July 9, 2021 • 34 mins
In this episode, host Geoffrey Zakarian speaks with author, culinary expert, and permanent judge on Bravo’s Top Chef Gail Simmons. They discuss how Gail got her star in the food world, what it’s like to run the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, and what direction she sees chefs going after such a challenging year.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
My name is Jeffrey Z. Carrion, and you're listening to
four Courses with Jeffrey Z Carrian from I Heart Radio.
In four courses, I'll be taking you along for the
ride while I talk with the top talent of our time.
In each conversation, I focus on four different areas from
my guest life and career. And during those four courses,
(00:25):
I'm gonna dig deep and cover new insights and inspirations
that we can all use to fuel ourselves to push forward.
My guest for this episode started her career in food
as an apprentice in two of New York's most legendary kitchens.
She formerly ran The Food and Wine Classic in Aspen
and has been a judge on Bravo TV's Top Chef
for eighteen seasons. Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation
(00:50):
with Gail Simmons. Hi, Gail, Hello, Jeffreys A carry in.
What a pleasure. For my first course, we hear all
about how Gail's parents had complimentary impacts on her love
of food. So when you were growing up, I always
want to know, like I closed my eyes say, I
can think of as a child the smell of my
house and the smell of my mother's cooking. So what
(01:12):
was that for you? It was an interesting how you
grew up in Toronto. It's a powerful memory. I know,
you know Toronto, well, I do very well. What was
that for you? So a few things in the I'm
like literally closing my eyes. No, you have to. It's
really important. It's so powerful. It really rushes back in
the winter. It is soups like it is soup making.
(01:36):
My mother made, you know, classic Jewish mother MutS of
all soup for sure, the best, the best, but also
a lot of vegetable soups. But I have like the
smell of chicken broth is sort of what I imagine
in my house in the wintertime. And schmaltz absolutely, but
(01:57):
then in the summertime, and this is sort of interesting
the smell. Two things, the smell and my mom was
a very good cook. But the smell of plum tarts,
you know, so interestingly, my mother always made this plumb tart,
you know, it was like a vanilla cake that she
(02:18):
baked Italian prune plums into in the summer with vanilla.
And so this kind of thought of these plumb tart
cakes that were always on the counter and that which
make She was not a baker. This was literally the
only thing I ever remember her making. And it was
only when I was in maybe even forty, that I
(02:40):
realized that the recipe is that classic plum tart recipe
from the New York Times, more or less with some
of her tweaks and adjustments that I then took an
adjusted and tweak and I now make. It's sort of
an upside down cake thing going on? There is it
like that? It is essentially the same, but it's not
upside down. You know, you cook it eight side up
(03:01):
so that the fruit roasts on top. Wow, that's incredible.
Did Dad cook or did Dad just did he eat? No?
He did not cook. I mean, large joke. My whole
life was that he barely knew how to turn the
dishwasher on. And my mom was so in charge of
the kitchen and so competent there that like, there was
nothing like he never even came into the kitchen that
was her domain, except he made three things every summer.
(03:26):
He made pickles, so he would go to the market
and he would buy bushels of Kirby cucumbers exactly and
make full sour dill kosher style pickles, and it was
all my dad. He made apple sauce same way he
would get bushels of apples in the fall. He used
the skin of plums in the apple sauce so that
(03:50):
the apple sauce was bright fuchia. My memory of breakfast
often in the morning was a bowl of my dad's
apple sauce with cream on top. And then the third
eard thing he would make was on the weekends, he
would let my mom sleep in and take care of
me and my brothers in the morning, I duel to
brothers and he would make us chocolate cream of wheat,
(04:11):
so you know, cream of wheat like hot cereal. So
my dad grew up in South Africa eating something called
mealy pop, which is essentially polenta. It's corn meal, it's
it's it's grits, it's a fine milled grit and you know,
that was something very traditional in South Africa that he
ate growing up. So he was a hot cereal eater
every morning, but on special occasions on weekends for us,
(04:32):
he would make us like cream of wheat and he
would stir cocoa into it for us, and that was
like our special dad thing. And what's interesting and I'm
curious about it with you because you're the chef in
the house. Like for us, my mom was the most
phenomenal cook, but we were so used to her cooking
that it was those three things I remember most. Even
(04:55):
though my mom was like cooking NonStop, making the most
beautiful meals for us all the time, it was like
our dad's special three things that we were like in off. Yeah,
I know, I know, I get that all the time.
I cook all the time. And you know, when I
leave for a go film with shooting and my wife
makes breakfast for the kids, and you know, when I
come back and like dad, mom's eggs are better than yours.
(05:16):
You know, like okay, Like I have thirty years of
training and I'm happy. It's very fun. But that sounds
like your your dad is quite the That's a kind
of a thing that perfectionists do, you know, they structure. Yes,
you're deep in my dad's psychosis right now, and I
like it. Well, my father is an engineer. He's a
chemical engineer, you know, a scientist. Yes, these are projects,
(05:37):
these were his like science experiments. This is how you
do it. There's no other way. Wow, So your mom,
I mean, I mean, it's kind of like not fair.
Your mom was a food column, and you know, honestly,
you're like at home, You're in a very very warm family,
and you're like reading obviously you're reading. When did you
(05:59):
get into your mom's actual when you read them, like
oh this is really mouth watering, this like makes me
hungry or this? When did that happen? I mean, what age?
Not Intel college? I truly it was osmosis for sure. No,
I was around great food. My mom was a great cook.
She ran a cooking school out of our kitchen. She
built our kitchen in They gutted our kitchen and we
(06:23):
and she rebuilt our kitchen at our house so that
it could be more conducive to cooking classes, so that
there was like a pass that she could stand at
where the stove was. You know. She built this area
with a huge living room open to the living room
dining room so that people could sit in the living
room dining room and she could teach. And she wrote
a column for the Globe and Mail, which is Canada's
(06:44):
biggest newspaper, for years until I was probably ten years old,
and I knew it. I was like proud of it.
I thought it was cool, but it wasn't in my
purview of like careers interestingly, and I really didn't give
it a second thought intel college. I mean, how it
affected me most, Jeffrey, when I was growing up was
(07:06):
that all I wanted it was like mac and cheese
and hot dogs, because that's something I never got at
home because my mom was like cooking shad Row, I
don't know, you know. And it was really only at
the end of college, when I was living on my
own with roommates and started to cook for myself in
earnest that the light went on. And that's when I
started reading magazines and all of a sudden realizing, oh wait,
(07:30):
my mom did this, and I would call her for
her recipes in the middle of the night. And I
started reading Food and Wine magazine. And I remember for
my college graduation, I went to McGill University and for
college graduation, my mom was gonna take me on a
trip for my college graduation, just the two of us.
So the choices were, do you want to go to
(07:52):
either the Food and Wine Classic in Aspen or t
Napa and Sonoma and San Francisco, because I'd never I'd
never been to any of those places that's not fair,
And I chose San Francisco and Napa, Sonoma. But that
was the trip that like, I came home from college
and was like, this is what I'm going to do
with my life. But it really wasn't until then. And
even then my mom was like, are you sure you
(08:13):
don't want to go to law school? Even though it
was her job for such a big part of her life,
she was not convinced that this was the road I
should take. I'm still not sure she's convinced. Actually, I'm
not sure either, quite frankly, if I'm really honest with myself,
But did you The first thing I do when I
see a city is like, if it's not doesn't have
good restaurants, I'm not going. So did you line up
all the restaurants in San Francisco? Always? I mean I remember,
(08:35):
I remember almost every meal. So this is like what,
So what were the hot restaurants in San Francisco? What
was it like? Stars? Japanese? I remember all of them.
We didn't make it to Japanese. We went to the
Slanted Door, Slanted Door, amazing, amazing. We went to swan
Oyster Depot. We went to Zuni Cafe. And so my
(08:57):
best friend. This is sort of an interesting thing. My
best friends since I was born. Right when college ended,
he moved out to San Francisco and went and enrolled
in the California Culinary Academy. So he was there already
when I came out to San Francisco, and so his
mom came out as well at the same time. And
so me and his mom and my mom had this
like four day eating exploration of San Francisco together and
(09:20):
I was, you know, I it was twenty one, and
I remember every meal and Zuni Cafe, like I remember
sitting and ordering the roast chicken and Zuni Cafe and
it just being like such a revel I mean, it
sounds cliche. Everyone has that moment. You can't not have
that moment when you sit at Zunni Cafe. Same with
the slanted door. It was the original slanted door, not
the one that's now in the Ferry building. It was
(09:41):
like upstairs downstairs in the mission. There's great Vietnamese food
in Canada and Montreal and Toronto, but I had never
eaten Vietnamese food in that way before. And I remember
Swan Oyster depot like I remember. I remember well For
(10:07):
my second course, we explore Gal's rapid rise through the
food industry, starting with being an apprentice cook in New
York City and rising to run the Food and Wine
Classic in Aspen, Colorado. And I moved to New York
City and I lived in my good friends closet for
a year and a half. I've done that in Murray Hill.
And I went to culinary school and I just kind
(10:28):
of jumped in feet first and loved culinary school. And
and then when I graduated, I was like, Okay, great,
now I can go back to writing and I'm just
gonna get a job. You know, maybe I'll get an internship.
You know, you have to do an apprentice ship when
you graduate culinary school and externship. And I was like, great,
I'm gonna go to the gourmet magazine kitchens and that
will be my job, and then I can go back
to Canada and be a food writer, right like snap
your fingers. But my culinary school really deterred me from
(10:52):
doing that. And I didn't understand at the time, but
they were like, go to a kitchen, just go work
as a cook, Like you need to work as a cook.
You still don't know how to cook. You've done everything once,
culinary school, like any sort of like even if it's
a master's degree, whatever it is, you don't have any
practical experience. And they convinced me to go to kitchens
and cook, and I'm so glad they did. I didn't
know at the time how valuable that would be. I
(11:14):
cooked for a while. I ended up cooking longer than
I thought I would, into you know, big New York kitchens.
They really kicked my ass, as you could imagine. I
went to Le Cercle Sark two thousand, Right, were you
a cirk? Yeah? I was in the Serk from nineteen
eighty three to nine. Yeah, you were there in the
Danielle years. No, that was before Danielle. But now that's
(11:36):
where Danielle Restaurant is, where Les Serk used to be.
So you did two thousand? Will you at at the
Palace Hotel? Yeah? Sota was someone who was my sush
chef and when he was at when before they moved, Yeah,
I never forget him. He would look at me with
these eyes and he would say, that's no good, that's
that's no good. I'll show you, and he sort of
(11:58):
took a liking to me. Oh, you're lucky. And he
would show me. He had this wizardry of flavors. He
was not like the yelling chef. He was like no, no, come.
He was like your best friend, kim, let me show
you this. Don't don't do this. He was self. Yeah,
he was. We used to call him the shark because
we all wore we all wore you know, the tops,
the big round tokes with the big round top. But
(12:19):
his toke had came to a point at the top.
And he was small, a small man, and he would
weave through the kitchen like a shark um. And he
kind of never talked directly to me because I was
the apprentice. I was like, you know, the extern. He
but he would once in a while just come up
to my station and like stuff a piece of peking
(12:40):
duck in my mouth and be like eat that. And
it was always like unbelievable. He was an amazing man.
You worked, like there's many less starks. She worked at
the one that had that gorgeous kitchen and the glamorous
dining room. I mean we worked. It was a special
place there, It really really was. That was a moment.
I mean, imagine being in the kitchen list, So what
station did you work? You know, I started doing a
(13:00):
lot of prep work, obviously, and then I worked Pasta's
Hot Apps Risotta like Pasta Risotta Station Hot Apps for
a while long time, and then I left for a
number of reasons and went to Vong with Philippe. Yes
chef Philip. Bong was a very different kitchen in a
million ways, but I actually was a lot happier there.
(13:21):
The Cirque was a really huge kitchen. I was the
only woman. I kind of got lost. It wasn't a
great time in my life, Like it was a very
difficult time, and I wasn't my best self. But also
I felt was a really tough kitchen to crack, and
I didn't think I was. It was good for my
mental health. And so I went to Vong and it
(13:44):
was a much smaller kitchen. I was still the only
woman this is now, and I loved cooking at Vong.
Bong was groundbreaking, you know, Geen George. It was like
three star tie French. The ingredients that I cooked with
there I had never seen four at the time, you know.
And the crew was just a really great sort of
(14:04):
like pack of hooligans, but they were good to me,
and they taught me a lot, and I have really
fond memories of my time at Wong. Were these two
apprenticeships to complete your ice education? Yes, no, I did
Les CIRCU and that completed it. And then I went
to Bong and I was cooking, you know, I was
a cook. And then you went to work with Jeffrey
and then I left. Exactly, I got the job. While
(14:26):
I was at Wong, I read Jeffrey Steinerten's book, one
of the funniest books I've ever read. Yeah, there's so
much about his writing that is extraordinary, like long format
food writing that really doesn't exist anymore. Doesn't exist. No,
it doesn't. It's too bad because he was really groundbreaking me.
He was difficult guy. I remember him. He's one of
(14:46):
these people that are right but also kind of obnoxious
at the same time. You're like, Okay, I get I
get it on the first past. You don't have to
tell me three times. Oh, he'll let he won't let
you forget it. Of course. We'll imagine when you're when
you're twenty four years old, and this is uh, how
you're working for him. I think it's kind of good.
I think it's kind of good because there's no bullshit,
and you don't want to get bullshit when you're twenty four,
(15:09):
you know, because it really I think it annexes a
part of your brain that you don't want to use
yet you just want to use. You want the truth.
Just give me the truth and the facts and I'll
figure it out. I can do that. And you know what,
he pushed me in a lot of ways. I worked
for Jeffrey for two years as his assistant in all things.
I did his research, I did his recipe testing, I
did all his shopping for crazy esoteric ingredients and equipment.
(15:33):
And it really was, like I say this all the time,
it was the most formative, what a great experience. Two
years in New York. He introduced me to everyone like
he would take me to dinner with Pierre ere May
and and Dory Greenspan and Danielle. I mean, that's how
I met Danielle. And he was flying to Thailand for
three weeks at a time to research mortar and pestles
(15:55):
and then coming home to me and saying, Okay, Gail,
these are the specifications. Go out and track one down
in a mary And I was spent three weeks tracking
down the perfect mortar investal to make tie curries like
it was just like I mean, on paper, the most
amazing job. It was an incredibly challenging job because he
was an incredibly challenging person and we were working alone
in his kitchen every day, one on one. But he
(16:17):
was like my father, you know. I worked for Danielle
for three years, and it was through Danielle doing kind
of marketing and PR that I met the team at
Food and Wine, and ultimately Chris hired me in the
end of two thousand four to come work for the
marketing team at Food Wine and I didn't even know
what the job was going to be, but I just
knew that after my work with Vogue and my work
(16:37):
with Danielle, that this was the opportunity to put it
all together and that I'd be working for the magazine
I had admired since I was in college, and I
would didn't know if I'd get to write or do,
but I loved all the stuff I've been doing with
Danielle to it really opened my eyes to the business
of restaurants, So the importance of marketing and PR and
that sort of engine and the socialization of that as
(16:59):
opposed to like sitting get your computer and just writing
all day long. So I knew that food and wine
and this job under Christina would just give me the
opportunity to do all those things together for a pub
for you know, in the media, which is where my
goal had been since I had left Canada. And so
I went to food wine. Yeah, and I ran the
marketing department. I ended up within a year running the
(17:21):
Classic in Aspen. You know it must have been for you, Like,
this is a dream come true. This is all my
favorite things. I came from this family with a food
writing mom. I love pickles, and here I am in
Aspen exactly, and I get to do everything I want
to do and eat whatever I want. And I have
all the best chefs here. I have to go anywhere
that just they came to me. That's incredible. And what
(17:43):
I loved about it too, is the operations of it.
Like what I found that I actually loved was the
production of the whole thing that's making pickles. Gale making pickles. Yeah,
I know, I'm my father's child, It's true. I loved
the details of all of the work. I mean, it
was a full year round job to get everybody to
that crazy place in the mountains for four and I
(18:05):
worked with a team of four in New York and
four in Aspen under Jevin Paget, who I know you
know well too. He is the best. I mean, he's
my big brother forever and ever. We need to make
a statue for Devon in the in the center of Aspen,
in front of the little now right in the center.
This is the guy that makes sort of put Aspen
on the map for a lot of people. You know,
(18:27):
Devon and I were co pilots for five years, and
he and just I loved the work of putting it
all together, all the pieces for the consumers, for the chefs,
for the sponsors, for the magazine, for our the editors,
like all of the thousands of details that you know,
we're in my binder. The logistics of something like the
Aspen Food and Wine Festival is sort of people don't understand.
(18:49):
If anybody ever gets a chance to go. It's one
of the best I've ever been to, and it's one
of the best run. It's small, and it's not an
easy place to run a festival. Yeah, it's it's very
in depth. It's it's it's hard too, because you have altitude,
you have planes that don't show up, you have chefs
that are like drinking too much, and you know, it's
(19:09):
all exciting, all those things that are that are funny.
But like what an amazing sort of very ques a
rapid fire career. Yeah, I mean it happened from the
time I moved to New York to the time I
stopped running The Classic and Aspen was ten years. From
the time I moved to New York to the time
I started at Food and Wine was five years. And
(19:32):
then I ran the Classic for five years. That is
literally nothing. And people I I want to get the
young people ask me all the time, how do you
get on TV? I'm like, wrong question, wrong question. You know,
it's like you gotta you gotta know your craft. You're
so right. And I hear this and talk about this
all the time that like I didn't go on TV first,
Like I had ten years of experience in the industry,
(19:55):
and that is still not very much, but a full
decade of working in so many different sides of the industry,
and I could not have gotten the job that I
do now without every minute of what came before. It
Right for my third course, Gail and I pulled back
the curtain and let my listeners in and what it's
(20:17):
like to be a judge on a top TV cooking show.
Gail has been a regular judge on Bravo's TV Top
Chef since the show's inception in two thousand six. But
a perfect specimen for Top Chef to have in you,
because you've just come off this like explosion of information
and now they need someone who can like be relevant
also and actually be a formative judge who has the
(20:41):
correct opinions. And you've become so good at it because
you're with you've been with so many opinion makers that
know what they're doing, So it's really a sort of
a genius. I don't know if they knew that at
the time. Food and Wine sort of put me up
for the job because Food and Wine was partnering with
with Bravo to make this totally new show, this cooking
format that was very out of left field that we
(21:03):
certainly didn't know if it was gonna be successful, and
there was nothing else of its kind out there when
we started, and they sort of threw me into the
fire being like, yeah, I'll just go for this screen
test with you know at thirty Rock, we're thinking of
partnering with Bravo on a reality cooking competition, and I
almost like ran and cried because I was like, what
reality TV? Like, I'm not doing that, That's crazy. Why
(21:25):
would you throw me to the lions like that? You know,
I'm just gonna get decimated because all I knew of
reality television at the time was like Survived, not even
it was like it was like even before that. It
was yeah, but it was like Survivor and Fear Factor
and so. And we trusted Bravo because they had just
started making Project Runway, so I knew they were serious
(21:46):
and this was the same format. But we really had
no precedent before us for the show we were going
to make. And I remember going for the screen test
scared out of my mind and just worried more than anything,
like if we were a failure, I didn't care if
like the viewers out there saw me wouldn't know who
I was, you know, I was nobody, like no one,
So I wasn't worried about embarrassing myself to viewers. It
(22:08):
was more about my industry. You guys, right, you specifically
and all of your friends and thinking that we were
going to be like the laughing stock. And I know
that was Tom's worried too, what if this failed. We
could fail in a really big way here and be
you know, the kind of the laughing stock of our industry.
(22:29):
But we took a chance, and thankfully Tom really has
been our our north star, our moral compass in keeping us,
you know, towing the line the whole way through and
making sure that it is not about the drama but
that it's about the food. And he was right from
the beginning, and that's the course we took very grateful
to it. You're so natural on this show. It's a
(22:50):
very hard show. At six am. We could be eating
like you know, intestines, you know, and it's just and
we have I know what you think about being like
make fun of and profession because Tom was like a
serious dude and a seriously talented chef, so I'm sure
that he was didn't want it to be you know,
a quote unquote laughing stock. I think it was authentic
(23:10):
and it had people are authentic. I think, so people
see that they and they see it right away and
you have instant certifiability and that's what that's why shows work.
And they don't work. If you ask me, I think
so too, men. I think we've both been lucky to
be on shows that at the end of the day
just want to have like a real conversation about food,
and that you can't take it too seriously. But you
also have to respect. I respected, And when you have
(23:32):
a group of people together who have that really common goal,
you know, it's a lot about chemistry, but we have
this sort of shared purpose, and the production company in
the Networks that we both work with, I think obviously
share that and so are committed to just pushing us
and pushing the show to just be the best it
can be, which is why both of our shows, luckily enough,
(23:53):
I've had longevity in a way that I certainly never
imagine in my life. I mean, in two thousand five,
I remember them sending me to San Francisco to shoot
that first season of Top Chef, and Christina was like,
don't worry, Gail, just go for three weeks, then you'll
come back. You'll go back to your job running the
Classic in Aspen, and like, we'll just go about our
(24:13):
business like it won't be a big deal. And then
it aired and it actually wasn't a huge hit. The
first time it aired, they re ran the first season,
and only the second time they ran that first season
did it pick up speed. And then they ordered a
second season and I was like, Chris, we're doing a
second season, and I mean, if there's a third season,
We're gonna have to start talking about how I'm gonna
be splitting my job time. And she was like, Gail,
(24:35):
calm down, third season, Like come on, don't get ahead
of yourself. Here's third season. I mean I just made
my eighteenth season, right, So we didn't know. We didn't know.
I'll give you the same story when when they I
auditioned for Chopped in two thousand seven and Scott Fellman,
as we both know and love, my manager, said you're
(24:56):
gonna try the show. I'm like, Chop, what's this about?
And he said, well, it's three judges and as a
gun and if they don't like it, they chop you.
And that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Maybe
you don't know this, but the the person that got chopped,
the dish they got chopped was supposed to they had
a dog and they would feed the chopped dish to
a dog. That was the first can you imagine if
(25:19):
they kept that they thankfully didn't air the air that
they took it out or they changed it. But I
think it's one of the key ways that people non
cooks learned. They watched these shows and they learned they
watched judges judging, and they get it. If they get it,
they're like, oh, yeah, now I know why my asparagus
this tastes like this because now I get it, and
(25:42):
so they it's a real connector no question. But we
were teaching them about identifying moments in their life that
they had eaten something and it didn't really they didn't
like it, and the reason why they didn't like it
was because it wasn't cooked properly. So the reason why
people like Brussels sprouts is because your mom boiled a
shoot out of them and they smelled like sulfur. Mom
still won't eat Brussels sprouts because when she was a
(26:03):
child she had to eat them at school and that
they boiled Brussels sprouts and served them to the girls
for lunch every day. And my mom, now at the
age of eighties, still won't eat Brussels sprouts. And I'm like, mom,
let me make you a good Brussels sprouts. So our
shows are MythBusters. Really, yeah, that's a great way to
look at it. I love that. That's what keeps the
viewer of coming back and say, oh my god, what
(26:24):
else do I don't not know that I need to know?
And what have I believed for so long that I've
never understood? And now it's like literacy in this craft.
Food has changed so much, Like so the food I'm
tasting now, I'm chopped. I have thirteen years of tasting
the food that was started. It's it's evolved so much.
(26:44):
There's still crappy cooks and chefs that cook it and
like they're not really their home cooks and they're like, well,
I don't know what I'm doing. They have learned from
our show the changes in cuisine, and so they're mimicking
what they've learned, even though they're not necessarily a chef,
And so we see that at the judging tape. It's
kind of fascinating. Oh yeah. It trickles down, of course
into the cultural you know, trends of how how we
(27:07):
all eat. There's no question. For my fourth and final course,
Gale shares the surprising lessons that cooks are taking away
from the past years. So your past season, what what
it struck you about your last past season that is
is so different? What it struck you about the food
and how people sort of the vision of food, because
(27:27):
what I'm noticing in my side is people want simple
killer flavors like less, less is more, but more of
the best. What have you found? Simplifying the way young
cooks cook has always been our mantra on Top Chef,
but this year the takeaway from me for Top Chef,
(27:49):
which was an un it was an outlying year, right
we shot. We only shoot once a year Top Chef.
We now are making Top Chef Amateurs. That's done separately,
and there were years past when we did more than
one season, but we only do one for its fourteen
episodes once a year, once a year, and it takes
us two months to make fourteen episodes because it's two
(28:09):
to three days in episode. And this year we built
a production bubble. We shot in Portland, Oregon, which in
many ways was going through a triple pandemic. While we
were there, I mean, there was forest fires, there was
obviously COVID, there was intense civil and social justice protesting, rioting,
(28:30):
happening all around us, but specifically in Portland's. You know,
it had so much conflict. But we also chose Portland
because the COVID rates were really low there so that
we could relocate to Portland's. And so how does that
come out in the food? Which is your original question?
And I will say that this year more than anything else,
(28:51):
you know, in past years. And if you look at
the sort of trajectory over the years from where we
started with Top Chefs to where we are now, it
used to be that the cooks came and they cooked,
no matter where they were from, no matter their personal heritage,
they cooked the food that they thought we wanted to
eat in America, which is like kind of Western European tradition, right.
(29:15):
You know, we had chefs from everywhere from China to
the Caribbean serving US, Italian and French food. And I'm
not saying that a lot of it wasn't amazing. It
was extraordinary because these are professionals. However, we didn't want
to see that from them, like where's your soul, where's
your heart? Where are you cooking from? And so many
times on the show. Their evolution by the time they
(29:38):
left the show think about chefs like Shirley Chung or
Nina Compton. You know, Nina was working for Scott Konant
running his Italian kitchen in Miami. But by the time
she left Top Chefs, she was like, I need to
cook Caribbean food where I'm from St. Lucia. I need
to cook from my heritage, and she went to New
Orleans and merged it and created her restaurant. So this
(30:00):
season on Top Chef, we started in a different place
because the world was in a different place, and the
chefs on this season came to us with a lot
of figuring out to do about who they are as chefs.
But what they knew and what they all gave us
from the beginning was their heritage. Like, no longer do
we give a crap about that kind of Western European model.
(30:23):
If that's what you cook best and that's who you are, great,
give it to me. But the best moments of our
season have been from chefs who were truly cooking from
their heritage, which has nothing to do with our heritage.
Right we are learning from them from the African diaspora,
from all across the regions of Mexico, from Vietnam, and
(30:46):
Japan and from the American South, and those are the
cuisines that we need to hear about, the representation we
need to see. Those are the food ways that this
country was really built on. And I think, what are
the most important foods for us all in our kind
of understanding of American culture that we want to see
and to amplify. And that was the lesson of this
(31:08):
year on Top Chef. I think those are the foods
you identify with to this day. If I really cooked
what I wanted to cook, I would cook what I
was born and raised with, which was Middle Eastern food
every single day. But it was delicious. So in my mind,
I'm saying, one day I'm going to open up an
Armenian bistro and just say fuck it. Oh Jeffrey, do it,
(31:30):
because no one could do it better than you know.
I know. It's it's funny that's it took a pandemic
to get the top chefs actually cook the food they like.
Cook from your heart, like cook from your heart, not
from your brain. I hope the pandemic will stop the
narrative of the food critic coming in and trouncing someone
(31:52):
because they can Oh yeah, I think it has to change.
I think it has to and it will. There's no
room in our industry anymore for negativity. There can't be right.
There's no reason to destroy a restaurant. If you want
to have write something that's off color a bit, be constructive,
I think, is it be constructive? Don't waste time killing people?
(32:16):
Why why these people are they're killing themselves. You don't
have to kill them for them, right. That's the thing,
like if the if the pandemic taught the public, you know,
and customers anything, consumers, diners. It is the struggle of
making a living in the restaurant industry. And we're up
against enough, you know, restauranturs and chefs are up against
(32:37):
enough just to feed their families and keep their employees employed.
Especially right now, that the conversation has to change, and
I think we're headed in the right direction. Like James
Beard Foundation not giving awards and winners this year, I
think said a lot. It's just about just raising and
lifting people up and telling stories when they're great, and
if they're not great, you know, we don't need to
(32:57):
tell them. You don't need to promote that. Let's just promote,
you know, promote the strength of this industry and and
the way that it is nourishing people. Well, I am
in good company today with you, and I could talk
all day. We don't have all day. Unfortunately, I'm so
happy to have to get to catch up with you, though, Jeffrey,
take care, Bye bye, Thanks very much for listening to
(33:20):
Four Courses with Jefferyszcarrian, a production of I Heart Radio
and Corner Table Entertainment. Four Courses is created by Jeffreys Zcarrion,
Margaret Zacarion, Jared Keller, and Tara Helper. Our executive producer
is Christopher Hesiotis. Four Courses is produced by Jonathan Haws Dressler.
Our research is conducted by Jescelyn Shields. This episode was
(33:43):
engineered by Katie Fellman and edited and mixed by Joe Tisdel.
Our talent booking is by Pamela Bauer at Dogtown Talent.
For more podcasts with my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Four
My name is Jeffrey Z. Carrion, and you're listening to
four Courses with Jeffrey Z Carrian from I Heart Radio.
In four courses, I'll be taking you along for the
ride while I talk with the top talent of our time.
In each conversation, I focus on four different areas from
my guest life and career. And during those four courses,
(00:25):
I'm gonna dig deep and cover new insights and inspirations
that we can all use to fuel ourselves to push forward.
My guest for this episode started her career in food
as an apprentice in two of New York's most legendary kitchens.
She formerly ran The Food and Wine Classic in Aspen
and has been a judge on Bravo TV's Top Chef
for eighteen seasons. Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation
(00:50):
with Gail Simmons. Hi, Gail, Hello, Jeffreys A carry in.
What a pleasure. For my first course, we hear all
about how Gail's parents had complimentary impacts on her love
of food. So when you were growing up, I always
want to know, like I closed my eyes say, I
can think of as a child the smell of my
house and the smell of my mother's cooking. So what
(01:12):
was that for you? It was an interesting how you
grew up in Toronto. It's a powerful memory. I know,
you know Toronto, well, I do very well. What was
that for you? So a few things in the I'm
like literally closing my eyes. No, you have to. It's
really important. It's so powerful. It really rushes back in
the winter. It is soups like it is soup making.
(01:36):
My mother made, you know, classic Jewish mother MutS of
all soup for sure, the best, the best, but also
a lot of vegetable soups. But I have like the
smell of chicken broth is sort of what I imagine
in my house in the wintertime. And schmaltz absolutely, but
(01:57):
then in the summertime, and this is sort of interesting
the smell. Two things, the smell and my mom was
a very good cook. But the smell of plum tarts,
you know, so interestingly, my mother always made this plumb tart,
you know, it was like a vanilla cake that she
(02:18):
baked Italian prune plums into in the summer with vanilla.
And so this kind of thought of these plumb tart
cakes that were always on the counter and that which
make She was not a baker. This was literally the
only thing I ever remember her making. And it was
only when I was in maybe even forty, that I
(02:40):
realized that the recipe is that classic plum tart recipe
from the New York Times, more or less with some
of her tweaks and adjustments that I then took an
adjusted and tweak and I now make. It's sort of
an upside down cake thing going on? There is it
like that? It is essentially the same, but it's not
upside down. You know, you cook it eight side up
(03:01):
so that the fruit roasts on top. Wow, that's incredible.
Did Dad cook or did Dad just did he eat? No?
He did not cook. I mean, large joke. My whole
life was that he barely knew how to turn the
dishwasher on. And my mom was so in charge of
the kitchen and so competent there that like, there was
nothing like he never even came into the kitchen that
was her domain, except he made three things every summer.
(03:26):
He made pickles, so he would go to the market
and he would buy bushels of Kirby cucumbers exactly and
make full sour dill kosher style pickles, and it was
all my dad. He made apple sauce same way he
would get bushels of apples in the fall. He used
the skin of plums in the apple sauce so that
(03:50):
the apple sauce was bright fuchia. My memory of breakfast
often in the morning was a bowl of my dad's
apple sauce with cream on top. And then the third
eard thing he would make was on the weekends, he
would let my mom sleep in and take care of
me and my brothers in the morning, I duel to
brothers and he would make us chocolate cream of wheat,
(04:11):
so you know, cream of wheat like hot cereal. So
my dad grew up in South Africa eating something called
mealy pop, which is essentially polenta. It's corn meal, it's
it's it's grits, it's a fine milled grit and you know,
that was something very traditional in South Africa that he
ate growing up. So he was a hot cereal eater
every morning, but on special occasions on weekends for us,
(04:32):
he would make us like cream of wheat and he
would stir cocoa into it for us, and that was
like our special dad thing. And what's interesting and I'm
curious about it with you because you're the chef in
the house. Like for us, my mom was the most
phenomenal cook, but we were so used to her cooking
that it was those three things I remember most. Even
(04:55):
though my mom was like cooking NonStop, making the most
beautiful meals for us all the time, it was like
our dad's special three things that we were like in off. Yeah,
I know, I know, I get that all the time.
I cook all the time. And you know, when I
leave for a go film with shooting and my wife
makes breakfast for the kids, and you know, when I
come back and like dad, mom's eggs are better than yours.
(05:16):
You know, like okay, Like I have thirty years of
training and I'm happy. It's very fun. But that sounds
like your your dad is quite the That's a kind
of a thing that perfectionists do, you know, they structure. Yes,
you're deep in my dad's psychosis right now, and I
like it. Well, my father is an engineer. He's a
chemical engineer, you know, a scientist. Yes, these are projects,
(05:37):
these were his like science experiments. This is how you
do it. There's no other way. Wow, So your mom,
I mean, I mean, it's kind of like not fair.
Your mom was a food column, and you know, honestly,
you're like at home, You're in a very very warm family,
and you're like reading obviously you're reading. When did you
(05:59):
get into your mom's actual when you read them, like
oh this is really mouth watering, this like makes me
hungry or this? When did that happen? I mean, what age?
Not Intel college? I truly it was osmosis for sure. No,
I was around great food. My mom was a great cook.
She ran a cooking school out of our kitchen. She
built our kitchen in They gutted our kitchen and we
(06:23):
and she rebuilt our kitchen at our house so that
it could be more conducive to cooking classes, so that
there was like a pass that she could stand at
where the stove was. You know. She built this area
with a huge living room open to the living room
dining room so that people could sit in the living
room dining room and she could teach. And she wrote
a column for the Globe and Mail, which is Canada's
(06:44):
biggest newspaper, for years until I was probably ten years old,
and I knew it. I was like proud of it.
I thought it was cool, but it wasn't in my
purview of like careers interestingly, and I really didn't give
it a second thought intel college. I mean, how it
affected me most, Jeffrey, when I was growing up was
(07:06):
that all I wanted it was like mac and cheese
and hot dogs, because that's something I never got at
home because my mom was like cooking shad Row, I
don't know, you know. And it was really only at
the end of college, when I was living on my
own with roommates and started to cook for myself in
earnest that the light went on. And that's when I
started reading magazines and all of a sudden realizing, oh wait,
(07:30):
my mom did this, and I would call her for
her recipes in the middle of the night. And I
started reading Food and Wine magazine. And I remember for
my college graduation, I went to McGill University and for
college graduation, my mom was gonna take me on a
trip for my college graduation, just the two of us.
So the choices were, do you want to go to
(07:52):
either the Food and Wine Classic in Aspen or t
Napa and Sonoma and San Francisco, because I'd never I'd
never been to any of those places that's not fair,
And I chose San Francisco and Napa, Sonoma. But that
was the trip that like, I came home from college
and was like, this is what I'm going to do
with my life. But it really wasn't until then. And
even then my mom was like, are you sure you
(08:13):
don't want to go to law school? Even though it
was her job for such a big part of her life,
she was not convinced that this was the road I
should take. I'm still not sure she's convinced. Actually, I'm
not sure either, quite frankly, if I'm really honest with myself,
But did you The first thing I do when I
see a city is like, if it's not doesn't have
good restaurants, I'm not going. So did you line up
all the restaurants in San Francisco? Always? I mean I remember,
(08:35):
I remember almost every meal. So this is like what,
So what were the hot restaurants in San Francisco? What
was it like? Stars? Japanese? I remember all of them.
We didn't make it to Japanese. We went to the
Slanted Door, Slanted Door, amazing, amazing. We went to swan
Oyster Depot. We went to Zuni Cafe. And so my
(08:57):
best friend. This is sort of an interesting thing. My
best friends since I was born. Right when college ended,
he moved out to San Francisco and went and enrolled
in the California Culinary Academy. So he was there already
when I came out to San Francisco, and so his
mom came out as well at the same time. And
so me and his mom and my mom had this
like four day eating exploration of San Francisco together and
(09:20):
I was, you know, I it was twenty one, and
I remember every meal and Zuni Cafe, like I remember
sitting and ordering the roast chicken and Zuni Cafe and
it just being like such a revel I mean, it
sounds cliche. Everyone has that moment. You can't not have
that moment when you sit at Zunni Cafe. Same with
the slanted door. It was the original slanted door, not
the one that's now in the Ferry building. It was
(09:41):
like upstairs downstairs in the mission. There's great Vietnamese food
in Canada and Montreal and Toronto, but I had never
eaten Vietnamese food in that way before. And I remember
Swan Oyster depot like I remember. I remember well For
(10:07):
my second course, we explore Gal's rapid rise through the
food industry, starting with being an apprentice cook in New
York City and rising to run the Food and Wine
Classic in Aspen, Colorado. And I moved to New York
City and I lived in my good friends closet for
a year and a half. I've done that in Murray Hill.
And I went to culinary school and I just kind
(10:28):
of jumped in feet first and loved culinary school. And
and then when I graduated, I was like, Okay, great,
now I can go back to writing and I'm just
gonna get a job. You know, maybe I'll get an internship.
You know, you have to do an apprentice ship when
you graduate culinary school and externship. And I was like, great,
I'm gonna go to the gourmet magazine kitchens and that
will be my job, and then I can go back
to Canada and be a food writer, right like snap
your fingers. But my culinary school really deterred me from
(10:52):
doing that. And I didn't understand at the time, but
they were like, go to a kitchen, just go work
as a cook, Like you need to work as a cook.
You still don't know how to cook. You've done everything once,
culinary school, like any sort of like even if it's
a master's degree, whatever it is, you don't have any
practical experience. And they convinced me to go to kitchens
and cook, and I'm so glad they did. I didn't
know at the time how valuable that would be. I
(11:14):
cooked for a while. I ended up cooking longer than
I thought I would, into you know, big New York kitchens.
They really kicked my ass, as you could imagine. I
went to Le Cercle Sark two thousand, Right, were you
a cirk? Yeah? I was in the Serk from nineteen
eighty three to nine. Yeah, you were there in the
Danielle years. No, that was before Danielle. But now that's
(11:36):
where Danielle Restaurant is, where Les Serk used to be.
So you did two thousand? Will you at at the
Palace Hotel? Yeah? Sota was someone who was my sush
chef and when he was at when before they moved, Yeah,
I never forget him. He would look at me with
these eyes and he would say, that's no good, that's
that's no good. I'll show you, and he sort of
(11:58):
took a liking to me. Oh, you're lucky. And he
would show me. He had this wizardry of flavors. He
was not like the yelling chef. He was like no, no, come.
He was like your best friend, kim, let me show
you this. Don't don't do this. He was self. Yeah,
he was. We used to call him the shark because
we all wore we all wore you know, the tops,
the big round tokes with the big round top. But
(12:19):
his toke had came to a point at the top.
And he was small, a small man, and he would
weave through the kitchen like a shark um. And he
kind of never talked directly to me because I was
the apprentice. I was like, you know, the extern. He
but he would once in a while just come up
to my station and like stuff a piece of peking
(12:40):
duck in my mouth and be like eat that. And
it was always like unbelievable. He was an amazing man.
You worked, like there's many less starks. She worked at
the one that had that gorgeous kitchen and the glamorous
dining room. I mean we worked. It was a special
place there, It really really was. That was a moment.
I mean, imagine being in the kitchen list, So what
station did you work? You know, I started doing a
(13:00):
lot of prep work, obviously, and then I worked Pasta's
Hot Apps Risotta like Pasta Risotta Station Hot Apps for
a while long time, and then I left for a
number of reasons and went to Vong with Philippe. Yes
chef Philip. Bong was a very different kitchen in a
million ways, but I actually was a lot happier there.
(13:21):
The Cirque was a really huge kitchen. I was the
only woman. I kind of got lost. It wasn't a
great time in my life, Like it was a very
difficult time, and I wasn't my best self. But also
I felt was a really tough kitchen to crack, and
I didn't think I was. It was good for my
mental health. And so I went to Vong and it
(13:44):
was a much smaller kitchen. I was still the only
woman this is now, and I loved cooking at Vong.
Bong was groundbreaking, you know, Geen George. It was like
three star tie French. The ingredients that I cooked with
there I had never seen four at the time, you know.
And the crew was just a really great sort of
(14:04):
like pack of hooligans, but they were good to me,
and they taught me a lot, and I have really
fond memories of my time at Wong. Were these two
apprenticeships to complete your ice education? Yes, no, I did
Les CIRCU and that completed it. And then I went
to Bong and I was cooking, you know, I was
a cook. And then you went to work with Jeffrey
and then I left. Exactly, I got the job. While
(14:26):
I was at Wong, I read Jeffrey Steinerten's book, one
of the funniest books I've ever read. Yeah, there's so
much about his writing that is extraordinary, like long format
food writing that really doesn't exist anymore. Doesn't exist. No,
it doesn't. It's too bad because he was really groundbreaking me.
He was difficult guy. I remember him. He's one of
(14:46):
these people that are right but also kind of obnoxious
at the same time. You're like, Okay, I get I
get it on the first past. You don't have to
tell me three times. Oh, he'll let he won't let
you forget it. Of course. We'll imagine when you're when
you're twenty four years old, and this is uh, how
you're working for him. I think it's kind of good.
I think it's kind of good because there's no bullshit,
and you don't want to get bullshit when you're twenty four,
(15:09):
you know, because it really I think it annexes a
part of your brain that you don't want to use
yet you just want to use. You want the truth.
Just give me the truth and the facts and I'll
figure it out. I can do that. And you know what,
he pushed me in a lot of ways. I worked
for Jeffrey for two years as his assistant in all things.
I did his research, I did his recipe testing, I
did all his shopping for crazy esoteric ingredients and equipment.
(15:33):
And it really was, like I say this all the time,
it was the most formative, what a great experience. Two
years in New York. He introduced me to everyone like
he would take me to dinner with Pierre ere May
and and Dory Greenspan and Danielle. I mean, that's how
I met Danielle. And he was flying to Thailand for
three weeks at a time to research mortar and pestles
(15:55):
and then coming home to me and saying, Okay, Gail,
these are the specifications. Go out and track one down
in a mary And I was spent three weeks tracking
down the perfect mortar investal to make tie curries like
it was just like I mean, on paper, the most
amazing job. It was an incredibly challenging job because he
was an incredibly challenging person and we were working alone
in his kitchen every day, one on one. But he
(16:17):
was like my father, you know. I worked for Danielle
for three years, and it was through Danielle doing kind
of marketing and PR that I met the team at
Food and Wine, and ultimately Chris hired me in the
end of two thousand four to come work for the
marketing team at Food Wine and I didn't even know
what the job was going to be, but I just
knew that after my work with Vogue and my work
(16:37):
with Danielle, that this was the opportunity to put it
all together and that I'd be working for the magazine
I had admired since I was in college, and I
would didn't know if I'd get to write or do,
but I loved all the stuff I've been doing with
Danielle to it really opened my eyes to the business
of restaurants, So the importance of marketing and PR and
that sort of engine and the socialization of that as
(16:59):
opposed to like sitting get your computer and just writing
all day long. So I knew that food and wine
and this job under Christina would just give me the
opportunity to do all those things together for a pub
for you know, in the media, which is where my
goal had been since I had left Canada. And so
I went to food wine. Yeah, and I ran the
marketing department. I ended up within a year running the
(17:21):
Classic in Aspen. You know it must have been for you, Like,
this is a dream come true. This is all my
favorite things. I came from this family with a food
writing mom. I love pickles, and here I am in
Aspen exactly, and I get to do everything I want
to do and eat whatever I want. And I have
all the best chefs here. I have to go anywhere
that just they came to me. That's incredible. And what
(17:43):
I loved about it too, is the operations of it.
Like what I found that I actually loved was the
production of the whole thing that's making pickles. Gale making pickles. Yeah,
I know, I'm my father's child, It's true. I loved
the details of all of the work. I mean, it
was a full year round job to get everybody to
that crazy place in the mountains for four and I
(18:05):
worked with a team of four in New York and
four in Aspen under Jevin Paget, who I know you
know well too. He is the best. I mean, he's
my big brother forever and ever. We need to make
a statue for Devon in the in the center of Aspen,
in front of the little now right in the center.
This is the guy that makes sort of put Aspen
on the map for a lot of people. You know,
(18:27):
Devon and I were co pilots for five years, and
he and just I loved the work of putting it
all together, all the pieces for the consumers, for the chefs,
for the sponsors, for the magazine, for our the editors,
like all of the thousands of details that you know,
we're in my binder. The logistics of something like the
Aspen Food and Wine Festival is sort of people don't understand.
(18:49):
If anybody ever gets a chance to go. It's one
of the best I've ever been to, and it's one
of the best run. It's small, and it's not an
easy place to run a festival. Yeah, it's it's very
in depth. It's it's it's hard too, because you have altitude,
you have planes that don't show up, you have chefs
that are like drinking too much, and you know, it's
(19:09):
all exciting, all those things that are that are funny.
But like what an amazing sort of very ques a
rapid fire career. Yeah, I mean it happened from the
time I moved to New York to the time I
stopped running The Classic and Aspen was ten years. From
the time I moved to New York to the time
I started at Food and Wine was five years. And
(19:32):
then I ran the Classic for five years. That is
literally nothing. And people I I want to get the
young people ask me all the time, how do you
get on TV? I'm like, wrong question, wrong question. You know,
it's like you gotta you gotta know your craft. You're
so right. And I hear this and talk about this
all the time that like I didn't go on TV first,
Like I had ten years of experience in the industry,
(19:55):
and that is still not very much, but a full
decade of working in so many different sides of the industry,
and I could not have gotten the job that I
do now without every minute of what came before. It
Right for my third course, Gail and I pulled back
the curtain and let my listeners in and what it's
(20:17):
like to be a judge on a top TV cooking show.
Gail has been a regular judge on Bravo's TV Top
Chef since the show's inception in two thousand six. But
a perfect specimen for Top Chef to have in you,
because you've just come off this like explosion of information
and now they need someone who can like be relevant
also and actually be a formative judge who has the
(20:41):
correct opinions. And you've become so good at it because
you're with you've been with so many opinion makers that
know what they're doing, So it's really a sort of
a genius. I don't know if they knew that at
the time. Food and Wine sort of put me up
for the job because Food and Wine was partnering with
with Bravo to make this totally new show, this cooking
format that was very out of left field that we
(21:03):
certainly didn't know if it was gonna be successful, and
there was nothing else of its kind out there when
we started, and they sort of threw me into the
fire being like, yeah, I'll just go for this screen
test with you know at thirty Rock, we're thinking of
partnering with Bravo on a reality cooking competition, and I
almost like ran and cried because I was like, what
reality TV? Like, I'm not doing that, That's crazy. Why
(21:25):
would you throw me to the lions like that? You know,
I'm just gonna get decimated because all I knew of
reality television at the time was like Survived, not even
it was like it was like even before that. It
was yeah, but it was like Survivor and Fear Factor
and so. And we trusted Bravo because they had just
started making Project Runway, so I knew they were serious
(21:46):
and this was the same format. But we really had
no precedent before us for the show we were going
to make. And I remember going for the screen test
scared out of my mind and just worried more than anything,
like if we were a failure, I didn't care if
like the viewers out there saw me wouldn't know who
I was, you know, I was nobody, like no one,
So I wasn't worried about embarrassing myself to viewers. It
(22:08):
was more about my industry. You guys, right, you specifically
and all of your friends and thinking that we were
going to be like the laughing stock. And I know
that was Tom's worried too, what if this failed. We
could fail in a really big way here and be
you know, the kind of the laughing stock of our industry.
(22:29):
But we took a chance, and thankfully Tom really has
been our our north star, our moral compass in keeping us,
you know, towing the line the whole way through and
making sure that it is not about the drama but
that it's about the food. And he was right from
the beginning, and that's the course we took very grateful
to it. You're so natural on this show. It's a
(22:50):
very hard show. At six am. We could be eating
like you know, intestines, you know, and it's just and
we have I know what you think about being like
make fun of and profession because Tom was like a
serious dude and a seriously talented chef, so I'm sure
that he was didn't want it to be you know,
a quote unquote laughing stock. I think it was authentic
(23:10):
and it had people are authentic. I think, so people
see that they and they see it right away and
you have instant certifiability and that's what that's why shows work.
And they don't work. If you ask me, I think
so too, men. I think we've both been lucky to
be on shows that at the end of the day
just want to have like a real conversation about food,
and that you can't take it too seriously. But you
also have to respect. I respected, And when you have
(23:32):
a group of people together who have that really common goal,
you know, it's a lot about chemistry, but we have
this sort of shared purpose, and the production company in
the Networks that we both work with, I think obviously
share that and so are committed to just pushing us
and pushing the show to just be the best it
can be, which is why both of our shows, luckily enough,
(23:53):
I've had longevity in a way that I certainly never
imagine in my life. I mean, in two thousand five,
I remember them sending me to San Francisco to shoot
that first season of Top Chef, and Christina was like,
don't worry, Gail, just go for three weeks, then you'll
come back. You'll go back to your job running the
Classic in Aspen, and like, we'll just go about our
(24:13):
business like it won't be a big deal. And then
it aired and it actually wasn't a huge hit. The
first time it aired, they re ran the first season,
and only the second time they ran that first season
did it pick up speed. And then they ordered a
second season and I was like, Chris, we're doing a
second season, and I mean, if there's a third season,
We're gonna have to start talking about how I'm gonna
be splitting my job time. And she was like, Gail,
(24:35):
calm down, third season, Like come on, don't get ahead
of yourself. Here's third season. I mean I just made
my eighteenth season, right, So we didn't know. We didn't know.
I'll give you the same story when when they I
auditioned for Chopped in two thousand seven and Scott Fellman,
as we both know and love, my manager, said you're
(24:56):
gonna try the show. I'm like, Chop, what's this about?
And he said, well, it's three judges and as a
gun and if they don't like it, they chop you.
And that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Maybe
you don't know this, but the the person that got chopped,
the dish they got chopped was supposed to they had
a dog and they would feed the chopped dish to
a dog. That was the first can you imagine if
(25:19):
they kept that they thankfully didn't air the air that
they took it out or they changed it. But I
think it's one of the key ways that people non
cooks learned. They watched these shows and they learned they
watched judges judging, and they get it. If they get it,
they're like, oh, yeah, now I know why my asparagus
this tastes like this because now I get it, and
(25:42):
so they it's a real connector no question. But we
were teaching them about identifying moments in their life that
they had eaten something and it didn't really they didn't
like it, and the reason why they didn't like it
was because it wasn't cooked properly. So the reason why
people like Brussels sprouts is because your mom boiled a
shoot out of them and they smelled like sulfur. Mom
still won't eat Brussels sprouts because when she was a
(26:03):
child she had to eat them at school and that
they boiled Brussels sprouts and served them to the girls
for lunch every day. And my mom, now at the
age of eighties, still won't eat Brussels sprouts. And I'm like, mom,
let me make you a good Brussels sprouts. So our
shows are MythBusters. Really, yeah, that's a great way to
look at it. I love that. That's what keeps the
viewer of coming back and say, oh my god, what
(26:24):
else do I don't not know that I need to know?
And what have I believed for so long that I've
never understood? And now it's like literacy in this craft.
Food has changed so much, Like so the food I'm
tasting now, I'm chopped. I have thirteen years of tasting
the food that was started. It's it's evolved so much.
(26:44):
There's still crappy cooks and chefs that cook it and
like they're not really their home cooks and they're like, well,
I don't know what I'm doing. They have learned from
our show the changes in cuisine, and so they're mimicking
what they've learned, even though they're not necessarily a chef,
And so we see that at the judging tape. It's
kind of fascinating. Oh yeah. It trickles down, of course
into the cultural you know, trends of how how we
(27:07):
all eat. There's no question. For my fourth and final course,
Gale shares the surprising lessons that cooks are taking away
from the past years. So your past season, what what
it struck you about your last past season that is
is so different? What it struck you about the food
and how people sort of the vision of food, because
(27:27):
what I'm noticing in my side is people want simple
killer flavors like less, less is more, but more of
the best. What have you found? Simplifying the way young
cooks cook has always been our mantra on Top Chef,
but this year the takeaway from me for Top Chef,
(27:49):
which was an un it was an outlying year, right
we shot. We only shoot once a year Top Chef.
We now are making Top Chef Amateurs. That's done separately,
and there were years past when we did more than
one season, but we only do one for its fourteen
episodes once a year, once a year, and it takes
us two months to make fourteen episodes because it's two
(28:09):
to three days in episode. And this year we built
a production bubble. We shot in Portland, Oregon, which in
many ways was going through a triple pandemic. While we
were there, I mean, there was forest fires, there was
obviously COVID, there was intense civil and social justice protesting, rioting,
(28:30):
happening all around us, but specifically in Portland's. You know,
it had so much conflict. But we also chose Portland
because the COVID rates were really low there so that
we could relocate to Portland's. And so how does that
come out in the food? Which is your original question?
And I will say that this year more than anything else,
(28:51):
you know, in past years. And if you look at
the sort of trajectory over the years from where we
started with Top Chefs to where we are now, it
used to be that the cooks came and they cooked,
no matter where they were from, no matter their personal heritage,
they cooked the food that they thought we wanted to
eat in America, which is like kind of Western European tradition, right.
(29:15):
You know, we had chefs from everywhere from China to
the Caribbean serving US, Italian and French food. And I'm
not saying that a lot of it wasn't amazing. It
was extraordinary because these are professionals. However, we didn't want
to see that from them, like where's your soul, where's
your heart? Where are you cooking from? And so many
times on the show. Their evolution by the time they
(29:38):
left the show think about chefs like Shirley Chung or
Nina Compton. You know, Nina was working for Scott Konant
running his Italian kitchen in Miami. But by the time
she left Top Chefs, she was like, I need to
cook Caribbean food where I'm from St. Lucia. I need
to cook from my heritage, and she went to New
Orleans and merged it and created her restaurant. So this
(30:00):
season on Top Chef, we started in a different place
because the world was in a different place, and the
chefs on this season came to us with a lot
of figuring out to do about who they are as chefs.
But what they knew and what they all gave us
from the beginning was their heritage. Like, no longer do
we give a crap about that kind of Western European model.
(30:23):
If that's what you cook best and that's who you are, great,
give it to me. But the best moments of our
season have been from chefs who were truly cooking from
their heritage, which has nothing to do with our heritage.
Right we are learning from them from the African diaspora,
from all across the regions of Mexico, from Vietnam, and
(30:46):
Japan and from the American South, and those are the
cuisines that we need to hear about, the representation we
need to see. Those are the food ways that this
country was really built on. And I think, what are
the most important foods for us all in our kind
of understanding of American culture that we want to see
and to amplify. And that was the lesson of this
(31:08):
year on Top Chef. I think those are the foods
you identify with to this day. If I really cooked
what I wanted to cook, I would cook what I
was born and raised with, which was Middle Eastern food
every single day. But it was delicious. So in my mind,
I'm saying, one day I'm going to open up an
Armenian bistro and just say fuck it. Oh Jeffrey, do it,
(31:30):
because no one could do it better than you know.
I know. It's it's funny that's it took a pandemic
to get the top chefs actually cook the food they like.
Cook from your heart, like cook from your heart, not
from your brain. I hope the pandemic will stop the
narrative of the food critic coming in and trouncing someone
(31:52):
because they can Oh yeah, I think it has to change.
I think it has to and it will. There's no
room in our industry anymore for negativity. There can't be right.
There's no reason to destroy a restaurant. If you want
to have write something that's off color a bit, be constructive,
I think, is it be constructive? Don't waste time killing people?
(32:16):
Why why these people are they're killing themselves. You don't
have to kill them for them, right. That's the thing,
like if the if the pandemic taught the public, you know,
and customers anything, consumers, diners. It is the struggle of
making a living in the restaurant industry. And we're up
against enough, you know, restauranturs and chefs are up against
(32:37):
enough just to feed their families and keep their employees employed.
Especially right now, that the conversation has to change, and
I think we're headed in the right direction. Like James
Beard Foundation not giving awards and winners this year, I
think said a lot. It's just about just raising and
lifting people up and telling stories when they're great, and
if they're not great, you know, we don't need to
(32:57):
tell them. You don't need to promote that. Let's just promote,
you know, promote the strength of this industry and and
the way that it is nourishing people. Well, I am
in good company today with you, and I could talk
all day. We don't have all day. Unfortunately, I'm so
happy to have to get to catch up with you, though, Jeffrey,
take care, Bye bye, Thanks very much for listening to
(33:20):
Four Courses with Jefferyszcarrian, a production of I Heart Radio
and Corner Table Entertainment. Four Courses is created by Jeffreys Zcarrion,
Margaret Zacarion, Jared Keller, and Tara Helper. Our executive producer
is Christopher Hesiotis. Four Courses is produced by Jonathan Haws Dressler.
Our research is conducted by Jescelyn Shields. This episode was
(33:43):
engineered by Katie Fellman and edited and mixed by Joe Tisdel.
Our talent booking is by Pamela Bauer at Dogtown Talent.
For more podcasts with my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows. Four
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