satisfying.
Coi is the last place I'm going to cook at.
It's like the place that-- as quirky
as it is, as terrible as the location is, we're remodeling
it again in January, we keep improving it, improving it--
I'm more excited now than I was when we opened.
And so sometimes what's next is doing what you already do,
but a little bit better.
And we got a great team of people.
And they allow me to come here and talk.
Which is, by the way, totally bizarre
because I never got into restaurants to talk to people.
So one of the things that I mentioned before
is this idea of a culinary language.
When I was growing up, I wasn't good at talking to people.
I didn't have a lot of communication skills.
And I think that's true of a lot of people in restaurants.
And you're probably sitting here saying, OK,
you've talked about 40 minutes straight, so--
But I learned that.
It's not natural.
What is natural to me is the language of cooking.
And it's a nonverbal language.
When I was young, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents.
My grandfather, he was the guy who took us to restaurants.
I love restaurants from when I was
an early age because of my grandfather.
I'd sit right next to him.
I would get the cherries out of his Manhattans.
I felt so special.
That was the moment actually that I
felt most special in my life.
And I think everyone has their own shitty
stories of what did or didn't go right
when they were growing up.
And my parents split up early.
And I was kind of left to my own.
But that moment when I was in a restaurant with my grandfather,
I felt like the center of the universe.
And so for me, that's what restaurants were.
They were not reality.
A restaurant was a place where you could be anything,
where your life could just totally transform.
My grandmother, as outgoing and gregarious as my grandfather,
she was quiet and inward.
So I spent a lot of time with her in the kitchen.
She was a great cook.
She was not good at expressing herself
or her love for her family through words.
But through her cooking, it was magic.
And she would cook for 30 people at the holidays.
And it would be like she was casting a spell over everyone.
The way she could express yourself through her food
was incredible.
She wouldn't sit down.
She wouldn't eat.
She stayed in the kitchen on the stove all night.
Maybe if you begged her, you'd get
her to take literally two bites of something.
And when I grew, I realized that I became her in a lot of ways.
So somehow this is very familiar.
Writing is a very familiar form of communication.
But talking, I think, is really hard.
And so the other thing that's next--
and I brought this because we have about 120 employees.
We have more than just one restaurant.
Everyone says, how do you run four restaurants?
I don't run four restaurants.
That would be inhuman.
I have a team of people.
This is 20 people out of 120, and just a nice little cross
section of really amazing, talented people.
And so part of what's next is to help the company grow
and to stay out of the way, to let
them do what they're good at doing.
And I think as I get older, I realize
the biggest part of management is not getting in people's way,
not inhibiting their natural ability.
Out of everyone here, I would-- and I could go on
for another hour talking about all of them-- that guy up
there with the glasses?
Ron Boyd, my partner?
He's the guy who oversees the other restaurants.
I'm mostly a cheerleader for the other restaurants.
I go there.
I have dinner.
I bring people in.
I say everything's awesome.
And it allows me to do the work at Coi.
Ron is probably one of the most creative, brilliant,
kind, and generous people I've ever met.
And so I feel very lucky.
And so part of what's next is we have
a couple of projects for next year already.
Neither one of them are restaurants.
And both of them pretty exciting.
And then this is the other part of what's next.
So I have two kids.
And I always said I wouldn't have
kids that grew up without seeing their father.
So it turns out that I have two kids that are growing up
without seeing their father so much.
So I'm trying to change that.
And so that's part of having this amazing team.
I have a great chef de cuisine.
There's a great quote by Paul Bocuse.
Someone asked him-- he was out of the kitchen-- and they said,
who's cooking in your kitchen tonight?
And he said, the same people that cook every night.
And so having seen this team of people
allows me to have the ability to help the company grow
and also, I think, maybe have the ability
to have a little bit more family time.
So I thought maybe you might have some questions.
And then maybe you guys might have some questions, too,
about anything I talked about, didn't talk about,
embarrassing personal questions.
MALE SPEAKER: I think we're about the same age.
Certainly, we followed a certain path from the East Coast.
DANIEL PATTERSON: 872 years old?
That's how old I am.
MALE SPEAKER: I'm 871, so I a little bit younger.
One of the things that I found interesting in my career,
and I heard you echo, was as you started off,
you had a desire to make things more intricate or more simple.
And if that makes sense, you have evolved.
And it sounds like Coi is maybe not your end
game, but your ultimate evolution.
Would you say that that's true?
DANIEL PATTERSON: Yeah, that's true.
Although the thing about evolution is it never stops.
So like for me, it's a constant refinement.
And it's about hiding our work, our effort.
MALE SPEAKER: Right.
DANIEL PATTERSON: If you see the effort on the plate,
we've done something wrong.
So the work should stay in the kitchen.
And what's on the plate should be easy.
It should be like, no one should have
to wonder how to eat something.
And this is just my own feeling.
Or when they eat it, they shouldn't
wonder what they're eating.
So we go for flavor.
When you talk about simplicity, simple is hard.
Simple, to mean concentrated, clear, distillation,
of a flavor that's just like a pinpoint
and like a shock of recognition, to deliver
that every single time?
That's really hard.
And so that's really what our focus is.
And that comes from ingredients.
It comes from technique.
And it comes from knowing when to stop,
I think, a little bit, too.
MALE SPEAKER: Over-manipulation.
DANIEL PATTERSON: Yeah, I mean, it's a tough thing.
Because I think the second you take a chicken and kill him,
you manipulate it.
And then you put it in the oven, you manipulate it again.
So you have roast chicken, which is the least manipulated thing.
But everything is manipulation.
But for me, it's more a matter of understanding
the proper limits of a dish.
Each dish has its own moment where you just
need to have the intuition to know
when to stop, to add something.
And I think intuition is the hardest thing to teach,
I think.
MALE SPEAKER: Only comes with time, right?
DANIEL PATTERSON: Or it doesn't come at all.
MALE SPEAKER: Many times, unfortunately.
DANIEL PATTERSON: Yeah, I mean, let's be honest.
I think you can teach anyone how to cook well.
But there's a certain point at which you can't really
teach someone to make a connection that's not already
in place.
But you can teach someone to make
a connection that has been established.
MALE SPEAKER: As a chef, there are many things
that people do in my kitchen that have infuriated me.
What is an example for you?
DANIEL PATTERSON: You know what?
It's funny because-- I mean-- I'm so much better than I was.
But if you caught me 10 years ago?
Oh, my God.
But even now, like what just sends me
through the roof is just not caring.
I feel like when people come into a restaurant,
they've given us their trust.
And that trust is sacred.
And when I feel like people haven't taken that seriously,
that's the only thing.
We have so many safety nets in place,
it's almost impossible for a mistake
to get to the dining room at this point
because we have so many checks and balances along the way.
But not caring is the only thing.
So if you make a mistake, we're human.
We make mistakes.
That's not something that makes me upset.
But not caring or not trying hard enough
is the thing that gets me.
Because it's like, if you don't want to work that hard,
go to another restaurant that has a simpler form where
you don't have to work that hard.
Our form demands a lot of work.
And it demands a lot of caring.
And the caring is the thing that is the most important.
If you care and you make a mistake, ah, it happens.
And we get some young cooks that come in.
Sure, they make mistakes.
They're not experienced.
But a lot of heart.
And that's what matters.
MALE SPEAKER: How do you feel about the epic
issue with obesity in this country,
the government's attempt to either tax soda,
or perhaps to inspire people to eat
better which I'm certainly a fan of?
But I'd love your thoughts on that.
You don't necessarily deal with healthy eating
as a focus in Coi.
DANIEL PATTERSON: Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that.
So for about three years, we've been
working with Larkin Street Youth Services.
MALE SPEAKER: OK.
DANIEL PATTERSON: And you get hit up a lot in restaurants
for, why don't you make 1,000 pieces of something
on a shitty piece of toast for the opera or something?
And you feel nickel and dimed a little bit.
And I thought, well, why don't we just take a lot of energy
and put it in one place that is doing work that we really
believe in, that has our values.
And this is an organization that takes kids in off the street.
They give them counseling and job training
and a place to stay and food.
MALE SPEAKER: OK.
DANIEL PATTERSON: And so we've tried a lot of different things
with them.
But the thing that worked best is I
finally called them and said, look, bring some kids over.
We're closed on Mondays.
I'll do a cooking class.
And these are kids who grew up, a lot of them, with processed
food, without healthy food.
A lot of things that are so, so, basic to me,
they've never seen before.
And it wasn't like we were on opposite sides of the table.
Like, OK, everyone come on back.
Here's some cutting boards.
Here's some knives.
Try not to cut your fingers off.
And let's cook some food.
Lets have fun.
So the whole thing is delicious and fun.
And get people with A, a taste memory of something
that's good for them that's delicious.
Because if there's no taste memory of good food,
there's no way to reorient-- the way we're put together,
if you grow up being comforted by potato chips,
potato chips is what you're going
to reach for in a time of stress or crisis.
And if someone gives you a bowl of greens,
but you have no association with them?
You're not going to crave them.
But if you have a bowl of greens that's delicious,
and you associate it with this very fun day
that you're hanging out with these people
who you're living with, and then you have this good experience,
then you're like, oh, I'd eat that again.
Because it's not just good, but it's
connected to a good feeling.
And then the other thing is having some basic tools
to feed themself at home that good food.
And so we started something called The Cooking Project.
And right now it's out of San Francisco Cooking School.
And it focuses tightly on the Tenderloin,
using products that they can get in their neighborhood.
We have a different chef come every other week
and teach them one or two little things,
things that they can tell a story about,
things that have meaning, whether it's a pasta,
we've had different kinds of porridge,
different kinds of stews, salads, whatever.
And then afterwards-- everyone makes all the food
and they sit down and eat it together.
And in a way, that's even like the best part of it.
So it's a very modest program.
We're not trying to change the world.
But I don't think you can have too many people working
on this.
Ours is just like maybe at the end of the year,
200 kids know how to feed themself
a little bit better than they did before.
I think that's pretty great.
MALE SPEAKER: What do you tell, with the outbreak
of the celebrity chef, certainly, there's
the television--
DANIEL PATTERSON: Like a virus.
MALE SPEAKER: I mean, to some extent,
I mean, I know Bobby Flay, Morimoto.
I know that they can cook.
I do not know them.
But I know that they can cook.
They did not get there because they couldn't.
I know that there's plenty of chefs on TV
that are great personalities and are able to excite people.
I also know that I have kids from 10 to 20
coming up to me saying, I want to be a chef.
DANIEL PATTERSON: Well, every development
that's new in culture has good things
and it always has side effects.
You don't get any forward movement
without a little bit of negative side effect.
This fetishization of chefs is like crazy time.
We're manual laborers.
We're like the people who lay carpet or paint walls
or put woodwork in.
That's our job.
Our job really hasn't changed for 100 years.
Our perception of the job was changed.
But at the end of the day, we don't have coal in our ovens
anymore.
So that's a big improvement.
MALE SPEAKER: Sometimes you do now in flavoring things.
DANIEL PATTERSON: That's true.
But at least we're not breathing it in.
But I think our approach is much more human in the kitchen.
We're much more cognizant of people's emotional development.
I always think, how do I create an environment that
supports people to be as good as they can be?
So we're thinking about these things
a lot more than we used to.
But the basic job is the same.
You have raw ingredients that you transform into food.
And it takes a lot of work and a lot of hours.
So however that's being contextualized,
to the extent that it brings people closer
to thinking about what they put in their bodies,
I think it's great.
And if a little bit of that is that people
have this idea that it's a glamorous profession, ah, come
on, they'll learn soon enough.
MALE SPEAKER: Hear, hear.
Thank you so much for allowing me to host this
and for coming to San Francisco.
DANIEL PATTERSON: Thank you so much--
MALE SPEAKER: It was an absolute pleasure.
DANIEL PATTERSON: --for having me.
[APPLAUSE]
DANIEL PATTERSON: Hey, thanks for coming.