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