Hungry | Jeff Gordinier

Hungry
Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World

By Jeff Gordinier

Intro:                  Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.

Jeff Gordinier:                  My name is Jeff Gordinier and my latest book is called Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World.

Suzy Chase:                  For more Cookery by the Book, follow me on Instagram. If you enjoy this podcast, please be sure to share it with a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book. Now on with the show. Before the holidays, Pete Wells wrote about you and new year's resolutions on his Instagram. He wrote, "Realize that this book is not just a bunch of weird encounters with a famous chef, but actually a very convincing argument for moving into the unknown, entering dark rooms. Even though you stub your toes, fighting complacency, knowing you can do better, painting yourself into corners, so you'll have to invent a new way out. Why, potential resolutions are strewn over every page of this book like pine needles on the sidewalk on January 2nd." Do you see this book as a sort of an ode to resolutions?

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah, I do. And I was very grateful for that post as you can imagine. Pete Wells is a close friend of mine. We worked together at Details Magazine years ago before we were both at The Times. And yet he hadn't tweeted or posted anything about my book all year. So I was kind of like, "Okay, that's fine, you do you." But then at the very end of the year, he put up that incredibly gracious post about Hungry and I really felt, and this is no surprise to anyone who knows Pete, but I just felt he got it. Actually there were three things that happened around the end of the year in the beginning of 2020 which is Helen Rosner, from The New Yorker, put up a nice tweet about Hungry. Pete Wells did that Instagram post and Publishers Weekly named it one of the team's favorite books of 2019. And the person who wrote about it at Publishers Weekly echoed, sort of said something similar to what Pete Wells said, which is like, "This isn't really a book about food. It's actually sort of a book about self-discovery and change."

Jeff Gordinier:                  I think that Hungry is about my friendship with connection to Rene’ Redzepi, who's the Chef at Noma in Copenhagen, which a lot of people over the past decade have considered the best restaurant in the world. I mean that's always debatable. But it's certainly the most influential restaurant of the last decade around the world. I think most chefs would agree with that. I struck up a friendship with Rene’ about five years ago, actually, I guess we're coming on six years ago now. It changed my life, which sounds kind of cheesy to say, but it's true. And I think that Rene and I were both at periods in our lives where we needed to shake things up. We wanted to change things. So we sort of dovetailed in 2014. It was kind of a random thing. I met Rene Redzepi for a coffee in downtown Manhattan and this kind of awkward conversation led to a friendship and led to pretty much four years of traveling around together.

Suzy Chase:                  So what did you think when you got that phone call in 2014 saying, "Hey, I want to meet with you and chat at a coffee shop in the village." What were you thinking?

Jeff Gordinier:                  I felt like I had to do it as an obligation. That sounds really lame in a way, but it's true. I was a journalist, I am a journalist. I was a reporter at The New York Times on the food section and I felt like, "Well, I ought to do this as part of my job." I mean, this person is considered the most influential chef of our time. And obviously as a reporter, I have to do my due diligence. Right. But I was, he actually reached out to meet the very week I had moved out of the house with my first wife and my two older children. It was a very sad period in my life. I was in despair, frankly, and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I'm just being honest. Like, it's just so bizarre and serendipitous that Rene happened to reach out to me that very week. Okay.

Jeff Gordinier:                  And I was very vulnerable and kind of like just wanted to go home on the train, frankly. So to this little sad sack, bachelor apartment, I was renting down the street from my former house. So, most people Rene’ Redzepi reached out, they'd be pretty excited. I wasn't actually up for it, but as soon as I met him in this coffee house, it was like there was a kind of electricity in the air. There are certain people who give off this intoxicating charisma. I mean, one thinks of Beyonce’. You think of a person like Steve Jobs, you think of people who change the world and change the course of culture and have this kind of vibrancy. Almost like you can see the electrons when they enter the room. Right?

Suzy Chase:                  I've heard you say he's a bit Tony Robbins-esque.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah. There's a little bit of like, "Will you walk on coals with me?" Within a few minutes. We weren't talking about his manifesto. We weren't talking about his new cookbook. He was asking me questions, which I will tell you, as a reporter, it's fairly rare. I mean, I've interviewed rock stars and movie stars and film directors and poets and politicians and chefs. And it's very rare that they start asking you questions. Right? And Rene’ Redzepi did that. And he was like, "Oh, you're from LA. Do you like tacos?" And I was like, "Dude, yes. Tacos are-"

Suzy Chase:                  Life.

Jeff Gordinier:                  ... "very important to me." Yes, tacos are life. I live for tacos. And I was like, "Why are you asking me about tacos? You're from Denmark. What could you possibly know about that?" I mean, look ... and it turned out that he'd had this longterm ongoing love affair with Mexico, which was news to me. And it turned out to be news to most people in the food world. And I'm not talking about, he would just go to Cancun for vacation. I mean, he would spend weeks, if not months, in Mexico every year. He was obsessed with the history of the country, the people, the food, the ingredients. So he said to me like, "Why don't we go on a trip to Mexico together?" And I was like, "What? You and me? We just met." And that started a series of trips.

Jeff Gordinier:                  I didn't intend to write a book originally. It was just first for an article. But then I started going on these trips on my own dime, just because I found that being around Rene’ Redzepi and being around the Noma team was kind of, it was kind of changing me.

Suzy Chase:                  So, let's back up and talk about when you landed in Mexico City with Sean Donnola, a photographer, and you were immediately summoned to Pujol, perhaps the best restaurant in Mexico City and who was sitting at the table with Rene?

Jeff Gordinier:                  Danny Bowien, who is the chef of Mission Chinese Food in New York and in San Francisco.

Suzy Chase:                  So crazy.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah, that was my first sign, Suzy, that we were on a bigger adventure than I realized. Because, as you see in the book, everywhere Rene Redzepi goes, there was this kind of orbit of other famous chefs, right, who he's friends with. So it's sort of like that Bob Dylan movie, the documentary Don't Look Back like, "Oh, Donovan just shows up." You know, like, "Oh, there's Joan Baez." People would just show up all the time. Which of course enriched my narrative in our experience. It turned out that Rene’ Redzepi had become sort of a mentor to Danny Bowien from Mission Chinese Food. Danny had been through hell because the original New York Mission Chinese Food had been shut down by the health department, which was very humiliating and embarrassing. And he felt like his whole career was falling apart.

Jeff Gordinier:                  And in that moment of fear and weakness, Rene had reached out to him and kind of rescued him. So in a weird way, Danny and I were in a similar position. We were people who would become part of this cult because Rene’ had reached out to us. So in that room you have like arguably the greatest chef in Mexico, Enrique Olvera from Pujol, and then you have Danny Bowien and then you have Rene’ Redzepi, we're all at a table together. I mean, Enrique was bringing the food, but we were all hanging out together. Yeah. And there were other famous people in the room as well. It was just like, where am I? Have I just landed in the circus? It was as if there was some incredible documentary about the food world that you were watching. And then suddenly you opened your eyes and you were in the documentary. You were in the middle of it.

Jeff Gordinier:                  There's something kind of irresistible about his invitations. And I am not alone in saying yes to them. I mean, many people have been sort of sucked into his orbit in this way and it always ends up being kind of life changing.

Suzy Chase:                  So how long did you stay in Mexico?

Jeff Gordinier:                  The first time was a week, I guess, but then I went back many times. Basically, as you've seen, like most of the book takes place in Mexico, which is maybe a little odd when people pick it up because they think, "Wait, isn't this a book about a Danish chef? Why are we in Mexico the whole time?" It's because Mexico was sort of the crucible of his transformation and my own really, and he was building toward this meal, which happened three years after we met.

Jeff Gordinier:                  It was called Noma Mexico. It was a pop up in Tulum. Now when you hear the words pop up, a lot of people think, "So it was one night and they just cooked Noma food in Mexico." No, that's not what this was. This was seven weeks in Tulum. He flew the entire Noma team to Mexico. They spent months looking for the best ingredients and months and really years working and working and working at these recipes.

Suzy Chase:                  After you came back from Mexico, you wrote the article and then he called you to Tulum, right?

Jeff Gordinier:                  After I wrote the article, I figured that was the end, that's how it is for us journalists. You meet someone and you have this kind of fling, you meet the individual and then they go their merry way. But email sort of popped up on my Gmail. It said, "You have a table at Noma." Now, it's impossible to get a table at Noma. There's like 30,000 people on the wait list on any given night. Okay. And I had not asked for one. So it was confusing. I thought it was a mistake, because also the table was like a few days later, it was like lunch at Noma later that week, I texted him, I said, "Chef, I think you made a mistake. I think somebody typed my email in by accident and I have a table at Noma." And this is the Tony Robbins quality that Rene has. He basically said, "Take it or leave it." And I was like, "Oh wow."

Suzy Chase:                  What do you do?

Jeff Gordinier:                  Oh, it's a test. Like he's testing my will to live. So he's testing my sense of adventure and I thought, "Well, God, I mean, this chance is not going to come again." It's impossible to eat at this restaurant, and it's supposed to be the best restaurant in the world. So you know what? Damn the torpedoes. I just like went on one of those websites where you get a cheap flight and I found a very cheap flight. It turns out there are a lot. I booked it without attending to logistics first on the home front, shall we say. I just sort of threw myself a curve ball and I didn't even know who I would eat with. But it was, that was the beginning. So then there were all sorts of texts and invitations. I mean, that was-

Suzy Chase:                  Wait, tell me who you took.

Jeff Gordinier:                  This seems to be everybody's favorite part of the book.

Suzy Chase:                  Well, I have a funny story, so tell the story first and then I'll tell my funny story.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Oh cool. Well, I asked everyone, I mean everyone. I asked, I studied with John McPhee in college, The New Yorker writer and I asked him, because I feel like I owe him. And being John McPhee, he was actually pretty close to going, I mean he's in his 80s but he was like, "I might just do it," but he couldn't work it out. I asked my brother, I asked my father, I asked every wealthy friend I knew thinking that maybe they could help cover the costs. And I'm just being practical and it turned out that no one could do it. Everybody said no. And Suzy, it was such, it was so illustrative. Like I really learned a lesson from that. Like before this everyone said, "Oh wow, you met Rene’ Redzepi. If you ever get a table at Noma, let me know. I will do anything. I will move mountains."

Suzy Chase:                  Then crickets.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah, exactly. Crickets. When you finally get the table, they're like, "Oh, well, I forgot my son has a soccer practice, or I forgot I have a haircut appointment and I can't change it." I'm not kidding, like people were saying stuff like that. And I was like, "Yeah, but this is Noma, dude." So anyway, to answer your question, I ended up going with a random guy from the office at The New York Times. I did not. His name is Grant. A very talented web designer, very talented artistic type guy. But I did not know him at all. I mean, I met him once at an office party. And he heard that I had a table ... those who pick up Hungry, this led to a very bizarre comic sequence because Grant didn't exactly show up for the meal. He did buy a ticket to Copenhagen go and hang in. He did agree to share the meal with me, but he kind of messed up with the time. He had a very wicked case of jet lag. So that was totally unforgettable.

Suzy Chase:                  So, I have a funny story. I was at my neighborhood nail salon over Christmas vacation and brought your book to read while they did my nails. And I'm friendly with the gals at the salon and they're always saying, "What cookbook are you reading?" And they want to talk about recipes. So that day I said, "There aren't any recipes in this book, it's just a book about a well known chef." So there was a girl who's getting a pedicure next to me and she goes, "I overheard what you were saying." And she said, "Have you gotten to the part where the guys sleeps through the meal at Noma?" And I said, "No, I just started it." And she goes, "That's a really good friend of mine. And now because of the book, he's known as the guy who slept through the meal at Noma." And I was like, "Oh, poor Grant Gold."

Jeff Gordinier:                  I feel for him. Yeah, I feel for-

Suzy Chase:                  So that was fun.

Jeff Gordinier:                  ... That's amazing, that's satisfying as a writer to hear that. I do feel for him. I mean, I didn't intend to cause him any pain, I like the guy. I really just thought it was amusing that-

Suzy Chase:                  Totally.

Jeff Gordinier:                  ... this happens to us, that we accidentally sleep through important events, shall we say.

Suzy Chase:                  So in terms of thought experiments, you described the sea urchin hazelnuts a simple dish, you wrote, you tasted what it was and yet you tasted the micro tones, the flavors between the visible and the obvious. I'm curious to hear about that.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah, thank you for asking that. That's really crucial because I think sometimes people hear about Noma, Rene’ Redzepi's restaurant or they hear about this book and not all of us will have the opportunity to eat at Noma. So people are confused, a little bewildered as to why it can be so good. Like what is so good about the food at this restaurant? I mean, restaurants, I've been to restaurants, restaurants serve good food. What's unique about this? And the way I've described it to people has to do with things that are delicious that you've never encountered before. People have their favorites, like pizza, pasta, sushi, et cetera. With Noma, you're tasting things that are equally delicious, maybe even more delicious than those favorites and yet your palate has never encountered them for the most part.

Jeff Gordinier:                  It's like if you went into a museum and you saw a painting and the painting was particularly beautiful because it involved colors that you had never seen before. Like you know blue, green, red, yellow, et cetera. What if there were colors in the spectrum that for some reason, because of our DNA, the human eye had never apprehended, and then all of a sudden you could see those colors, like you would be, your mind would be blown, right? It's the same with the flavors at Noma. It's like they are finding little pathways of flavor, little micro tones, as you put it, which are like the notes in between the notes that not only blow you away because they taste so good, but because it's the first time.

Jeff Gordinier:                  So they do that through the foraging. They find all these wild herbs, greens, mushrooms, sea grasses, seaweeds, all sorts of things that you've probably never tasted. Even people in Denmark had never tasted them or didn't even know they were edible through the fermentation. So they have a whole fermentation lab at Noma that goes beyond what you'd find at almost any restaurant. You know how people will say stuff like, "Human beings only use 10% of their brains or 20% of their brains."

Suzy Chase:                  Yeah.

Jeff Gordinier:                  I think in part what the Noma enterprise is arguing is that we only use 10% of our pallets.

Suzy Chase:                  When thinking about Rene’, I was wondering if you can be a perfectionist if you're restless.

Jeff Gordinier:                  I think he manages to be both restless and a perfectionist. It's just that his definition of perfection keeps changing. So, like he achieves perfection and then he blows it up. As soon as he achieves perfection, he's bored with it. So, he's not interested. He's the opposite of a lot of the food artisans you find in Japan for instance, people who simply, like Jiro, of course, who's famous from the documentary, making sushi day after day for decades, getting better and better and better with each passing meal, you know. Rene is different than that. He likes to create a whole menu and at the moment he feels it's achieved perfection. It's achieved radiance. It's just what he wants to express. He's done. He's like, he actually will blow it up at that point.

Jeff Gordinier:                  So this means that the team has to create something like hundreds of new dishes every year. Hundreds. It's an impossible task. And each time Rene’ wants that menu to be an example of perfection, to answer your question. So the challenge there is just extraordinary. This is one reason I was drawn to the guy. I'd never met anyone like that. He could've just coasted. He could've just said, "Okay, we've got the perfect Noma menu. We're done. Let's just keep serving this for 40 years." But no, he just blows the thing up every three months.

Suzy Chase:                  So, speaking of perfection, you wrote in the book, "Moles are all negotiation, but tortillas are non negotiable." You never saw Redzepi master a tortilla. The whole female population of Mexico has mastered the tortilla. How come he couldn't?

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah, that was so interesting to me. That was like ... because we went to Mexico many times and I would see Rene’ try at the comal to create a perfect tortilla. And tortillas are very simple. You have the masa dough and it's a matter of ... I'm patting my hands right now. It's a matter of patting them correctly in your hands, the right texture, the right density, et cetera. And for cultural reasons, historical reasons throughout much of Mexico, I'm sure Diana Kennedy would tell you, the women make the tortillas. It's a cultural thing. The more traditional the village, the more likely it is that the men never even touched the masa. So there are many men in Mexico who can't really make a good tortilla.

Jeff Gordinier:                  But Rene’ being Rene’ and the greatest chef in the world, et cetera. I sort of thought, "Well, he'll figure it out." But he never did it. It's really about dexterity and it's kind of about muscle memory, you know? And many of these women have been doing it since they were little girls and it just becomes second nature. They just become very natural at it. And I mean, in this one village on the Yucatan peninsula, this Mayan village called Yaxuna. I mean, I couldn't believe the deliciousness of the tortillas, just absolutely perfect.

Jeff Gordinier:                  And they're using local corn, these kind of heritage strains of corn that are from the region. It was actually a point of slight friction between me and Rene’ because I'm not a chef, as my kids would say, I'm not even a very good cook, but I could master the tortillas. I actually made them-

Suzy Chase:                  What, really?

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah, yeah. When we were in Yaxuna he got a little annoyed with me because he said, "Well, why don't you give it a try LA boy?" And I did, I grabbed some masa and I just patted it in my hand, I put it on the comal and instantly it started puffing up, which is a sign that you made it, right. The women of the village were all kind of cheering for me. They were kind of surprised that I was able to do it. And I was like, "Wow, amazing. I did something better than the greatest chef in the world."

Suzy Chase:                  That's hilarious.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah, it was funny. I mean, Danny Bowien never got it either. I mean, and so, when we went to Oaxaca, he kept trying to figure it out and he never really could nail the tortillas either. I have a picture on my phone of Danny Bowien and Rene’ Redzepi at a comal in Oaxaca with all these Mexican ladies sort of surrounding them as they ... it's actually a series of photos as they try to figure it out. And their tortillas looked terrible. They're all clumpy, they're uneven. They're not puffing up.

Suzy Chase:                  So funny. So, by the end of the book I realized that this journey coincided, and this isn't funny, with the breakdown of your marriage and it felt to me like you and Rene’ were meant to travel this bumpy road together and come out learning to, as you wrote, keep moving because it's the only way.

Jeff Gordinier:                  That's sort of Rene’ Redzepi's philosophy, it's just keep moving. To get back to your first question, when you were talking about resolutions, we always feel life can be better than that. There must be something I'm doing wrong. What can I do differently? How do I live the optimum life? How do I create everything I want to create and love people the way I want to love them? How do I be a better dad, a better partner, a better friend? And we never really get the moment to sit and think about that.

Jeff Gordinier:                  The Buddhists have this concept of Samsara, Samsara, which is like the cycle that we're trapped in. You know? Where we keep gnawing on the past and we keep making the same mistakes. And we're almost like in a Mobius strip, like this feedback loop that we feel we can't get out of. I felt that way when I met Rene’ Redzepi. I felt that way because of my marriage coming apart and I was in that point of drift and malaise that sometimes we get into, we get caught in. I felt intoxicated by this philosophy of Rene's, which is just like just keep changing and keep moving and keep seeking out new experiences and keep learning and it will kind of shake you out of this rut. He was right and that's what happened.

Jeff Gordinier:                  God, I feel weird saying this, but I sometimes feel when I'm doing something or I'm thinking about the next steps in my life, I hear a little Rene’ Redzepi voice in the back of my head saying like, "Take the chance. Risk is good. Change is good. Jump off the cliff, do it." I don't know if that's the angel voice or the devil voice, but it's always saying that we have to embrace change.

Suzy Chase:                  Now to my segment called My Favorite Cookbook. What is your all time favorite cookbook and why?

Jeff Gordinier:                  My all time favorite cookbook is one that I anticipate a lot of your listeners and a lot of your guests would also a name. It's The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters.

Suzy Chase:                  No one's named that yet.

Jeff Gordinier:                  That's crazy. That surprises me.

Suzy Chase:                  But you're the first.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Really?

Suzy Chase:                  I swear.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Well, okay, well, I mean Alice Waters is a goddess of course. And I'm in California and so I have that kind of built in produce worship that a lot of West coasters have. And if that's where you're coming from, then Alice Waters is sort of your queen of course. But I mean, to me, I actually have the book here and it's like all I have to do is float through the table of contents and I start to feel this sense of warmth. Like I start to feel comfortable and at home and ready for dinner just from looking at the table of contents. Like it's just, it's The Art of Simple Food. So there's this simplicity even in the way each section is listed.

Jeff Gordinier:                  I often write about these fine dining places. It's part of my job at Esquire Magazine. And I admire what the chefs do with those Michelin starred spots. But in my heart of hearts, when I'm at home, whether it's at my parents' home in Laguna Beach or it's at home here in the Hudson Valley, this is what I want to cook and this is what I want to eat. Like it gets back to the basics.

Suzy Chase:                  Where can we find you on the web and social media?

Jeff Gordinier:                  The best place to find me is on Instagram. I'm known as TheGordinier on Instagram, or I guess we would say TheGordinier.

Suzy Chase:                  I was just going to say that.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Yeah, no, just TheGordinier. So the best place to look for me is on Instagram.

Suzy Chase:                  Well, thanks Jeff for telling this incredible story and thanks so much for chatting with me on Cookery by the Book Podcast.

Jeff Gordinier:                  Thanks so much, Suzy. It has been fun. And it has been an honor.

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