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earth2table: Creativity
October 31, 2006

Stu Stein

October 31, 2006
"Faites tout à l'excès, rien en modération.” – "Everything in excess, nothing in moderation."

I want to touch on the balancing act of creativity versus business. Michael Bauer, restaurant critic and executive food and wine editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, recently wrote about this dilemma in “ How to thwart a chef's creativity” in his “Between Meals” blog.

He wrote that Mark Gordon, the chef at Terzo in San Francisco, said in response to a recent review, “My goal is to have a clientele that trusts that my food will be as good as the last favorite, and whatever I put on the menu, they will like. Too often, diners return to eat the same dish over and over again. I would like diners to trust the chef of a restaurant and know that they will eat good food no matter what dishes are offered.”

As a chef, I say, “I’m with you, brother. I will follow you up the mountain and help you preach to the world.” As a businessman, however, one needs to balance this philosophy with the very real need to actually sell items and make money. Bauer goes on to write what some of us right-brain creative types actually feel: “Chefs become prisoners of their own success. Certain dishes become so popular that customers get upset if they're not on the menu. How do you balance the old favorites and the new ones?”

A chef needs a basis of great technique and a “sense memory” to create great new dishes. Alan Richman, restaurant critic and author of Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater (HarperCollins Publishers, 2004) appropriately said in a recent interview, “One of my arguments about so many chefs is not that they don’t know how to cook, but they don’t know what good food tastes like. If you go into a little bistro and there’s something on the plate that doesn’t taste right, it may not be that the chef can’t cook. It may be that he hasn’t tasted this particular dish prepared correctly.”

Personally, I would rather never see a Caesar salad on another menu again, but I also would rather eat a perfectly executed Caesar than be used as a guinea pig or a test subject for a young chef’s experiments.

Chef and restaurateur Guy Savoy (http://www.guysavoy.com/) poetically said, “A great chef is a craftsman with the soul of an artist.” To me, this means a really good cook has a lot more to offer than signature dishes.

And the journey continues.

Cheers!

Stu

Posted by Stu Stein on October 31, 2006 | Comments (8)