Dan Barber on What Makes a Great Chef

[Music playing] This to me what makes a great chef. The ones that I respect the most are when all the vectors, when you sit down to meal are pointing at the chef. They are pointing somewhere else. Now that might be in the reign of sustainability but also might be in the realm of history or some type of culture. You know Maria Batalya is very good at that and he is one of the greats of that. All this chefs who do not scream me, me me on the plate, I think that it says to me there is something going on that is larger than just food, which makes the food taste better. It is not just focus on the ego and on the manipulation of the ingredients but as something larger. It is about something. I think those are the chefs that end up making a real mark. And then you know, there is a second part to this too. Which is like the editing of a dish, which is to me the most critical. They are those chefs who put way too much ingredients and we all had that. and then there are other chefs on the other hand, who are minim less for the sake of being minimal and it is very sort of a feet and kind of off-putting precious, right. But to strike that balance, and it is like art, and that sense, I really hate relating cooking to art because I think that is pretentious too. Like this is the one place where I give up to and make the analogy to art whether it is writing or painting, there are very few real artist and real people are top of there profession who can take out from what they are creating to get to the essence. So they do not have a steel. You know in the great chef restaurant, there is no great dish, the one dish you have to have. The experience is much bigger than that. It reminds me of this back up thing that someone told me that the back up is riding three sisters. There is this great scene where one of the guys says the other guy, “Tell me about your wife” and the guy stands up and he does speaks, “let me tell you about my wife. My wife in the morning is that blah. My wife by noon time is that blah, and by the afternoon, my wife starts talking about blah, blah.” She goes on everyone and the rehearsal for this thing is just eating their first born, they love to speak so much that at the end of the week right before, they are about to do the performance. Someone says in the back up, you know that scene might make history one of the greatest scenes in the history of play writing. That night in the back up sense, of telegrams, the director says, “I want you to re-write the scene where the guys ask how is his wife? When he asks how is his wife, he should answer, “a wife, a wife is a wife.” So it takes out this incredible scene and to me, it was like I never hearing that story like that is true arts because what he was saying in the back up, I was kind of wrong. It was check up, three sisters so. Anyway, check up when he was saying that he is really saying that the play is bigger than that scene and if people walk away from that play just thinking about that scene or that scene steals the show. it is not great art and that is the same way when you site down to dinner. If there is one or two things in your meal that stands out, you have lost the greatness of the experience. So, that sounds little high flouting but I feel like it is generally true. [Music playing]