In Part two of our interview with Joe Beef’s David McMillan we talk about the perils of success, the joy of vegetables and whether the customer is, in fact, always right. Read part one here

Did you both come from fine-dining backgrounds yourselves?

Both Fred and I worked in fine-dining around the city, I worked for a young French chef who’d done time with George Blanc & Alain Chapel – he’d done the three Michelin star circuit. Even before I moved to Montreal, this kid I used to work for, Nicolas Jonglers who was a chef de cuisine at George Blanc, he eventually ended up killing himself, at the end of a rope. Fred worked at Toque! and three other very good restaurants around the city. But before we opened Joe Beef we worked together at a place called Globe, which was kind of like a hip, trendy restaurant, but was cool because there was a lot of money in the restaurant, all the customers spent well. So we worked together for like twelve years and because the restaurant was very busy, we got to really hone our skills, 250 customers a night, all big spenders, we had access for twelve years to top quality product. Giant swordfish, whole tuna’s, truffles, foie gras. We got to know a lot of people there, it was a hip, trendy place.

So when we moved to a tertiary neighborhood, where Little Burgundy is, which was a dump when we moved here, it’s like moving into the crack ghetto. We didn’t really realise, we thought that we were going to open a simple restaurant for the neighborhood people because we’d been out of it for a year and we thought we’d drop off the radar and retain none of our old clientele. but we realised really quickly that even in the crack ghetto, in the first week we opened there was Lamborghini’s parked in front of the restaurant. My $60 maximum price wine list wasn’t doing it for the customers, the most expensive thing on the menu was a hanger steak at $20, the customers were telling me, ‘Listen dude, I work super-hard and I don’t fucking eat hanger steak.’ The week after that we brought the wine list up to $300 and started offering rib steaks and lobsters and just doing our thing.

‘Success somehow is a double-edged sword’

Do you feel like the restaurant still serves the neighborhood though – you write in the book about having two students in and treating them like kings, throwing food at them.

I’ll be honest with you, the restaurants changed, this year, because I guess we wrote a book and we didn’t really know what we were getting into. So the book’s out there and we’re really happy, we won a piglet award and we’re up for IACP on April 2nd, which I feel we might take or not. Now you can’t get a reservation at Joe Beef till June… I’m in Florida… I’m going back next week and Fred’s going to be in the Bahama’s. The clientele’s different, because it’s all these people that reserved a month, two months ago and it’s a lot of people from all over the US and Europe. What built Joe Beef, the locals, my core clientele of twenty years, they can’t get a table anymore unless they reserve a month ahead, two months ahead. That’s not for me something that I aspired too, it’s flattering, it’s a problem that my restaurateur friends tell me I should not consider a problem. But I find it a problem that I can’t get my friends and the people that made us in, this weekend. I don’t answer my phone, I don’t return emails, so yeah thing are changing. Hopefully it’ll go away quick, I figure it’ll last a year.

This will be a big summer, the books fresh out there, a lot of people want to come. But nothing changes , I go back next week and I got to start planning for the garden, we’re just planning to get ready to shuck oysters, crack lobsters and do crabs, make life as easy as possible in the restaurant and serve the most amount of meals possible to try and get everybody in, to feed them. Success somehow is a double-edged sword, not a lot of people say that, no-one says it. I used to like the anonymity that we had, it was interesting, it was more pure, it was real. This little bit of food celebrity, is not… it’s good for business, but I’m not that guy, I make fun of that guy I laughed for twenty years at Bobby Flay, I think the guys a douche, I still do. Not that we’re anywhere like that. But Fred and I are somewhat timid and when he walks into the dining room and everybody looks at him, he doesn’t like that, he’s not into it. Neither am I really, I used to like getting drunk at the end of the bar at 9.30, but know I have people coming up to me, talking to me, asking me stupid questions, I have to watch what I say now, it’s now what it’s cracked up to be. It’ll go away though.

That’s a shame, that character seems pretty integral to the place.

I have to watch what I do now, because if I say something stupid at the bar, or I’ll make a bad joke about girls and some asshole is listening to me and posts it on twitter ten minutes later. ‘McMillan just made a misogynistic joke about Women, NOT COOL’ it’s like really? I’ve been doing that for twenty years, now I’ve got to watch what I say. Fred just leaves through the kitchen and goes out the back.

This whole thing about celebrity and people being super into the food network, what happened? I used to love the days when you’d go to a restaurant and you didn’t care what the chefs name was. Do you remember that those days? It’s you guys fault, Marco Pierre White changed everything.

Marco’s become a bit of a parody of himself.

I’ll tell you this though, it’s not really his fault, because he never saw any other chef get famous so he never knew how to act. He made all of those decisions thinking their the right ones. But it’s now, if you look carefully, I’ve seen a lot of guys go into TV and once you’ve been on TV and made an ass out of yourself on television you’re an ass. It’s done. So I see TV as dangerous and you’d better stay off. If you want to have any credibility and we’ve seen from what other chefs have done by endorsing products that are not great – don’t endorse them. I believe, I’ll tell you that television has robbed a lot of good guys from any credibility, you have to be very careful about how you’re portrayed somehow.

It’s hard to control that I guess…

Yeah the control that you have is not doing it. Just say no. TV chefs, it’s wrong, we work in a restaurant, twitter’s fine, social media works. Anything else than that – America’s next top cupcake, it’s not going to do you any good in the long term, except for putting money in your bank account. Money’s not all that there is.

‘you wouldn’t be calling me right now if I was really good at pruning trees’

It seems perhaps that there is a problems with some chefs wanting fame more than wanting to actually work in a restaurant?

The new chefs, some of them go into it for the wrong reasons, I could have easily become a woodworker, a mechanic, a chef, a landscaper, I would have like to have been a horticulturalist, I would have like to work in a greenhouse, I would have like to take care of pools, I would have liked to have been a tree surgeon. There’s a whole bunch of shops that I would have liked to have done and am still fascinated by, I like to work with my hands, with a couple of people, listen to some tunes and put in a hard days work. Whether I have to do that in a kitchen or up a tree or in a garden or by a pool, or even riding a lawn tractor, all of those choices made me happy, woodworking is still fascinating to me, I would love to renovate homes, I would love to work with old homes especially. Both Fred and I have other hobbies than the restaurant and both of us maybe realise that we could have just as much fun, doing something else. There’s no magazine like Lucky Peach that talks about woodworkers or gardeners. And you wouldn’t be calling me right now if I was really good at pruning trees.

It’s about creating something you would like yourself, whether it’s a table, a garden or a restaurant.

You got it there, you said exactly what Joe Beef is all about right there. We built a place where we wanted to go work, we have a yard, we have a wood shop, we have a garden, we have a smoker, three gardens now, we have pick-up trucks. We have tools, a greenhouse all these things. Sometimes, twelve hours behind a six-burner stove it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, it’s like shovelling coal down a coalmine, nothing will kill you more than to put in six days of twelve hours behind a six burner stove pumping plates out the kitchen. The fact is that now we can walk off the line, plant radishes and smoke fish properly out of a big smoker, make hams, dig a hole in the garden or paint the greenhouse. Organise the inside of the greenhouse. Spend time trying to figure out how to make cheese. Joe Beef now is many different things.

I’m the dude who’d knock your teeth out, why would you want to go into business with me?

You have total ownership over what you’re doing at the places you have now – I imagine you get offered contracts to do hotel restaurants – I can’t imagine you translating what you do into that context?

All the time, I say no. ‘Two years, no rent’ No. I would never show up, so you would mess up. I would ruin you, because if I don’t like to do something I don’t do it. I’m not going to move to somewhere I don’t like. Even at Joe Beef, sometimes I don’t want to be there, sometimes I want to be at my house with my kids and nobody talking to me. So dealing with other people… Some guy offered us a huge contract in Toronto the other day, a long term, lucrative, several restaurants, re-organisation of the whole multi-million dollar business around the brand. I just had to say ‘Dude no let’s stop this now, five minutes into the conversation’ These guys flew into town, I’m like ‘you’ve just wasted your time, we could have done this over the phone, I would have told you no in 120 seconds.’ Even if you paid me a million dollars in my bank account, I would never show up. I’m not the guy you want to go into business with, I get drunk I’ll fist-fight you, I love scrapping. We’re unemployable I’d even say. I’m the dude who’d knock your teeth out, why would you want to go into business with me? Tell me my food cost is too high…

What about the fact there’s so many bad places to eat, does that make you want to do more?

It’s like that everywhere, whether you go to London or wherever.. I’m in Miami right now and there’s some great places but there’s… We’re a real small group on social media, real small chef-owned restaurants, we’re almost like trekkies you’ve got to realise that. It’s a small tight-knit community of a bunch of people and we enjoy small chef-owned independent restaurants that serve natural wine and as much as possible, farm-fresh locally sourced organic food. We’re always looking for each other, if I go to London, I want to know where the ten best restaurants are that are like myself. The same thing in New York, the same thing in Miami. But in reality, we’re a very small community of like-minded individuals somehow. There’ll always be more Mcdonalds than us.

There’s no point in chefs trying to change things on a grand scale?

Fred said something interesting in the Lucky Peach article, Fred said true change in food is gonna come, not through Alice Waters or Fergus, it’s gonna come through Justin Bieber, Beyonce, Jay-Z and the Kardashians. If they started inserting into their television shows, positive talk about nutrition, you would see monumental changes in North America. It’s pop culture that holds the power to change in food, it’s only going to be when Justin Bieber starts becoming a foodie, we’ll see real change. Mcdonalds has the power to change things if it wanted to, they will when it becomes viable because pop culture has told it to do that. When pop culture has decided they don’t want sugar in the soda pops anymore, pop culture will figure out a way of making them sugar-free. People will be more educated about drinking sugar and soda pops when Kim Kardashian starts telling the youth about it. They are the true catalyst to change, not any celebrity chef, they can do a small part, but the real tide will come with pop culture and large scale restaurants offering true real food. it’ll take a long time too to get people over the Big Mac flavour. But if they stop, ten years from now you’re never going to remember what a Big Mac tasted like, because you will always be eating the healthy low fat, wholegrain version of it that they’ll get accustomed to in the future. I really believe that.

Both Fred and I are bigger guys, we’ve been hard on our bodies for the last twenty years, whether it’s drinking or smoking or… other things. We’re pretty both banged out, he’s thirty-five and I’m forty and my health is… OK, but not great.  Alain Senderes has just opened a vegetarian restaurant in Brooklyn and he’s saying these brilliant things about the future of meat protein. You know what? I toy with it all the time, I hate to say it, I own a restaurant called Joe Beef, but I have as much fun eating delicious vegetarian food, I want to open a restaurant that’s as cool and as fun as Joe Beef, but that doesn’t say vegetarian anywhere. Just a good vegetarian restaurant, all the side orders that we cook? Butternut squash with maple syrup and garlic, a bowl of fresh green peas, mashed potatoes, dairy, cheese crumbled over celery, lots of vegetables, with wine, delicious beer and wicked music, blasting. Guys there that don’t even realise they’re in a restaurant that doesn’t serve meat, because they’re full, of vegetables. A big side order of brussel sprouts, green bean salads with cheddar, I’ll eat my belly’s full and I don’t even really need the $40/50/60 dollar lobster or the double steak.

What are the pleasures of owning a restaurant?

A restaurant is like having a workshop, it’s your workshop so you can have everything how you want it. Owning a restaurant’s wonderful, the hard part of having a restaurant is having customers eat in it. Everything about owning a restaurant’s wonderful, till 6.30. My dream would be to have a restaurant, where I go in there with six like-minded individuals and we prep food all day and we go in the gardens and we order wine and then at 6 o’clock we sit down in the dining room and we eat and then we clean up and go home. No customers have ever come.

We say the customer in fact, is often wrong

Have you heard of Kenny Shopsin’s in New York? He wrote a chapter in his book called ‘The customer isn’t always right.’ Do you agree?

I haven’t but we say that all the time. We say the customer in fact, is often wrong. The customer doesn’t know more about wine than I do. That’s not possible, I’ve been buying ten thousand dollars of wine, for twenty years, I read voraciously about wine. I know more about wine than I need to know, I know more about wine than most sommeliers do and I know more about wine than all my customers do. Especially I know more about wine that’s on my wine list than my customer’s do. So when customers come up to me and try and lecture me about wine, they don’t know what they’re talking about, we could write a book about the stupidities we hear, just from the dining room.

The other day I was standing outside the restaurant and this pretty woman was asking me what she should order on the menu, because she only, only ate organic food and drank natural wines and she told me all this, looking at me dead in the eyes as she took a drag from her cigarette. I didn’t say anything, I just looked at her and registered the moment, really? you only eat organic, you only drink natural wines, but you’re smoking. And she got upset seven times during her dinner and went out for seven cigarettes.

Kenny also has a militant table policy – he won’t serve more than four people and even if it’s a table of five and they want to split up, he won’t serve them.

We’re the exact same dude, at Joe Beef I have one table of four, two tables of six, five tables of two and you can’t be five you can be four there’s nowhere for you to sit down and if you’re a two that show up as a three we can’t accommodate you and if you show up as a seven not a six you can’t sit, you have to go and you have to go now. There are a lot of rules, that are there for everyone’s enjoyment and when you follow the rules it’s fun. But when you get a guy and he’s an idiot and he insists on being a seven on a table of six, well the whole table’s penalised – it’s not what we do. Next door we have Liverpool House and it’s the same kind of thing, we don’t even do groups anymore. we had one table of ten, now I broke it down and it;s two tables of four. We don’t do anything over four. Generally groups are too loud, one guy at the end of the table tries to speak to the guy at the other end of the table and they end up screaming at each other.

Some people take it too far…

The problem is there’s a lot of people that were raised that way, people that believe that the customer’s always right. But generally 99% of people are really cool, it’s just that one table every night where it’s like, what’s the matter with these people? Always have one table of barbarians.

you don’t need silverware, you don’t need Riedel glasses

What advice would you give to someone opening a restaurant?

Do it on the cheap, do not ever get saddled with a big rent, big rent will cripple you and turn you into a slave to the building you’re in. The secret to me to enjoying your life and your restaurant is ‘don’t get that perfect space that you want, get the other space that’s cheaper.’ Go very slowly, if people keep coming to the restaurant you have to keep one thing in mind, people go to the restaurant to do two things, to eat and to drink. Everything else in the restaurant is make-up, a bad table, a bad chair, a  white gyprock room with delicious food, is delicious food. Everything else is detail. It’s not important. If you know how to cook, cook. Don’t get saddled with designers and ridiculous rents, you don’t need all the equipment you think you need, you don’t need silverware, you don’t need Riedel glasses. I can drink my red wine out of a glass that says coca cola on it, I don’t care, the red wine is the red wine, it’s delicious, I don’t care about the glass, it’s stupidity. You just need a beverage and food, start off with that and see how it plays. You can adjust after. Find a cheap room and practice your trade, the rest will come. If the food’s good, the money’s going to come later, through hard work. You’ll be able to add a little detail  every week. Get a better stove, better pans, better chairs, better tables. But really if you’re starting out, just focus on food, just that is hard, food on it’s own.

Just doing chicken properly is very complicated, for the average person. The egg. The simplest food is the hardest thing. You don’t need anything, just a chair, some tables, some walls, you can put up pictures of your grandmother, it it’s not important. Today I couldn’t care less about luxury, I don’t wear luxury clothes or have luxurious things in my life, I don’t feel comfortable around luxury, when I do feel comfortable is to be around intelligent people and delicious food, wine and beer and someone showing me this whisky I’ve never heard of. That are sympathetic, can look me in the eyes and put aside all the how can I say – behaviours. Let’s try to get to first name basis as quick as possible, that’s what I appreciate in a restaurant. Hi David, how are you, I’m well Mark how are you? Very well. Dave what are you eating tonight? Dude whatever you want I don’t feel like eating fish, Dude I’ve got it are you drinking red or white wine? I’m thinking white wine. I got it, I’ll see you in a few minutes. Bang, if you can get there that’s the sweet spot.

In France there’s still places that you can can go and just ask for lunch and they’ll just serve the one thing they’re doing that lunchtime.

I love that, that’s not done enough and even when a customer asks, you just want the waiter to not acknowledge it, to shrug it off. ‘Excuse me, what’s for lunch?’ they just go pfff, they grunt and walk away. That’s not done enough. That’s totally beautiful. You walked in and you sat down, this is what we’re serving at lunch now. You’re gonna have to eat lunch three hundred and sixty five more times this year is it really a big deal that you know what’s going on right now? It’s just another day in the year, three hundred and sixty five days, three hundred and sixty five lunches, I’m going to serve you a delicious soup, a salad and a piece of smoked fish then you can do whatever.

The real is when after this phone call I’m going to go and make lunch for my daughters

The opposite of the temples of gastronomy.

It’s all rings and necklaces and spray tan, it’s all not real. The real is when after this phone call I’m going to go and make lunch for my daughters, they don’t know what I’m going to make them. Whatever I make them will be delicious, I hope they like it and that’s that. There’s a restaurant like you talk about in Nuits St Georges in Burgundy where you sit down at a long table, next to guys that smell like transmission oil, that are truckers, it’s an old room it’s beautiful, ugly women, bring you food, first they bring you bread, then water, then they ask if you want wine, the wine comes in a bottle it’s red or white, if you ask them what it is, they just look at you like you’re an idiot, they don’t know. Is this local wine from Burgundy? they shrug. Then they bring you country pate, you don’t even know if there’s rabbit, duck, I’m sure there’s pig in there, but they don’t tell you. ‘Here’s some pate to go with your bread. There’s mustard there’s pickles. Then ‘do you want meat or fish today?’ When people understand how to eat at Joe Beef, they’ll just sit down look at the waitress and go ‘we’re 5/6 people bring us red and white wine $60 a bottle and bring us food please – she has a fish allergy’ that’s it. Not the people that sit there with camera’s and take pictures of all the food, don’t talk to their girlfriends, are obsessed with the wine list, that want to have a long discussion with me about the wines of Leflaive and Macon. Really? Do you really want to have a discussion with me? Because here’s my smartphone, why don’t you just take it for a few minutes and just google Oliver Leflaive.

Order ‘The Art of Living According to Joe Beef’

Check the Joe Beef website and the highly entertaining tumblr.

Neither of these people are called Joe Beef. The name of their restaurant is a tribute to working class hero, Charles McKiernan. McKiernan was a well known tavern-owner & philanthropist in Montreal in the 18th century, he was nicknamed Joe Beef during the Crimean War – whenever his regiment was running low on food, McKiernan would miraculously locate some, often meat. After being discharged, McKiernan opened Joe Beef’s canteen, a place where “no matter who he is, whether English, French, Irish, Negro, Indian, or what religion he belongs to,” everyone was welcome. This largesse extended to the animal kingdom, his menagerie included ten monkeys, three wild cats, a porcupine. an alligator and four black bears, one of whom had a twenty pints of beer a day habit.

Something of McKiernan’s everyman attitude is apparent in the way Fred Morin and Dave Mcmillan – the two chefs behind Joe Beef, operate. There’s no standing on ceremony here, sommelliers are outlawed, as are square plates  and white tablecloths. What you do get, is great food in big portions, sausage martini’s and a fart machine hidden in a moose head. It may be apparent to you by know that this is a restaurant with a distinctive voice, so let’s hear from David McMillan, (he speaks for Fred and vice versa.) David can really talk, so we broke this up into two parts, today’s subjects include sous vide, the art of cooking and how he’s really just running a gastropub… Click here to read part two

‘Joe Beef’s not for everybody, people hate it’

For the benefit of those people who’ve never heard of Joe Beef, how would you describe it?

Joe Beef is like every cook / apprentice’s dream. When you’re working for other people for fifteen years, it’s that restaurant you dream of owning. It’s that small, quaint, thirty seat dining room, with the kitchen almost the same size, raised beds in the back gardens, with not just chives but a lot of vegetables growing on the property. So as big as the dining room is, we have seven times the size raised bed gardens in the back of the restaurant, that have beautiful sunlight exposure all day long. A chalkboard wine list, drawn up with complete disregard for what the customer wants to drink, only really what I want to drink, ultimately that means there’s no new world wines, there’s nothing oaky. There’s no pretentious wine, there’s nothing over three hundred bucks, three hundred dollars is expensive, over that it’s stupidity. Even then, generally anyone who buys a wine at that price has something wrong with them anyway. You’re either a criminal or embezzlers or just making far too much money for your own good. And the chalkboard menu, where we just practise good old french cooking really. That I think goes against this grain of a lot of restaurants that are now popular in North America, where everybody’s trying to re-invent the wheel, whereas we actually built a restaurant that has simple values, a good cheese plate, delicious crusty bread, old-school wine, large pieces of beef, large pieces of fish for two people, plain delicious salads, old-school pates and terrines, then a few more playful things and lots of oysters and seafood. The food is what Fred and I feel like eating, I never dream of eating Thomas Keller’s last creation, I couldn’t care less.

Your food seems more straight to the point.

I just want to be sitting in a fun little environment, where I can talk to my partner, friend or whoever I’m dining with and have delicious food. Joe Beef’s not for everybody, people hate it, but the thing is, the people in the know love it, the industry types love it, we’ve had a lot of support from Tony Bourdain, David Chang, a lot of the bigger chefs.

It’s seems a logical way of running a restaurant, selling the food you love, the wine you love.

Yeah, the fact is we’re also not after the buck, we’re only open five nights and both Fred and I live very humbly, I don’t want to open another restaurant in New York. I want exactly what I have, to run Joe Beef and not work very much. That to me is success. Other chef’s success is I guess to be in the newspaper every day, to spend the majority of their lives on a plane or in an airport, to be away from their families, to have seven restaurants, or ten restaurants might make one person feel more successful. And I respect that – our friend David Chang he’s building a little empire and we’re there to talk him down, when he’s about to jump off the bridge he can always come up to Montreal and relax with us.

When chefs expand and move into different areas it seems that often, they lose the essence of what their restaurants were about in the first place?

It does seem to happen, we’re very wary of the whole star chef, TV bullshit, food network, it’s not something that we enjoy. So we’ve put this book out and got a little bit of press out of it,  but ultimately both of us are looking forward to more or less doing what we do. The Art of Living according to Joe Beef is about doing what we said in the book and that’s what we do. I don’t really desire to go eat at any restaurants in New York, though I would like to go London one day and eat at Fergus’ places.

The good thing about Fergus’ places is they always seem to have stayed true to their original intentions, they have never gone after the quick buck.

That’s why we really respect that restaurant, I know we can get a reservation there, I know they’re not.. pressing the lemon, I’m pretty sure they don’t have really big conversations about the bottom line of food cost everyday.

‘are you copying a painting or are you truly painting new paintings’

Something Fergus was talking about, in an interview with us recently, was the danger of ‘the village idiot’ in a kitchen, copying what’s gone before without context and perhaps losing the essence of the original idea.

He’s 100% right about saying that, I see it all the time, you ask anybody in Montreal and Joe Beef is a very copied restaurant, even in our city and now we’re seeing little Joe Beef’s in Toronto and Vancouver. They are very similar to our dumbed down restaurant program, you’ll see restaurants with similar items on their menu, they look retro, chalkboard menu’s like us. We’re flattered that some chefs pay homage, but I think if you’re going to decide to open a restaurant one day you have to look at the building, the actual physical space, very carefully and have to decide, where you are, what time it is, what year it is and what kind of food you’re going to put into that building you’re cooking in. And sometimes marijuana helps, not that I smoke marijuana, but sometimes when you’re sitting across the street from an empty building, where a restaurant might go into, you might want to look for some inspiration and Marijuana usually helps that somehow – when you look at the space and you can visualise what you’re going to do there.

It’s fine to have learnt cooking from someone, we all have our mentors and apprenticeship masters, chefs that we love, respect and idolise. But it’s very important that when you walk away that you pay homage to that chef that you worked for, but you also learn your own voice. A lot of kids have problems with that. It’s easy to trash on the most popular show on TV at the moment, but it’s very hard to come up with your own style, a lot of kids have problem with that. That’s what separates the men from the boys really, is are you copying a painting or are you truly painting new paintings. It’s always hard to come up with new food in 2012, when everything’s been done already for two thousand years. But it’s not that hard, if you sit down and give it a lot of time and thought, you can find your own voice, pay respect to your mentors, but do something new to yourself, new for the city. You also have to think of tourism and the town you’re in, where you are, you want to take some inspiration from the city that you’re in.

Certainly Joe Beef is very grounded in Montreal and you write about that in the book.

It’s interesting, Joe Beef history and the food, because it’s the fresh cooking of British occupied new colony, french cooking, but from an English pub owner’s perspective.

I was going to say, it does seem your ideals are similar to that of a (really good) gastro-pub?

You’re 100% right, see we opened Joe Beef before that word started being floated around, I remember working at Joe Beef, owning Joe Beef, not realising that perhaps we might even be a gastropub, but wanting to open a gastropub,while I owned Joe Beef. It’s only as the years went on, that I realised that maybe I just had a gastropub.

‘I wouldn’t eat another circulated egg if you paid me’

Fergus was also talking about his dislike of sous vide, I wondered if you used it at Joe Beef?

We bought last year, for the first time, the immersion circulator and we thought that was really cool for like six months, we thought it was the best. But then we quickly just changed our minds, the old tin pan’s, the thin French pans, it’s better, you get a better crust on the meat, I don’t even like that flavour anymore, I wouldn’t eat another circulated egg if you paid me. They’re disgusting. I like the crust you can get on the beef, the steak when it’s done and there’s almost a char on the outside and then it goes to firm up for a centimetre, almost well done and then it’s blood-rare, medium-rare. I find the traditional medium/medium-rare/medium-well steaks in cast iron are always going to be better than the circulated meat that’s pink from top to bottom. I’m not a super-huge fan. I always feel that we’re going to contaminate someone, dancing too much in that danger zone of heat,  in that zone of bacterial contamination, which freaks me out a little bit. I like to see the kids using cast-irons, doing traditional things like it’s always been. I’m always wary of new things.

It seems a bit robotic, there’s less… cooking involved

The act of cooking, is basting a chicken while you’re cooking five salmons, one dover sole and maybe a couple of half dozen chicks under bricks. Basting a duck, you have your big spoon, saucing things as you go along, adding salt to one thing, there’s an act of cooking. Now service can’t just be sitting in front of a temperature hot water bath, with a bunch of timers and a pair of scissors. Sometimes it’s good, when you do it with fish and butter and lots of tender vegetables inside the vacuum-pack. But I still like cooking with butter, roasting things.

I think it might be good in the future, I think it’s going to come back again, you know in those medium-end hotels that serve a lot of banquets. A vacuum-packed stew where the food would be better if it was made like that in those kitchens. I’m sure we will see sous vide cooking come back in a commercial way perhaps.

When you opened Joe Beef, were there any specific models you looked to?

Fred and I had both spent a lot of time in the state of Maine in the US, a 3/4 hour drive from Montreal, Portland, Maine, the lobster shacks of Maine, there’s a warm feeling to the coast and we’re both big fans of oysters, clams, lobsters, crabs, scallops, all things seafood. So we kind of just wanted to open a seafood and fish restaurant, inspired perhaps by Maine. One restaurant in particular called Fore Street, we really liked the cooking there, it was all delicious food, dishes cooked in a wood burning oven with tons of garlic, butter and herbs, menu changed every day. There was a certain sense of freedom of cooking that Sam Hayward, had, now he’s very old and the food has changed, it’s not that great anymore. When we started going there ten years ago, twelve years ago, it was really, an eye-opening restaurant. To see a guy just cook all this different fish and meat from the area in a wood burning oven, with simple vegetables, in generous portions, when everybody else was trying to stuff carrots with carrots.

Click here to read part two, where McMillan talks about whether the customer is always right, his dream of opening a vegetarian restaurant and the perils of success.

Order ‘The Art of Living According to Joe Beef’

Check the Joe Beef website and the highly entertaining tumblr.

Catching a glimpse of the Aurora Borealis, the legendary weekend Rúntur (‘round tour’) of the bars and clubs of Reykjavik, bathing outdoors in heated geothermal pool, glaciers, volcanoes… There were many reasons me and my girlfriend wanted to go to Iceland. But it’s safe to say food wasn’t first on my list. My knowledge was limited to vague notions about them eating a lot of fish and a documentary I’d seen on TV years ago where a guy ate slices of a rotten shark he had hung up in his garage (both of these vague notions turned out to be true). So I went there with a resolution to try everything. The weird and the wonderful. To get a sense of what Icelandic food is about.

This determination is somewhat dimmed when we arrive in Reykjavik on a bitterly cold and snowy evening with an hour to kill before we’re due to drive out into the dark wilderness to look for the elusive northern lights. Comfort eating is the name of the day. We take a stroll down Laugevegur, Reykjavik’s main thoroughfare, looking for a non-challenging quick bite to eat. Luckily the downtown “101” district is well furnished with pleasant, laidback cafes and bars that serve food in the day and transform into nightspots later on. We opt for Prikið, a hip bar that serves up tasty, reasonably priced burgers. The fries are nothing to shout about but the burger is big, juicy and hits the spot.

I start the next day with a look around the local supermarket. I’ve been sent out for milk and cereal but get quickly distracted by the array of fish based stuff on offer. There’s salmon, trout, cured herring, picked herring (We pretty much live off the variety that comes in a sweet mustard sauce when not eating out). And I get my first sighting of the notorious hákarl, or fermented shark meat. The Icelandic delicacy described by one famous chef as “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing” ever to pass his lips. It sounds like the sort of thing you’d only eat for a bet. But it looks innocuous enough. Bite sized chunks of yellowy white meat. I resist the perverse temptation to buy some. It’s only 9am. Instead I pick up some rather less challenging skyr, a kind of yogurt with the consistency of soft cheese. Which is actually very nice with fruit or on cereal for breakfast.

The first place on the list today is a small booth stood in an uninspiring car park facing the harbor. Bæjarins Beztu Plysur (‘the best hot dogs in town’). Hanging inside the booth are framed photos of Bill Clinton and James Hetfield chowing down on their hot dogs. This is all the evidence I need of the claim so boldly stated in the place’s title. You get your standard dog, crispy onions, the usual yellow American mustard and another, sweeter, sauce. Efforts to find out what it is lead variously to me to remoulade, sweet mustard and Icelandic hot dog sauce. Whatever it is, it tastes great. We made sure to pick some up before leaving Iceland.

We order just as a particularly harsh blizzard comes in off the sea. My exposed hot dog holding hand quickly going numb as I wolf it down. We stumble blindly into the sheltered doorway of Laundromat Café and decide to take refuge inside. It’s a buzzing, trendy café with a real functioning launderette in the basement. We order a coffee and skyr cake. I expect it to be a moist, fruity cake but when it comes it isn’t cake at all more like a Sundae with skyr instead of ice cream. Unexpected, but tasty. Can’t get enough of this skyr stuff.

When it comes to restaurants in Reykjavik there are many to choose from, and although not as expensive as they were before the Icelandic banking system keeled over in 2008, mid to high range eating out in Iceland is still a pricey affair. On our budget we can only afford to do it once. Choosing proves hard. Discounting your standard world cuisine places – Indian, Thai, Italian etc, the range goes from traditional Icelandic restaurants like Við Tjornina and 3 Frakkur that serve dishes such as smoked puffin and horse steak, to a whole lot of seafood restaurants. From the Reykjavik institution that is The Lobster House to newer places like Fish Company that bend Icelandic ingredients with herbs and spices from around the world.

We decide that if we’re only doing to do this once then we need to sample as many things as possible. We’re very tempted by Tapas Barinn’s Icelandic Feast special – seven tapas plates of stuff like smoked puffin with blueberry and grilled Icelandic lamb. But the restaurant’s exterior, decorated with a large Spanish flag and paella pan, makes us feel like this might not be the authentic Icelandic experience we’re hoping for.

We opt for Fish Market. Local opinion seems to be that this place serves outstanding seafood even by Reykjavik standards. Fish Market’s ‘angle’ is Asian. The food is cooked on a Japanese robata grill in view of the customers. They don’t have a table free for an hour so we stop for a drink in Kaffibarinn. This red corrugated house with its distinctive London Underground signage hanging out the front has a special place in the Reykjavik nightlife scene. It provided the setting for numerous scenes in cult Icelandic film 101 Reykjavik and it’s also rumoured that Damon Albarn has a stake in it. The beer on offer is your Reykjavik standard – a pint of Viking lager. But at just 500kr (around £2.50) this decent if unremarkable beer goes down very easily.

We go back an hour later but end up having to wait even longer. This is Friday night and Fish Market is the place of the moment in Reykjavik. In the meantime I order a Skjalfti lager. Complex and fruity, it is the one genuinely great tasting beer I try in my week in Iceland. Finally seated in Fish Market at 10.30pm we’re so hungry we could eat something very large indeed. Which is handy because the first starter course is Minke whale (not an endangered species) sashimi served with a lemon mayonnaise. The wafer thin slices have the appearance and texture of beef. Only with a slightly more salty taste that suggests it comes from the sea. I have to admit it tastes great. The other stand out starter is the giant king crab claws garnished with chili mayo. I have never really enjoyed crab, however this is unlike any crab I’ve eaten before. Much more fresh tasting and meaty than the smaller variety you’re likely to get in the UK. I can’t resist getting down and dirty with the claws and picking them clean of meat.

Between the starters and the main there’s a sushi course that includes some sublime raw sashimi scallops. Then the big boys come out; the first main is lightly salted cod with celery, cherry sauce and puree potato. This is infinitely more delicate tasting, and less salty, than the stuff we got down the supermarket the previous day. The smoked duck with caramelized onions and mango is a revelation. There’s more – robata grilled salmon plus 3 dessert rounds. By the end of it I’m thoroughly stuffed and satisfied. Also a lot lighter in the wallet. The rest of the holiday is going to be a budget affair.

 Hungover after a hefty night out (Most bars open until 5.30am on weekends) we spend Sunday afternoon wandering around the Kolaport flea market. There’s your usual bric-a-brac and a food section. Everyone, even the guy selling DVDs, seems to be selling little tubs of hákarl. But no one seems to be buying it. The strong smell of ammonia seems to offer a clear challenge to me now. But in my delicate state I back down, defeated. We escape the pungent market and head up the road to the Sea Baron, generally regarded as the best informal place in town. Of everywhere we eat, this is the one that best encapsulates Reykjavik for me. Situated in a row of squat, corrugated iron shacks huddled together on the harbor wharf, with a view north across the bay toward the snow covered Mount Esja, you get a very real sense of being in the world’s most northerly capital city. A final place of habitation before the polar regions.

Inside seating is provided on stools made from sea packing containers at long, rough-hewn wooden benches. The walls are pleasingly decorated with fishing nets and photos of fishing folk from Reykjavik’s past. On the menu are a range of fish skewers. After my previous encounter with it I’m tempted to go for Minke whale (‘Moby Dick on a stick’) but the memory of stern signs at the airport reminding returning travellers that whale meat is illegal to import into the UK dissuade me. I go back in a few days. It could still be in my system. I go for the humarsupa (lobster soup) and don’t regret it. This warming, rich stew contains generous amounts of lobster in a creamy tomato soup with bits of celery and red pepper and is just what I needed.

Monday is art day and between galleries we pop into Café Loki. On the menu here are many traditional Icelandic foodstuffs. I opt for ‘Icelandic Plate II’. A dish that includes mashed fish and smoked trout on rye bread, a slice of rye flatbread with smoked lamb, dried fish with butter and the suspiciously named ‘strong tasted shark’, which I don’t notice until I’ve already placed my order. Have I unwittingly ordered hákarl?

My suspicions are confirmed when the plate arrives. I dodge the issue by trying the dried fish with butter. It has the tough texture of beef jerky, but is flakier. I don’t mind it, but it seems chiefly a vessel for eating butter with. Everything else is good. Especially the mashed fish. I’m not particularly enamoured by the smoked lamb. Icelanders like to claim they have the best lamb in the world but this doesn’t do it for me. But enough messing around. It’s time to face up to the challenge at hand.

The smell tells you this is something you shouldn’t be eating. And for good reason. Greenland shark is poisonous when caught due to the large quantities of cyanic acid it contains. The Icelandic method to get around this is to behead and gut the shark, bury it for a few months, wait for it to putrefy, and then dig it up, cut it into strips and hang it up to dry out for a few more months. By this time the offending chemical will no longer be poisonous. It will however give off a strong scent of ammonia, which accounts for the instinctive gagging reflex most people have when smelling hakarl for the first time. Why would anyone eat this? It doesn’t make sense. Out the window I glimpse the statue of Leif Ericson, the Norse explorer credited with being the first European to set foot in America, some 500 years before Christopher Columbus. This is why they eat the stuff. A country founded by hardy settlers and outlaws who survived in the most challenging of climates by preparing and preserving food in any way possible. It has to be done. Holding my nose I place a chunk in my mouth. The taste is not as bad as the smell. Not fishy at all, more like cheese. That’ll be the putrefaction. Then it hits the back of my throat, a sort of burning sensation. I don’t eat any more of it.

It’s the final day and there’s one thing left on my list of things I vowed I would try in Iceland. Svið, or singed sheep’s head. Available at Fljott og Gott, essentially a glorified service station canteen at Reykjavik’s main bus station. The head is singed with gasoline to remove all the fur, and then boiled. One blessing is that they remove the brain before serving with mashed potato and beet. It sounds disgusting, and doesn’t really look any better.

I ask the guy behind the counter what it’s like. He reassures me that “it’s not as bad as it looks, it’s just meat.” I have to say I’m not any more appetized when they take the display plate from the counter and heat it up for me. All I can do initially is prod at the bizarre texture of the skin. When I finally break in I find a layer of fat and then, well, bone. Around the cheek I do uncover a small amount of meat and, to be fair to the guy running the place, it does just taste like meat, but surrounded by so much singed skin and fat it’s pretty hard to stomach.

The tongue, completely intact, is ok but taking a bite out of it while your plate is literally smiling back up at you is more than enough to put me off. I can’t bring myself to go near the eye or ear. Game over. My last meal in Iceland is also my worst. We head back to Kaffibarinn to forget the taste with a few pints of Viking.

JOE DENNETT

In Tokyo there’s a tiny, underground restaurant that serves sushi. It has a single bar for diners to sit at, fitting only ten at a time, and the toilet’s outside. It’s also been awarded three Michelin stars, bookings must be made months in advance and start at around $300 a head. Its success is down to the restaurant’s owner and head chef, 86 year old, Jiro Ono. A man widely believed to be the greatest sushi chef in the world.

Director David Gelb travelled to Japan to spend some time with Jiro and his two sons. Both of whom are taking after their father, patiently refining their craft under Jiro’s watchful eye. David’s film, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, takes a fascinating look into the patience, dedication and sacrifice required to master the craft. I had a little chat to David about making his film:

How did you first hear about Jiro and his restaurant? What made you want to make a film about him?

I love sushi. I thought that making a film about sushi would be the best way to make it my job to eat the best sushi in the world! All the sushi chefs that I’ve interviewed point to Jiro as the grand master of Sushi, a living legend. So, I packed my gear and headed for Tokyo.

How willing was he to be featured in a documentary like this?

The food writer Masuhiro Yamamoto, who appears in the film and serves as something of a narrator, has a long relationship with Jiro and convinced him to take part in the film. Jiro feels that sushi is very misunderstood, and he wants to spread the gospel of true, pure Tokyo style sushi.

I found myself sympathising with Jiro’s eldest son. It felt like there was so much pressure for him to continue his father’s legacy but he didn’t feel as strongly about it as Jiro. How did you see their relationship?

Jiro’s son Yoshikazu certainly has an uphill battle ahead of him. Fish prices are rising and supply is diminishing.  Customers, rattled by the Tsunami and nuclear disaster that followed are unnerved by the cratered economy. And on top of that, Yoshikazu has huge shoes to fill. However, because of how good and kind a father and teacher Jiro is, Yoshikazu is prepared for the challenges ahead of him.

Do you feel optimistic about the future of the restaurant? And to a larger extent, how do you feel about that element of Japanese culture in particular? (The ‘devoting your entire life to the mastering a certain craft’ thing?)

Jiro has taught Yoshikazu well, and I know that the legacy and craft will continue. However, finding young apprentices to replace the older ones that move on to start their own restaurants is difficult. It’s hard to find young people with the determination and patience that such a pious devotion to a craft requires. An apprentice at Jiro’s restaurant doesn’t get paid much but has to work extremely hard. Whether the next generation is going to be willing to do hard work for the sake of excellence before profit remains to be seen.

How badly did the tsunami affect his business?

Jiro and Yoshikazu are working 6 days a week, doing the best that they can. The tsunami has presented new, difficult challenges, but they will persevere.

I imagine you ate quite well while making the film. Did you pick up any sushi skills?

I’ve become an expert at eating sushi, but after everything, I’ve learned making the film that it’s better to leave the sushi making to the experts.  Jiro’s philosophy, however, applies to everything, including filmmaking. He’s inspired me to do the best that I can every day.

JOE ILEY

Jiro Dreams of Sushi doesn’t appear to have a UK distributor yet, but is getting some select showings around the UK. Ask your local independent cinema to show it!

Fergus Henderson’s story should be familiar now, but here’s the extremely brief version: Trainee architect loves cooking, does occasional stints at a joint in Notting Hill, starts up full-time above the French House (where Polpetto now resides,) with his wife Margot, gets footfall and critical acclaim. Teams with restaurateur Trevor Gulliver and takes on his own premises in Clerkenwell, St John, to even more acclaim and fame, opens Bread and Wine, opens a bakery and now the hotel. Amidst this, Fergus contracted Parkinson’s disease, stepping out of the kitchen and eventually undergoing experimental surgery which has helped him enormously.

For me the influence of St John is a little like the influence of the Velvet Underground, it might not make a big noise to the general public, but the examples and ideology of the restaurants has trickled down and influenced every bit of food worth eating in the last ten years. Eating things that grow or reside here, in season and eating things that often get forgotten about, be it offal, marrow or sea urchins. Reviving British food traditions that have somehow got lost.

Thankfully Fergus is a much nicer person to interview than Lou Reed ever was. I caught up with him at St John HQ where he kindly offered me a glass of Fernet Branca, the herbal italian digestif and supposed hangover cure (it certainly worked for me that morning), that he swears by. Below Fergus talks in a joyous ramble that traverses sous vide, La Grande Bouffe and the perils of Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean obsession.

When you started cooking professionally you didn’t have much experience, but you had ideas. Do you think if more chefs came at cooking from this outsider’s perspective, it would result in  a richer dining culture?
Well, I think there’s, yes a surprising number of chefs, who’ve come from somewhere else… it’s a sort of Gandhi theory. He came to India and saw all the problems that the Indians hadn’t seen themselves, it’s always quite good to come from another angle at something, because you can see it in another light. I trained to be an architect, I take that to food, not necessarily building towers of food but buildings that inform my feasts perhaps….[there's] not much magic in architecture these days, so I turned from architecture to food, because there’s magic in cooking. That got me going and I’ve always had my own kitchen to follow these strange thoughts. I think it’s very healthy. If you have chefs, a chef who’s worked for another chef, the ultimate master as it were there is a danger of the village idiot, perhaps idiot’s a strong word, but I’m just not sure it’s always the healthiest of things. I wouldn’t say it was bad but there’s just a risk of well….

A kind of blind devotion?
Yes, that’s not necessarily always a bad thing, but well, trends and things I’m not a fan of at all, that’s not to say that there’s not blips and moments in food, but the great moments, they’re very particular. Take sous vide cooking, I’m not a fan.

Why Not?
Well people say: ‘Ooh our meat it’s sort of perfectly wobbly,’ What happened to the singe? What happened to the Jedi knight of the chefs just using their forks to feel when it seems right.  You feel the fillet of flesh and you bite it. Everyone’s very impressed if it goes all soft and wobbly, but if everything ends up soft and wobbly, where’s the fun in that?

It removes some passion from it somehow?
I feel so. Take Michel Bras, his cuisine. Fine in his hands but then it gets picked up by other chefs second-hand, Chinese whispers take place and it turns into something else. A lot of my chefs come from the classic system, it is very good. But it’s a fine line. There’s also a number of chefs who came to cooking from other ways. For me it wasn’t really my aim to have my own kitchen, just sort of worked out that way….seems to have worked out.

When I was in New York recently, particularly in Brooklyn, it seemed that a lot of restaurants are opening in a more DIY fashion, places with a similar attitude to your restaurants, I wondered if you thought your books and St John was more influential in American than Britain?
Possibly… yes I suppose. But there’s a danger again [of misinterpretation].

I don’t mean a carbon copy.
No, not at all in fact I’d say that they may well be doing better, much more heartfelt things than I’m doing. We seem to be big in America, I don’t like to put us on pedestals, but yes they seem to have taken on some of our ideas. Brooklyn certainly seems very happening at the moment.

It seems like people are creating places they want to eat at themselves, rather than some temple of gastronomy.
Indeed, yes it’s all good I suppose!

Where do you eat in New York?
The usual… I’m a bit of a creature of habit, so The Spotted Pig, John Dory, The Breslin, April’s [Bloomfield] food is fantastic. David Chang, Momofuku. But possibly my best moment was at the Four Seasons Hotel  The restaurant is just so extraordinarily beautiful it feels so very American, the whole experience of dining there is so different. Oysters, dry martini, sculpture of spikes above us that felt like it might run us through. The best dry martini and you can have a burger at the bar. It’s a magical place, it feels… like America. I’d say foods very buoyant over there.

Do you make an effort to eat at places like Noma and other places in top restaurant of the world lists?
If one’s travelling through, I suppose one’s drawn to places like that. I’ve eaten at Noma a couple of times and it was fantastic, brilliant. Rene’s an amazing chap and both times have been delicious. One of my favourite places in Copenhagen though, was where I had black bread, pork fat, pickled herring & schnapps, it’s one of my top lunches. (likely to be a place called Schonnneman’s,)

Couple of years back I took my chefs to El Bulli, we had lunch in a place called Bar Bomba in Barcelona. The joy! and the smell of garlic & lard, everything had pork fat and garlic. And we went to El Bulli at night time and it was amazing, but Bar Bomba was also amazing. It’s very tricky how you balance these things.

So eating out still inspires you?
Definitely, all chefs should eat other people’s food. it’s good. But then there’s movies, Le Grand Bouffe, where they eat themselves to death. They kill themselves by eating too much. And it was about two weeks before we opened here, went to see this film, a Saturday afternoon. And they had these brilliant deliveries of meat to their house, and they suck on the bones and it was like kerching! Bone marrow! Which never left the menu.

Sitting in a kitchen, smashing six doubles in a row, isn’t good for you. You need to get out and live, keep your eyes open, taste buds ready and just enjoy life. That’s very informative I think. The books you read – cookbooks are very good, I used to devour books, I’ve calmed down in my old age but reading a Yugoslavian book or something, then suddenly aha! Inspiration can come from anywhere, [you must] keep your mind open.

Do you think the cooking at St John has changed since you’ve opened?
It’s probably got a bit calmer. At the beginning the menu would be a bit, it wasn’t bullish, but it was more offal. Which sometimes creeps back in, one day. It’s changed at Bread & Wine since it opened, the bones stay here. It’s calmed down. Not that it was crazy before, but with my old age. The aim wasn’t, the offal menu wasn’t a gimmick,  a restaurant that looks more like a school or an abattoir, serving offal, it’s not a recipe for success at all. But now people can have heads, toes or lamb chops, It’s progressed.

How does the creative process work at the restaurants?
I have a discussion with the head chefs, ever seen a Man O’ War? those ships and the bosun, ears out, [puts on a gruff sailor voice and exclaims something I can't quite understand.] I talk to the chefs, if there’s something on my mind I’ll go into the kitchen. Sadly I’m not cooking here anymore, mainly through vanity, I’m much slower than I used to be, so I hate, it really pisses me off that I can’t do it as quickly as I used to. Which is rather sad, but there we go, I’m still here every day, so it’s not a bad lot.

They come with an idea, I have some thoughts, everyone rises to the occasion, we have an adventure.

You started doing late night at the hotel, how’s that going?
We did. We don’t anymore, occasionally we served till 12, if there were some people coming. No people don’t do that sort of thing here. I don’t know why, because in America, it’s in loads of places. It’s a mystery, we had to trim that very quickly, very unfortunate, it was a short lived experiment. Sad, because it’s lovely to be eating there late. Not to be, not to be.

Do you think if people were more connected to the whole process of an animal going from the field to the table, they would be more likely to eat nose to tail?
People are very happy with this distinction, meat in plastic, this anonymous flobby stuff. After all these people saying righteous things that’s what they’re all eating. But obviously what people are eating is what the butchers left, that’s all technique, if you want to obtain offal, you need a butcher who can do the job and there aren’t many left.

There is definitely a problem with a lack of skilled butchers
Which is sad. They’re evil, supermarkets I think, they tell people what to eat, what size it will be, give people strawberries at Christmas. And they eat it, it’s the might of the evil empire.  We all go to  them, buy the paper and things like that, supermarkets, they’re everywhere and they’ve got people trapped and they just tell you what to eat. It’s world of ersatz. It’s all very perfect… Fresh pasta has a three month shelf life, fresh pasta? 3-month shelf life? It doesn’t make sense. No not a fan.

They’re such a disconnection, it’s hard to see things changing on a big scale
Cow in field, steak on plate, people are slightly weird about but that’s because they’ve been trained to be.

You’re writing another book?
I am, but not another cookbook, there will be food in it, when necessary, I’m illustrating it as well. It’s a sort of… weirdy book. I’m producing a package of the old two books in a newer, glossy version. But the new book, it’s… observations, perhaps more comment than observations, a short story as well, with a happy ending.

Where are you with it?
Way off, it’s about four years overdue to the publisher. This year’s definitely the year though! Well… hopefully.

What advice would you give to someone opening a restaurant?
Why? Why are you doing it? You have to have a really good reason why, if you have a really good reason why, then do it. I love it, I’ve been here a long time and it’s all very good.

It’s more passion than business?
Yes, well someone makes money out of restaurants, there’s people you hear of, making fortunes but I haven’t seen that. But if you can explain why, you’re halfway there, you’ve just got to make it happen.

What British food traditions would you like to see more regularly observed?
The weird thing is how British food went so wrong, because there’s such fantastic short seasons – it’s really exciting when nature’s firing things at you. Just watch out for it, eat lots of it at a time and then wait till next year, there’s oysters, green asparagus, gull’s eggs, game, soft fruits it’s brilliant. In no way am I knocking her, but Elizabeth David, her Mediterranean obsession, has a lot to answer for. There’s this obsession with Mediterranean food in a country that is not warm enough for it to grow, we’re not going to have basil growing or courgettes. But we have marrow, marrow in white sauce, fantastic. The short seasons of this country are so exciting, eat lots of what’s around. In America when the ramps are out, everybody is ramps ramps ramps, ‘wahey ramps have arrived.’ In Finland the Kraftskiva, ‘wahey let’s all go crazy drink schnapps and eat crayfish,’ there’s a celebration moment. Whereas in this country it’s strawberries in December and anonymous meat all round.

Are there any ambitions you’ve yet to realise?
Let’s see, I’ve got three restaurants, that’s enough, I’m happy with that, I’ve eaten well all round the world, that’s all good, Yes, probably finishing the book, the weird book.

Has it got a title?
There’s various titles… Watch this space!

St John website

Rochelle Canteen website

It certainly looks the part, we entered through red curtains, into a timeless interior, walls dotted with caricatures of the famous patrons, a dark wood bar inhabited by some cheery barmen and the staff, tables and everything but the dull light of the till system screens dressed up in classical french bistro fashion. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen Hemingway himself drawling at the bar, knocking back pernod, but that might be just be because the whole vibe reminded me of the places Owen Wilson travels back in time to in the last, surprisingly decent, Woody Allen film, Midnight in Paris, where he does indeed rub shoulders with hilarious parodies of Papa, Fitzgerald and Dali. Anyway we had cocktails, including what had been suggested to us as the best Bloody Mary in New York (they weren’t wrong) a Gin Blossom and for me, an extremely well mixed Murray Sour.

We sat at an excellent round table, a luxury for a table of eight, we were crammed in, but it felt fine amid the hustle and bustle of a busy room. Our waitress was extremely French and the service here generally was a little more formal than we’d got used to in New York, not entirely my bag, but certainly not bad. The all French wine list reflected the status of Mcnally’s restaurants as something of a hangout for the rich and famous, they didn’t have anything under about £40. The wine we did get was lovely, as you’d expect.

I had bone marrow to start, having had it just once before at Hawsmoor’s breakfast to share. It was better here, the marrow was rich, buttery and intense, paired with crispy baguette ‘soldiers’ and a delicious shallot confit. As you can see it looks pretty primal, but it tasted as rich as foie gras and is a lot more ethical. Anthony Bourdain has long called St John restaurant’s classic roasted bone marrow and parsley salad his favourite dish of all time, I haven’t tried that yet…. But this version was one of the most enjoyable starters I’ve eaten.

We also tried an excellent salt cod brandade, a pretty good roast baby beets and a mesclun salad (above) with warm goats cheese, that was a little sparing on the goats cheese (but giving with the leaves).

For the main I continued with the meat theme and went for the $26 black label burger, recommended to me as the best burger in New York and worth checking out just to see how a burger can cost £20. This burger has been well thought out in it’s creation, a mix of prime cuts of Pat La Frieda’s dry aged beef, the composition of which is a closely guarded secret, but includes rib eye, skirt steak and brisket on a specially created brioche bun made at the Balthazar bakery. There is a fairly exhaustive guide of the process behind creating this burger here, which details how this burger is treated something akin to a £40 steak and this context makes the whole thing seem a little less expensive.. I was pretty absorbed in eating it, so we didn’t get a picture, this one is stolen from Serious Eats.

The dry-aging of the beef really does make a difference to the taste and this burger had a tasty funk beyond any beef I’d eaten before. It was garnished with caramelized onions and fries that were indistinguishable from the ones we got at Balthazar later in the week, i.e. fantastic. It was a little let down by a lack of seasoning and a soggy bun, but overall it was still wholly enjoyable. We also had classically french crisp  pigs trotters with Dijon mustard and lentils dish, a tavern steak that had my aunt in raptures, trout fillet meuniere and roast chicken that was like the burger, under seasoned, but did come with excellent Robuchon-like mash.

We did get one bargain here, a surprisingly cheap bottle of sherry on the wine list, $16 for a 500ml bottle of La Gitana manzanilla. It was such a bargain it was probably a mistake on the menu and though the french waitress insisted otherwise I wonder if it’s still on the menu at that price. Most of us couldn’t manage dessert, but the two that could had the pots du creme, rich custard puddings: coffee, vanilla and  chocolate, simple, delicious and very french.

The Minetta is a classy joint, it hasn’t lost the character for which it was originally famous, but it has gained some very good cooking and a new lease of life. Our meal wasn’t faultless, but in such an exciting bustling environment it was extremely enjoyable, hopefully they’ll keep the $16 sherry deal or add some more affordable wines, but I don’t think either are likely.

Keith McNallys long mooted opening of a restaurant in London is supposed to be happening this year. Recent rumours suggest that it’s actually going to more like the Minetta than the Balthazar copy originally talked about, a decision which might be fortuitous. Especially if they serve the bone marrow.

Afterwards we stumbled down some steps opposite the Minetta, through a black door with a rabbit sketched on it in chalk. We weren’t going down the rabbit hole, but we were going into the 124 old rabbit club, a ‘secret’ bar I’d read about (a contradiction in terms, perhaps.) It was pretty much a cellar, turned into a subterranean bar with a large selection of rare and obscure bottled beers, a few draft options and a small but good wine offering. It was the perfect place to wind down after the grandeur of the Minetta and worth a visit in it’s own right. The barman was wearing a Coke Bust t-shirt and was friendly and knowledgeable, he pointed me both to an excellent belgian wit bier and to a ‘goth party’ on the next night which we didn’t end up going too, not goth like goth, goth. Goth like you and me goth. It was another excellent night in New York.

I first heard of David Chang in an article in the Observer Food Monthly that mainly focused on his mythical pork buns, but didn't really give me much of an impression of his restaurants. I got more of that when watching an episode of Vice' munchies series (Chang goes to a fried chicken joint in Korea-town called Mad for Chicken) and the cookbook, which aside from some excellent if time-consuming recipes, is worth getting for the excellent writing. The stories of the unconventional rise and the shaky starts at both Noodle and Ssam bar are as charming as they are inspiring. Charming because he makes a lot of mistakes, (Ssam bar was originally supposed to mainly sell the Korean Burrito's known as Ssam) inspiring because he he barely knew what he was doing when he started and does a lot of things differently to the restaurants we're used to in the UK.

Each of the Momofuku restaurants has an iconic picture when you arrive through the door, at Noodle bar it’s an Elliot Landy picture of The Band, at Ssam bar it’s a tattered picture of John McEnroe and even at their new Sydney outpost there’s two pictures of AC/DC’s Angus Young, because Chang apparently reckons they're ‘Australia’s best export.’

A top ten most played list at a Momofuku restaurant:

• “Tomorrow Never Knows” by 801,
• “Providence” by TV on the Radio,
• “Five Cornered Drone (Crispy Duck)” by Yo La Tengo,
• “You Can’t Stop Me Now” by the RZA,
• “Life Like” by the Rosebuds,
• “Mambo Sun” by T-Rex,
• “Your Fucking Sunny Day” by Lambchop,
• “Point That Thing Somewhere Else” by the Clean,
• “Sweet Lady Guinevieve” by the Kinks,
• “Freaking and Tweaking” by Luna,
• “Margarita” by the Traveling Wilburys.

And the food, a mix of high-end techniques, processes and knowledge with an appreciation of comfort food and the munchies (Chang enjoys Marijuana and probably loves the Big Lebowski). They've made grits fashionable again, spearheaded a fried chicken renaissance and created desserts like crack pie and compost cookies at the hugely successful Milk bar offshoots. Of course walking around New York now, you'd say that there's tons of restaurants doing similar things, but most of them weren't doing it eight years ago and aren't named no.40 in the top 100 restaurants in the world. I managed to get into both the restaurant Ssam bar and the second incarnation of Noodle bar and check out the sites of the original dude-food revolution.

SSAM BAR

As we walked into the restaurant, Pavement were on the stereo and the signature scruffy McEnroe picture hung loose on the wall. The host told us we’d have to wait (there were six of us) but could do so in their bar next door. In the last week this has transformed into a new Dave Chang and Dave Arnold collab-bar called Booker and Dax, (a scientific cocktail bar which includes a red hot poker section). But right then this wood-lined room ski-lodge-resembling room was Momofuku Bar; a pretty loose set-up with wine, beer, cocktails and snacks. As at Frankie's, The Stooges were on the stereo, I ordered a bottle of Ithaca Cascazilla red Aae, which was one of the best beers I drank in New York, my girlfriend had a bottle of Virgil’s cream soda, which was so good we searched for it at every bar for the rest of the trip. From the snacks menu we ordered some ham chips and fried hominy, the chips had the texture of feather-light prawn crackers, but infused with the flavour of ham rather than crustacean. Hominy is one of the forms of corn that can be made into grits, and this time was made into a grit chips, (very similar to the polenta chips we are more familiar with) which were a little bland on their own, but good with the shrimp mayo they came with. Both snacks were especially good with beer.

When our table was ready we were guided into the restaurant passing a glistening rotisserie duck that forms part of the Duck Ssam menu they offer for parties and the busy open kitchen.
We were given water in the school dinner-like stainless steel jugs that are a feature of New York restaurants. In New York, we never had to ask for water.  We ordered liberally, our server thought it not enough, but then, they always do.

Jonah crab claws, which are in the excellent Momofuku cookbook. The yuzu mayo was delicious, but the claws were, we thought, a little too cold. It does say in the cookbook they buy them frozen-  still tasty. I love crab.

The legendary pork buns, how can something so simple be so good?

A voyage of discovery through a plate of pickles, the carrots or the meaty mushrooms were the best.

The bread came with whipped lardo (cured pork fat) and sea salt butter. It was good and the lardo was great.

Matsutake Dashi with fishballs, sepia & pine. This mushroom dashi was incredibly flavourful and fresh, like tasting a forest. One of the best things we ate.

Stuff we didn't get photos of:

Veal sweetbreads with almond, sauerkraut & thai chilli. I’ve had sweetbreads before, but not veal. Damn these were good, the best I’ve eaten. Deliciously crisp on the outside, moist in the middle with an amazing almond puree, it's a shame people get so freaked out about eating thyroid glands. Who even knows what thyroid glands do?

Bev Eggleston’s pork shoulder steak, cauliflower, piperade. This one’s also in the cookbook (though with a different garnish) and was one of the tastiest bits of pork I’ve ever eaten. Perhaps it was because it was served pink in the middle, maybe because  Eggleston's pork is so damn good. It came with a super-tasty cauliflower puree and chunky non-traditional piperade combo.

NOODLE BAR

We hit noodle bar for lunch, with the sole intention of having Momofuku Ramen, having made an appropriation of it at home and being big fans of the stuff without actually being able to get it much in the UK (outside Wagamama's). There was no queue this time, a Thursday lunchtime, so we sailed right in, past that picture of The Band (representing the Momofuku group mentality). This isn't the original noodle bar; that tiny space has now been turned into the twelve-seat, two-Michelin star Momofuku Ko, which as you might imagine, is pretty hard to get into. (Get on the website at 10am, a week before you want to get in and you might get lucky.)

The lunch menu centered around variations on their 'classic' ramen and buns, plus daily and seasonal specials. We held true to our stated intentions and ordered Momofuku ramen, though we did relent just a little and get a pork bun each too. Pork shoulder and belly, nori, spring onions, noodles, an incredibly flavorsome broth and a slow cooked poached egg that made everything taste even better once the yolk was broken. This bowl of ramen was the kind of simple, uncomplicated bowl of food I wish I could eat once a week... for the rest of my life. There was only one thing that let Noodle Bar down: a surly bartender who made us feel like he really didn't want to be there, which after having had such good service at other places, perhaps seemed especially unfortunate.

Oh, the music:

The Silver Jews were on the stereo telling jokes:

Robot walks into a bar.
Orders a drink, lays down a bill.
Bartender says "Hey we don't serve robots,"
and the robot says "no, but someday you will."

IN CONCLUSION

In the evergreen, excellent state of New York's current dining scene, Momofuku might not seem quite as exciting and as revolutionary, as when it first arrived. But for me, a first-time visitor to what has become an institution and enduring influence, this was an exciting, interesting and above all else fun, place to eat. And you know what? The Pork buns really are the stuff of myth.